Comedian Guy Montgomery takes us through his life in television, including a What Now nightmare and the comedic genius of Goldstein from the ASB ads.
To the untrained eye, Guy Montgomery appears to be one of the busiest people in comedy right now. With both the local and Australian versions of Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont Spelling Bee airing right now on both sides of the Tasman, the comedian had just returned from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, by way of an appearance on Thank God You’re Here, when he settled in to talk about his life in television with The Spinoff.
“The busyness of people who work in television is all an illusion,” he said, folding his washing. “You’re really busy for weeks at a time, but then other people become incredibly busy making you look good. And then months later, or in the event of Spelling Bee New Zealand, almost a full year later, the show is released, and then everyone’s like, ‘well, you must be so busy’. The secret is that now we’re actually sitting around and doing not much at all.”
With the second season of Spelling Bee airing now on Three, Montgomery described the “luxury” of being able to build upon the gameplay of season one. Or, as he put it, “create more unbearably and unnecessarily circuitous routes towards the spelling of words”. The addition he is most proud of is a game called A Decent Proposal, inspired by the prisoner’s dilemma, which led to an enraged Rose Matafeo calling Eli Mathewson a “piece of shit” in episode three.
As the format creates mega five star buzz across the Tasman, the recent run of live shows in the Edinburgh Fringe could also be the ticket to sending Guy Mont Spelling Bee truly global. “The dream is that someone sees it and might want to do something with it in the United Kingdom, but my responsibility starts and ends with getting to Edinburgh, putting on a funny show and leaving,” said Montgomery. “I’ve done my bit, I don’t know what happens next.”
While we wait for news of Spelling Bee’s next move, Montgomery was happy to take us through his life in television, including a What Now nightmare, why nothing can stop Alan Partridge, and the comedic genius of Goldstein from the ASB ads.
My earliest TV memory is… We were not a big TV house. We had a TV but Mum was pretty tight on allotment of TV watching time. And so I remember Mum turning off The Simpsons, which at the time I understood to be for having inappropriate content. I’ve since discovered this was because she just doesn’t like cartoons. They were big Coro fans, so I just remember every week they would park up for Coro, and then that warbly sound of whatever that instrument is [editor’s note: it’s a cornet!] playing the Coro Street theme song echoing through the house.
The show that I would rush home from school to watch… I remember watching Kenan & Kel at home after school once, and that’s one of the first times I remember being by myself and laughing out loud at a TV show and thinking “holy moly, these guys are making me laugh like I laugh with my friends”. That felt incredible.
My earliest television crush is… I remember adult Nala in The Lion King made me feel kind of funny. “What’s happening? What is this physiological response I’m having to this sexy lion”, said the seven-year-old boy. It was the same as the feeling I used to get when you are in a car and you go over a hill and you’d lose your tummy.
The TV moment that haunts me is… I once went to a What Now recording as a kid, and got called up to play on a handheld Tetris machine while they were doing those crazy crash zooms to promote the prize to the people at home. And I remember pissing my pants. It wasn’t picked up on camera, but I remember being trapped into the responsibility of promoting the console and also being aware that I was in a crisis situation with my bladder. I was probably eight or nine – old enough to know better and old enough to be really embarrassed by pissing my pants.
The NZ TV ad that I can’t stop thinking about is… I always have fond memories of the DB Draught ad with three people in a pub in heaven, looking at the patrons down on earth at the end of a hard day’s toil. And so they are going “that man deserves a DB”, and “that man deserves a DB”. And then there was a third guy, some yuppie who had been sitting around in an office cubicle all day, and they just shake their heads and the guy’s handle of his beer breaks off. That used to really crack me up.
Those Fresh Up “thirst is creepy” ones also had a really lovely, unique flavor to them too. When I’m nervous to perform, sometimes I get cotton mouth, so I can really empathize with the thirsty characters. But I think the best joke in a New Zealand ad is an old Goldstein ASB one where he’s trying to blend in on a farm, and he says to the farmer, “lovely flock of cows you got there”. And the farmer says, “herd of cows” and Goldstein is like “yes I have, herd of chickens?” I think that is quality joke writing by any metric.
My TV guilty pleasure is… I am a classic for sort of walking through a room when Chelsie [Florence, partner] is watching something that I deem not of interest to me, sitting down a few minutes and then getting through a few episodes. Married at First Sight would be a classic for that. The issue for me is that a lot of the TV I watch is TV I’ve watched infinite times before, and I just cannot stop going to the same shows.
My favorite TV moment of all time is… For its sense of internal justice and comeuppance, I’m thinking about David Brent standing up to Chris Finch for the first time in The Office Christmas special. I remember feeling a powerful sense of relief when he did that.
My favourite TV character of all time is… I think my relationship to this character spans virtually every media genre, because they’ve been so elastic and prolific. Alan Partridge is probably the greatest. To be introduced on a satirical news radio show in the early 1990s and then move through every permutation of media – talk show, sitcom, movie, podcast, three autobiographies, documentaries – I can’t think of a character like it. I think some things are funnier than others, but I still don’t think he’s missed once.
The funniest show on television is… I think Peep Show has got to be in the conversation. That show is properly so funny and squeamish and is a great example of how far youcan push two characters and the audience. It goes from a world in which these two are behaving or responding to things in a way that a person might behave, but then just slowly turns up the dial to the point where they’re making these decisions, like when Jeremy eats a dog, and it doesn’t feel like it has gone too far. I totally believed it, I was like “this is the situation they’re in, and this is how those people would behave”.
My favourite TV project I’ve ever been involved in is… I mean, it sounds trite, probably, but Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont Spelling Bee. Even for the most ambitious or hopeful comedian or creative, it seems like such a pipe dream – and increasingly so, the more time marches on – that you ever get the chance to make your own thing. Getting to see the show come together, and knowing how small the gap between what I dreamt of making and what we made was, was unbelievably gratifying.
The TV project I wish I could be involved in is… I don’t think there’s any sitcom or comedy show where I could really contribute anything to elevate the experience. So I’m going to say it would be going on a Who Wants to Be a Millionaire style show. I don’t think I do especially well, but I’d love to sit in that chair and experience being inside of that.
My controversial TV opinion is… I think we should probably stop defining TV as anything that plays exclusively on broadcast television, because we’re going to get left behind. If the funding bodies keep defining TV in New Zealand as what gets played on free-to-air TV, and our only metric for whether or not a show can get made is Nielsen boxes, we’re just not going to be able to keep creating at the rate or the quality that we have been able to.
A show that I will never watch, no matter how many people tell me I should is… I’ve not seen Breaking Bad or The Sopranos or Mad Men, but the one show I genuinely think I’ll never, ever watch is Game of Thrones. It was so big, and there were a lot of people getting a lot out of it, but the wind really came out towards the end. And so by the time I was even considering joining the conversation, even the people who loved it were just begrudgingly getting through it.
The last TV project I was involved in was… An episode of Thank God You’re Here in Australia. Those guys are incredibly guarded about who appears on what episode, so there’s nothing I can expressly share, but I can say I got to go on it with a childhood hero of mine. We got to hang out between our scenes, and get to know one another, and it was cool.
The very last thing I watched on television is… I was trying to stay up last night because I had jet lag, and so I watched the very first episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. In lieu of me starting something new or taking a chance on something, it’s me going back over something I already know I love with a fine tooth comb.
Watch Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont Spelling Bee Thursdays on Three, or here on ThreeNow.