Out of the Question with Adam Zwar

Matt is one of the most recognisable faces in Australia due to his role as a judge on Masterchef. But his story started in England, going to boarding school, then the University of Kent before following his father into journalism. Matt wrote about television in Britain before the company he worked for sent him out to Australia to write about TV here. He then segued into writing about food for The...

Welcome to a special episode of 10 Questions – called “Another 10 Questions” -  which gives me a chance to have guests return to the podcast. On the first episode is Dave O’Neil, who was the first guest on the show back in 2015 – 64 episodes ago. Dave O’Neil’s a veteran comic, radio host, screenwriter and definitely the person who gets name-checked the most on this podcast. You’ll know him from ev...

Dave grew up in Geelong, took his first steps into stand-up comedy in his early 20s, and his gift of the gab was quickly recognised by Nova and then Fox FM – where he hosted various shows including the top rating Fifi, Dave and Fev. On television, he hosted This Week Live and appeared on such shows as Talkin’ About My Generation and Hughesy We Have a Problem. Personally, I was always grateful to b...

Welcome to the 63rd episode of Ten Questions where Adam talks to Shaun Grant - the multi-AACTA Award winning screenwriter of Nitram. Shaun’s debut film, Snowtown, about the infamous Snowtown murders in South Australia in the 1990s – won multiple awards and screened at Critics’ Week at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. And that’s when Shaun’s career took off – writing the feature films Jasper Jones, B...

This week’s guest is the actress Georgina Haig. Selected credits from Georgina’s fabulous career include the first season of Underbelly, Queen Elsa in Once Upon a Time, The Crossing and Snowpiercer. And now she’s back in Australia playing Rachel Rafter in Packed to the Rafters for Amazon Prime. In our chat we get into the weeds of what it’s like to be a working actor and to have a father who wrote...

Four-time Logie Award winning actor, singer, and dancer, Hugh Sheridan. Hugh grew up in Adelaide with six brothers and sisters, studied ballet with the Australian Ballet, sang with the State Opera of South of Australia and went to acting school at the National Institute of Dramatic Art. Hugh’s major break was playing Ben Rafter on the Channel Seven hit, Packed to the Rafters. What followed was the...

Dr Chris graduated from the University of Sydney in 2001 with First Class Honours in vet science. After practicing in Sydney’s North Shore as well as remote communities in the Northern Territory, a chance meeting in a pub with a media manager helped him land a presenting role on Harry’s Practice in 2003. After that, he went on to win a Logie for Most Popular New Talent and write the best-selling b...

Back in 2018, Christian was the most popular breakfast host in the UK – with three million people listening to his show each morning. Then, a combination of panic attacks and wanderlust made him decide to leave his top rating show, uproot his family and move to Australia to become the breakfast host on Melbourne’s Gold FM. In his book, No One Listens to Your Dad’s Show, he charts his experiences w...

We talk about her broadcasting beginnings from newsreading on Channel 10 to co-hosting The Today Show opposite Karl Stefanovic, the controversy surrounding her departure from The Today Show, her battle with post-natal depression and her mother’s battle with bi-polar disorder. Jess and her mother, Penelope, would go on to write the book, The Best of Times, The Worst of Times, which charted her moth...

This episode is the Denise Scott episode. It’s such an honour to have her on the show.   Yes, she’s hilarious and an icon, but she’s also one of the most generous and supportive performers in our industry. She started off in a clown troupe, gained national recognition on The Big Gig and Tonight Live With Steve Vizard, put in several Most Valuable Player performances in the Agony series before writ...

Nick Boshier’s entry into showbusiness was via community radio and managing the singer-songwriter, Lior. Then, in 2008 he made Youtube viral sensations “Trent From Punchy”, which is currently sitting on 9 million views, and “Beached AZ”, an animation about a Kiwi whale, that reached 10 million views, sold 80,000 T-shirts and won the hearts of The Flight of the Conchords. After those early videos,...

He’s one of the few performers on Australian television who has fans from multiple generations. First, there were the Comedy Company fans who loved him as Uncle Arthur, then there were the Russell Coight fans – and then the Kath and Kim fans who were beguiled by his multiple outings as Kel Knight. I speak of course of the great and enduring, Glenn Robbins. In this episode, we chart his beginnings...

One of the people I’ve known longest and admire most in the Australian entertainment industry and that’s Dan Ilic. Dan’s had success on Australian television thanks to writing and starring in such shows as The Ronny Johns Half Hour, Hungry Beast and Can of Worms, and then taking on the grown-up jobs of executive producing and showrunning ABC shows Tonightly and At Home Alone Together, which could...

One of my favourite actors – a performer who can do comedy and drama, stage and screen, and that’s Kat Stewart. Kat got a degree in marketing and arts before attending the National Theatre drama school at night while working as a publicist during the day. After graduating, she started making guest appearances on The Secret Life of Us, Stingers and Blue Heelers before landing her first leading role...

You’d know Mark from his brilliantly observed sketches for The Roast on ABC 2, The Feed on SBS and most recently for 7.30 on ABC. He’s also hosted the channel 10 quiz show, Pointless and, along with his co-writer Evan Williams, has written the book On Politics and Stuff. Which is bloody funny. I don’t want to generalise, but in comedy, people are generally scoundrels, but Mark’s one of the decent...

Jan Fran was born in Lebanon, came to Australia when she was a kid, grew up in Bankstown, went to the University of Technology in Sydney, then started working for SBS current affairs shows Dateline and Insight before becoming a foreign correspondent and filing from Bangladesh and then Uganda. When she returned Australia she became a presenter on SBS’s the Feed. And it was her work on a Feed segmen...

Scott rose to prominence in 2005 with the release of his micro-budget independent feature The Magician – a mockumentary about a hitman called Ray Shoesmith. We’ll talk about how that came into being as the show unfolds. Then more than a decade went by before Scott and Nash Edgerton, one of the producers on The Magician, turned Ray Shoesmith’s life into a TV series called Mr InBetween, with Scott w...

Most people know Merrick from his long-time radio partnership with Tim Ross, who I interviewed for this show in October 2017. Merrick and Rosso started on Triple J in 1998, moved to Nova in 2001 and ended their 11-year partnership in 2009. During that time, they also made the TV shows “Planet Merrick and Rosso” and “The Merrick and Rosso Show” for the Comedy Channel, “Merrick and Rosso Unplanned”...

Nell started her career writing for Spy Magazine and Vanity Fair. Since then, she’s written for The Simpsons, Letterman, Murphy Brown, Newhart, NCIS, she created Sabrina The Teenage Witch, she was the executive producer on Charmed. She has written jokes for Obama. She co-wrote Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s best-selling book, Lean In. And her autobiography, Just the Funny Parts, is an enthralling...

In light of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival we're replaying a handful of shows. This episode was first published 9 December 2015. He's since morphed into the sitting Prime Minister on occasions.  Check out the videos.   2018 MICF Show  Lawrence Mooney: An Evening with Malcolm Turnbull Running until 22 April 2018 Athenaeum Theatre Two (map) Tickets - $30 to $42   Socials Twitter - Adam...

In light of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival we're replaying some comedians who've answered 10 Questions.   2018 MICF Show Fiona O'Loughlin: "Gap Year" Tickets available now. Shows available on 10th and 15th of April. Melbourne Town Hall, Lower Town Hall Price: $25 - $37   This episode was first published 13 February 2017. The interview takes place after Fiona was in a coma for a month,...

In light of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival we're replaying a handful of shows. This episode was first published 29 Feb 2016 Sam had won the Barry Award in 2015 for his show "Spaghetti for Breakfast".   2018 MICF Show  Sam Simmons Radical Women of Latin American Art, 1960-1985 Running until 22 April 2018 Fairfax Studio, Arts Centre Melbourne. Tickets - $27 to $42   Socials Twitter - Ad...

The doyen of entertainment journalism, Angela Bishop. She’s been with Network 10 for 29 years and she’s interviewed everyone from U2 to Julia Roberts and she was one of the last journalists to interview the legendary Audrey Hepburn. Not only has she been on the news every night for nearly three decades, but she’s always on the red carpet at the Emmys, The Oscars, and the Golden Globes as well as a...

The champion Australian leg spinner, Stuart MacGill. Now, I’d probably be happy to devote more of this podcast to cricket, but I’ve held off because I wanted to speak to a cricketer who thinks a little deeper about life and the world than your average test legend. In cricketing terms, Stuart was an incredibly gifted leg spin bowler who turned the ball a mile and had a brilliant test average, and w...

Tracey Spicer was my favourite newsreader in the 90s and 2000s – back in the days when you had a favourite newsreader because there were only about 12 of them. But I had no idea what was going on for her behind the scenes – the general harassment and discrimination. All this she talks about in her book,The Good Girl Stripped Bare, which has just joined the best seller list. Since her newsreading d...