Six Musicians Who Got Absolutely Owned On ‘Hard Chat’
"What's it like to be a ventriloquist doll come to life?" Tom Gleeson once put to Anthony Callea.
Put simply, Tom Gleeson’s Hard Chat segment on ABC show The Weekly was a stroke of genius. After all, why throw your interview subjects some softball questions when you could just straight up ask them why they’re so shit?
It’s delivered some stinging moments over the year, with figures such as Kevin Rudd, Karl Stefanovic, and Mia Freedman all offering themselves up to be shredded into fine wisps of paper.
So in honour of, well, nothing, we decided to take a look back over the best and most brutal musical Hard Chats — from the hilarious, to the cringe-worthy, to the downright painful. Enjoy.
James Blunt
Everyone throws shit at James Blunt, but no one throws more than James Blunt himself. The ‘You’re Beautiful’ hitmaker’s determination to consistently and brutally take the piss out of himself made him the ideal candidate for Hard Chat, and it might be the first and only time that Gleeson looked slightly out of his depth, such were the impeccable comebacks that came flying from Blunt’s chair.
“Why are you smirking?” Blunt asks Gleeson at one point.
“Because what you said’s really good,” Gleeson replied, marking probably the only positive sentence ever uttered in a Hard Chat.
Jess Mauboy
It shouldn’t be fun, watching Australia’s sweetheart Jess Mauboy be gently torn to shreds by Gleeson, but golly…it is.
Under some heavy fire from Gleeson — “Are you the only person to do Eurovision and lower their profile?”, “Mariah Carey is your inspiration, do you also want to root James Packer?” — Mauboy simply cackles, a grin plastered on her face from beginning to end.
“It’s like punching a puppy,” Gleeson admits.
Human Nature
Hard Chat relies on the interviewee being able to cop the horrendous insults on the chin, and if they’re good, volleying a few insults back at Tom.
Human Nature…didn’t quite cut the mustard. From the moment Gleeson started his assault (“How do four white Australians capture the essence of Motown?”) the group looked more than a little uncomfortable, and, on the whole, like they didn’t really get what it was about.
They have a half-hearted dig at Gleeson for his brief music career (he once played drums in the band Fantastic Leslie) but on the whole, it’s a cringeworthy watch.
Sophie Monk
No one takes the piss out of themselves quite like Sophie Monk. Lest we forget, this was the popstar that happily stuck two recorders up her nose during an episode of Rove Live way back when.
She’s the perfect Hard Chat subject: quick to laughter, sharp as a tack, and always managing to get one-up on Gleeson by going harder on herself than anyone else could.
This was also the moment when Monk riffed that she’d quite like to be the leading lady on a season of The Bachelorette — “I’m very single,” she quipped — which would come true in 2017. Naturally, after she finished her run on the show, she had to come back for a second go at Gleeson.
Anthony Callea
“What’s it like to be a ventriloquist doll come to life?” Begins Gleeson’s assault on poor Anthony Callea, who can muster up no response other than laughing in shock.
Callea takes everything in his stride, and while he doesn’t crack back at Gleeson that often, he does muster up the courage to straight up call him a dickhead.
Paul Kelly
“You’ve toured before with Neil Finn,” Gleeson puts to Australia’s national treasure Paul Kelly. “What was it like playing songs that are more popular than yours?”
It didn’t get any easier from there, but Kelly received each blow with a cheeky smile and sly quip, disarming Gleeson with aplomb.