Shaun Micallef and son Gabe to co-host new show 'Parents' Evening'

You have reached your maximum number of saved items.

Remove items from your saved list to add more.

Gabe Micallef remembers the first time he saw his dad on screen – not on a TV mind you, but on YouTube, where he had unearthed old clips of Shaun as Milo Kerrigan, his famously punchdrunk boxer from skit show Full Frontal.

“Well, I was born in 2000, so my …” says Gabe, before Shaun cuts in.

“Heyday was over,” says Shaun.

Gabe continues: “I mean, it coincided with not the afterlife, but the second act of television where it entered an archival form on YouTube. And I remember, I think, seeing Milo Kerrigan, maybe around age eight, and not knowing it was him until it got to the end credits, and then being like, ‘What? That’s my father? What on earth is he doing?’”

Fast-forward 18 or so years, and Shaun and Gabe are hosting a new quiz show together – Shaun Micallef’s Parents’ Evening – in what is perhaps one of the more unexpected TV pairings of the year.

“I’d never done a [imported TV] format before and Gabe’s never done television before,” says Shaun. “So we had that in common. We’d never done this thing before, and that was really the appeal.”

Parents’ Evening is adapted from a UK format hosted by comedian Romesh Ranganathan with his mum Shanthi as his sidekick. And where Shanthi brings a lot of BME to her role – Big Mum Energy – Gabe plays the straight-ish guy to Shaun’s more eccentric style.

And before you get to the nepo baby accusations, well, that’s really the point of the show.

“What we usually do when we’re worried about accusations … we deal with in the very first episode,” says Shaun, 64. “And I think I might even refer to Gabe as a nepo baby – ‘Well, you might think he’s a nepo baby, and here’s my argument as to why he isn’t’ – of course, all I do is support the argument.

“But of course, that’s natural to the show. You can’t bring on someone else’s father or mother. You can bring on your own [mum or dad], or your daughter or son. That’s the point.”

But also, as Gabe points out, when you have a parent who is so prolific – Shaun has appeared in everything from rom-com SeaChange to the drama BlackJack, as well as hosting numerous comedy shows, the Logies and now documentaries on SBS and the ABC – it can be difficult to find something they haven’t done.

“The problem with you,” says Gabe, talking to his dad, “is that not only are you a comedian, but you’re also an actor, a screenwriter, a novelist, a playwright. In other words, he’s left very little uncontaminated territory for me to try anything in. So this felt like a good opportunity just to jump in with both feet and see how it went because I do want to work in this kind of stuff, but I don’t feel like I’m competing with you, which is good.”

The show features three teams of two, each made up of a celebrity with either their parent or child as a teammate. Guests include journalist Ray Martin and his daughter Jenna, radio host Amanda Keller and her son Jack, actor Miranda Tapsell and her mum Barbara and comedian Tom Walker and his dad David. Each team competes to see which parent/child combination knows each other the best, with each team bidding on the number of questions they think their teammate will be able to answer correctly.

Confused? You’re not the only one. During the taping I watched at Network 10 in Sydney recently, champion racehorse trainer Gai Waterhouse and her daughter Kate were among the contestants, and it took Gai a couple of rounds to figure out how it worked, even though Kate kept begging her mum to stop bidding (clearly, the competitive streak runs thick and fast in one half of that family).

And it is that dynamic – the public face versus the personal face – that interests Shaun the most. Who we are at home, and our relationship with our families, is sometimes quite different to who we are in public.

“Peter Helliar can’t be Peter Helliar as we know him, because his son Aidan is sitting next to him,” says Shaun. “And he can’t pretend with Aidan. And Aidan is going to call him [out] if he [Helliar] tells some story that’s not true.

“And I think that’s the fun. It’s that gentle chiding that happens between family members that makes them more real. That world exists online, supposedly in terms of rawness and honesty, and something genuine that you don’t get on so-called slick television.

“So this is a smashing together of the worlds, and there’s an intersection within which both things can happen at once. And I think the way they orbit each other is interesting. I see it as like a series of plates we’re spinning, and Gabe’s spinning three, and I’m trying to move four, and the guests are, ‘What are we doing now? Where are we?’”

And while it’s a bit more of a rarity here, the father-son TV duo is more common overseas – think Canadian comedy pair Dan and Eugene Levy, who starred in Schitt’s Creek together and hosted the Emmys, or UK TV hosts Bradley and Barney Walsh, who co-host Gladiators, or UK comedian Jack Whitehall, who has spent five seasons taking his dad Michael on holiday for his Netflix series Travels With My Father.

Seeing Shaun and Gabe perform together during Parents’ Evening – and during our interview – it’s clear they are quite alike, with a shared sense of silliness. But Gabe, who is the middle of three sons and has worked behind the scenes in TV for the last few years, was nervous about being seen as too similar to his dad.

“My main concern was that the expectation was that I’d have to perform a version of him,” says Gabe. “But then we did the first episode, and I very quickly realised that I don’t really have a lot of choices. I’m so inexperienced as a performer that I really only have one choice with whatever I do, and it’s just raw.

“So the concern very quickly faded, and it ended up just being OK. I’ll just step into this, and it takes whatever shape it does. We are kind of similar in temperament, but I can’t do comedy, at least in the way that he does. I’m much more close to a real human, if I can say that.”

Adds Shaun: “I can vouch for that. Between the two of us. He’s the closest thing to an actual human being.”

So how do they see their dynamic?

“People keep asking me, ‘Oh, what’s the advice he gives you to tell you what to do?’” says Gabe. “It’s like, ‘no, he affords me the room to try out all my terrible ideas’. Some of them work, a lot of them don’t, and it never feels like I’m being directed. It’s always like, OK, ‘here’s an opportunity. Just try something, and have a good time with it’.”

Adds Shaun: “Can I tell the skateboard story?”

He gets a nod from Gabe.

“So Gabe’s 10,” recalls Shaun. “And so we go out and find places to skateboard with safe spaces. We’re down there at the head of the railway line at Williamstown, and there’s a large embankment that goes all the way into the train line at the end of it. And 10-year-old Gabe says to me, ‘Oh, can I go down?’ It’s unsealed and rocks everywhere.

“And I said, ‘Sure’. My parents told me I could do anything I ever wanted. Anything I manifest in my mind, I could achieve, and I saw no reason why he couldn’t do that. Anyway, how much skin did you take off?”

Gabe motions along his body. “It was about here to there.”

Continues Shaun: “It seemed reasonably significant. Nothing I could conceal from his mother. It was pretty horrible. And well, you know, the lesson learned is don’t trust me, obviously. But the next lesson was, I don’t know, I should ask you [he turns to Gabe]. Has it made any difference to your life at all that experience?”

Gabe: “Well, I don’t skateboard any more.”

The point, I think, Shaun is trying to make is that he is happy to let Gabe take his own risks, even if they are incredibly unsafe. After all, it’s what Shaun did, at age 31, when he left the relative safety of being a lawyer, to try his hand at comedy.

“You don’t know where the wall is until you run into it,” says Shaun. “You don’t know whether your grasp is beyond your reach, and you don’t know until you hopefully gently tap on the wall, and you go, OK, that’s it. That’s as far as I can go with this.”

Shaun Micallef’s Parents’ Evening premieres at 7:30pm on Monday, September 28, on Network 10.