I quizzed Tom Gleeson, HARD, on whether integrity has returned to the Logies

Fitz: The schtick you delivered up on interview segments like Hard Chat and I Hate You, Change My Mind, was all about uttering absolutely deadpan truths with a twinkle in your eye to see how your subjects react. You’ve continued the approach with Hard Quiz. How did that develop?

TG: It started with doing really tough stand-up and corporate gigs. Sometimes I’d look around at dull events and think: “What’s the worst thing I could possibly say right now?” And I’d say it and I’d get a laugh, so I thought saying what you’re not supposed to say might be the way to go. While we were workshopping it, the name “Hard Chat” was suggested to me by the host of The Weekly, Charlie Pickering, and it went from there.

Fitz: Can we agree that the one person you just never saw coming on Hard Chat for her own deadpan brilliance was Sophie Monk? Take it away, Sophie: “People think I’m very smart. A teacher at school said I had a very high IQ and went and checked it. A few days later I asked [my teacher] what my IQ was and she said, ‘No, it was low’.” Honestly, Sophie Monk was so deadpan she out-did you.

TG: Yeah, it was like a chess game. We were both moving our pieces, committed to it 100 per cent, and neither of us wanted to break – but she broke me. I went to bed after the episode went to air, and I woke up and my social media accounts were just going crazy. The YouTube segment had been seen by a million people overnight. Before that, it was a bit of a hard time getting people to do Hard Chat, but after that, it started to become a “thing”.

Fitz: Are you sorry that when you invited me on Hard Chat, you called me “a professional boof-head”?

TG: (Laughs.) I was pretty happy with that.

Fitz: And I loved it, even if I prefer “a cross between a thinking man’s boof-head, and a boof-head’s thinking man”. But you can go pretty close to the wire. You said to Steve Price: “You ate some pretty disgusting things on I’m a Celebrity. Is it worse than the disgusting shit you serve up to your listeners on 2GB?”

TG: I just thought that was a funny thing to say. The thing that’s most amusing about that is the presumption that I would have ever listened to his show, which I hadn’t.

Fitz: You said to Pauline Hanson: “You do have some good ideas, you said you’re going to move to England.” I was surprised she didn’t bite your head off.

TG: Yeah, well, that’s the thing with Pauline Hanson, she is quiet when you meet her in person. She actually comes across as quite vulnerable because she’s not sure of what she’s saying. She often says the wrong word and she’s quite nervy in the way that she presents on camera. I think it actually makes people have sympathy for her – like I did. And then I realised, “Oh no, no, I think this is just what she does. This is her thing.”

“She is quiet when you meet her in person.”Credit:James Brickwood

Fitz: In I Hate You, Change My Mind, you interviewed the likes of Cory Bernardi, Bob Katter and Barnaby Joyce. You said to Barnaby: “To make mistakes is humans, so does that make you superhuman?” Did any of those blokes make you change your mind, where you came away and thought: “Actually I don’t hate you.”

TG: Well, the dirty secret of talking to all these different people with this segment is that anyone who opens themselves up to scrutiny is immediately appealing. When someone voluntarily sits down and says: “Give me your worst”, you can’t help but like them a little bit, even if you might not agree with all their political views.

Fitz: Everything you do is dressed up with humour, but your progressive politics are there for everyone to see. Given the ABC’s charter to be neutral, do you ever get grief for only ruthlessly lampooning people like Barnaby Joyce and Pauline Hanson? Never Penny Wong and Tanya Plibersek?

TG: Unfortunately for you, Peter, that’s not true, as I have done Tanya. And as for Penny Wong, I remember doing a long routine at a private function where she was a guest, about how I thought my daughter, who was less than a year old, was a lesbian, and I was going to raise her as a lesbian and one day she was gonna come out as heterosexual! And Penny Wong was laughing, so I’m pretty glad I went that way.

Fitz: I did this same Five Minutes interview with Mark Humphries and he, like you, has got this endlessly sunny persona. But when the subject of Clive Palmer putting out Trump-esque election loss denialism came up, he suddenly turned savage in his condemnation. Is there anything like that for you, where you drop the jokes and just go in genuinely hard?

TG: Not really. I used to do breakfast for a commercial radio station in Melbourne. I realised the only way I was going to survive was if I didn’t take anything to do with the job seriously. So I would make jokes about the sponsors, the station, my co-hosts, the music, everything. Because I knew that if I got caught up in it and started taking it all seriously, it would drive me insane.

Fitz: You’ve obviously had great success in most things, but that breakfast radio gig only went for two years?

“It kind of always works.”Credit:ABC

TG: I got the job, and then I bought a house with the money, and I didn’t need another one. So I quit.

Fitz: What about Hard Quiz? I saw where you said to one contestant: “You’ve been doing security for hotel quarantine during COVID. How many return travellers did you root?” I mean, there must sometimes be blowback, which ends up on the cutting room floor when it doesn’t work?

TG: [Nope.] It kind of always works.

Fitz: Your latest show is Taskmaster, where you and Tom Cashman – who you call “the lesser Tom” – set fellow comedians tasks while you all crack gags. Can we both agree that Julia Morris is the funniest thing on two legs south of the Equator, and much funnier than you?

TG: I think that Julia Morris is very funny, but she’s not as well-thought-out as me. I prefer to be funny in a clever way, and I’ll let her look after the other end of the spectrum.

Fitz: Let’s go to you winning the Gold Logie in 2019, and then being the carry-over champion for two years because of COVID. And you nakedly campaigned for it. You charlatan, you mongrel, you worse than senseless thing!

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TG: It was hugely inspired by Norman Gunston. I never saw it, because I’m too young, but I knew that every time my dad tried to talk about Norman’s campaign to win the Gold Logie in 1975, he would burst into laughter. And it just sounded really funny to me, because the idea of someone [so nakedly] saying “Vote for me” was just hilarious. So I did a deal with the ABC viewers. “There are hundreds of thousands of you and if you vote for me, I’ll win and I’ll give a very funny speech and you can sit at home and enjoy it.”

Fitz: And you gave that funny speech, during which a cutaway shot to Amanda Keller – who we both know should have won that year, you heard me – showed her looking a bit grim.

TG: I can’t let that go on record, the way you’re saying it. The Gold Logie goes to the “most popular personality on television” and Hard Quiz rates more than the Living Room, which is not even on TV any more, while Hard Quiz is. So, historically, the decision still holds.

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Fitz: Do you think you winning the Gold Logie destroyed the legitimacy of the way the whole [voting system] works?

TG: No, it’s all good. Now everything’s gone back to normal because Hamish Blake won last year, and that means the Logies have gone back to what they should be, which is Channel Nine giving awards to itself. Everything has been restored back to the natural order of things. And I’m happy with that. It’s a bit confusing now, though, as the Logies have gone to Channel Seven. But Seven will probably give the Gold Logie to David Koch, so I suppose everything will stay normal.

Fitz: Norman Gunston used to hang his Gold Logie around his neck. Where is yours now?

TG: At home next to my computer. I look at it and it just makes me giggle.

Fitz: Thanks for the chat. Hard!

Quote of the Week

“I’ve been in so many Mardi Gras that I know I’m no chance of competing there. It is a celebration of who people are and, you know, I am just a pretty daggy bloke from Marrickville and the look reflected that.” – Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on his lack of leather and glitter, while marching in the Mardi Gras last Saturday evening, the first Australian PM to do so.

Joke of the Week

Twitter: @Peter_Fitz

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