Winners are Grinners Dave Callan interview

Winners are grinners BY LLOYD GORMAN

Dundalk born comedian Dave Callan is onto a winner with his latest gig. He fronts the Lotterywest’s latest advertising campaign ‘That’s the Ticket’ to thank their customers for playing the lottery, and by extension supporting many good causes and groups in WA. Last year alone, for example, $865million was funnelled into local communities across the state in the form of grants and prizes, which benefit thousands of West Australians. Research carried out for Lotterywest found that many people do not know that most of the money raised by the state owned body goes to local charities, clubs, groups and projects. “I had no idea myself,” Dave admitted to Irish Scene. “I discovered that the work Lotterywest do is pretty great for the community and the give a lot of money to worthwhile causes, such as Foodbank, Mens Shed and help for the homeless in Fremantle. It makes a huge different to the people who may not have a voice or be able to fend for themselves or as privileged as as many of us our, so its a great cause.” The new ad – which was first shown on Perth television channels on June 6 – has Dave as himself, dressed in Lotterywest activewear, dashing around several local locations and organisations linked to lottery funding, including Midvale Skate Park and St. Patrick’s Community Support Centre in Fremantle. He is happy with the end product but hasn’t always had a good experience shooting them. “You don’t know they go, they can be a bit cringe worthy, but they did a good job, sometimes scripts do not have you in mind, or are for a version of you they believe exists but which may not be accurate. But in this case they wrote it with me in mind and they gave me a bit of flexibility to be me. I really enjoyed the whole thing, it came up well. From the very start I said I was willing to work with them to make it as funny as possible and put my own stamp on it, which is what they wanted, so that made me optimistic from the start about how it would turn out.” Shooting on a previous ad for a home loan provider did not go as well. “The idea of the ad was there was a really black and white couple paying their mortgage and they don’t like it and then it went into full colour and its me and some girl and we are in the nude, because we are free of our mortgage and happy in a lovely garden with the sprinklers on and they put black bars over our bits,” he said. “We had to stand in the front garden of this house in a residential street in Claremont, if I remember correctly, and then we heard close by, a little too close for comfort, a bell ring and then there were all these kids walking past us looking at us naked in this garden, that was a little bit awkward. I won’t forget that.”

It took Dave, then at the tender age of 15, about a year to settle into their new life when his family migrated from Dundalk to WA in 1990. One of the things that helped him find his feet in the early years was comedy. As a first year student at Edith Cowan University he took part in a talent competition called Uni-mates. He did a five minute stand up routine. “I always wanted to try it and I said oh stuff it, I don’t know anyone, not thinking ahead that if I bombed I’d be a social leper until people forgot about it. So I jumped up and did it, I can’t remember much about it,it was a bit of a blur.” After the show the MC – professional comic David Lenny – urged him to come along that night to the Laugh Resort, a pool hall called Pockets in the area that is now Yagan Square, for their comedy night. “I said I didn’t think so because it was all Ben Elton and Billy Connolly material. I just repeated stuff I had heard watching them on VHS tapes over and over again because I loved it,” he added. “I love it, I was drawn to it but I never thought I’d do it. This was going to be a comedy venue with other comedians and a comic savvy audience so I knew that wouldn’t fly so I said I’ll come down and watch for a couple of weeks and write my own material. So I went down the first night, which happened to be the debut of Rove McManus and the next week I went was also the first night for Dave Hughes, hard acts to follow, but on the third week it was my turn.” Self conscious about a roomful of people looking directly at him while he took to the stage for the first time Dave came up with a novel solution to the problem. “I figured the best way to go would be to blindfold myself and do the whole set blindfolded,” he explained. “I still had the eye mask from the plane that they give you to sleep, so I wore that and could hardly find the mike stand but got free laughs fumbling my way up there and did the whole routine with my blindfold on. I had loaded the audience with about 17 of my friends from school and uni and it was great, it was absolutely amazing. I think stacking the audience helped, and nervous energy helped and they said come back the following night and do it and I said great. I was expecting it to be as good as the night before but

the second night I absolutely bombed, its a common story, second gig blues.” he turned up for the second night in his Woolworths uniform (he worked at the supermarket in the Galleria Shopping Centre) and it was a quieter night in terms of the size of the audience, and it wasn’t packed with his mates for moral support. He heard people talking in the audience and thought they were talking about how bad he was which made his confidence plummet. “So I cut my losses and got off before my set finished, but because the first night was so good it made me want to get back up there for a third time but if it had gone the same way I don’t think I would have got up again. I got the bug.” The stand up comedy scene in Australia is a tight knit community and Dave is now accepted as one of the country’s foremost funnymen. Certainly his friendship with Rove has continued to be a close one on a personal and professional basis. For many years the Perth born comic had a big presence on Australian TV and Dave often played roles in sketches and scenes for his shows. In one episode of Rove Live Dave was a guest alongside Jimeoin and Sinead O’Connor, for a section called ‘Words that sound better when said by….’ in what must have been one of the top Irish line ups on Aussie TV ever. As it happens Jimeoin – originally from Derry, Northern Ireland – is also on our screens at the moment, spruiking a brand of cartridge free printers. “His playful yet understated approach was a good match for a product with such a powerful and unique sales proposition that it, in many ways, sells itself,” the product owner said about why he was chosen to be the face of this campaign. “Jimeoin was a massive hero of mine growing up,” added Dave. “I was thinking whose this fella, he’s just brilliant, he’s speaking our language and having the Aussies in stitches with a real

Irish sense of humour. I once got my photo taken with him at the Regal which is funny now because I know him and I’ve never shown him the picture.”

When asked who he rates on the local comedy scene at the moment he mentions relative newcomer and fellow Irishman Ronnie Neville. Ronnie now calls Fremantle home but is a well known face and has a big following in America where he featured on a shopping channel as a ‘pitch man’ for the “Irish prep bowl”, which he uses his Irish charms and wits to promote. Watch out for him in local comedy venues around the city and expect to see more of him. John Pinder from the UK and Andrew Wolfe are his other picks. In terms of his own comedy Dave could well be moving in a new direction, thanks to Covid. Up until relatively recently he was based ‘over East’. “I bailed on Melbourne after the first big lockdown of three months, I let the lease go on my apartment and came back to Perth, where we migrated too in 1990. My brother just had a baby, my nephew and my parents wanted me to be close. Nobody knew what was going on with Covid back then so I thought the best thing was to be with family and so I came back here at the end of 2020.”

Danger Dave

Unsure if the comedy game would be able to recover fully from the fallout of the pandemic the comedian who is sometimes called Danger Dave looked in other directions. “It’s a bit of a pivot from show business but I enrolled in a Bachelors of Counter Terrorism, Intelligence and Surveillance at Edith Cowan University in Joondalup, which gets people sniggering until they realise I’m serious,” he said. “I spoke to someone who was doing the course and they were raving about it, its one of the first of its kind in the world, or was when it started anyhow. Its super interesting.” There was a bit of a learning curve involved from going from a “carefree comedian” to doing research and writing essays and assignments but after a while he found his level, even if he admits it was “quite taxing”. On top of studying full time he continued to work and gig full time as a

comedian, no easy feat at the best of times. “But that’s a good problem to have, being too busy. Unlike other parts of the country comedy didn’t go away here so I was still able to work. Not all his gigs have been in cushy corporate events or pokey venues. Back in 2016 his skills on stage brought him to Afghanistan where he helped entertain Australian and allied troops stationed there. “I find the course is brilliant, the lectures are fantastic and its really great material that I want to use for scriptwriting,” he added. “Most shows based in the spy world are over the top and borrow off each other and very few people writing content of the kind actually have a grounded understanding off how it all works so I thought it would be a good grounding in the world of espionage and security. I’m not going to pivot into that world but I want to do a comedy script series for TV or film that is an action comedy about spy agencies. “But we definitely have the cars and get to drive the Aston Martins in the third year,” he laughed. Dave’s overseas work

“The funny part for me is that I’m back at ECU Joondalup where I did an arts degree in 1993. Here I am again back where I started about three decades later, its disheartening, but kind of funny as well. It sounds like a real old codger thing to say but I remember when all this was sand. You’d get off the train at the end of the line and it was literally sand and a few highways and ECU would be the beacon in the distance

and now Joondalup is a whole city. It feels weird being an Irish person in what is now essentially Little Britain with English accents everywhere. I feel like my house is right in the middle of Little Britain. My house is basically Liverpool, its the one Irish spot in Little Britain.” A trip back to Ireland seems likely in the near future. “I used to go back every two or three years and I was going to go back in 2020 and I don’t need to tell you what happened then, so its been almost six years since the last trip back. I’ve got an iron in the fire for August but otherwise I might just up stumps and wander on over to do the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August and wonder over and see the old sod then.”

Manifest Destiny

‘Manifesto’, iiNet’s first major advertising campaign – which had a budget of $7 million – to introduce the company to the general public was launched in April 2007. Overnight the face of “iiNet’s lovable Irishman ‘Finn’” exploded across TV, newspapers, radio ads, buses and giant billboards in Perth and Sydney. Finn – aka Dublin born actor David Lee Smyth – had arrived. His days of dressing up as Peter Pan as an entertainer for kids parties were well and truly over but his story took on another Pan like quality. Today he is as fresh faced as he was back then and is still iiNet’s poster boy, which surely must be a record breaking stint in the fickle world of advertising. Working on a brief for the character to be someone between American actors Jake Glyllenhaal and Jack Black some 160 actors across Australia tried out for the role of Finn and auditions and tests over months. In the end they landed on the 30 year old Irish man who had done some acting in the Irish Club, Subiaco. “We saw a lot of good actors but when it came down to it David was believable, almost like we were hearing from an iiNet staff member - that’s how well he got our culture and the message that we were trying to deliver,” iiNet marketing manager Scott Waters told the Sydney Morning Herald in June 2007. Smyth himself said the brief was to be a young guy with the appeal of someone between American actors Jake Glyllenhaal and Jack Black. In terms of finding the right identity, Smyth was arguably a good fit for the tech firm started by Co. Clare born Michael Malone and his mate from university Michael O’Reilly. The two Michael’s were hungry and enthusiastic internet users at UWA where Malone did a science degree (majoring in pure mathematics). But as soon as they left uni – the only place with internet access at the time – they would lose access. So in 1993 before the World Wide Web was a thing the mates with nothing more

Ronnie Neville.

than a desire to keep accessing the internet - such as it was then – started a company (iiNet) in the bedroom of Malone’s parents house in Padbury as a way of sustaining their internet addiction. To make the venture work they needed enough paying users to support their hobby. Operating from home presented Malone with a particular hurdle to overcome. “[My parents] needed a lot of convincing that when I was talking to Ireland on the net they weren’t going to get a big bill for overseas phone calls,” he laughed.. Within a few months they had half a dozen customers, mainly other graduates looking to get online as well and within another 12 months they had 200 customers. By July 1995 they had 1,500 and iiNet took on its first paid employee whose office was a bedroom in the Malone family home that he shard with Michael, Deanne Godfrey, a cat and a pool table. Michael O’Reilly worked in a storeroom that doubles as iiNet’s server room. From there the company would move into commercial offices in the Perth CBD and grew exponentially from this point. In September 2015 it was acquired by TPG Telecom for $1.56billion and CEO Michael Malone left the firm he had created. Despite the odds Finn survived the corporate takeover and even a change of advertising agency for the company’s marketing.