TV: From a Crowded House to a shed full of fun

Erstwhile pop rocker Paul Hester took time out after he packed it in - to spend some time pottering at home. FIONA RAE reports on the subsequent transition ...

The best year Paul Hester had was the one he spent in a shed. When he left Crowded House in 1994, he built one in his backyard in Melbourne and thought about stuff.

"I put a pot-belly stove in there and slept and listened to the radio and it was wonderful," he enthuses.

From small, sheddy beginnings do big ideas grow, and that is where he devised Hessie's Shed, a big, friendly variety TV show that started life at the Melbourne Comedy Festival.

"I thought, 'wouldn't it be great to have a show which was a shed and you could invite people along like your friends and they'd turn up and it would just kind of happen?'"

Ten episodes of Hessie's Shed were filmed at Melbourne's Esplanade Hotel, but the set was designed to look just like Hester's old shed. And he invited his friends - among them a few New Zealanders, including the "Crowdies," the Topp Twins and Sam Hunt.

"We used comedians, poets, painters, rock 'n' rollers and singer-songwriters and the audience. And we got the audience on stage and the big thing was that we wanted to have food," explains Hester.

"I wanted to have toasters, crumpets, muffins, cups of tea being made on stage. And that was the whole idea so that when you came into the shed to see the show at the comedy festival you would get this huge waft of toast. I was literally trying to recreate a domestic vibe in a performance space.

"I was interested in playing with the shed in a rock 'n' roll circus sort of style and thought it was time for some hairy old 40-year-olds like myself to dangle ourselves out there."

The shed is also the starting point for Hester's relaxed chats out the back in, yes, a shed behind the Esplanade.

"I never had to ask anyone anything actually. With the Topp Twins, I just had to say 'shed' and that was it for about half an hour. It was hilarious.

"There's a real thing between Australians and New Zealanders with sheds. They're a real common denominator. You can say 'galvo' in hushed tones in New Zealand and Australia and it's understood. You can't do that anywhere else."

Galvo? But anyway ...

"It's an area for men's business, and I thought that maybe we can even have a few insights into that shed and talk to some blokes about some of that blokey stuff and maybe stuff will come out. We definitely went for that. I've been told stuff in the shed by blokes that I would never have been told in the house."

Finding himself on the other side of an interview was also enlightening for someone who spent more than 10 years being interviewed in Split Enz and Crowded House.

"It certainly made me realise the questions I would not ask. It didn't lead me to the questions I should ask, it more identified things I would never do to someone that were done to me.

"With the Crowdies we always tried to muck around and try to catch them out a bit, more for our own interest than anything. It made me realise not to treat that trivially - but not to try to set it up too much, either. It's a really perilous thing, to try to do an interview."

Hester once described Crowded House as "two dorks and a dictator," but his newfound rock 'n' roll freedom has, ironically, seen him in the role once occupied by Neil Finn.

"Forming my own band and doing my own telly show and forming the company and being Mr Goody Two-shoes, I was immediately on the phone to Neil in the first week or two of it and saying, 'Now I realise what you've been going through with me and Nick for the past 10 years and I'm so sorry for being late and I'm so sorry for doing all those things.'

"I used to think Neil was a real goody two-shoes and I was like 'just relax' and now I'm on the other side I realise he's the person who was driving a lot of that and holding that together. So I rang up and apologised and he just laughed at me for about 10 minutes."

The reunion of Split Enz for the millennium celebrations in Gisborne may see the prankster in Hester resurface, for one night anyway.

David Bowie's management are getting nervous.

"We're in intense negotiations at the moment with Mr Bowie as to what time we get off stage and what time he gets on. Mr Bowie's people are very, very worried."

That you're going to be naughty?

"Can't wait to be naughty. Red rag to a bull."

Who: Paul Hester

What: Hessie's Shed

Where: TV4

When: tonight, 9.35