Comedy With Spike

Felicity Ward has a new show about hedgehogs, called The Hedgehog Dilemma. Well, kinda. She's a good girl worth seeing no matter what she's talking about, although she's not quite ready to give too much of the game away in advance to us, here, yet.

“I set it up in the first five minutes [of the show] – it's the predicament that hedgehogs face in Winter – they can either cuddle up to each other to stay warm, at the risk of hurting themselves on each others' spikes, or they can stay by themselves, without getting hurt, or hurting anyone else, but they could be cold and alone,” Ward says. “And it's an analogy for human intimacy. What a total bum-out, huh? It sounds like the show is depressing, but it's not. By the way, I have not used the phrase “bum-out” for about…20 years. I'm sorry.”

Ward's now a staple of the local comedy and TV circuits, but since we last saw her on stage she's also done the big screen thing with the Working Dog movie Any Questions For Ben? And, in the nicest possible way, like the rest of us she did lose her shit over being part of it. “Every time I met up with them I had to hide the fact that I had a sweat beard,” Ward says. “It also took a lot of will power not to bring my Funky Squad T-shirt to set for them to sign. So on top of it being a childhood dream to meet Working Dog, let alone work with them, they were the greatest people in the world to work for. So loving. So professional. So awesome. Sadly, good times don't make for funny stories.”

The film was awesome, but it did also mean the Hedgehog show was written in bits and pieces. It's a process that will make for a well polished piece, but it was also a labour that was, well, a bit drawn out at times. “This one took ages,” Ward says. “I started trying to write 'bits' back in September, then I tried to write more seriously in December. There was one afternoon in Sydney when we were doing the interviews for Any Questions For Ben? and I had about three hours off. And I was exhausted but I just had to keep writing because the show was being trialled in a week; and I remember starting to cry in the middle of a joke because I didn't think it was funny enough. Then I started laughing at the fact that I was crying, trying to write comedy. Maybe you just had to be there.”