Guy Montgomery: ‘I’d feel more scared of what’s happening at Warner Bros if I didn’t have stand-up’
Off to Oz for a spell: Guy Montgomery's Guy Mont-Spelling Bee debuts on Australian screens on August 14th. Photo / Zara Staples
The night before Guy Montgomery talks to the Listener, he’s on 7 Days, a show he first appeared on in 2014, having been given a slot as that year’s Billy T Award winner for up-and-coming comedians. He says his 10-year anniversary came up in conversation backstage. “I remember watching 7 Days before I even knew I could do stand-up or that it was a career path and thinking, ‘I reckon I’d be good on that.’ I was saying that to Dai [Henwood] in the green room this week, and he was just laughing at me.”
Montgomery’s first appearance back then was okay, he thought. His second not long afterwards “didn’t go as well, but it wasn’t a disaster”. Still, the show didn’t have him back for five years for some reason. “I remember being really frustrated, because as far as opportunity in New Zealand comedy goes, that was the golden goose.”
But he’s made up for it since. These days, 7 Days possibly needs him more than he needs it. And just as Australia is grabbing our nurses and police, it seems to want to give Montgomery gainful employment.
Here, when 7 Days finishes for the year on Three this month, into its slot will go the second season of Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont-Spelling Bee, the show he started in the pandemic-lockdown Zoom era with comedy mates before he took it to the stages of Auckland and Melbourne, and soon Edinburgh.
In the TV show, Montgomery is the quizmaster asking for correct spellings and asking lateral-minded questions designed to amusingly aggravate the comedian contestants. Not only has it got another go on local telly, but also the Australian Broadcasting Corporation commissioned Montgomery and NZ producers Kevin & Co to make a version for Oz. With Montgomery as the host, the ABC iteration, with guests including Tim Minchin, debuts in prime time on August 14.
It’s the first time a Kiwi comedy panel format has been exported. In a world where the likes of Taskmaster is made in a dozen countries, Australia doesn’t have to be its only destination. “It would be phenomenal to me if Spelling Bee reached beyond a show I was hosting in Australasia. In America, I don’t think there’s even a realm of possibility in which I would be successful enough to host the show and so I’d love the idea of John Mulaney’s Guy Mont-Spelling Bee … but we’ve made a second season in New Zealand and we’ve made a version of the show in Australia. You want to enjoy that without getting in your own way of being like, ‘Yes! Now the world!’”
Today, Montgomery is on Zoom from the home he shares with partner, actress and film-maker Chelsie Preston-Crayford and her daughter Olive – they, and his stepfatherhood have featured in his stand-up monologues, providing self-deprecating moments among the absurdist, observational stuff that has become his trademark. So, he’s not the only adult in the household whose career involves gigs away from home.
“When you’re a freelancer in the creative arts, it’s very difficult to say no to any job. So, you just have to hope that when you’re both saying yes, you can make whatever it is work and the timing’s right that you’re not both totally absent from each other. It’s a beautiful dance and you don’t get to choose the music.”
Montgomery is off to the UK imminently for four stand-up shows in London (already sold out) before a week at the Edinburgh Fringe, which he finishes with two nights of Spelling Bee live on stage. Its guests will include 2018 Fringe winner Rose Matafeo. Having been involved in its online infancy, beaming in from London, she is also one of the contestants on the new NZ series of Spelling Bee, which was recorded last November.
Montgomery and Matafeo go back. They were both part of Snort, the regular improv night and talent incubator at Auckland’s Basement Theatre in the early 2010s and on the short-lived youth channel TVNZ U around the same time. They double billed at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, then Edinburgh in 2015, when she stayed on in the UK to rise to prominence with her sitcom Starstruck.