Rove McManus returns to TV with Celebrity Escape and he couldn’t be happier

The world has no shortage of unlikely ideas-turned-successful TV shows. Tipping Point, where guests watch a giant slot machine and hope the coins fall in their favour. Is It Cake? where judges guess if everyday objects are real or actually baked goods in disguise. Love Is Blind, where couples fall in love without ever seeing each other. And now, Celebrity Escape, where a group of comedians are locked in a series of escape rooms and must work together to find their way out.

“This was the easiest pitch anyone’s ever given me,” says Rove McManus, Celebrity Escape’s host. “I immediately said yes.”

The New Zealand-made show brings him back into a presenting role, more than six years since his last hosting gig on the short-lived Saturday Night Rove (only two episodes went to air in Australia in 2019 before it was cancelled).

“In the past, I’ve been asked to do shows like this and have found that the host doesn’t get to have the most fun. Everybody else does, and the host is just a traffic cop.”

But he says being in the control room as the “voice of God” to the comedians – New Zealand’s Chris Parker, Abby Howells, Hayley Sproull and Josh Thomson, and Australia’s Celia Pacquola, Luke McGregor and Frank Woodley – was too good an offer to turn down.

“Being the host was probably the most fun you could have as part of the show: watching on and being able to have little aside comments to the people watching at home, with our comedians struggling to find their way out of our rooms.”

For a good chunk of the 2000s, McManus was such a staple on our TV screens he felt like one of us. His Friday night chat show Rove Live (later shortened to simply Rove) screened in New Zealand prime time, and he may have been an Aussie, but he was the best kind.

His manner seemed so unguarded, so natural, so warm and welcoming, it was like hanging out with a friend. Albeit a friend whose other friends were some of the world’s biggest stars – he interviewed everyone from Matt Damon to Hugh Jackman; Cameron Diaz to Kylie.

He had a magical way of getting them to let loose and have some fun, like an Australian Graham Norton.

A skilled interviewer himself, it should be no surprise that he’s a master at keeping our chat very much on message. He has a show to promote and by crikey, he’s going to do it well.

He answers all my questions in the nicest possible way, but finds a way to bring them all back to Celebrity Escape.

I ask: Are you good at escape rooms?

“I’m good enough, I think. Like you’ll find with our comedians on camera, you just want to be able to solve a puzzle on your own, like a clue that no one else can get ...” and then he’s off on a fun anecdote about how real-life besties Pacquola and McGregor did an escape room for McGregor’s stag party.

I ask him about his appearance on the current season of Taskmaster Australia, and he says it was great, creatively fulfilling, exhausting, a privilege, a whole lot of fun ...

“And yeah, if Celebrity Escape can be anything remotely close to a Taskmaster as far as international recognition goes, that would be fantastic,” he concludes.

Now 52, does he think he’s changed over the years; does he have a different outlook on life?

“I’m very fortunate that here I am, still at a point in my life and career where people want me to come and host the show for them. So it means a lot to be asked to be part of something like Celebrity Escape, especially because there’s young cool people like Abby Howells ... the fact she even knows who I am is nice.”

It becomes clear that McManus is very proud of this show and he wants it to be a success.

His career track record suggests he’s a man driven to achieve. As well as hosting, movie and TV guest appearances and stand-up comedy tours, his production company Roving Enterprises was behind The Project, the successful panel comedy-current affairs hybrid that ran for 16 years in Australia and six in New Zealand. That kind of success comes from hard work and shrewd business sense, not by accident.

McManus won’t talk about his family, the Celebrity Escape publicist tells me. That’s the worst thing to hear as a journalist preparing for an interview, but who could blame him? This is a man who had so much public interest in the death of his first wife, Belinda Emmett, from breast cancer in 2006, that there were paparazzi photos of him standing by the hearse at her funeral.

Then came the gossipy magazine stories when he found love again with Blue Heelers actor Tasma Walton, marrying her nearly 17 years ago.

More recently, speculative stories appeared in the Australian press about his reported $35 million property portfolio.

I begin to feel vindicated during our chat when he volunteers a story about his 12-year-old daughter, Ruby; how she recently came to his stand-up comedy show and asked a question during the audience Q&A section. But when I ask him what kind of father he is, he deftly deflects without giving much away.

“Oh gosh. A good one, I hope. That’s not for me to answer. I do my best. Of course I muck around, but at the same time, you don’t want to be sending a little monster out into the world, so, you know, I do what I can.”

The family suffered a tragedy in May when their beloved 8-year-old dog Holly died in an accident. McManus posted about it on his social media platforms and admits they’re “still dealing with it”.

“The hardest part for us is we just thought we’d have more time.”

His Instagram tribute post to Holly gained more than 1100 comments, including from his celebrity friends Pink, Bindi Irwin, Megan Gale and scores of empathetic fans.

McManus has 291,000 followers across Instagram and Facebook, and a growing audience on TikTok.

He manages his social media himself and has “only just cracked the code in the last 12 months”. It’s exhausting but fun, he says – a way to engage with people, and a great way to share his favourite clips from his shows, both current and past.

He’s also enjoying social media’s ability to get him in front of a whole new audience, one that doesn’t consume linear TV in the way his early fans did.

“It’s important because I’ve had people say to me, ‘Oh, why aren’t you doing TV any more?’ And you go, well, I am, I’m still on TV all the time, I’ve just got a new show that’s on its way. But what people deem TV and how they find it is very different to how it used to be. I just say to people, as long as you follow me, you’ll always know what I’m up to.”

He’s a fan of Australia’s under-16s social media ban and is surprised that his Government got to it before New Zealand did.

“It’s very rare that we do something before you guys,” McManus says.

“In the past, kids could have said, ‘Oh well, everyone else in my social group has it, and if I don’t, I’m a pariah’. It’s good that the Government in Australia has at least put the boundaries in place to help support parents as best they can”.

McManus and family now live in Perth, the city where he and Walton grew up, after “temporarily” moving there from Sydney during Covid lockdowns. Western Australia had strict border controls and, aside from not being able to leave the state or the country, life carried on pretty much as normal.

“We said, ‘Well, when the border opens back up again, we’ll make plans’, and we haven’t had to, so we’re very happily here,” he says. “I think we were just fibbing for the first 18 months we were even here, we weren’t telling anybody.

“It is a lovely lifestyle, we’re only a few minutes’ walk from the beach, our family’s here, the weather’s obviously fantastic. It’s a wonderful work-life balance.”

He travels often for work – back to Sydney, touring in Australia and to New Zealand to film Celebrity Escape. One thing he will never skip when he visits Aotearoa is the chance to catch up with his close friend John Campbell.

“The love [between] JC and I runs very, very deep. He’s one of my dearest friends in the world,” McManus says.

“We message each other on a regular basis, we catch up whenever we can, and, yeah, that’s another reason why I hope people watch Celebrity Escape, so we can get many more seasons to give me many more reasons to be back in New Zealand, especially to see John Campbell.”

There he goes again. But for his friend John Campbell’s sake, I suppose we can forgive him.

Celebrity Escape premieres on Three and Three Now on June 9.