By Tania Phillips
Meet the Mavericks
Tuesdays, 10pm,
ABC-TV (Starting 13 June)
Back for it’s third series, this little gem of a show starts with an episode which is both entertaining and, now, poignant.
Over it’s first two series the show has featured a group of iconic artists, performers, cultural leaders and all-round troublemakers. Each week a different pair of mavericks have a freewheeling and intimate conversation.
This time the series kicks off with a chat between British comedian and writer Alexei Sayle and the late great comedian writer and satirist John Clarke.
Recorded late last year, the episode shows us just how much we lost when Clarke died in April, he’s funny and informative, interested and interesting. While Sayle is a great interview subject at times he seems a little out of his depth as the interviewer and it’s Clarke, who has obviously researched Sayle backwards and forwards, who keeps it all going, interviewing Sayle and then adding his own bits too.
Of course these two mavericks meet in a bar and cover everything from comedy to sheep and what we get in the end is a lovely interesting chat about comedy of the ’70s and ’80s and how we evolve as we get older.
Episode two will see multi-Aria award-winning singer-songwriter and actress Missy Higgins jam with banjo-wielding comedian Anne Edwards.
