Australian media personality Ryan Shelton has shared the jealousy he felt when his best friend Hamish Blake teamed up with Andy Lee and the pair quickly catapulted themselves to be two of Australia’s biggest celebrities.
Shelton and Blake went to high school together and forged a very close bond. After high school the two mates both worked hard to achieve success in the media industry. However, despite having Blake’s best intentions at heart, Shelton revealed that he felt a sense of jealousy when Lee and Blake first started working together.
“It was really hard,” Shelton told podcast host Mia Freedman on No Filter. “Because… Hamish and I went to high school together. So in high school, he and I were so close. We watched Monty Python together. We just connected on a level I didn’t with anyone else at school, really. And he was, you know, he was my guy, from a performing point of view.”
“So he meets this other guy at uni, who I didn’t know, this guy called Andy. Hamish is like, ‘him and his friends make sketches as well.’ So maybe we should meet. And so we all met up and we all got along. And we started making sketches together. And it was this amazing, cohesive thing that just sort of worked,” Shelton says.
“But Hames and Andy very, very quickly found this dynamic which just worked so, so well. And it was kind of undeniable to them but also to anyone. It just clicked.”
“It’s a strange thing… It is really, really tricky. Because it seems petty to worry about it. If your friend is hanging out with a new friend, it seems very petty. Friendships aren’t exclusive! You can be friends with anyone.”
“Haymes had more ambition and confidence than I did back then. So he was already in there and that didn’t bother me at all. Because it was just him and I was happy for him,” Shelton tells Freedman.
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“But it was as soon as Andy the new friend came in – that’s when I kind of felt like, ‘Oh, hang on. I didn’t know we were doing duos!'”
Hamish and Andy went on to host their first radio show together in 2003, The Almost Tuesdays Show. The pair’s undeniable chemistry made their show a hit and was the start of an extremely successful career for the two men.
Blake and Lee went from strength to strength and hosted five more different prime time radio shows together up until 2017. They have also hosted multiple hit TV shows and cemented themselves as two of Australia’s most popular comedians of all time.
Though Shelton has been successful in his own right – he has been in a number of TV shows and radio shows – it’s safe to say that Blake and Lee’s achievements have eclipsed his.
Looking back, Shelton explains that he regrets not being able to fully celebrate Blake’s success.
“The really tough thing for me and the thing that is really hard even now that I’ve had so much time to think about it and process it… but the thing that I really regret so much is that I was never able to properly be happy for Hames,” Shelton admits.
“The more successful he got with Andy, the more things they did. They were the biggest radio show in Australian history. They were doing things that had never been done on radio; they were doing so much incredible stuff. And I just couldn’t be happy for him because I was holding all this resentment… which had nothing to do with anything he’d done,” he continues. “And now that I have the clarity of hindsight, I realise that they’re just guys who were trying to make it. They’re trying to do their thing… They worked hard for it.”
During the interview Shelton was asked when he was able to overcome his jealousy of Blake and Lee’s success. “Well, I kind of didn’t really,” he replied. “Until I met Hugh.”
Shelton went on to reveal that when he met Hugh van Cuylenburg and the pair started their podcast The Resilience Project in 2011, he found it within himself to discuss his feelings of jealousy with Blake.
Shelton explained that he took Blake out for dinner and then “dropped the bomb.” Shelton explained, “And he was, as he tends to be… you know, listening without judgement. Listening without judgement and listening without ego. And not being defensive. There’s a lot to take in for him there. And it was everything I hoped it would be.
“We had subsequent conversations after that, which I haven’t spoken about. We spoke about stuff together. And that was quite enlightening, from his point of view, about how he felt at different times. I just thought it was gonna be, ‘I’ll just drop this conversation on him. And then that’ll be that.’ The thing I didn’t expect was the ongoing conversation, which wasn’t necessarily that big and deep. It just creaked the door open and it made it okay to talk about things that we wouldn’t have otherwise talked about.”
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