With the new series of Spicks and Specks airing tonight, OUTinPerth was lucky enough to chat to team captain Adam Richard. The openly gay comedian shared his thoughts on taking on an iconic Aussie game show, his new stand up show ‘Gaypocalypse’ and his gay sci-fi series, Outland. Richard’s laugh is infectious from the moment he picks up the phone.
What are you looking forward to most about the new season of Spicks and Specks?
Having a job! No. [Laughs] It’s the ABC, it’s pretty much volunteer work. Seriously, I have not had this much fun doing anything in my life. Like I always have fun being a guest on the show, but doing the show every week is a joy of crazy proportions.
You went from being a frequent guest on the show to team Captain. How did it feel to make that transition?
It’s a lot of responsibility involved, really. Not just within the show itself, where your job is to make musicians who perhaps have never been on television before feel comfortable in the situation and to transition between the different cameras pointed at you. I mean it’s one thing to get up and perform onstage, but TV can be a whole other situation. But the other responsibility is the amazing work that was done by Adam and Allen and Myf that I feel is a huge legacy to inherit. So it’s a lot of responsibility.
What is your particular area of expertise when it comes to music?
I have an encyclopaedic knowledge of Mariah Carey. [Laughs] That’s about it. You know what my head is full of bizarre facts. I don’t have anywhere near the expansive and almost exhaustive knowledge that Ella does, but I know a lot about Justin Bieber.
Your audition piece for Australian Idol has become quite popular, any chance you’ll take to the microphone again on the show?
Only if we have two completely tone deaf guests and I get forced to do substitute [laughs]. Other than that I should hope not. You know, we have some of the best musicians in the world on the show, the most outrageous singers ever and my A Capella nonsense really does not need to be seen ever again. It’d be like going up with a checker board to a chess champion and going ‘Yeah, do you wanna play?’. It’s just embarrassing for everybody.
You also co created and starred in the series “Outlands”, the gay sci-fi comedy. What were the highlights of working on that show?
That was such a long long process. It was amazing, but yeah. Like the writing and then the performing, and working with Kevin Carlin who’s an amazing director. He’s currently working on “Wentworth” which is one of my favourite shows at the moment. It’s a surreal experience, when you’ve written a stupid joke and then it’s coming out of Christine Anu’s mouth. And it was a really intense time because I was also doing breakfast radio at the time, so I’d go in, do brekkie and then rush off to a film set, so I don’t really remember much [laughs].
How was it straddling a lot of different roles for that production?
When we got into the actual performing part I, you know, took the writing hat off. Jon Richards, the other writer, who was there on set every day, just to sort out any problems just so I could legitimately, as one of the other actors go, ‘Don’t ask me, not my problem’. And also I’d not really done much acting before, so you know, I was there to learn from all these amazing performers. I’d kind of done what I had to do, as a writer. It’s like with the terrible singing, you know it’s hard acting in front of people who are really good.
Would you be up for doing a second season?
It’s been a while [Laughs] I think that’s up to the ABC. We would do it in a heartbeat, but they’d have to commission it, which is a whole other story.
So you finished a decade-long career in breakfast radio last November, how has it been adjusting to life without the 4am alarm for the past few months?
I actually don’t know what to do with myself [laughs]. I get up early but not that early. I kind of go ‘Oh, I don’t have anything until like 9 o’clock tonight, what am I doing with myself today?’ So, yeah. It’s a bit peculiar. It was a really hard slog, with the stupid hours. I was working on 92.9 in Perth for a while, like from Melbourne, but occasionally I’d come over to Perth and do a few days there. And on those days I would get up and still have to do the Melbourne show from Perth. Which means getting out of bed at 2am local time. I could tell you that engineers loved me, having to go into work at that hour. [Laughs]
So you’ve got a new stand up show, “Gaypocalypse” can you tell me a bit about that?
“Gaypocalypse”, it’s about zombies, gay zombies who come here and instigate the gay apocalypse. [Laughs] No, it’s about a lot of things. But I’ve been obsessed with marriage equality at the moment and the fact that a lot of straight people, well, not a lot of straight people, a lot of fundamentally religious people, not even all religious people, but the fundamentalists are opposed to gay marriage. But also what it means for our community. Because a lot of our culture and a lot of our community is built around protest and there’s this notion of fighting for equality and it’s all about visibility and it’s all about being seen to be part of the wider community and once we get marriage equality, that’s kind of our last hurdle, really, for true equality. So therein lies no need for the visibility and the community. So is marriage equality the end of our culture? The end of this culture of rebellion and the ghettos we’ve created and the clubs we’ve created. Is there no need for that any more? Have we destroyed our own culture in our quest for normality?
Have we lost our uniqueness?
Yeah! But I mean, I think equality is an amazing and incredible thing and we really need it because otherwise you’re not a true citizen of this country, without the ability to live like everyone else. I think it’s a time of change. And for people my age, all we’ve known is pressures and not being a full and equal member of society. Whereas young people now just take it for granted, like, it’s fine, everyone’s okay with gay, but for us it’s like we’re watching the lives that we lived kind of slowly dwindle. So there’s also the whole issue with people older than me who just don’t exist because our community was decimated by the AIDs virus really badly. So we have no mentors, we have no older people to look up to, you know, how to we chart our lives from hereon in? It’s a really interesting point I think in the history of our culture that we’re at the point of equality but we’re also at point of becoming invisible.
So if everyone becomes equal do we all become homogenous, in a way?
Yeah, are we all going to go to Bunning’s and IKEA and argue with each other on a Saturday morning? [Laughs] A lot of clubs are closing down. If you go to Oxford street in Sydney there’s maybe three gay bars. There used to be everything, the whole street was gay and now it’s just a small pocket. There’s almost nothing left on Commercial Road in Melbourne. There’s a couple of clubs in the North which cater to older gay men. I even went to the big super clubs on the other side of town here in Melbourne last week and even then I noticed there weren’t that many people there. It was a very small turnout. I guess everyone’s meeting on the internet or just at regular clubs. Like there’s no need for a delineated gay club any more. So I kind of see the gay populace as, we’re getting something amazing but are we losing something integral as well? What are we trading in for our normality? I know I think too much about these things. There are jokes, as well. [Laughs]
It’s good to have comedy that’s got something political to say.
Well, yeah. When I first started doing stand up I had a reason for doing it. Continually finding reasons to get up and talk about things is, I think, the challenge. I’ve never wanted to be one of those comedians that just gets up and talks about shoelaces. As hilarious as shoelaces can be. You can be very skilled at that kind of stuff. But yeah. I’ve never wanted to be an entertainer for entertainment’s sake. I’ve always had a second agenda. Like even when I was doing ten years of radio and I was talking about Justin Bieber and Chloe Kardashian and the whole works I figured that having an openly gay man on the radio every single day in the car with peoples’ mums, would hopefully make it easier for their kids, when they grew up and started to come out, to go “Oh you know how you like the gay guy on the radio, well, I’m gay.” “Oh. Are you also hilarious?” “No. I’m not.” [Laughs tremendously] “Do you know anything about Kylie?” “A little.”
That was always the point of doing a really high profile, mainstream job is to go ‘Look, just because you’re gay doesn’t mean you have to only be a hairdresser or a florist. You can be a policeman if you want.’
You were one of the first openly gay stand ups in Australia, so how do you think the scene has changed for that over the years?
Oh my god there’s like four hundred of them now! You know what I do love is that I judged a RAW! Comedy heat last year or the year before and there were about six or seven gay comedians on. One of them was really good, but the other five were terrible and I thought ‘I’m so glad that we’ve come to a point now where you don’t have to be- Like I had to be twice as good as everyone around me just to get where I am. I’d be judged from the off. But also, on the other hand people remembered who I was, because I was ‘the gay one’. There were hundreds of white male comedians. I had an advantage in that way but yeah you have to be really good if you’re a woman or if you’re gay or if you’re any kind of ethnic minority because while you’re memorable, you also aren’t allowed to be shit. Like, now you can be shit! [Laughs]
Like it’s not a big deal any more , there are so many gay comedians and they all have very different voices, they have very different skill sets like some are storytellers some are just one liner merchants. Some push the boundaries and then there’s you know amazingly intelligent, incredible people like Tom Ballard. There is now a spectrum of gay performer whereas once there was just, you know, me. That was it. [Laughs]
How would you like to see the comedy scene in Australia develop in the next few years?
Well I think we went through a period where- like when I first started doing stand up in Melbourne particularly it’s huge, like there’s thousands of shows on. It was pretty much considered to be almost like an art form. So it took itself a little too seriously. So now we’ve gone through a period of that and I think we’ve now been in this grey period where it’s a form of entertainment, like pop music or television, it’s disposable and fun and enjoyable. And I think we’ve come out the other side of that where it can be taken more seriously as an art form. Because I think there was a period where comedy tried to be like a monologue or spoken word and now it can be that because there is this whole other element and there are entertainer’s for entertainment’s sake. Now there can be stand up comedy that pushes buttons and does something more, because there is the opportunity to go and do something that is essentially bubblegum. You can also go and get something a bit more meaty when you want. It’s hard to just do art as stand up, because you know, people would be horrified by it. You need one for the other. You need the yin and the yang.
It’s interesting you say that about minorities having to work harder in comedy because it seems a bit like it’s a lot of straight white guys a lot of the time.
That’s everywhere. But you know, that’s an endemic of our culture on a larger scale that, you know, white middle class boys essentially grow up with the belief that they can do anything. They can be anyone. Whereas you know, if you are anything else, you kind of feel like you are pigeonholed into some other kind of terrible stereotype, be it housewife or taxi driver or hairdresser. Whatever minority it is you come from. Not that women are a minority, it’s half the population but when it comes to out culture, women are for some reason treated as 20% of the population when it comes to spending money or entertainment as opposed to 50% which is the reality. Yeah, I think it’s just harder and audiences generally- you know, sadly, women judge other women really harshly. Men already judge women when they walk onstage and having the women judge you as well makes it even harder. And yeah, with any kind of minority. The one good thing about being gay is that it’s not visible. Well, until I open my mouth! [Laughs] Then you’re in trouble.
Will you be bringing the show to Perth?
I would love to. I’m kind of chockers until at least June, I think. But later in the year I would love to come over. Last time I came was a stand up night for 92.9 for the kids appeal for hospitals. Which was yonks ago. With Joel Creasey. It was a fun night, but yeah, it’s been a long time since I’ve wandered onstage just for the fun of it. So yeah, hopefully later in the year I’ll turn up out of the blue.
Anything you’d like to add?
Spicks is awesome fun. Like the first episode which is on the 5th of Feb is magnificent. It’s got Meshel Laurie, Jay from Tame Impala, Jacqui Dark who is an opera singer with a physics degree and American-Irish comedian Des Bishop who is really good fun. I cannot explain how much fun we have making it. I hope it comes across on the telly! I hope we don’t just look like a bunch of drunk people mucking around in a room.
Sophie Joske
· What are you looking forward to most about the new season of Spicks and Specks?
Having a job! No. [Laughs] It’s the ABC, it’s pretty much volunteer work. Seriously, I have not had this much fun doing anything in my life. Like I always have fun being a guest on the show, but doing the show every week is a joy of crazy proportions.
· You went from being a frequent guest on the show to team Captain. How did it feel to make that transition?
It’s a lot of responsibility involved, really. Not just within the show itself, where your job is to make musicians who perhaps have never been on television before feel comfortable in the situation and to transition between the different cameras pointed at you. I mean it’s one thing to get up and perform onstage, but TV can be a whole other situation. But the other responsibility is the amazing work that was done by Adam and Allen and Myf that I feel is a huge legacy to inherit. So it’s a lot of responsibility.
· What is your particular area of expertise when it comes to music?
I have an encyclopaedic knowledge of Mariah Carey. [Laughs] That’s about it. You know what my head is full of bizarre facts. I don’t have anywhere near the expansive and almost exhaustive knowledge that Ella does, but I know a lot about Justin Bieber.
· Your audition piece for Australian Idol has become quite popular, any chance you’ll take to the microphone again on the show?
Only if we have two completely tone deaf guests and I get forced to do substitute [laughs]. Other than that I should hope not. You know, we have some of the best musicians in the world on the show, the most outrageous singers ever and my A Capella nonsense really does not need to be seen ever again. It’d be like going up with a checker board to a chess champion and going ‘Yeah, do you wanna play?’. It’s just embarrassing for everybody.
· You also co created and starred in the series “Outlands”, the gay sci-fi comedy. What were the highlights of working on that show?
That was such a long long process. It was amazing, but yeah. Like the writing and then the performing, and working with Kevin Carlin who’s an amazing director. He’s currently working on “Wentworth” which is one of my favourite shows at the moment. It’s a surreal experience, when you’ve written a stupid joke and then it’s coming out of Christine Anu’s mouth. And it was a really intense time because I was also doing breakfast radio at the time, so I’d go in, do brekkie and then rush off to a film set, so I don’t really remember much [laughs].
· How was it straddling a lot of different roles for that production?
When we got into the actual performing part I, you know, took the writing hat off. Jon Richards, the other writer, who was there on set every day, just to sort out any problems just so I could legitimately, as one of the other actors go, ‘Don’t ask me, not my problem’. And also I’d not really done much acting before, so you know, I was there to learn from all these amazing performers. I’d kind of done what I had to do, as a writer. It’s like with the terrible singing, you know it’s hard acting in front of people who are really good.
o Would you be up for doing a second season?
It’s been a while [Laughs] I think that’s up to the ABC. We would do it in a heartbeat, but they’d have to commission it, which is a whole other story.
· So you finished a decade-long career in breakfast radio last November, how has it been adjusting to life without the 4am alarm for the past few months?
I actually don’t know what to do with myself [laughs]. I get up early but not that early. I kind of go ‘Oh, I don’t have anything until like 9 o’clock tonight, what am I doing with myself today?’ So, yeah. It’s a bit peculiar. It was a really hard slog, with the stupid hours. I was working on 92.9 in Perth for a while, like from Melbourne, but occasionally I’d come over to Perth and do a few days there. And on those days I would get up and still have to do the Melbourne show from Perth. Which means getting out of bed at 2am local time. I could tell you that engineers loved me, having to go into work at that hour. [Laughs]
· So you’ve got a new stand up show, “Gaypocalypse” can you tell me a bit about that?
“Gaypocalypse”, it’s about zombies, gay zombies who come here and instigate the gay apocalypse. [Laughs] No, it’s about a lot of things. But I’ve been obsessed with marriage equality at the moment and A the fact that a lot of straight people, well, not a lot of straight people, a lot of fundamentally religious people, not even all religious people, but the fundamentalists are opposed to gay marriage. But also what it means for our community. Because a lot of our culture and a lot of our community is built around protest and there’s this notion of fighting for equality and it’s all about visibility and it’s all about being seen to be part of the wider community and once we get marriage equality, that’s kind of our last hurdle, really, for true equality. So therein lies no need for the visibility and the community. So is marriage equality the end of our culture? The end of this culture of rebellion and the ghettoes we’ve created and the clubs we’ve created. Is there no need for that any more? Have we destroyed our own culture in our quest for normality?
Have we lost our uniqueness?
Yeah! But I mean, I think equality is an amazing and incredible thing and we really need it because otherwise you’re not a true citizen of this country, without the ability to live like everyone else. I think it’s a time of change. And for people my age, all we’ve known is pressures and not being a full and equal member of society. Whereas young people now just take it for granted, like, it’s fine, everyone’s okay with gay, but for us it’s like we’re watching the lives that we lived kind of slowly dwindle. So there’s also the whole issue with people older than me who just don’t exist because our community was decimated by the AIDs virus really badly. So we have no mentors, we have no older people to look up to, you know, how to we chart our lives from hereon in? It’s a really interesting point I think in the history of our culture that we’re at the point of equality but we’re also at point of becoming invisible.
So if everyone becomes equal do we all become homogenous, in a way?
Yeah, are we all going to go to Bunning’s and IKEA and argue with each other on a Saturday morning? [Laughs] A lot of clubs are closing down. If you go to Oxford street in Sydney there’s maybe three gay bars. There used to be everything, the whole street was gay and now it’s just a small pocket. There’s almost nothing left on Commercial Road in Melbourne. There’s a couple of clubs in the North which cater to older gay men. I even went to the big super clubs on the other side of town here in Melbourne last week and even then I noticed there weren’t that many people there. It was a very small turnout. I guess everyone’s meeting on the internet or just at regular clubs. Like there’s no need for a delineated gay club any more. So I kind of see the gay populace as, we’re getting something amazing but are we losing something integral as well? What are we trading in for our normality? I know I think too much about these things. There are jokes, as well. [Laughs]
Well it’s good to have comedy that’s got something political to say.
Well, yeah. When I first started doing stand up I had a reason for doing it. Continually finding reasons to get up and talk about things is, I think, the challenge. I’ve never wanted to be one of those comedians that just gets up and talks about shoelaces. As hilarious as shoelaces can be. You can be very skilled at that kind of stuff. But yeah. I’ve never wanted to be an entertainer for entertainment’s sake. I’ve always had a second agenda. Like even when I was doing ten years of radio and I was talking about Justin Bieber and Chloe Kardashian and the whole works I figured that having an openly gay man on the radio every single day in the car with peoples’ mums, would hopefully make it easier for their kids, when they grew up and started to come out, to go “Oh you know how you like the gay guy on the radio, well, I’m gay.” “Oh. Are you also hilarious?” “No. I’m not.” [Laughs tremendously] “Do you know anything about Kylie?” “A little.”
That was always the point of doing a really high profile, mainstream job is to go ‘Look, just because you’re gay doesn’t mean you have to only be a hairdresser or a florist. You can be a policeman if you want.’
You were one of the first openly gay stand ups in Australia, so how to you think the scene has changed for that over the years?
Oh my god there’s like four hundred of them now! You know what I do love is that I judged a RAW! Comedy heat last year or the year before and there were about six or seven gay comedians on. One of them was really good, but the other five were terrible and I thought ‘I’m so glad that we’ve come to a point now where you don’t have to be- Like I had to be twice as good as everyone around me just to get where I am. I’d be judged from the off. But also, on the other hand people remembered who I was, because I was ‘the gay one’. There were hundreds of white male comedians. I had an advantage in that way but yeah you have to be really good if you’re a woman or if you’re gay or if you’re any kind of ethnic minority because while you’re memorable, you also aren’t allowed to be shit. Like, now you can be shit! [Laughs]
Like it’s not a big deal any more , there are so many gay comedians and they all have very different voices, they have very different skill sets like some are storytellers some are just one liner merchants. Some push the boundaries and then there’s you know amazingly intelligent, incredible people like Tom Ballard. There is now a spectrum of gay performer whereas once there was just, you know, me. That was it. [Laughs]
How would you like to see the comedy scene in Australia develop in the next few years?
Well I think we went through a period where- like when I first started doing stand up in Melbourne particularly it’s huge, like there’s thousands of shows on. It was pretty much considered to be almost like an art form. So it took itself a little too seriously. So now we’ve gone through a period of that and I think we’ve now been in this grey period where it’s a form of entertainment, like pop music or television, it’s disposable and fun and enjoyable. And I think we’ve come out the other side of that where it can be taken more seriously as an art form. Because I think there was a period where comedy tried to be like a monologue or spoken word and now it can be that because there is this whole other element and there are entertainer’s for entertainment’s sake. Now there can be stand up comedy that pushes buttons and does something more, because there is the opportunity to go and do something that is essentially bubblegum. You can also go and get something a bit more meaty when you want. It’s hard to just do art as stand up, because you know, people would be horrified by it. You need one for the other. You need the yin and the yang.
It’s interesting you say that about minorities having to work harder in comedy because it seems (and maybe this is just on the western side of the country) like it’s a lot of straight white guys a lot of the time.
That’s everywhere. But you know, that’s an endemic of our culture on a larger scale that, you know, white middle class boys essentially grow up with the belief that they can do anything. They can be anyone. Whereas you know, if you are anything else, you kind of feel like you are pigeonholed into some other kind of terrible stereotype, be it housewife or taxi driver or hairdresser. Whatever minority it is you come from. Not that women are a minority, it’s half the population but when it comes to out culture, women are for some reason treated as 20% of the population when it comes to spending money or entertainment as opposed to 50% which is the reality. Yeah, I think it’s just harder and audiences generally- you know, sadly, women judge other women really harshly. Men already judge women when they walk onstage and having the women judge you as well makes it even harder. And yeah, with any kind of minority. The one good thing about being gay is that it’s not visible. Well, until I open my mouth! [Laughs] Then you’re in trouble.
Will you be bringing the show to Perth?
I would love to. I’m kind of chockers until at least June, I think. But later in the year I would love to come over. Last time I came was a stand up night for 92.9 for the kids appeal for hospitals. Which was yonks ago. With Joel Creasey. It was a fun night, but yeah, it’s been a long time since I’ve wandered onstage just for the fun of it. So yeah, hopefully later in the year I’ll turn up out of the blue.
Anything you’d like to add?
Spicks is awesome fun. Like the first episode which is on the 5th of Feb is magnificent. It’s got Meshel Laurie, Jay from Tame Impala, Jacqui Dark who is an opera singer with a physics degree and American-Irish comedian Des Bishop who is really good fun. I cannot explain how much fun we have making it. I hope it comes across on the telly! I hope we don’t just look like a bunch of drunk people mucking around in a room.
