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Try the calamari, Sam,” calls out the woman as she leaves the back dining area at the Napier Hotel. “I’m really boring, I have it all the time, I don’t even look at the menu.”
“That’s good enough for me. Thank you!” replies Sam Pang.
It’s a Friday lunchtime and the 51-year-old comedian and TV host is sitting in the back dining area of the old-school corner pub in Melbourne’s inner-city suburb of Fitzroy. He is just days away from launching season two of his chat show Sam Pang Tonight and is still a bit twitchy after a few days of heavy press.
He has a reputation for not liking interviews, something, he says, was purely a product of him always playing second or third fiddle on panel shows. With Sam Pang Tonight, however, and his Logie hosting duties, he has been prised into the open. Still, the interview comes with a caveat – no personal questions – but he will happily talk about his work. He is great company – charming, personable and generously laughing at my terrible jokes – but sees no point in talking about himself.
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“I don’t like talking about myself,” he says. “Some people, by the way, love talking about themselves. You know, they love it. But this show, it seems when your name’s in the title – and I’m so grateful, and I’m proud to be able to have my own show – I’m happy to try to do some publicity, or get the word out there.”
He winces when I mention I spotted him that day on the cover of TV Week (headline: “I’m very grateful”) and admits that, yes, he gets recognised regularly. Is he a celebrity?
“No,” he says. “I’m comfortable with being a comedian. I’m happy with that.”
So there’s no tell-all book coming, the usual celebrity memoir caper?
“That sounds like too much work.”
His good friend Kitty Flanagan has written a book … “But she’s a supremely talented woman who can do anything, and I’m concentrating so hard on doing just one thing,” he says. “She can do that because she’s already a triple threat. I’m not that.”
Sam Pang’s order: salt and pepper squid with togarashi mayo, bean sprout, spring onion salad and burnt lime.
Pang chose the Napier because “because pub meals are a bit hit and miss – I don’t usually go for the food – but this is good, I can back this menu in.”
He adds a side of chips to his plate of salt and pepper squid with togarashi mayo, spring onion salad and burnt lime, while I go for the enormous crispy fish burger with salad and fries (it’s delicious, but it’s also the most awkward food you can eat while interviewing someone). For drinks, it’s a large soda water with lime for both of us.
He won’t say if the pub, which featured in the ABC TV series Jack Irish, is his local – although staff member farewells him by name when we leave – but he did attend primary school nearby, in Clifton Hill. He won’t give away much about his family: I try to sidle in by talking about my young daughter, knowing he also has a daughter, and for a moment, it looks like he’s going to say something before he decides not to. Same story when I ask about his parents. Do they watch his show, are they proud? “I’m not a doctor, so you know…,” he jokes.
What he does confirm, however, is that he is related to Lorrae Desmond, aka Shirley from A Country Practice aka Australian TV royalty. When I read that, I honestly thought it was made up. She is his mum’s cousin – although his mum had never met her – and Pang arranged to present with Desmond at the Logies in 2017.
The enormous crispy fish burger with salad and chips. Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui
“We grew up hearing about this mythical figure,” says Pang. “She was on A Country Practice, and she won a Gold Logie and had her own show … the Logies asked if I wanted to present with Ed or Tom [his Have You Been Paying Attention co-stars] but I said I’ll present at the Logies if I can do it with Lorrae Desmond, which was an odd request.
“And they found her. She was living in Bowral [she died in 2021]. She hadn’t been on telly for ages. And it was a special moment. There’s a lot of love in the room for it. And I remember – it’s the only time I met [Mushroom Records boss] Michael Gudinski – he came up and said, ‘Well done. Well done on celebrating and getting her here tonight, so that people can pay tribute to her.’ It was like, you know, I can do nice things … I think I made mum proud.”
Lorrae Desmond as Shirley in A Country Practice.
While Pang may see no point in talking about himself, he is one of our most in-demand small-screen personalities, who manages to work simultaneously across two commercial networks (on Have You Been Paying Attention and Sam Tonight on Ten and the Logies and The Front Bar on Seven). He has also logged several stints at SBS, co-hosting Eurovision for eight years with Julia Zemiro, as well as two seasons of the FIFA World Cup show Santo, Sam and Ed’s Cup Fever! and one year of the short-lived quiz show ADbc.
That’s a lot of TV. This year alone, he’ll have been on our screens for, say, about 40 out of the 52 weeks in a year.
“This will be as – what’s the word? – combative as I get,” he says. “If you add up the hours, what is it, about 90 [hours across the year]. So if you, say, hosted a nightly news program or a breakfast television show, they’re on five days a week, for three and a half hours a day.
“I don’t feel like I’m on that much … but for the next eight weeks, you’ve got me for eight hours, OK? My work ethic is ridiculously overblown. There’s the illusion of busyness.”
Sam Pang is one of the rare small-screen personalities who is working across multiple networks.
Rosie O’Donnell and Sam Pang in epsiode one of season two of Sam Pang Tonight. And yes, they got a new chair for the guests.
His chat show returned for its second season on Monday night this week. The first season, which debuted in March for an eight-week run, was the first time Pang had gone solo since ADbc in 2009. It was a rough ride, with ratings diving after the first episode premiered to mixed reviews, while viewers had opinions on everything from the choice of guests to the cheap-looking set (in particular, he desperately needed a new guest chair).
Pang, however, says he was not bothered by the feedback. Or the ratings, which started at about 799,000 (for comparison, on that same night, Married At First Sight on Nine held 2.43 million viewers captive), but then dropped away before a small recovery at the end.
“If the trend of the viewers had kept on going – I think someone described it as a J curve or something like that – I didn’t look at the ratings, but there’s other people that do. I just feel like there’s nothing that I can control less. On Monday night, we’ll do the show and, hopefully, enough people watch that the network says you’re on again next week. That’s all.
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“I was on Have You Been Paying Attention and The Front Bar when no one watched them. And I thought, when I did them at the time, that we had a good time shooting them and then the idea that [the ratings the] next day would affect the enjoyment or satisfaction [I had] of the night before, you know, that’s not a good model. But there’s commercial realities, and if it just started off at this number and it went down, I understand you don’t survive.”
The thing is, Pang is a survivor. His rise from working in a bottle shop in his 20s, after several false starts at university, to manning the phones for Melbourne community radio station 3CR and then a spot on Triple R’s breakfast show to, eventually, TV and commercial radio is well known. It’s a rare path to tread, especially when you don’t have connections, apart from a neighbour who was a Triple J producer who suggested community radio.
“It wasn’t paid, I was a volunteer,” he says of his start on 3CR. “It was like I was in a radio station. That’s cool.” He first words on air, as a fill-in host for the Marngrook Footy Show, were “Hello, welcome to the Marngrook Footy Show, I’m Sam Pang, and I’m not Indigenous.”
The bill
After that, it was just one step after another, no great light bulb moment, no great magical career plan. He won’t say if he’s signed on for the Logies again next year – although it’s hard to imagine Seven won’t have him back, as this year’s broadcast was its highest rating since 2012, with an average national audience of 1.43 million.
“I don’t think years and years and years,” he says of his Logies future. “I’ve done three, and that might be it. Who knows? I think Bert [Newton]’s 19 [times as host] is safe.”
Sam Pang Tonight airs on Mondays at 8.40pm on Ten and 10Play.
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