Hamish Blake is useless. And he’d like you to hire him for your next job

Hamish Blake is a bit useless. To be clear, that’s not my view, it’s his own. “I’m well into my forties and after essentially just talking for a living, I’ve got to this point in my life and realised I don’t really have any other skills,” he says in the intro to his new series, Unskilled Adult. “I look around everywhere and see people who can do actual useful stuff, and I guess I’m a bit jealous. So I wondered, could that be me.”

The reality series is essentially Blake’s effort to learn by doing. He sets up a business – UA (for unskilled adult) Enterprises – ropes in a couple of similarly useless mates, typically from the world of comedy, and sets about completing actual tasks for actual people for actual money. If they think he’s done a good job, they pay him in full. If not, they pay him what they think it’s worth.

At the end of it all, they get the job done, and he gets to be, well, a little less useless. Well, that’s the theory anyway.

Let’s start with the basics, Hamish. Do you really think you’re an unskilled adult?

“I think it is a fair description of me, and people who feel like me, usually from the entertainment industry,” he says. “If you don’t get taught those skills [building, sewing, cooking] as a kid or in your teenage years, I guess you can just grow up without them. So this was my attempt to force myself to learn things.”

Given enough time and resources, most people could probably learn to do most of the things Blake and co set about undertaking in the series – in the first four episodes, that includes basic carpentry, welding, panel beating and catering. But UA Enterprises appears to have a predisposition for the tight turnaround – jobs typically land on a Wednesday and need to be finished by close of business on Friday – though the budget for tools, gear and lunch is seemingly unlimited.

Making the task that little bit harder is that Blake and his guest workers tend to spend most of the first day gasbagging, eating and shopping; day two is typically long, and day three is where the poop really hits the oscillating wind-blowing machine.

“It does a strange thing to your head when you know you have to do it, you know it’s on you,” he says, attempting to explain the procrastination. “When you don’t know how to do something, it’s just human nature that your first port of call is to do a lot of things that aren’t the thing, to make you feel like you’re getting somewhere. So a lot of planning, a lot of wild ideas – you’re on with really funny people, so everyone’s having lots of ideas – but then it does slowly dawn on you that the people who have to do all these ideas are still us.”

The customers know what they’re signing up for, of course – on the off-chance they don’t recognise Blake or any of his guests (including long-time collaborator and mate Andy Lee, Flight of the Conchords’ Bret McKenzie, Spelling Bee host Guy Montgomery, comedian Becky Lucas and the ubiquitous Sophie Monk), the camera crew is a dead giveaway. But Blake insists that the job at hand is real, there’s no safety blanket – stuff up that car repair and there isn’t a new car waiting for you – and the exchange of cash is genuinely based on how they assess the work.

“It was important for us to keep it real because it is central to the idea of biting off more than you can chew, and genuinely having to figure your way out of it, and not being allowed to give up. And I think if you combine those elements that creates a great adventure.”

Blake describes himself as someone who talks for a living. In reality, he’s parlayed being a regular bloke – good-looking, affable, a bit of a doofus, always willing to poke fun at himself – into a very significant media career (radio, podcasts, TV, the occasional movie role) and a considerable fortune. “I’ve talked to good effect,” he concedes. “But I haven’t really done anything that you would hang your hat on as a skill.”

Has doing this show changed that at all – have you actually acquired any real skills?

“Shamefully not as much as I was hoping,” he says.

He tells me that before they set out on this adventure, he and his co-creator and director Tim Bartley wondered if there was any risk that he might become too capable, and thus kill the gag. “I was like, ‘I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it’,” Blake says. “And we have not come to that bridge.”

He did, however, become passably good at “some wood stuff”, he boasts.

I think they call it carpentry, I note.

“Yeah. I think if I had to go and be an apprentice in any field, I’d be a chippy. If they’d take [me].”

So since doing this, have you done anything in your own actual life, like maybe put up a shelf at home?

“I did something the other day, and the family was cheering,” he says. “My kids were like, ‘He’s done it! He’s done it! He’s not unskilled’.”

For a moment, he struggles to recall what it was. And then it comes to him. “We live a couple of blocks from the beach in Sydney, and I’d left a jacket in the garage and the zip had rusted. I put WD40 on it, and I used pliers. ‘Look at that everyone, come gather round. Dad’s going to do something’.”

And that’s something you wouldn’t have been able to do before this show?

“How would I know what to do?”

As much as he talks up his incompetence, in the episodes I’ve seen Blake and co actually manage to do a passable job of mastering the basics. I mean, you might not hire them to build your next house, but you might entrust them with a planter box.

Given the enormous following he has with tradies, is there a risk that he might inadvertently be giving the impression that being a carpenter, a bricklayer, a chef, a welder is a breeze, that two days is all anyone needs to master it? To put it bluntly, might some people think their favourite multimillionaire is being just a bit disrespectful?

“Look, I did actually kind of wonder the same thing,” he says. “This is certainly not us going, ‘Wow, these trades are easy. Being a chef is easy. Being a carpenter is easy. Anyone can do it.’ It’s certainly not that. I know it takes years and years to acquire mastery of these skills. But what could you get done in a few days? Can you just learn anything?

“I suppose it’s just learning the bare, bare, bare basics. There’s no risk of any bricklayers looking at it and going, ‘Well, I can’t fault them. They’re the best bricklayers I’ve ever seen.’ It’s more that thrill – and I really enjoy this in life – of being a beginner. I think anyone who has any level of proficiency in any of these things would look at [our efforts] and go, ‘That’s about what I thought people with one day of experience would be able to achieve’.”

Blake has shown some of the show to an electrician mate, whose response gave him confidence that no one is going to mistakenly conclude he is passing himself off as the real deal.

“He was laughing at stuff I didn’t even know was funny, where we’re telling the client, ‘All right, we’ll see you at 10’,” he says. “He spat out his coffee, he was like, ‘That’s hilarious’.”

After 23 years as one of the most affable personalities in Australian showbiz, Blake has a huge network of friends and colleagues he could tap to be part of this exercise in comedic upskilling. But one person who doesn’t turn up as a guest labourer is his wife, Zoe Foster Blake.

The beauty entrepreneur and author is plenty busy with her career, but that’s not why she’s not on Unskilled Adult.

“I floated it with her,” he says. “I was like, ‘Hey, if you wanted to be on the show, that would be funny.’ And she was like, ‘That is my hell. It’s my absolute hell.’ She was just like, ‘No f—ing way, mate’.”

Why?

“I think what it comes down to is we have a real different relationship with uncertainty and with chaos,” Blake says. “I feel quite comfortable in uncertainty. I’m really bad with a script, the times I’ve had to learn something word-perfect, I’m the worst. I like just being a bit loosey-goosey. But Zoe would prefer to know what’s going on. So I don’t know if it’d be great for our marriage if I had her as one of my workers on the show.”

That sounds like a very wise decision there from the adult in your relationship.

“The best skill I have is keeping my marriage.”

Unskilled Adult premieres on Sunday, November 1, on Stan, with new episodes dropping weekly.

*Stan is owned by Nine, the publisher of this masthead.

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