In 2016, Russell created a one-man show titled ‘Who Am I?”, based on his ‘Sale of the Century’ adventure.

Welcome to the penultimate instalment of my chat with 1993 Sale of the Century Grand Champ Russell Cheek. And as someone who’s created his own one-man shows, I was super curious to ask Russell about his!

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SH: I want to ask you about your one-man show Who Am I?, because that obviously plays into what we’re talking about today.

RC: Exactly.

SH: You did this about 9 years ago, around 2016? Can you tell us about that?

RC: Yeah, I started it in 2016, that’s right. And it was a show I would never have even considered doing myself because it would seem too self-obsessed, too indulgent, too much wankery… But for quite a long time, I had Steve Abbott living at my place here in Bondi Beach, and Steve was my very dear, closest male friend from The Castanet Club. You know, he started The Castanet Club! And he ended up living here for about six years.

SH: Oh, is that right?

RC: Yeah, and during that time, we’d have people over for dinner, and some people would know that I’d won Sale of the Century and others wouldn’t have a clue, but by the end of the evening, they would all be saying, “Sale of the Century? Do you have any of that on DVD? Can we watch some of that?” And so I would say yes. Not exactly reluctantly… but it wasn’t exactly how I’d planned for the evening to go. So I’d put on the DVD, and I’d get out our favourite tool, the ‘Pause’ button.

SH: The remote control, yes.

RC: And from the four hours of my time on Sale, I would show bits of certain episodes, and I’d use the ‘Pause’ button to stop it and tell stories. I’d only show them the bits of the show that were either funny or embarrassing, or brilliant or poignant. And I’d tell the stories in between. And one night after the guests had gone, Steve said, “Russ, do you know what you were doing is actually a show? And,” he said, “it can be a really great show.” So I spent the next year and a half or so writing a show and editing all the clips of my footage on Sale of the Century. I edited it down to find a progression of interesting, difficult, embarrassing, humorous bits.

Now I think one of the other bits of advice I might’ve given you when you were going on the show was that when I was on the show, I was a performer. I did not want to be a railway sleeper on that show. I wanted to be entertaining for the people at home. So when the question was being asked, I trained myself to home in on the question by listening to every single word of the question. That’s how I focused. Because you can’t train your mind the other way. You can’t train your mind to block things out and say, ‘Well, I’m not going to have any extraneous thoughts while (host) Glenn Ridge is asking the question’. But you can focus in on something and all the other extraneous thoughts will drop away, a bit like meditation.

And so I would focus on every single word of the question and then just answer as I could. But the rest of the time, if we had a bit of freeform banter, I was determined to let all that tension go away and just be open to having a relationship with Glenn and (co-host) Jo Bailey and just letting the moment take care of itself. That was a very important philosophy for me.

So some of those moments that you’ll see in my one-man show are when Glenn and I do have a bit of banter. But the main thing was, I assembled all the clips of the show and started making the story; being as open as I could about all those things that I had aspired to, all the fears, all the apprehension I had about going on the show, all the meditation I’d developed for myself, the positive visualisation, all those things that I did really regularly to maximise my chance of winning.

And Steve directed the show. That was his idea. He said, “If you write it, I’ll direct it”. And he was fabulous because he has a wonderful sense of theatre. We also got Warren Coleman, who was also in our band, and who has been writing with Steve for the last 10 years or so. And Warren’s really great on telling a story technically; on turning points and character development and how to cut out all the extraneous bits.

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Russell’s show was very well-received in its debut season in 2017… but what happened next? Join us back here next week for the final instalment of our chat to find out!

Until then, then!