There’s a finely-crafted chaos to the comedic torments inflicted in Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont Spelling Bee, says Eliza Janssen, as she takes in a new quiz show that’s hosted with open malevolence.
Guy Montgomery's Guy Mont Spelling Bee (AU): Season 1
There’s something charmingly analogue about the latest quiz show to hit Australian TV. We’re living in an era where most of us may read and write less than ever before: our former dependency on Microsoft’s incessantly annoying Clippy giving way to even more intrusive systems like Autocorrect or, god forbid, AI spellchecking programs. As stuffy grown-ups, we don’t need to expend much mental effort on, say, the correct spelling of the word “sherbet”, and dusting off those waning literacy skills can expose greater vulnerability than one might expect.
This is all making Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont Spelling Bee sound like some urgent educational service, but the thing is that the show’s primary goal is fun—and it’s achieved with an infectious, old-school breeziness. It’s there in the wilfully stupid mouthful of a title! It’s there in the warmly coloured, mod-styled set, and in Montgomery’s throwback of a hosting role. He’s giving Truman Burbank a bit, but if Truman was in on the whole joke: smirking at mean twists in the gameplay, delighting in wrong answers, and sporting amazingly ugly ties.
Beginning on Zoom as a COVID-era distraction before two Melbourne International Comedy Festival versions, and an initial TV run in Montgomery’s homeland of Aotearoa, the format has galvanised into something dependably amusing, with this first Australian season of eight episodes never flagging even through substantial 50-minute runtimes.
The gameplay is deceptively simple, with each episode requiring four familiar faces from Aussie TV and comedy scenes to beat their competitors in surreal spelling challenges. The winner gets through to the next episode; the loser must wear a literal dunce cap as trombone music plays. Round one immediately separates the nerds from the class clowns with competitors picking words from one of three receptacles, increasing in score value and difficulty: the pathetic Coward’s Cup, average People’s Purse, and intimidating Bucket of Bravery. The final segment—and the only one with any real impact on the results of the competition—is a lightning round, with words picked from categories such as “Sexy” testing the comics to quickly spell “boom chicka wow wow”, “titillating”, and “tit”.
In between, though, there’s a finely-crafted chaos to the torments Montgomery inflicts, like forcing Urvi Majumdar to wear a claustrophobic medieval helmet for inventing the imaginary word “Mayne”. The secret weapon here is Montgomery’s sidekick Aaron Chen, clad in a powder-blue Dumb & Dumber suit. He’s arrestingly awkward, getting most of the series’ big laughs with the dumb acts he must pull off to inspire the contestant’s words: drinking seawater, playing panpipes, or telling one loser “your time in the sun is over” when he panics and can’t think of what he’s meant to say.
There are a few elements here that encourage the players—and audience—to have what scans as authentic, belly-deep fun: no weak links, no phoned-in laughs. One is Montgomery’s open malevolence, combined with an accent that steers the Australian competitors wrong on words like “petty” and “rear”. In one cruel, hilarious game, he forces the players to correctly remember and spell the name of a crew member they’d met before filming. But if, like on Whose Line Is It Anyway?, the points don’t matter and the host hungers for their failure, the uniformly delightful contenders often find genuine moments in this purposefully frustrating gauntlet to shine. Tim Minchin whips out some impressive sign language when given the impossible task of miming his word’s letters, and author Steph Tisdell is just as much of a gun at wordsmithery as she confidently claims.
Will “Australia’s most popular and indeed only comedy panel show about spelling” get another season? Despite its basic pleasures and flashback feel, there’s enough that feels fresh and current about Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont Spelling Bee to make me cross my fingers. Especially when one holds the show’s cast of rising talents and hip punchlines up against the ABC’s otherwise stagnant comedy programming, with Shaun Micallef getting his 70th show greenlit and attempts to inject Fresh Blood into the channel seemingly going nowhere.
Despite comedy contests like Spicks and Specks and Thank God You’re Here getting their chances to return to Australian TV, new formats rarely find enthusiastic support—I pray that the situation’s different in this case. And I also pray for the poor buggers in the Can You Spell What Aaron’s Cooking? round, who had to tackle “paella” and “The Perfect Man” before one lucky bastard got “HSP”.
