Hard Quiz Live

Based on the very popular ABCTV quiz show, Hard Quiz Live packs out the big room at the Melbourne Town Hall.  On my evening, the audience queue to get in stretches down Collins Street from the side entrance, and around the corner into Swanston Street for three hundred metres. Quizmaster Tom Gleeson, whose schtick is cruel, nasty, and politically incorrect putdowns, and scurrilous or snide remarks on his rivals, comes out onto the stage – and he revels in having no cameras, and a huge live audience. 

He is his own warm-up man, and we get fifteen minutes or so of sheer stand-up – of course in the Gleeson mode: cruel, nasty, politically incorrect, etc.  Free of broadcast restrictions (and libel laws?) and the quiz show format, he lets rip about and into anyone who stands in his way, including the ABC itself and his boss.  And he does all that with an insouciant and self-assured arrogance that is pretty funny in itself.

True, if you’ve never watched the television show, the fact that a quiz is live on stage may not mean much, but if you have watched you may still wonder how they are going to make this format work live?’  

For the pre-recorded television show, contestants (victims) are auditioned weeks before, selected, and they nominate their supposed expertise in their special subject, giving the show’s researchers time to cook up the questions – from easy-peasy to impossibly arcane.

But here, Gleeson or his producers choose the special subjects beforehand. He then selects hapless volunteers, who claim to know lots about these subjects, out of the audience.  It could be different every night, but the special subjects we had were: The Beatles, Princess Diana, Australian Prime Ministers, and the TV sit-com Seinfeld.  On stage, there are roughly the same individual stands and buzzers for the contestants, a huge screen for the scores and video clips, and the same rounds of questions and eliminations.

The volunteers troop onto the stage. Gleeson does his ritual insults and humiliation of each – but no one seems to mind. It’s too funny. One contestant  is an over-confident but very entertaining schoolgirl who sadly knows zip about Australia’s Prime Ministers, or much else – so she’s first to go.  At the other end is the Seinfeld man who reveals he’s watched every episode ‘Oh, maybe ten times…’  Uh-oh.  It’s the same routine as the quiz, including the contestants coming back at Gleeson, but it’s live – and curiously it’s much more fun than watching a TV screen on your couch.

Someone, years ago, told Gleeson that he was much funnier when he was nasty – or as he’d put it now, ‘hard’.  He’s made that into his own art form – with a gleeful awareness of being a naughty fellow.  Half of it is what we’d say – if we dared.  I was laughing all the way through – but then I wasn’t in the firing line.

Michael Brindley