A Quiet Word with ...
A Quiet Word with ... was an Australian conversation television series originally broadcast by ABC TV in 2010 and 2011. Each episode featured New Zealand-born Australian comedian and writer Tony Martin engaging in a twenty-six-minute conversation with a local or international entertainer, mainly other comedians.
Outline
The premise of A Quiet Word with ... was that it relied solely on a conversation between the presenter and guest, focussing only on career-related discussion, rather than the entertainer's personal life. It also avoided the use of filler material such as video or audio clips, and guests were not interviewed in order to promote a current movie, book, or other production.The show was filmed without an audience in order to keep the conversation more intimate, and remove the possible distraction for those that may play to an audience. Production was kept intentionally modest, being filmed in a local bar using just three cameras, one of which was unmanned, allowing the focus to remain on the conversation. The show was described by the original broadcaster the ABC as being about "just interesting talk, surprising tangents and more than a few cheap laughs".
Original concept
Martin attributed the origins of the show to a segment called "One on One" that he had done on the ABC's Sunday Arts program in June 2009. This segment involved two international contemporaries in an eleven-minute conversation, rather than a traditional interview of one person by the other. Martin was paired with internationally renowned American screenwriting instructor Robert McKee; while Martin reported that this segment started uncomfortably, McKee opened up when it became apparent that Martin was himself a film-buff rather than just an uninformed interviewer.Martin subsequently received considerable positive feedback for this segment with McKee, which he realised had been both the first time he had interviewed anyone on television, and the first time he interviewed anyone by himself in twenty years. Some time later Martin viewed an "infuriating" interview with American comedian and actor Will Ferrell on the Nine Network's A Current Affair that involved the reporter attempting to get Ferrell to repeat catchphrases from the film Anchorman rather than containing anything of substance; Martin regarded this interview as an embarrassment to the nation. These two factors gave him the idea for a more substantive interview program, and inspired him to create A Quiet Word With ....