Game for a laugh

Jeremy Corbett, comedian, radio personality and host of TV show 7 Days. Photo / Babiche Martens

The applause isn't canned on TV3's comedy hit 7 Days. It's pre-recorded. In the half-dark of Auckland's Transmission Room nightclub, we, the studio audience for the weekly panel show, are being cajoled into applauding, howling and yahooing like a class of 8-year-olds by 7 Days' warm-up guy Tarun Mohanbhai. Clap, clap, clap, whoop, whoop, whoop, we all go. "Try taking a deep breath like you would be jumping in a pool," Mohanbhai advises us before we do it all again. Clap, clap, clap, whoop, whoop, whoop.

Eventually producer Jon Bridges is satisfied with our performance, though we've worked hard for our hard seats here below the lights and the cameras. And now it's showtime. More clapping.

The core 7 Days crew - Dai Henwood and Paul Ego - and this week's guests, including Aussie comic Charlie Pickering, trot on to the set and take their seats. But hold on, the guy I'm really here to see - Jeremy Corbett, longtime radio man, 7 Days host but still not-quite-a-celebrity (his Wikipedia page was taken down in June because there was "no indication of importance") - is missing.

We wait a few minutes more until, wearing a good suit and chin stubble, he appears out of nowhere. "How was the haircut?" the rubber-faced and quite barking Henwood asks. "F*** you," fires back Corbett. Oh good, they're fighting already. That I'm happy to applaud.

To say that Jeremy Corbett is damned pleased with 7 Days - a panel show which satirises the news - is something beyond an understatement. It's the show the broadcaster-cum-comedian has always wanted to do, he tells me when I ring to arrange an interview. It's the show he's always wanted, he tells me again after we've both taken a seat inside the lovely, airy Mt Eden villa he shares with his actress wife Megan and their friendly though rather pongy (Corbett does apologise) golden retriever, Nugget. "It feels really good. But someone asked me the other day whether I felt vindicated by it and I said 'well not really'.

I wasn't trying to prove anything. But I've always believed that a show like this would work. "I think it's a relatively cheap form of television that somewhere like New Zealand can probably compete. It is harder for us to compete with the really good drama or a really good sitcom because the overheads are so huge. But with something like this, I think you can. The rest boils down to the material which is not as expensive - more's the pity." He laughs. "I'm more surprised that we managed to get it on air than that it's successful. But I always thought it would be a good solid programme." These are not idle, boastful words.

The show, which screens at 10pm on Fridays, is rating very well for something in such a late slot, and reviewers seem to like it as much as viewers (it's averaged a significant 26.5 per cent of its 18-49-year-old target audience). Herald critic Frances Grant wrote after the premiere that, though the adult content could be "a bit vile", the show was laugh-out-loud funny.

7 Days is the product of many hands, starting with the small production company, The Download Project (responsible for some C4 special features, Jaquie Brown's game show Pop Goes The Weasel, and the comedy panel show Off the Wire, first heard on National Radio), which makes it.

It is produced by Corbett's longtime friend Jon Bridges and, of course, involves a fair number of the country's stand-up comics, including Ego and Henwood.

Corbett was in from the ground floor, hosting the show from its pilot show onward - which wasn't the foregone conclusion it might seem. He's done his share of TV tryouts which have never made it to screen. "Paul Ego calls me 'the stewardess' because I have a tendency to f**k pilots," Corbett laughs. "I've made a lot of pilots and a few of them have been of this ilk; there are a lot of people, I guess, who believe New Zealand should have some sort of chat show like this. We had The Panel for a while [in the early 2000s], which I didn't see a lot of, but perhaps it didn't quite nail it."

Indeed, the only similar show that might be said to have properly nailed it was The Ralston Group more than a decade ago. The Ralston Group's success was built not only on the talent of that show's host, Bill Ralston, but on the clear and fertile chemistry of those who filled out the panel each week. So too with 7 Days. "It's a good bunch," Corbett says. "It just sort of clicked into place. They know what they're doing and they've got a really good feel for it and they're kind of, I suppose, they know the attention span of the new TV audience. It's just gag, gag, gag."

This Gatling gun approach means plenty of hits. And the virtue of the panel is that no single comedian is left holding the gag if - or rather, when - a joke suffers a brutal, painful demise.

Corbett knows all about dying. "It's pretty horrible," he says. Well, yes, of course it is. But how does it feel? "You just feel like a bit of a dick really." He's been a dead man walking more than once. Though of course dying on stage is, if not an ever-present spectre for stand-up comics, then a customary workplace injury - one ACC won't cover - that's bound to occur more than once in a stand-up's career, particularly if you have a career spanning some 20 years. "I guess it's like that dream where you turn up to work in your underpants. It's kind of like that. But I have to say every death I've had has been my own fault. I've known beforehand that I shouldn't have gone on. One was when I was drunk at The Kingslander [an Auckland bar].

Another was a gig I really didn't want to do down in Queenstown prior to an All Blacks match. And both were gigs I probably knew to avoid and didn't, and I went on and failed." He laughs. But of course he's had his shining successes on stage too, including, memorably, a set in Montreal, one of the few foreign gigs he's done. "I came off stage and was like 'wow that was really good, I really enjoyed that'. I went into the green room and Megan was there but there were other comedians too. She said 'oh hi'. I thought 'she's playing it cool, have I really misread this?

I thought it went really well'. Then we wandered out into this hallway where no one else was and she went 'oh my God that was great!' That was a cool feeling. "I had another showcase later that night and went along feeling a bit cocky and, ah, died," he says, and hoots. Corbett, now 47, got his start in comedy in the late 1970s-early 1980s at Massey University in Palmerston North, where he completed a BA in English and computer science.

The Corbett family had been living in Palmerston North since Corbett was five. He'd been born in Westport before his parents (he a doctor, she a nurse) moved the family to England for three and half years, then returned home in 1965. Corbett is the second in a family of four boys: the eldest, Greg, has a garage and LPG installation business in Ashhurst; Nigel is an Auckland advertising creative; and Andrew, the youngest and "brightest of all", works for Navico, a local company which recently developed a new radar system seen as the biggest advance in the technology since the 1940s. They are not, Corbett says, a competitive family - "we've all found our niches and gone our separate ways" - though he credits competition to get a word in edgeways at the dinner table for honing his wit.

At Massey, Corbett got involved with the university's annual capping revue, a live, sketch-based comedy show, and with the student station, Radio Massey. He doesn't recall being an overly demonstrative type, but he joined in all the same. "Nigel and I did [capping revue] together and I think there was safety in numbers. It wasn't like I was walking in solo ... you didn't have to have quite the balls." There was also safety in developing one's comic ability in a comparative backwater.

"In Palmy you kind of did everything, you weren't limited and you also didn't expect anything. Maybe you could get through your ugly duckling phase without getting shot down. If you tried it in Auckland and it didn't work, they'd have said 'f**k off' and you'd give up." A little further down the track, the siblings would work professionally as the Corbett Brothers, however a career in entertainment never really occurred to Jeremy at Massey.

"I'm not great planner, I'm not a great imaginer of what I'm going to be doing, which I suppose makes me more flexible in terms of what I will did. "When I mentioned wanting to be an actor at school, it was all very frivolous; that's not really what you do. Although if I'd pursued it my folks would have supported me. Academic pursuits were what you did. Now you can do degrees in radio and all the rest of it, but it wasn't even an option then. It was science or maybe the arts ... so I never really sat down and planned out an entertainment career."

Is Jeremy Corbett funny? Well the man himself isn't entirely sure. "There are days where I think things worked or things didn't. But I don't ... I think I need to work harder to be funny. I think there are some people who, genuinely, their brains are just funny. I don't think I'm one of those. I think that perhaps I thought I was for a while and I'm not, and I realised I needed to work a bit harder to make something that's worthwhile broadcasting." Yet comedy, or at least using humour, has been key to Corbett making a living for more than a decade and half.

After graduating he put in time at New Plymouth radio station Energy FM with Steven Joyce, now a minister in the National Government, before working as a computer analyst in Palmerston North and then, for four years, in Perth. On returning from Australia, he was offered a copywriting job at Palmerston North station 2XS before finally making the move to Auckland in the early 1990s where, after working as a radio producer at 91FM and Hauraki, he was offered the Auckland breakfast show at brand new station More FM in 1993. He's been there ever since. His co-host for 14 of those years was Kim Adamson, though the pair were split in August after Adamson's contract was not renewed.

The new Auckland More FM breakfast show, with co-hosts Joe Cotton, the former Truebliss singer, and comedian Jesse Mulligan (who also writes for 7 Days), has had a hard beginning with the show going from 5.2 per cent of the Auckland breakfast audience to 3.5 per cent in the most recent survey. "[The new team] is like an arranged marriage," Corbett says. "But I love them both. I think the latest survey hurt them a lot and I tried to say 'look it's change, it wouldn't have mattered who it was'."

You'd think 16 years in the same job would have made him cross-eyed with boredom, but apparently not. He's certainly kept himself busy in other areas, with stand-up work, TV ads, MCing corporate events and, of course, doing TV work. "I don't think I've ever found radio a cruise ... radio is my real food and stand-up my soul food. They're two quite different things." Corbett is an original, paid-up member of what was known, in the 1990s, as the Palmy Mafia. A largish group of comedians and entertainers from the Manawatu - many of whom belonged to the comedy group Facial DBX - which included Bridges, Alan Brough (now in Australia), David Downs (these days a manager at Microsoft New Zealand) and Paul Horan, who is a producer on a similar Australian panel show, The 7pm Project.

This group was key - with Scott Blanks, the founder-owner of Auckland's The Classic comedy club - in putting stand-up on its feet in Auckland in the early 1990s, with regular gigs at Kitty O'Briens, a central Auckland pub now called The Drake. Corbett continues to do stand-up every month or so at The Classic - it helps keep his creative tank full - but it's been More FM, the bits and pieces on TV and the MCing that have paid for his flash home and not-so-flash car, an ageing Saab ragtop. In the harsh light of hindsight, his TV career might not have been quite as successful as it has been regular.

Since his first show, The Paradise Picture Show, which screened back in the early 1990s, he has popped up every few years in comedy shows (A Bit After Ten, Pulp Comedy), variety shows (The Gong Show), reality TV (Downsize Me) and game shows (Celebrity Squares).

Few lasted more than a series or two at best. However he has, somewhat to his surprise, found himself that most peculiar of telly creatures, the TV host - most notably in a stint as the anchor of the now-cancelled gameshow, Deal Or No Deal. "I guess I've done a lot of MCing corporate gigs and MCing at [The Classic] and as I got older comedians of my age sort of dropped off. I was the more senior guy, so you get the MC role. I haven't really analysed it beyond that. I suppose perhaps [I'm] inoffensive.

"One journalist was asking me about [Deal or No Deal] and I said 'I've got a new respect for gameshow hosts' and she said 'didn't you respect them before?"' He laughs. "Gameshow host, it's like ... I don't know if a lot of people who aspire to do TV work go 'I want to be a gameshow host'." Still, he hoped Deal would get a good long run.

"Basically its history around the world is that it's always gone for several seasons, I'm the only one who managed to kill it ..." The year until August had been his hardest year in broadcasting, he says, without a hint of anger or regret. It's no wonder then Corbett is so chuffed about 7 Days. By the time it comes to an end it will have run close to 20 episodes.

Dai Henwood is a very rude fellow. And, as the 7 Days' filming wears on, he becomes increasingly ruder, developing a mad riff involving, well, I couldn't possibly say here. It falls to the "inoffensive" Corbett, as per his job description, to call a halt to this wild flight of fancy, but it's this sort of stuff he enjoys most.

"Some of the nicest stuff is when people just start conversing and jumping off each other rather than going for gags." Indeed, the big difference between 7 Days live and 7 Days on TV, apart from the length (the filming takes well over two hours) is the, well, rawness.

Fans of the show should definitely try to get a seat in the audience because much good stuff gets left on the cutting room floor in paring 7 Days down to a commercial half-hour. The bigger question, of course, is whether the show is destined for another season or is itself, in the flaky way of television, for the chop, despite its viewing numbers. It's a question Corbett can't answer, though TV3 does include 7 Days in its 2010 season launch booklet. "This is one of the problems with TV. In my experience - and this is why I try not to invest too heavily in things - with TV you never hear 'no'.

You only hear 'yes we want you' and that's usually a week before you have to be on air. Other than that no one ever rings you and says 'look it was really good fun, but it's over'. I suppose learning that has made it good for me in a way because Megan used to say 'why aren't you excited about this' and I'd say 'well I'll be excited when I'm recording it because then I know it's happening'. I've seen so many things that don't make it. But with 7 Days ... I can die happy because it's one I wanted to see take off."