Lying in bed at his remarkably pink London home, Sam Campbell is resplendent in a yellow t-shirt from the anarchic 1990s kids’ TV show Fun House, honouring its once-mullet-sporting host Pat Sharp.
Sharp cameos in the fifth episode of Campbell’s supremely silly new mockumentary series Make That Movie as a version of himself who’s a ‘barefoot-truther’ (and thus against shoes). During the episode, he voices an animated foot in a cartoon feature film meant to champion the cause and raise money for a couple trapped down a cave.
You wouldn’t expect anything less deliriously bonkers from Campbell, the Aussie absurdist. At 34, he has the comedy world at his (exposed) feet – thanks to breakout stints in Taskmaster and the second season of Prime Video’s Last One Laughing UK, where he managed to out-leftfield even returning champion Bob Mortimer by dressing up as a vicar’s pet bird.
Campbell entered Last One Laughing UK (where the aim of the game is not to laugh or smile) as arguably the least well-known mainstream comedian, but left as its most beloved. Even the hardened performers on the show seemed wrong-footed by Queensland’s Dadaist don. In fact, so solemn was his demeanour that co-host Roisin Conaty remarked, “is he on a sedative?” while David Mitchell – who narrowly beat Campbell in the final – once observed of him: “You have a disconcerting presence. There’s something ghostly about you.”
“David needs to look in the mirror once in a while!” jokes Campbell today, via Zoom. “He’s a funny guy to talk to. You feel like you’re in Peep Show.”
A fan of “high-concept ideas” and “batshit premises”, Campbell has filtered his eccentric style into a five-part mockumentary sitcom for Make That Movie. He stars as, well, Sam Campbell. But this Campbell is a fictional director on a downward slide, now helming a shonky reality series (think ‘90s OGs Changing Rooms and Ground Force) where members of the public write in with harebrained film ideas.
Clad in purple jumpsuits, Campbell’s quirky crew – Lara Ricote as his dogsbody assistant Jess, Aaron Chen as the bullied Sebastian whom they only tolerate because his moneybags family are bankrolling their endeavours and Helen Bauer as temperamental sound engineer Pat – set about bringing them to insane life. It’s rightly been hailed as “the funniest show of the entire year.”
“I don’t want to get rammed down people’s throats like a lozenge”
Speaking to him today, it’s hard to discern where Campbell’s persona ends and the man begins. When we tell him the tone of the show reminds us of cult 2000s comedy Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace and ask a softball question about his influences, he intentionally misunderstands and shoots back in a faux-naïve style: “Garth Marenghi’s influences for Darkplace? You’d have to phone him up and ask him…”
It has a similar effect to the time on Last One Laughing UK when Richard Madley said of ChatGPT, “it’s like talking to a soulless robot, isn’t it?”, and Campbell retorted: “I don’t feel that way at all. You’re a great guy.”
You might assume “Jesus, he’s hard work!” but Campbell is knowing and charismatic enough to carry the schtick off. That’s why he’s been able to bend formats like QI and Would I Lie to You? (where he claimed to have once been a hair lice model) to his idiosyncratic will.
A little more prodding and Campbell says of his latest creation: “I don’t know if I’ll ever get to make a movie, so this was the best way to make a bunch of them. And what happens behind the scenes is always really funny to me.” Touchstones included Walter Herzog’s calamity-plagued 1982 epic Fitzcarraldo, the 2002 documentary Making Venus (charting two Sydney filmmakers’ doomed attempts to make a self-funded feature about the porn industry) as well as the podcast What Went Wrong, about Hollywood movie mishaps.
As for Make That Movie’s crackers spoof films themselves? Well, they entertainingly make Ed Wood resemble Martin Scorsese. There are baffling detective stories about a man and a woman who can turn into snakes (but only one at a time) and sci-fi musicals about superannuated residents in a retirement home entering a computer by plugging USB-cables into their mouths to battle online scammers,
Best of all is an episode where a “child” (played by Lenny Rush) wants to make a movie about reversing the fortunes of his beleaguered lower-league football team with the help of The Yooglet, a magical woodland creature that viewers have taken to their collective heart. It’s a mash-up of a footie hooligan film and the patriotic hysteria over Paddington.
“I like Rupert The Bear as well,” says Campbell, who’s currently building a Lego replica of Everton’s riverside Hill Dickinson Stadium. “I like all the bears, not just Paddington. And of course Winnie The Pooh always needs a look in.”
Like all great cult comedies, it takes a couple of episodes to get used to Make That Movie’s askew world – but as soon as your shoulders are under the water, it becomes compulsively watchable. Even its stars seemed confused, with 86-year-old acting vet David Hargreaves (who plays a raddled cinematographer) describing reading the scripts as “completely off-the-wall. I thought, you know, they’re all mad… Particularly Sam!”
“No one knew what was going on,” agrees Campbell. “We did a screening the other night and people were like: ‘Oh, I think I’m starting to understand it.’ I don’t know if the click will happen for everybody, but for me, it made sense.”
That click has been a long time coming for Campbell, who played to single-figure audiences at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival in 2016. That was in his mid-twenties, after plenty of graft on the Brisbane and Sydney stand-up circuits. He never considered quitting though. “You serve the badge, the badge doesn’t serve you,” he says. “So I tried to focus on making funny stuff rather than making it, as it were.”
By 2022 however, he’d won the Fringe’s main prize – and followed it up a year later with a 10-minute set called Bulletproof Ten. Not that accolades matter. “I won an award for the last tour I did and the tour manager and I threw it into the Thames and that felt more special,” he says. “It’ll probably be found in a whale’s skeleton.”
While quipping that he’s going to make a Sam Mendes-style anthology of Beatles biopics about “the entire London Symphony Orchestra”, his next project actually sees him team up with Saturday Night Live UK’s Paddy Young for the live show Floggers, where they play auctioneers and punters bring along their wares to be hawked. Mainly, however, comedy’s oddball crown prince is planning a well-earned rest. “I’m looking forward to taking a break,” he says. “People have seen enough of my ugly mug. I don’t want to get rammed down people’s throats like a lozenge.”
All episodes of ‘Make That Movie’ are available to stream on Channel 4 now