Five Minutes with Heath Franklin from Chopper

It’s going to be me working harder than James Brown, then when I go on a IV drip backstage to restore vital fluids lost from exertion another member of Australian comedy’s A-team will come out and rip it in half, rinse and repeat relentlessly. It will be like Mad Max: Fury Road but with comedy instead of cars.

As far as infamous Aussie lineups go, this rivals the Ned Kelly Gang – but which of the two groups would win in a fight?

The first rule of fighting the Kelly Gang is don’t arrive by train. Then after that it depends where we held the fight. If you fought the Kelly Gang in open ground with pistols, all that armour would give them the upper hand. If I got to choose where to fight the Kelly Gang I would pick at the bottom of river or an Olympic swimming pool.

What is it that audiences Down Under love about the bad boy?

Good boys are boring, aren’t they? They have nothing to talk about. Oh, you did your tax on time and ate a healthy breakfast. Boo! I’m bored. I think Australia is becoming an increasingly frustrating place to live too, so people really enjoy the escape of someone who can commit horrible acts of violence to people and things that deserve it.

Is Aussie larrikin humour going through a bit of a renaissance at the moment?

I don’t know if we are going through a renaissance, to be honest. Australia’s favourite pastime is waiting for a new comedy show to come on television and then put the boot in straight away. We’ll tolerate any sort of garbage in drama and sit back and consume any sort of pre-digested condescending reality crap, but one dud moment in a new Australian comedy show and everyone is howling for it to be cancelled so its budget can be used to reanimate Graham Kennedy’s corpse so we can all sit back like idiots and crap on about the good old days. Then we watch some of this stuff old again and realise it wasn’t even that good.

What is it about Chopper that keeps him relevant?

I think he is relevant because he is critical of everything. He would have been critical of fax machines and now he is critical of social media. I hope he’s like a bullshit detector – just point him at whatever and see how he reacts. Being a criminal gives him access to the depths of human depravity but being a reasonably smart guy means he can switch seamlessly between being erudite and telling someone to get fucked.

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