In the first episode of Shaun Micallef’s Origin Odyssey, Micallef joined comedian Aaron Chen as he travelled to China for the first time. They visited places where Chen’s father and grandfather lived and worked, in an effort to learn about their rich heritage and the stories of the generations who came before him.
Featured in other episodes are Lizzy Hoo, Michael ‘Wippa’ Wipfli, Dilruk Jayasinha, Nina Oyama and Arj Barker.
Micallef spoke with the TV Gold podcast hosts Andrew Mercado and James Manning about his new SBS series.
Below are highlights from the interview. Listen to the complete discussion here.
Watch Shaun Micallef’s Origin Odyssey on SBS and SBS On Demand.
How many TV series have you made?
I haven’t done an audit lately. I haven’t checked.
I’ve been very lucky because it’s been 30 years since I decided to enter the world of showbusiness from my previous job as a lawyer.
The first show I did was something called Theatre Sports many years ago. That was in 1987. I reckon I’ve probably done about maybe 10 series.
You’ve been on all networks – Seven, Nine, 10, ABC and SBS
That’s true. I mean, it’s harder to hit a moving target. That’s always been my philosophy in my career.
I’ve recently stretched my tentacles overseas because I appear in a couple of episodes of an AppleTV+ production Time Bandits that was on recently.
Before this, I made Newstopia for SBS and also Stairway to Heaven.
The approach for Origin Odyssey came from David McDonald, who used to work for Fremantle, and is now with EndemolShine.
When I first met David I’d been doing Newstopia. We wanted to work together and it’s taken David 15 years to find something that he thought I might like to work on.
The basic premise was me and the younger comedian with ancestral heritage in another country go back and see what life might have been like had that ancestor not come to Australia.
Generally, we concluded that the life of a comedian probably would have been very different. There’s something about the comfort of Australia, the middle class, where we can live our lives that makes things like comedy a viable profession.
If Wippa had stayed in Switzerland, or if Aaron Chen had ended up in China, comedy just wouldn’t have been considered a viable option.
Aaron Chen with Shaun Micallef
Were there any challenges in finding your comedians?
There was a lot of interest from a lot of comics. We were blessed with interest from the very beginning.
Arj Barker was the only comedian who decided that he wanted to do a stand-up act in the country of his ancestral heritage.
In the last episode of the season we see Arj getting ready to put on a show in Delhi, which is where his father comes from. His father is a Sikh and Arj had never performed in India.
Tell us about making the series
We had two camera people, two DOPs, we had one soundie and we had two production assistants, the director, me and the guests.
These are six episodes of Origin Odyssey. Each episode was shot in four days.
We had a total of six weeks to shoot six episodes.
We did miss planes. We did find ourselves in an airport for 12 hours longer than we should one day.
Was it difficult filming in China with Aaron?
In terms of saying what we wanted, or saying what needed to be said, or using the words that we wanted…yes, it was.
We had to find another way to tell the story other than just to be frank and have a conversation. Every other country we went to had different sorts of challenges.
I wanted to do justice to Aaron’s story, which was as much a story about his father as it was about anybody else we talked about. His father lived through the Cultural Revolution and had put in abeyance his ambitions and dreams as a young man.
We found it difficult to be frank about history with those around us listening in. We found another way to tell that story, which I think we did.
Was there a favourite place you hadn’t been before?
I did have a special place in my heart for a particular destination in Switzerland. I wasted a whole day of shooting, going to Geneva to visit Charlie Chaplin’s house.
His house is on Lake Geneva, and it’s been turned into a museum.
There’s great stuff everywhere, it’s a goldmine, if you’re love silent films.
I’m going around saying look at this, and we’re filming it and everything. I turn around and Wippa is just scrolling through messages on his phone, not interested at all.
See also: Shaun Micallef to leave Mad As Hell after latest season