Shaun Micallef’s Origin Odyssey ★★★½
Tuesday, 7.30pm on SBS

A curious mind is one of the marks of a great artist: the creative spark and voluminous imagination that produce memorable work tend to go hand in hand with a desire to learn as much as possible about the world, to absorb all that one can and attempt to maximise the understanding of life.

This is no doubt why Shaun Micallef, in what one might delicately term the latter stages of his career, has taken more to investigating the lives and cultures of others, gradually sliding away from sketch comedy and satire towards documentary (though still finding time to do a bit of acting in the recent Time Bandits reboot).

Shaun Micallef’s Origin Odyssey is not a show about Shaun Micallef. Rather, it’s about a roster of comedians – a different one in each episode – who Micallef takes on a journey to their ancestral homeland. The idea is to gain insights into the culture of the countryand, more importantly, insights into the comedian, their relationship to their ancestry and what role that background has played in making them the person they are now.

Now, at first sight Origin Odyssey could be described as “comedians go on fun overseas holiday” – and that is, to a certain extent, accurate. There’s nothing wrong with that, but there is an awful lot of that about nowadays. Ever since Michael Palin broke down the barriers separating comedy from travelogue, the floodgates have let in a veritable tsunami of funny folk seizing the opportunity for some free travel so they can wander the world goggling at temples and marketplaces and exotic dances (not that kind). So if you want to make a comic’s gallivanting worthwhile, you do need a point of difference. What does Origin Odyssey have?

Loading

First of all, it has Micallef. Although this is a show with many earnest moments and a serious purpose at its core, it’s a pleasure to report that Micallef is still Micallef, and his comedic sensibilities are not extinguished from this exercise. His narration, especially, contains plenty of trademark wit and hints of the whimsy that long ago stamped him as a unique voice. In conversation with his subject, we see more of the sweet, gentle Micallef than his documentaries and Eve of Destruction tend to showcase: but the comic is forever bubbling underneath. There’s also an energy to his presentation, a spark borne of enthusiasm for the show and clear affection for his travelling companion. Relaxed and confident, Shaun is having fun, and that’s a big element of the show’s appeal.

But as mentioned, this isn’t actually a show about Shaun Micallef, as much as his personality is shot through it at every point. Like a globetrotting cross between Julia Zemiro’s Home Deliveries and Who Do You Think You Are, Origin Odyssey seeks in each instalment to rummage about in the heads of a prominent comedian, seeing what can be unearthed by putting them in contact with the land and culture their family has come from.

In episode one, the subject is Aaron Chen (subsequent eps feature Dilruk Jayasinha, Michael Wipfli, Lizzy Hoo, Nina Oyama and Arj Barker), and it’s a genuinely fascinating process to see Chen in China exploring the old haunts of his father.