For the starting point of his festival show, Andy Muirhead has taken one adjective assigned to him in a review: perky. I’ve got one that’s a lot less flattering: dull.

It’s a shame because he seems such a nice chap – open, charming and personable; in many ways like a younger version of Adam Hills. But he just hasn’t got anything interesting to say, which makes for a restless 50 minutes in the Town Hall’s pokiest room.

Muirhead hosts an antiques series on ABC television, in which he interviews people who collect things. It’s called, with typical Aussie bluntness, Collectors, and has become an unlikely primetime hit, at least with older audiences.

It was in a review of this that he was called ‘perky’, which you might think was neither here nor there. But so bereft is the baby-faced Muirhead of things to talk about, that his vague ponderings about whether this is a good thing or a bad forms one the central planks of his festival show.

Equally light premises include shop assistants who say you look good in shirts that really don’t suit you, what it’s like to be drunk, and the thrill of going to the Logie awards – the antipodean version of the Baftas. It’s stuff so shallow it would but a saucer to shame, and contains very few jokes.

He can go long minutes on a set-up, carefully explaining his childhood dyslexia, for instance, and the pills he would take for it, then detail how quitting the medication gave him the confidence to approach a woman for the first time – and all this palaver is for the sake of one weak joke in which he confuses one word for another and to set up a nonsensical routine when he thinks his dog is God. The phrase ‘cut to the chase’ seems to be alien to him.

Despite all this procrastinating, the show is still padded out with a lot of aimless banter with the audience – including a protracted bit of business at the start when he persuades one punter to give him the big showbiz intro like he, as he’s keen to point out, often gives to the likes of Wil Anderson.

Tasmania-based Murihead has an assured, friendly delivery style and he tells his stories as if they were funny – irregardless of whether they actually are. But this feels too much like the aimless ramblings of someone with too few interesting experiences and too little to say about the world to really hold the attention.

Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
May 2006