Friday 29 March 2024

Claire Agius Ordway at Chez Philippe, Gzira

Claire Agius Ordway arrives at Chez Philippe with her three-year-old son fast asleep in his pushchair.  This lovely restaurant on the Gzira seafront is one of my favourites; with its French shabby chic and staff who greet you with genuine warmth, I had no doubts we would be treated well. As for the food, I have never been disappointed. We both opted for salads, Claire had the salmon salad while I had the Thai beef with sweet chilli.

The last time I interviewed Claire she had one son and was very busy. Today she has three children and is, if possible, even busier.

She’s a director of Zoo Media & Entertainment, a TV presenter and actress. At the moment she’s juggling so many things I feel tired just listening to her reel them off: rehearsals for the upcoming Zoo show North vs South, working on her new TV programme Ilsien in-Nisa (which she presents with Pauline Agius, Moira Delia and Mariella Scerri) recording episodes for Londri, a slapstick comedy and taking part in Tomate, a radio/TV show in which she and her Zoo colleagues poke fun at just about everything that’s going on.

Vivacious and down-to-earth, Claire describes herself as being quite shy and quiet at school, “but when the teacher used to leave the room, I would get up and start imitating her, and everyone would laugh, so I guess I’ve always had that talent.” Hers is not the loud in-your-face type of comedy – but intelligent and wickedly accurate impersonations based on quiet observation of the people she meets every day.

At first, Claire was a presenter on Net TV – I recall her presenting while pregnant with her first child which we calculated was over 11 years ago. So what took her from this rather serious straightforward presenting role, to the comedienne she is today?

“I met Sander Agius by chance at a wedding, and as we spoke he noticed that I had this flair for mimicry so he suggested I join them because they were looking for a female. I went to their first show, and despite the fact that the production was very amateurish compared to today, the sketches were genuinely funny. My first Zoo performance in Zoo goes Boo was a trial, and I was terrified.”

I remember her in that poster as Morticia Addams and also remember being surprised that the ‘serious’ TV presenter has this other comic side to her.

“Yes, a lot of people were surprised,” she laughs. Although she had trained as an actress with the Drama Unit, comedy was new to her and she was not quite sure she could make people laugh like Sander, Owen Bonnici and Daniel Chircop can. “The worse moment is when you step out on stage, say your line and there is dead silence. The best moment is when you get your first laugh – as soon as I hear them laugh then I relax and know it will be OK.”

As it turned out, Claire’s deadpan comic timing makes her the perfect foil for the other three. She still has texts saved on her mobile from that first show when ‘the boys’ sent her messages welcoming her on board. Claire is sentimental in that way. Today, the Zoo team does three shows a year, apart from their television work and appearing in corporate events. “As we gained more experience we began to realize that what works in a huge show does not work for the smaller corporate ones – you have to adjust your humour and your sketches accordingly.”

When she joined Zoo, Claire was already married with a child. How did your husband react to this new venture?

“When I first met him at 17, I was already involved in theatre. We had just started dating and he came to meet me after a performance; when he saw me joking around with my theatre friends he was not very happy. I immediately told him, ‘look this is me, this is part of my life so you have to accept it.’ Of course, he understood immediately, and when I joined Zoo, I included him as well. He is very involved in our shows and designs all our posters and programmes.”

Each Zoo show has a theme, and this next one is particularly intriguing. Does she feel there is a difference between people from the north and south ofMalta?

“Well, I’m from Zabbar, and up until Sixth Form, I had never heard of this ‘difference’. Then I joined the civil service, and I kept getting comments such as, ‘you don’t look or act like you’re from the south, if you didn’t tell us we wouldn’t have realized.’ I was flabbergasted! I said, ‘are you serious?’ It took me a while to get used to this prejudice and stereotyping of who is hamallu (low class) and who is pulit (well-bred). My husband and his family come from Bormla and they are the most well-mannered people I know. I think you get uncouth people in every town and village inMalta frankly, but the south, yes, still has this stigma.”

Similarly, I ask Claire whether her transition from being a Net presenter to going on One TV has caused any waves. She shakes her head, “I don’t think people care any more. Look at all the presenters who have moved from one station to the other. Anyway, we took our programmes to One TV because PBS were simply not interested. They have turned down so many good programmes, including our own Ilsien in-Nisa. I don’t understand it.”

Speaking of the all-female prime time chat show, Claire wants to make it clear that the glamorous photo shoot they did with the Sunday Circle was simply for promotional purposes. “I am really not like that! In fact, on our first programme I poked fun at myself because people know that it’s not me – the other ladies were quite at ease, but I had no idea how to pose and kept imitating the way Pauline Agius was pouting her lips. But I have to say it was an incredible experience and it’s a great boost to your self-esteem to see those photos. Now we are offering our female viewers a chance to win a photo session like that because I’m sure they will love it.”

The show has been a sort of a breakthrough for local television which does not give enough space to women in the evening – if you take a look at the programming, the time slot after the news has been ambushed by talk shows conducted by men (and not exactly very attractive ones at that). So to see four lovely ladies having a good time as they discuss light-hearted subjects while bantering back and forth makes a refreshing change. I have a feeling PBS are going to kick themselves when they see the ratings.

 

Photo by Allen Venables...Sunday Circle photo shoot

 

I take her back to the subject of the Zoo shows, which have an enormous following. She agrees that at first their humour was labeled as ‘vulgar’ with a reputation of only attracting low-brow audiences, but today this has changed, as can be evidenced by the constantly sold-out shows.  I think it is their daring which people admire, their irreverent humour about politics and politicians and their knack of impersonating any public figure. No subject is off limits, no cow is too sacred.

Claire’s impersonations of Kate Gonzi and Michelle Muscat, for example, are spot on.

Do you ever feel uncomfortable meeting anyone whom you’ve impersonated? “No,” Claire says. “In fact, when we had a show where I imitated Andreana Debattista who was presenting L-Ispjun, she came to watch it and really laughed. Most people are able to laugh at themselves, there are only a few who have objected and been offended,” she adds with a discrete smile without mentioning names.

Apart from the impersonations, however, I have always felt that Zoo succeed because they manage to translate the often sarcastic Maltese sense of humour onto the stage.  It is the humour of the man-in-the-street who can crack a joke or come out with a biting one-liner about even the most dire situations. For me though, Zoo are best seen in a live show, not television, because the characters they create are too larger-than-life for the small screen. When I tell Claire this, she nods thoughtfully.

Female comedians the world over have a tougher time in the business than their male counterparts and Maltais no exception. When she’s on stage, Claire has absolutely no inhibitions about doing physical comedy or saying the occasional rude word. She agrees that it took a while for the barrier to be broken and for people to accept that this new side to her was simply an act. It is a credit to her talent that she can play such a wide range of diverse characters: from the “zaqqi mas-sink u siddri mal-cooker” constantly complaining housewife, to the elderly, slovenly chain-smoking woman with grey, scraggly hair huddled on the sofa next to Sander’s equally disheveled old man.

Talk turns to her personal life and to her father who passed away a year ago.

She assures me she is fine talking about it now, but tears still well up in her expressive eyes as she describes that last day. “I think it was meant to be that I was the last one to speak to him. Usually I go running very early, and he goes out for his brisk walk later, so we never meet. That day, for some reason, we both went out at the same time, but when I joined him he kept urging me to run on ahead. I remember turning round to wave to him, and when I got home, my husband was on the phone with someone. I heard him say, ‘il-Papa’ and that’s it I instinctively knew, my Dad had died. The day before it happened, I was feeling very uneasy so I think I must have had a premonition.”

It was a moment she had dreaded all her life, because her relationship with her father was extremely special. When her mother would disapprove of some of the jokes on stage, it was Claire’s father who would jump to her defence, insisting that as long as the Zoo team did not offend his deeply religious sentiments, then their humour was harmless.

When I ask her what makes her laugh, she does not hesitate: “My children, the adorable things they say, and the way they talk especially when they are very young. They are so entertaining.”  Aged 10, 5 and 3, she is dismayed that the youngest now no longer needs a nappy: that is the sign that they are not babies anymore, she tells me. And yes, she would not hesitate to have another child.

“I love bathing them, dressing them, giving them their meals – I love being a mother and I am very calm in that sense. The only time I lose it is when they squabble, then I become very agitated.”

As I ask her to describe a typical day, it is a whirlwind of time management and juggling, picking up one child and dropping off the other, answering emails while they do their homework and a very supportive man by her side who shares the chores and child-rearing as every good husband should.

Does it ever get too much? “Well there was one time I thought I was going to crack. I was responsible for getting creating the set for the filming of Londri, and I was already tense with the responsibility of it. Well, that day my youngest woke up with a fever and I panicked. Somehow I managed to do it, after getting the doctor’s permission to take him with me (it was in summer) but at the end of the day I was a bag of nerves. I cried my eyes out with the stress and I asked myself what on earth I was doing.”

It is at these moments she sorely misses her Dad who used to drop everything to babysit.

And what do her children think when they see their Mum on stage or TV. “They think everyone has a mother who performs,” she laughs. “They were born into it, so it’s no big deal.”

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