I love him to bits and I'm not the only one. After a small flurry of research I found this incredible fanblog devoted to the man himself. Tirelessly recording every hilarious analogy, joke and bizarre noise he makes for the world to see, it confirmed my suspicions that we have a little ray of sunshine piercing through the post-Hickey rain cloud.
Corbett goes for an extremely theatrical presentation technique, with a consistent forecast of Gondry-sized hands and breadstick fingers. A great way to watch him is to sit as close to the screen as possible and just focus on the hands. Honestly, it gives Cirque de Soleil a run for it's money.
"That low coming through will temper your numbers," Corbett assures us, gently pushing both his palms down like he was resuscitating a ghost. It's hypnotising. The resemblance to a magician is hard to deny - you could hide about 40 packs of playing cards in those mitts.
Another one of his essential techniques is to personify or anthropomorphise the weather, acting out scenarios for people like me who don't know about things like "highs" or "pressure fields" or "science".
The other night he described a stubborn ridge as "sat there like a big rugby player." He would do his rugby player bit two more times throughout the segment. I feel safe in saying that he has never touched a rugby ball in his life.
Another night's anthropomorphic analogy came in the form of a mouse. I have never heard someone say the word "nibble" so many times on the six o'clock news. He said it five times in the space of three minutes. That's too many nibbles, surely? The high was being nibbled, the weather system was being nibbled, the rugby player ridge was being nibbled.
Corbett finished his segment on a poignant note: "The mouse eats around the edges of the cheese," he said, pausing and staring reflectively past the camera and into the deepest crevice of my soul, "and eventually gets to the middle of it."
Who's to say if he was even talking about the weather at this point, or simply closing his piece with a bleak reminder that the mouse of time is slowly gnawing away at the cheese of our lives?
Either way, I'll be checking back in with Daniel tonight, tomorrow, and the next day.
Have a nibble New Zealand, he's really great.
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- The Spinoff
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