Hostile Intervention

The thing that stands out with Glenn’s and Mick’s Celebrity Intervention is that it’s not a comedy show for the young. Australian comedy has been skewing older of late, but shows like Taskmaster or Have You Been Paying Attention? keep a few seats free for fresh young faces. Celebrity Intervention? No room on the couch for you – unless you’ve had a commercial radio career, which automatically adds fifteen years anyway.

So it’s oldie focused – the hosts are around 60*, and the format pretty much demands guests at the mid point of their careers. It’s also on Seven, officially Australia’s most conservative network. That means it’s serving up a very specific kind of comedy – the kind that most hardcore comedy fans aren’t really fans of. Breakfast radio banter, “big name” stand-up comedy shows that tour the regions, footy shows… look it’s a Mick Molloy effort, in 2026 you know the deal.

To state the obvious: if you were looking to make classic comedy, you wouldn’t start with Carrie Bickmore. This kind of thing only works if the audience already feels some kind of long term connection with the guest, so we’re back to the same old faces yet again.

Swinging between displeasure, annoyance, and “I’m going to make the best of this”, she was a solid reminder that Australia has an entire layer of celebrity packed with people who bring nothing to the table beyond an ability to talk about themselves on radio.

Oh wait, we meant Kate Langbroek. Bickmore can actually react to a joke with something more than “well, that’s what you think”.

It’s fun to imagine what this show would be like if the guest was some hilarious unknown, someone who was a complete stranger but whose life was packed with funny events and hysterical mix-ups. And then you see that the lengthy ad breaks during Glenn’s and Mick’s Celebrity Intervention are full of commercials for hearing aids and industrial hire and superannuation and those “the gas industry is great!” ads that even Gruen admits are bullshit. Jokes about skidmarked undies and fake tan and opening the front door naked? They fit right in.

Celebrity Intervention makes it clear yet again that while Molloy makes that kind of comedy, he’s not quite your typical mainstream Australian comedian. Sure, the show itself is little more than an excuse for a bunch of comedy dickheads to hang shit on the “guest” – feel free to call it a shit celebrity roast or This Is Your Shit Life, depending on how old you like your references.

But while everyone else here is serving up mildly embarrassing (in execution, not content) bits, Molloy is the one single-handedly keeping proceedings feeling like an actual program and not a pile of offcuts they accidentally put to air. It’s still pretty ramshackle television, but that’s deliberate.

Molloy is a smart guy who knows which side his bread is buttered on. While he’s still clearly capable of sharper and more pointed comedy, that puts off the audience he’s built up over the years**. Celebrity roasts are inexplicably popular. Glenn and Mick are likeable types with long histories in the industry. Nobody’s looking to break new ground here.

So yeah, much like pretty much all the Australian comedy on any commercial network that isn’t Ten, this is broad, crowd-pleasing stuff. The correct comparison isn’t HYBPA? or The Cheap Seats, it’s Here Come the Habibs and the last ten years of Paul Fenech’s work. To put it in a way regular viewers of Australian television will understand, comedy fans are used to MasterChef; this is a dinner party episode of MAFS.

At least Mick got to crack a gag about John Howard’s debt truck.

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*so is the host of HYBPA?, but that show is full of jokes about how old he is

**while it’s tempting to bemoan the fact that Molloy’s had to go downmarket to survive, as far as his comedy compatriots go, Working Dog make game shows, Tony Martin is a podcaster and Judith Lucy is running stories on Instagram about how she lives in a hovel.