Roving Rove
Andrew P Street searches for Rove McManus' heart of darkness on the eve of his national stand-up tour... and finds birds
With all the gossip mag intrusion into his personal life, Rove can emphasise with the goldfish
The phrase "needs no introduction" gets thrown around a lot, but with the man born John McManus it's actually pretty accurate - aside from his eponymous television show, he's currently staring out from the covers of several gossip magazines, badly Photoshopped alongside his reported girlfriend, actress Tasma Walton. Perhaps because of this level of media intrusion on his private life, the man Time Out is speaking to is very polite, very professional, and a little... well, if not guarded, then at least careful.
"I don't see it as going back to stand-up," he says when it's suggested that it might be a nice change to get away from the camera for a bit on his upcoming tour. "It's something that I still enjoy getting to do when I can and this is thankfully an opportunity."
Of course, it's not like his schedule appears to have slowed down to accommodate it. "That's true. But the writing, you just fit it in where you can. And as far as getting on the road is concerned, I do break up my stops along the way, but I'm more than happy to find the time to do something that I still love very much."
Explaining that the show has been written in "dribs and drabs" between his other commitments, he pauses when I ask whether the show has a narrative throughline or whether it's a collection of humourous bits.
"It's a little from both. There isn't a theme as such, and certainly the list of topics is quite random, but
I have a start and I have a finish and once I've got the rhythm of the show happening there is an end point: it's not like I walk out and I've just got a mixed bag of routines in my head that I'll just delve into until the clock on the stage says it's an hour-and-a-half."
Given Rove's persona, it's fair to assume that the show won't be a harrowingly confessional exploration of the dark side of the human condition. "No, not so much," he dryly confirms. "There's very accessible, everyday type material that you would have in a show like this, dealing with topics like my friends trying to get me on Facebook, or how I had to go get a medical done recently and it was quite confronting," he chuckles, "or watching a bird in my backyard smack into a mirror and hypothesising as to how that happened and what he was thinking. But then you do delve into other things, some quite topical material, political correctness, my opinions on things, the way the Iraq war is being handled, dealing with what gets written in the media sometimes..."
Which brings us neatly to Rove The Celebrity. He's been a regular subject of the gossip rags ever since his wife, actress and singer Belinda Emmett, lost her battle with cancer in 2006, with the journey from Rove's Private Grief to Rove's New Love being extensively charted - without, it should be added, any actual input from the man himself.
"That's kind of the tightrope I walk [in the show]," he replies when I suggest that many of his audience members would be immersed in the very media he was decrying. "You can't just turn around and say ‘this is really frustrating and the people who read this stuff are idiots,' for example. Because not everybody who reads it is an idiot - some of those people in the audience may read it. Some people would say I'm an idiot because I watch wrestling, but I don't take it as fact. And again, it's not specifically about my experiences, it's about those kind of magazines in general."
Which is what you'd expect from a man whose national televisual success has been based on exuding a very uncontroversial amiability. "I'd like to think that if you enjoyed what we do - or, specifically, what I do - on the television, you could still come and see the stand-up show and while it is a different performance style and a different persona in some respects, that it's not so vastly different that you can't appreciate the two," he shrugs. "I guess I see it as being an extension of what we do - on a very basic level, we can't take the show on the road as much as we would like to. It's an easy show for me to get out on the road and say hello to everybody, since there's just me and a microphone and a bit of a backdrop."
Rove takes the stage at the Enmore Theatre on Tue 13 May.