The Melbourne International Comedy Festival
Main Room – Melbourne Town HallReviewed on Friday April 1, 2022
This review may contain spoilers
For more than three decades, the Melbourne International Comedy Festival has become a growing staple in the city’s entertainment calendar. The range of options include art exhibitions, cabaret, competitions, debates, improvisation, musicals, sketch shows, song cycles, theatre, and traditional stand-up. With this huge array of acts and displays on offer, punters are easily spoiled for choice.
Since its debut on ABC TV in 2016, Hard Quiz has run for seven successful seasons (or 156 episodes) to date. With a simple yet ingenious premise, the program asks four players to each submit a specific area of popular cultural interest.
Over the course of thirty minutes, they are grilled in-depth on their chosen passion to determine an overall winner. Past champions have excelled in topics from ‘Doctor Who’ to the ‘Titanic’, ‘Elton John’ and ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’. In short, the possibilities never end.
What makes Hard Quiz stand out from television’s vast game show landscape, however, is one distinct difference. Players don’t compete for cash prizes. But instead, a moment in the spotlight and of course, the glory of being a know-it-all.
Without the draw of monetary incentives, why then, would contestants want to put themselves at the mercy of their own brainpower, rival opponents, and the clock?
The legendary American stand-up, Rita Rudner, once joked about fearing Scrabble with her friends because she couldn’t spell. Or worse, being challenged to a round of Trivial Pursuit. Then they’d find out she didn’t know anything.
Herein lies the public’s ongoing fascination with the ABC hit series. The show is as much about general knowledge, and the obsessive people who embrace it. If the sell-out Melbourne Town Hall audience at Friday night’s show is any indication, Hard Quiz Live allows both hardcore and casual fans to enjoy this magic up close and personal.
The veteran stand-up, Tom Gleeson, anchors the experience with wry charm and lightning quick wit. That contestants aren’t preselected but volunteer themselves on the spot, adds to the rollercoaster vibe of the evening. Meaning, Gleeson’s expert hosting skills, are put to the test from the get-go in search for comedy gold. Having fronted Hard Quiz since day one, he is completely at home and in his element. Sharp yet self-deprecating at the same time, no one is safe from ridicule.
At seventy minutes in length, Hard Quiz Live is divided up into two distinct parts. Gleeson jokes that in the straight to screen version, Leigh Sales from 7.30, is his incongruous warm-up act.
Here however, Gleeson works the room himself like nobody’s business. Meanwhile, explaining the history and rules of the show, and his own claim to fame with trivia. A highlights reel features several former champions and contestants who made their mark on the show, and lasting impact on the viewing public.
On this occasion, the four lucky victims ‘Liam’, ‘Cam’, ‘Aileen’ and ‘Mel’ didn’t disappoint. Fortunately, they were all willing fans, and revelled in every delicious moment.
The only constant, and whether this aspect is the same at each performance for the overall season, is that the topics are already locked in place. That being said, and without giving them away, the four areas of interest clearly matched the room’s wide-reaching demographic. As the show’s ‘home viewers’ for the evening, on more than several occasions, several audience members found it too hard to contain themselves from giving away the answers.
Part of an extensive national tour, the Melbourne stop clearly shows there is room for this kind of vehicle within the MICF program calendar. One for the fans and friends alike, Hard Quiz Live runs until Saturday 9 April.