Glenn and Mick’s Celebrity Intervention – A Reassessment

Six weeks into Glenn and Mick’s Celebrity Intervention, and it’s time for a reassessment. If you watched the first episode, with Carrie Bickmore, and walked away never to return, we get you. Honestly, we thought we’d be writing about this show again much sooner, because after that opener, it was clearly going to be axed after a few weeks. But no, it’s clawed its way back, and here we are staring down the barrel of episode seven.

What’s kept this on air? For starters, the second episode with Sam Pang was actually pretty good. In a roast format like Glenn and Mick’s Celebrity Intervention, you need a roastee who can fight back, or else it looks like bullying and stops being funny. And Sam Pang is a naturally funny guy who’s spent years working with Glenn and Mick, so in his episode, he held his own, got laughs and made a few salient points about the kinda shambolic show he was on…

Like, what actually is Glenn Robbins’ role on this? Mick and the guest host (who’ve included Lawrence Mooney, Kate Langbroek and Denise Scott so far) seem to do most of the talking, so why does Glenn even bother to show up? Can it be purely so that Mick can throw in the occasional Uncle Arthur reference? Or show footage of Glenn in Kath & Kim or Fisk in the partial nude? There are worse reasons to have Glenn Robbins sitting there, we guess, but it’s still kind of odd that one of the advertised hosts does so little that an additional guest host is needed.

Then there’s the other problem with Glenn and Mick’s Celebrity Intervention: it works less well when non-comedians are the guest, such as with the episodes featuring Dr Chris Brown, Guy Sebastian and Mick Fanning. Both came across as good sports and decent blokes, of course, just not hugely hilarious ones. Which puts the pressure back onto Glenn, Mick, the co-host and whatever prop gags they can come up with. Shout out to the Swiss Army Sneaker Mick pulled out in the Mick Fanning episode. Less hilarious were the plugs for mentions of the various beers Mick and Mick have financial stakes in.

So, the key to making this show work seems to be booking a comedian. Even if that comedian is Dave Hughes, the one guy who, out of all the guests so far, probably does actually need an intervention. Even guest Peter Helliar thought so, in a pre-recorded video explaining why he thinks Hughesy is self-obsessed, delivered in front of a poster for his own comedy show. We guess Glenna and Mick can refer to that when Helliar inevitably guests on the show himself!

As for the upcoming episode seven, the guest will be Jim Jefferies, who’s both a comedian and someone who, like Hughesy, has been up to enough crazy stuff over the years that even if you don’t find him funny, then maybe the crazy stuff will be entertaining. Let’s hope so.