As we walk down the top end of Collins Street, past the Rolex store on one side and Gucci boutique on the other, approaching the theatre bearing massive photos of his face, Tom Gleeson is describing how out of touch he is.
“A mate of mine once said to me, ‘Everyone thinks you’re really relatable because you come from the country or whatever but you’re not relatable at all. You never had a real job. You’ve worked in the arts your whole life. You’ve never really had to set your alarm for a job. This idea that you’re somehow this regular Australian guy is just so not true.’”
True or not, it’s at the core of Gleeson’s appeal. On screen, when he’s digging through the reputations of politicians and celebrities and plucking out the embarrassing or controversial nuggets of truth like a surgeon performing a gallstone removal, he’s often saying the things we’re all thinking. But instead of doing it over a pint he’s doing it from the stage at the Logies, surrounded by rich and powerful people whose careers rely on them seeming relatable.
He went viral for doing it on Hard Chat, the breakout segment on Charlie Pickering’s ABC show The Weekly, which earned him the spin-off Hard Quiz. Now in its 11th season, Hard Quiz makes regular Australians the target of his poking. The direction of his arrow is essential and something not all viewers respond to in the same ways.
“There are people still, to this day, who hate Hard Quiz because the host is so obnoxious,” Gleeson says. “It’s like, you do know I’m doing it on purpose? If you can’t detect that, it’s a rough ride. Taking everything on face value must be exhausting.”
The secret I’ve heard from people who’ve worked with Gleeson, and the one confirmed by our morning amble from Fitzroy to Town Hall, is that he’s quite lovely. He’s a good chat, generous with stories, eager to share memories of his years as a gigging standup walking this same route for evening shows at the Melbourne comedy festival (“Me and my mate used to walk home and kick all the bins over”), where this year his show – aptly titled Out of Touch – fills the ornate and stately Regent Theatre every night. It’s fitting that the audience for those shows sits in roomy leather upholstery while he’s on stage telling us how bad he is at managing all the money he makes. Also fitting: that the man seated in front of me on opening night was Googling “Tom Gleeson net worth” before the lights went down.
“I guess the show probably should be called Out of Touch – in brackets and self-aware. The self-awareness kind of wrecks it, doesn’t it?”
It also would make it something of an apology for Gleeson’s brutal brand of honesty. But isn’t that the real joy of watching him work? It’s thrilling to hear a celebrity refuse to pussyfoot around, say, Karl Stefanovic’s alleged party-boy reputation. If a Hard Quiz contestant seems particularly intense and geeky about a sci-fi subject, he’ll point out how nerdy it is. The magic trick of his comedy isn’t being unfiltered and a bit nasty, it’s having such a finely tuned filter that he can come out on the other side of a roast and still be likable.
“When I’ve got to weigh up entertainment versus hurting people’s feelings, I’ll pick entertainment every day of the week,” he says. “But as time wears on – I might be deluded – but I feel people know that I’m coming from a good place.”
He’s earnest and specific, holding eye contact even as we walk alongside one another. “I’m just mocking their visage or their facade. I’m not really mocking who they are as people. I’m not saying stuff that’s deeply personal. I’m usually just making jokes about decisions they’re made or opinions they’re there, and I’m prepared to be critiqued the same way.”
We start our walk down a Fitzroy sidestreet lined with compact little workers’ cottages, the kind that come with million-dollar price tags that belie their working-class origins.
It’s here that Gleeson shared a home with his wife, Ellie Parker. Even 20 years on, he remembers the exact amount of rent he paid to live here – and in the apartment before it. He remembers being booted out so the landlord’s son could move in, and the year-long feud he had with the landlord at his next place. “So I bought a house in Romsey out of spite – to spite him, specifically. I don’t want to have a landlord ever again.”
He was working on Triple M, hosting the evening show Tom & Subby, and starring on Skithouse when he lived in the sweet little house with a door that opens on to the footpath. He calls it his and Parker’s “first proper house”. He hosted his 30th birthday and a Kevin 07 election-night party here. Pickering stayed in the loft upstairs when he’d “run out of money” and moved back from a stint in London. “I charged him rent too,” Gleeson says, laughing into his coffee.
Money comes up often during our walk. As well as his rent, Gleeson remembers exactly how much he charged high schoolers to tutor them when he was a uni student, “on a collision course to becoming a maths teacher”. He’d been white-knuckling a degree in pharmacy while earning $450 a week off the books with his daily tutoring rounds – “I’d get the parents to pay in advance.” When he started doing comedy gigs and was offered drinks and flights and $100 to host open mics, the numbers made sense, and so a career in standup did, too.
“I really hate to say this because it’s about someone who works in commercial radio being right,” he says, in what might be one of the best disclaimers anyone’s ever given on the record, “but there was an executive at Triple M who said something like, ‘You either have to be talking about sex, money or dieting. That’s it. It’s the only things people care about.’”
Gleeson bristled against what he thought were reductive formulas for entertainment at the time. “But when I was putting [Out of Touch] together, I realised it’s a show’s about money and my relationship to it. And it’s instantly interesting to me because you’re not supposed to talk about it.”
It’s a nippy Melbourne morning, with a blue sky on one side of the road and pewter-coloured rain clouds hovering at our backs as we walk down Brunswick Street, with Gleeson pointing out the bars and restaurants he once frequented. “The Black Cat’s still there. It’s funny, for all the time I lived here, I never really went there because, even back then, it was just a bit too cool.”
Gleeson enjoys coming back to his old stomping ground but has grown used to the quiet of Romsey, a town of fewer than 5,000 people about an hour’s drive north. “I’ve become such a country hick that when I come back here, I tend to notice all the graffiti and the vomit on the ground and rubbish and stuff. In Romsey there is graffiti but I probably know who did it. ‘Oh, vomit. Oh, that’s a friend of mine’s from last night.’”
After his show takes him through regional Australia, Gleeson will return to the studios where he hosts Hard Quiz and Taskmaster in front of live audiences with a new metric for how much brashness an audience can stomach. He says he finds all the classic maxims of a television host – to make an audience feel welcome, to take them by the hand, to be a good guest in their lounge rooms – a bit corny.
Talking publicly about earning too much money during a cost-of-living crisis, he says, “breaks all the rules. That is not what a TV host should be doing. You are not supposed to be doing that. You are supposed to be humble. You’re supposed to be grateful that you’re there, privileged that you were offered the job, all these things. And when everyone says that over and over again, it just sounds boring.
“To me, it’s suddenly funny to say the opposite.”
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Tom Gleeson is touring Out of Touch nationally until September. It plays at the Melbourne comedy festival until Sunday