Pizza: The Big Cheese.

Catch Pizza Live On Stage at Festival Hall on Friday and Saturday.

Let’s face it, there’s fuck all to do most Monday nights. Basically, you’ve got TV. Well thank God for SBS, and thank God for Pizza. That’s Pizza the show, not Pizza the round cheesy saucy thing. Well now you’re getting Pizza live on stage. Pauly, Sleek, Bobo, Habib and Claudia McPherson are in town for two nights to rock your world in an action packed adventure loaded with shifty cops, alien abductions, serial killers, b-grade porn and Pauline Hanson wannabes. Big and cheesy it certainly will be; Dean Martin would be proud.

“Habib told me to do it,” Pauly explains. ”It’s good for distribution, you know, for Habib’s goods... We’ll do it under the guise of a stage show, you know. We’ll get up and tell a few jokes while Habib’s out there making some money, raising money for the film…”

“We just wanted to take the Pizza thing around the country. People in Brisbane, they’re going to get it because we’re going to let everyone from Logan in for free. We’ll be doing burnouts out the front for them.”

“There’s a mixture of stand up, some sketches. We’ll be getting around town the day before with a camera and doing some video. There’s some big screens for some video stuff. People can get out and see how tall we are. I’m in the big Tim Cruise shoes for the TV shows. I learnt a lot from Tom Cruise, he’s my inspiration for height on film.”

So you’d be next in line for Nicole, then…

“No mate, I knocked her back,” he laughs. “She’s not my type. She’s too cold. I saw her in that Dead Calm. I’m pretty sure Baz Luhrmann gave her one. He’s a director, I’m a director. You don’t want to follow in another director’s thing, you know. I’m doin’ all right. I don’t need Nicole mate, don’t worry about her.”

“I’ve got five stalkers as it is. I don’t need any more, you know. Those Queensland stalkers are the worst. I’ll have Fairlie Arrow hanging around out the front of my building next, trying to kidnap me.

“Claudia McPherson is coming, though. We’re already guaranteed that half the men in Brisbane will be there. I will put in a good word for as many as I can, but she’s picky, so what can I say. I’ll do my best to help anyone out.”

Is there much material people would recognize from the series, or have you been working hard to put together some new material?

“It’s all new material. It’s all fresh. All Habib’s best pick up lines. It’s good for the guys, and it’s good for the girls too. We’re actually setting up a great dynamic in Brisbane for guys and chicks, because if a chick hears a pick up line from the stage show she can tell the guy’s obviously a loser, and have nothing to do with him. And it will help the guys get creative, get them stimulated beyond ‘hey baby, here’s a Bundy and Coke, lets go back to your place’. I’ve heard that one is used quite a bit up here.”

So how close are the Pizza characters to their actual personalities?

“The characters are actually very much like real life. Sleek is just the same as life, there’s no difference. Bobo is very similar in real life, except he’s more drunk in real life. He drinks from whenever the pub opens; he’ll be waiting at the door looking out for the barman… My character is based on my relatives. Most of the people on the show play themselves.”

“Actually, there’s no way Annalise is anything like Claudia McPherson. She’s not a ditzy model. She’s smart; she speaks like ten different languages. Maybe 15, if you count all the little Norwegian dialects. Universities are calling up all the time to translate stuff. She knows.”

You mentioned a Pizza movie. Is the stage show a precursor to what we might see?

“Yeah, people are ringing me all the time, but we’re just ignoring them until they push the price up. Get a bigger budget. Someone called me the other day, and I said unless it’s like The Matrix I’m want nothing to do with it, you know what I mean, with all the tricks and things. That’s what’s it’s going to be. Pauline Hanson’s going to be in it. Her and Sleek might get it on (Pauly was the unfortunate in series two). Maybe she would get over her fear of chokos, and got some tender warmth happening.”

“We’ve got Vulcan, he’s going to be in it. Maybe she could get over the whole Aboriginal thing if they got it on. Change her tastes, you know what I mean. We’re going to visit her anyway, that’s guaranteed.”