Interview - Tom Gleisner : Working Dog
Author of Audrey Gordon's Tuscan Summer
and Molvania
By
Sean Lynch
Regarded as the Captain of the Working Dog
team, Tom Gleisner has been instrumental in some Australian comedy's
finest moments.
From Frontline
to The Late Show,
Thank
God You're Here to The
Castle he is a man that clearly knows the difference
between the funny and unfunny.
His latest venture - with the help of his regular comic callaborators
Santo Cilauro and Rob Sitch - is a satire of the foodie culture
currently sweeping Australia in Audrey
Gordon's Tuscan Summer.
Web Wombat's Sean Lynch sat down with the
comedy icon to talk all
things comedy, food and sex at sea...
Working Dog has been relatively quiet since the end of Thank God You're Here,
but lately it seems like it's raining Working Dog (with seveal books,
an iPhone app and a movie in the pipeline).
Is
that a coincidence, or is it all part of a larger plan?
No. There's never been a larger plan Sean. We've never had any element
of forward planning in what we do
[Laughs]. We just think of ideas and persue them, and when
we think they are ready to be unleashed - we do so.
Audrey
Gordon's Tuscan Summer
is an interesting concept for Working Dog, because it's not often you
launch a new character that involves anyone outside of the core group
(the last I can think of is Russell Coight).
Did
you feel there was any risk in doing so?
Not at all. We kind of find it liberating in a way, to put our ideas
and comedy through a different face.
Using Heidi Arena (TGYH,
The
Librarians) was, for us, a perfect choice to
play the role of Audrey Gordon because we've worked with here before -
and she really captures, photographically, the look and the tone of
these rather stern celebrity chefs. Do you get any guilty pleasure from knowing the audience doesn't quite know if she's real or not? She was on The Circle
recently and it was quite clear that a portion of the audience were in
on the joke, and a the rest just thought she was a bit of a bitch...
[Laughs] It's an absolute joy! I guess in a way, as long as it's not too battling for people, we sort of feel "Job Done". It's
similar to Molvania, our first travel book from years ago. We always
said our ultimate accolade would be if it found it's way into the
travel section, someone purchased one and actually thought the country
was real - at least for a while.
That's the way we've proceeded
in creating Audrey and Tuscan Summer. We want it to look and feel and
fell like a genuine cooking / travel book that creeps up on readers as
they work their way through the pages.
Books
are something of a dying comedic format, do you ever get worried or
annoyed that some of your best jokes may get lost within the format?
No, not really. The way we work is that we tend to come up with an idea
first, then we ask ourselves "What's the best format for this
idea".
It may be a televsion series or a feature
film - but in this case, it was clearly a book.
We wanted to send up, and to a certain
degree celebrate, our obession with foodies and travel and everybody
taking the "Plating Up" phenomenon to ridiculous heights. A book suited
that. Was Audrey born out of Jane [Kennedy]'s foray into the cookbook world - or Vice Versa?
It
was completley unconnected. Jane has loved food and serious cooking for
years and was working on her first book for quite some time while
rangling children. But they are in no way connected, ours is a pure
comic creation.
In
Audrey's book - are there any gags in there that you feel are comedic
"Make or Break" moments?
There's a page right at the beginning. When we were putting it together
we were following the traditional layout of your standard cook books -
and one page you always get in cookbooks is "Weights and
Measurements".
It's normally a fairly dry description : 1
Cup of Flour = 225 grams... all that sort of stuff.
I remember when we approached that section I thought "Look, we're not
going to get any jokes out of this page". But it's one of the early
pages in the book - so we tried to inject Audrey's attitude into that :
Organic eggs weigh more than non-organic eggs, when in doubt - add
sugar.
It's just completley ludicrous - but it's taking a very dry and
technical subject matter and just "infusing" it (to use an Audrey
expression) with just the right attitude.
Finally,
we ask everyone this, if you could start your own "Richard Gere Gerbil" Hollywood style myth
to spread about yourself in the press... what would it be?
It'd need to be something wholesome with
tireless charity work - and possibly a rescue at sea. Or, I guess,
there is the wild sexual exploits... in a perfect legal and consentual
way, of course.
So we'll mark it down as "Wild Sexual Exploits at Sea".
That's correct. Audrey Gordon’s Tuscan Summer by Audrey Gordon (with a little help from Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner and Rob Sitch) will be released in Australia on November 1, 2010.
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