In the lead up to season two of his hit ABC show Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont Spelling Bee, the titular Guy Montgomery joined Honi Soit’s Will Winter and Calum Boland to discuss the upcoming season, the evolution of the show since its first New Zealand season, and why the show is so good at finding the line between comedy and spelling.
Will: Thank you so much for joining us today, Guy. I’m Will, this is Calum. We’re coming to you from Honi Soit. For some background on us, we’re the only and oldest weekly student newspaper in the country.
Guy: Congratulations. You know, a student newspaper, it’s an important service. I went to Victoria University, and their student newspaper was called Salient Magazine, and I used to love reading it. I wasn’t an aspirational or disciplined writer, but I remember wanting to get something in the student magazine, and I wrote a film review, which, with hindsight, I really unnecessarily slated a film called I Love You, Beth Cooper, which I got free tickets to from a radio station. But it was well enough written that it was in the newspaper, and I felt a real sense of pride and accomplishment that anything I contributed had made it into the student rag. So I think what you guys are doing is great. Not that I’ve read it, but I trust that it’s all immaculate and balanced journalism.
W: Well, thank you. I think ‘immaculate and balanced journalism’ is going to be the new slogan.
Calum: We’ll just cut the “not that I’ve read it” bit.
G: Yeah, you can take that. Just put an ellipsis inside of the quotation marks!
Editors note: remember to pitch new slogan as “immaculate and balanced journalism…” to the rest of the Honi editorial team.
C: We’re going to nerd out for a moment. Will and I went to a filming of an episode of season one last year, we’ve seen you live a few times, and we saw you at the Enmore Theatre just last week. I first encountered Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont Spelling Bee as a zoom quiz you conceived of to get you through COVID, and now it’s had two seasons in New Zealand and another two in Australia. What has that journey been like for you?
G: This is all very flattering. Tracing the origins and development of the show, I remember walking onto the set of season one in New Zealand for the first time and being so overwhelmed and excited to see some sort of visual manifestation or realisation of something which had previously just existed in my head. Then obviously the dust settles and it comes out and you get to pause and reflect between then and the next season. We actually filmed the second season of New Zealand prior to the Australian one. That meant by the time we were making it in Australia for season one, we’d already made two full seasons of the show. So we made all these little tweaks as the show grew.
In Season one in New Zealand we were figuring out what the relationship was between myself and Sanjay [the Host Assistant] and his role expanded over the two seasons, and will expand further. Then you bring it over to Australia and it’s a different dynamic again. When the first season came out in Australia, Aaron Chen was a more recognizable name and bigger draw for an audience than I was. And so logically it would make sense to allow the audience who might be tuning in to see Aaron more opportunity to spend time with him on air.
I’m very proud of what we’ve made, and I still think that New Zealand seasons stand on their own legs and are really funny. But to see the development and the growth between the two is quite incredible.
W: It’s definitely been really cool to see how the profile of comedians involved in the show has gotten bigger across seasons. You have a lot of contestants you run through because of the formatting of the show, alongside the few who win their episodes. How do you go about building panels of comedians which are balanced in each episode?
G: There’s a few different moving parts to trying to get the right balance for a cast. You need to have that blend of people who audiences know and people who they’re meeting. Inside of that, you need to have different comedic styles and a balance of spelling abilities. It’s this great big movable feast of bits and pieces, ultimately you try to get the balance right and the interesting thing is that people perform and respond in ways that don’t always correlate to what you anticipate. The surprise that those contestants give you on the night is as delightful or sometimes better than what you had been hoping for.
I think the turnover of contestants and the fact that it’s a no prep show means that you have the liberty to persuade networks to take bigger risks on letting people have their first appearance on TV. My hope is always that we’ll be introducing people who watch television or who might be Australian comedy fans to the next generation of people who they might not know of yet, but will fall in love with. One of my priorities is creating that pipeline, and then of course you have to balance it with more recognisable or famous faces to get people to watch the show.
W: Are you scared at some point you might run out of contestants in the pool of comedians available in Australia and New Zealand?
G: No, I think, you know, the depth and breadth of comedy talent between our countries is so high, and the amount of opportunity afforded to comedians is, you know, it’s not necessarily diminishing, but it’s harder now than it was when I was coming up. I think I will always fight to be able to cycle through new faces. And look, ultimately, if we reach a point where we think we can’t furnish an entire season with people who haven’t been on the show before, there’s no firm rule which says no one can be on the show again. If it reaches a point where we think we’ve cycled through so many comedians that we need to go back to the beginning, you know, I’m sure there’s a lot of contestants who people have seen on the show who they’d love to watch again.
W: You could always do Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont Spelling Bee All Stars.
G: Y’know I hadn’t thought of that. One thing I have thought about is a Dunce’s redemption or something like that, where we take on the four worst performing spellers and put them against each other. There is always opportunity for variance and experimentation. So long as the network’s willing to let you play around with it, and the top people who we’ve worked with at the ABC are so supportive and have been the most generous collaborators.
C: Were there any moments during the writing period where you pitched a segment to the ABC and they went ‘absolutely not’.
G: I will say, for ‘Spell Your Own Adventure’ [a minigame] in season one, Planet of the Horny Apes, Joseph [the Head Writer] and I wrote a draft which was dismissed as “too horny”. There were specific paragraphs which were quoted back to us in quite a sober email, which did a pretty good job of highlighting to us just how far we’d let our imaginations run wild. But let’s just say the apes, and we didn’t even get to get into the story that much in the episode, but the apes were sort of dangerously horny.
C: One of the things that I really love about the show, which I think has really made the show stand out, is your persona as a host. It’s quite different to a lot of game shows, where you’re quite genial and supportive even when you’re mocking your contestants. How do you go about balancing this to create such a unique environment?
G: I think you can kind of tease the roughest with the people you love the most. And so it is core to my instinctive comedic DNA to be able to know where the line is and push someone right up to that point. I’ve got two sisters, and when we used to have family dinner my goal was always to try and make my younger sister laugh so hard she’d have to leave the table to sort of regurgitate into the sink. I’ve become consumed by this idea that I could make her laugh that hard. I think that carries through into the show as well: I respect and love and know all the people who are on as comedians and friends, and by getting them on the show there is an implicit permission to kind of try and poke and prod them into having a surprising reaction.
C: Are there any particular highlights or especially great moments to look out for in the upcoming season?
G: There is a game in episode six called ‘The Spelling Gym’ in which contestants can choose between an easy to spell word paired with a really hard exercise or a really hard to spell word paired with an easy exercise. So they had some agency over, you know, what part of the challenge they wanted to be difficult, and I don’t want to overhype what happened, but even if this was a totally scripted show and the outcome of every round and episode was scripted there wasn’t a world in which I could have dreamt of how perfectly off the rails it went in terms of it all falling apart for people.
W: We are very excited to see season two. We have one more question for you today. The newspaper that we come from is called Honi Soit and just with no context we would love for you to try and spell that for us.
G: [Repeats it back to us phonetically].
W: Yep.
G: Well so I’m going to put it together etymologically. Hmm. I hear On-i-swa, so ‘nswa’ is going to be N S W A. The Oni is like O N I, the O is a throw but I feel like it would be a U for University, so actually I’m going to say U. I mean it’s not a very inspired name, there must be more wordplay in a student newspaper.
Current guess is [O N I S W A].
W: Well it’s a condensed version of an old French saying. We probably should’ve started with language or origin.
C: We can use it in a sentence for you if you’d like.
G: Yeah can I get a definition.
W: Honi Soit: The student newspaper for the University of Sydney.
Guy looks at both of us smugly as we try not to giggle too much.
G: Alright, I’m going to go for it.
O N E U – N S W
W: Bah bum. That’d be H O N I S O I T.
G: Oh my gosh, I would have hated to see the letters coming up when I got it that wrong. You guys would have been shaking your damn heads.
Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont Spelling Bee season two airs on Wednesday 4 June at 8.35pm on ABC, with all episodes available to stream on ABC iview.
