Tim Ferguson Interview

Interview transcript

Date: April 1 2020

Audio Length: 00:17:32

Interviewer: Roland Naufal (Director, DSC), Nicole Rogerson

Start of Audio

Nicole Rogerson Thank you everyone so much for joining us today at DSC. My name is Nicole Rogerson and I'm here with Roland Naufal. And we are interviewing the absolutely fabulous comedian, as part of our, I don't know, COVID Home Delivery video messages.

Roland Naufal Welcome Tim.

Tim Ferguson Hey. Welcome everybody. Thanks Roland and it's great to see you again Nicole and thanks Evie for standing by. Just sit there and be millennial for a while, just relax.

Nicole Rogerson Evie's the only person that when I told about the option for, I kind of make you look better video screener said she didn't need it. I thought that was an ageist, but anyway, I digress. Let's get into the interview.

Roland Naufal So I've got the first question Tim. I saw you speak at a gig a couple of years ago. And as a comedian that is now treading into the disability space and the disability sector has, it reaches the high point of political correctness as you know at times. Do you find yourself editing yourself, changing your humour to fit into disability or just stuff them and get on with it?

Tim Ferguson Well, not really Roland, mainly because the great thing about people with disabilities is, you know, most of us have already made the jokes. It's usually the other people who are like, oh, should I, should I say, or they'll meet me, and then afterwards they go, oh no, I can't believe I was saying, I will

Interview with Tim Ferguson (1 April 2020)

not stand for that, when he's in a wheelchair, he's in a wheelchair, it's like I'm in a wheelchair, I'm over it. So it's usually only people who don't have a disability who will be treading on eggshells, otherwise most people, particularly Australian people with a disability, you know, we can't help ourselves. We try to be funny about it.

Nicole Rogerson And if there's a need to be funny right now because it's pretty dark right? So for a lot of people it's like, oh, you know, I've got enough going on in my life and enough challenges and like, could COVID make it worse? Like, really?

Tim Ferguson Yeah, yeah. It's been a funny period actually because I've got quite a few friends with various, you know, exciting, exotic disabilities and a few of them are homebodies anyway. So I had one friend, she said, what's the difference you know, I work from home, I do my computing from home. Not many people are visiting anyway, so she's sort of been self-isolating for quite some time. She's a writer with Multiple sclerosis, so she's not noticing any change at all. For other people of course it's a much bigger transition because there are people with disabilities and that's hard enough working, but then being told, oh no, you're not working anymore, is very difficult for anybody, especially if like you say, they've already got a disability to try and stay one step ahead of.

Roland Naufal I saw you musing on Bunga Bunga about it being some people saying it's the crappiest year of all time. Do you want to reflect on that?

Tim Ferguson Oh yeah, no, my spin on that, and I said it to my mum who said, this is just terrible. I said, for God's sake mum, you know, you and your parent's generation are the ones who stopped Hitler, you know, Coronavirus is bad, but we're not all worried about, you know, Adolf Hitler trying to kill us all. We're not at war. Most countries are not at war, which is why we can sit at home and you know, switch on Netflix and not be, you know, keeping an ear open for falling bombs. So it's bad, but you know, it could be worse, we could have Hitler.

Roland Naufal You're sort of touching on an issue that I wanted to ask you about too, which is resilience and I was reading about Jerry Seinfeld and what he says makes a good comedian today. And he was basically saying the ability to do a bad show and come back again the next day. And not that you've ever done a bad show, but you probably have had one.

Nicole Rogerson And bad shows, I've seen them, he's done them.

Tim Ferguson Yep, Nicole's seen them, where it's just, oh my God, is that a train wreck. Hard to know from the wreckage.

Roland Naufal So surviving from numerous train wrecks in your professional life, does that set you up for better dealing with MS and better dealing with COVID, does that give you a resilience?

Tim Ferguson

Interview with Tim Ferguson (1 April 2020)

Well, I suppose so yeah Roland, the thing with like when you're writing comedy, if you're trying to write jokes and things, is you're already playing around with finding new perspectives on things that can be scary or sad or outrageous or whatever it is. So when something like Coronavirus happens, writing a lot of comedy makes you more skilled at trying to find a way to put it in your head somewhere where you have, you know, a better perspective on it. It's much better to think about COVID looking down at it and you know, trying to think ahead about it, than to be lying under it and saying, oh, woe is us, everything's ending. Six months from now it won't have ended and all people will have is you know, bruises on their shins where they kicked themselves and a lot of toilet paper, a big ton of toilet paper that they don't know what to do with.

Nicole Rogerson I didn't realize how long it takes to go through toilet paper. I think everyone overestimated how much toilet paper they were actually using.

Tim Ferguson Well, you know, to use a bad word as I did in the New Daily, I do a thing called the Ferguson Report, Fake News You Can Trust. And I had a, and stand by citizens, I had a headline which was Australians who are scared shitless still need toilet paper. I mean you can't have both people. You can't have a need for toilet paper and be that scared.

Nicole Rogerson So Tim, in terms of the little bit that I know about comedians and actors and entertainment people, they don't like to be ignored, and staying at home and watching Netflix is difficult. So there's a lot of obviously refrigerator opening, lights come on, show starts. What's going to be the entertainment for you guys, because I know I saw you in a Bunga Bunga video with our dear friend Maynard this week. Are we all just going to go online, are we all just going to watch you online now and we get to see you in your trackies and?

Tim Ferguson I suppose so. Yeah, some people like the MTC and probably the Theatre Company are doing plays with one or two actors that they're filming, and you can buy a ticket to it and watch it online. So yeah, yeah, it's all about adapting. I mean the other thing about being, you know, a comedian as such, is that most of the time you've no idea what you're doing next month. Most of the time you spend your life being sacked again, if only because a project comes to an end, so you're effectively you know unemployed. The only difference is that most of the comedians I know are really quite adept at saying, oh well, so what do I do now? Maybe I can turn this into a movie. Hang on, maybe I can turn it into a podcast. Maybe I'll do this, maybe I'll do that. My friend , I caught up just before, you know, they locked everything up, and she said, well, I'm just going to be painting. And then when the sun comes up again, then I will sell my paintings. Like, so while we're sitting here, she's working, and I kind of, my beautiful Canadian wife who, I don't know, she was here before wearing activewear, and you interrupted me, she said, why don't you write an article about being resilient, about you know, coming up with ways to deal with this thing. Which is kind of easy if you're already working in a creative business. I guess it's a lot harder for people who were doing something that was a job that they could forget about as soon as they got home. A job that people rely on them coming up with new ideas. So it's a different kind of challenge, but it's kind of the same approach I think you just have to look at the whole thing from above and try to come up with a positive way to keep yourself busy, because after a while there's only so much on Netflix.

Roland Naufal

Interview with Tim Ferguson (1 April 2020)

It's true. Just speaking on behalf of a lot of people, we'd love to see you do some writing about it. It'd be great Tim so.

Tim Ferguson Oh good, yeah. I mean I'm trying to think in other people's heads, which is what writing comedy's all about. So I'm trying to think of, yeah, if you've got a job, say you are working, you know you're working at Myer who've now said, right that's it, everybody go home. It's very different to being able to say, well, I'll sit down and write a book.

Roland Naufal But being inside other people's heads Tim, comedians are known for being inside their own heads and you come from a group, All Stars, so known as pretty much the Intellectual Comedians.

Tim Ferguson Oh right that's funny.

Nicole Rogerson Who gave them that, that seems wrong, but whatever.

Roland Naufal But if you are inside your own head a fair bit Tim, what's it like in there at the moment?

Tim Ferguson Oh, in my head it's always been good. I have, my brain has a little dictator with big black boots in it, and has since I was a kid I went to nine schools, and so I had to toughen up early in terms of making new friends, doing new things, moving cities. And so I do have quite a rigid hold on my emotions. I don't let myself fall into a slump, which is, I call it conscious optimism. It's something I think that I learnt just through experiencing it and then deciding, actually I should keep that up. It's about being consciously making a decision to be optimistic even if it's about Coronavirus, to be optimistic, because most of the time you turn out right. Most of the time optimism wins.

Roland Naufal That's great. Tim, how long has it been since you found out you had MS and what can you tell us about that journey that you think's useful in like a 30-second soundbite?

Tim Ferguson Well, I'm 114 years old now. And so I was told well I think when I was about 31, 32, it takes a long time for doctors to work out what all these symptoms are. So yeah, I've been dealing with it for you know a long time. It's now a progressive, which means that the helium is slowly leaking out of my balloon. So I do as much physio as I can to maintain my function. But it's, MS is, it's not something I dwell on really, you get used to it in the same way that a person with vision problems, you know after a while they get used to it and they just find ways to work around it, so I tend to do the same. The only thing that really annoys me is when I see books by, you know, there's some guy, an Australian who's written a book about how, you know, the things you eat will cure your MS. So I want him to eat his hat and see if that makes any difference, because the word incurable is not something you can banter around. Incurable is not some conspiracy by you know, pharmaceutical companies. MS is not going to go away and it's not going to go away fast and homoeopathy won't fix it. But in fact, they annoy me more than the symptoms of Multiple Sclerosis as annoying and sometimes painful they can be.

Interview with Tim Ferguson (1 April 2020)

Nicole Rogerson I'm with you on that one Tim, and just as a reference, I think everyone now has to go and Google Homeopathy ER. I won't go into it, just go there.

Tim Ferguson Oh yeah.

Roland Naufal One of the things I wanted to ask you about too is you said that you don't spend your waking hours thinking about MS, you don't spend your time dwelling on it. And a couple of times my partner Vanessa has said to me, I forgot about the Coronavirus you know, you just get on with it, and we're locked up in a house together 24/7. We're only venturing out with wipes and doing all kinds of weird stuff. And we're constantly forgetting that anything has changed. You know we've adapted, we're amazingly adaptable creatures in lots of ways, aren't we?

Tim Ferguson Oh yeah and look and we're only two weeks in. In fact, I said to my mum who said, oh my God, six months, I don't know if I can cope locked up. And I said, well now its five months and two weeks. She said, what do you mean? I said, we're already two weeks into it. Just relax, relax. I mean I'm loving it because, you know, normally my wife is out at work. Whereas at the moment she's in one of the bedrooms typing away, on the phone, occasionally comes down. So I love having her around. So it's a win as far as I'm concerned. I mean, you know, Coronavirus is terrible and it's killing people, but you know, that can't be the first thought we have every morning, because the oceans are rising, if anything's going to get you Sydney Harbour will.

Nicole Rogerson I love your optimism. I was just immediately going to spike divorce rates, but I'm going to stick with your lovely, it's so nice to be at home together working cause it's so what's happening in this house.

Tim Ferguson Well, I live with a Canadian see that's the difference, Canadians.

Nicole Rogerson They can't get angry.

Tim Ferguson Well, they spend six months of the year Nicole locked up with each other because of the snow, so they're very good at getting along. So I just love having her around because she's just, she's just easy to get along with. Because in Canada you can't be a difficult personality because you get thrown outside where you have two minutes to live.

Nicole Rogerson Now, speaking of which you have been incredibly flexible, thank you very much. Because we have had the sad job of having to reschedule our conference, our GYST Conference that's happening in June.

Roland Naufal Tim was going to be a surprise guest for the dinner, and by the time the surprise was announced COVID had come along.

Tim Ferguson

Interview with Tim Ferguson (1 April 2020)

Oh, two surprises.

Nicole Rogerson We did not forget, not forget, it'll be a surprise again. So Tim has agreed to come to our now rescheduled November date. What will we be talking about by then Tim, will we be wanting to talk COVID or will we be kind of, if somebody mentions it, you get headbutted. What do you think we're going to be talking about?

Tim Ferguson I think we'll be talking about transformation, that everybody will have had to undergo some kind of transformation to survive. We've had to transform how we deal with the world, how we work with the world, how we deal with each other. Like you say, you know, being locked up with someone for six months, some people can't do 10 minutes.

Roland Naufal That's true, that's very true.

Tim Ferguson But we will have had to transform the way we negotiate our daily lives, and whether people have a disability or not that general principle is something we're all having to face. So I think that will be, that'll be what we're talking about, how successful we were in surviving. I mean, some of us will have pulled all of our hair out, but you know, it grows back. It grows back Roland, don't you worry about it.

Roland Naufal Thanks Tim. We've only got one last question and Evie can cut this out if it doesn't work. Do you have a favourite pandemic joke?

Tim Ferguson No, I haven't really heard any yet. You'd think I would have written some, but no, nothing's really occurred. Although I did have one, who does Flacco wrote the other day, which was just a sticker which says, 'Attention loners, you are not alone'. People who are homebodies must feel like everybody's just ripping off. You know, I used to be special because I was all alone and I had no friends and I never went out, and now everybody's getting into it. Hang in there loners. We will ignore you in about six months.

Roland Naufal The perfect note to end on. Thank you so much, Tim.

Tim Ferguson Thank you everybody. I'll see you in November. Woohoo.

Nicole Rogerson Thanks for agreeing to do this, Tim. We'll see you in November.

Tim Ferguson You bet. Thanks, Nicole. Thanks Roland, and thanks Evie. Evie, Evie let your hair hang down or grow your hair longer and then.

End of Audio

Interview with Tim Ferguson (1 April 2020)