Just after 7am and Melbourne is still waking up. On the drive from the western suburbs to East Brunswick, hot air balloons waft like dandelion seeds across a baking yellow sky. Only the most pious runners and sleepy dog-walkers are out when Claire Hooper arrives, only a few minutes late but apologising after negotiating a mess of Ubers and school runs. Over the next hour as we walk against a growing flow of commuters on the banks of Merri Creek, no one seems to spot her aside from one small boy on a bike who stares a little too long. Despite being a mainstay of Australia’s panel shows for 20 years, a much-loved comedian and podcaster, and a former host on Great Australian Bake Off she is rarely recognised, which she likes.
“It’s a beautiful thing to have someone go ‘I love you on Bake Off’, but it is even more beautiful to be able to just turn up to school drop-off looking like shit and have no one care about you,” she says. “I think you assume if being a little bit famous is good, being really famous must be better. But it’s not.”
We’re not far from where Hooper, her podcaster husband, Wade Duffin, and their two daughters, seven and 10, usually live. But the family are temporarily staying in Moonee Ponds while their house is being renovated – an admission that makes Hooper wince.
“What’s wrong with me?” she asks. “Why won’t I accept the fact that I’m middle class and fancy now? Stand ups punch up at people who have had life too easy or have too much money. And then if you are successful, suddenly you are buying your own home and taking nice holidays.”
“Sometimes I worry I have deprived my children of a wholesome and down-to earth-upbringing,” she says. “They have already been to eight different countries. They know what it is like inside an airline lounge.”
Hooper has always loved children: growing up in Western Australia she worked as a babysitter, ran a children’s gardening club at her parents’ garden centre, and taught theatre and dance classes for children. Still, having children of her own in her late 30s was a shock to her.
“I had so much to lose,” she says. “My husband and I got really comfortable having complete autonomy over our lives. Going out when we wanted, having big adventures. And when I had my own, I realised that I just enjoyed being adored by an easy audience. When you swan into a primary school for a performance, 300 kids will love you just because you looked them in the eye and gave them lots of energy. When you have your own, it is 24 hours of exhausting, relentless care. And they don’t applaud you! Ever.”
Her parents were “smart, but practical people”, which resulted in Hooper believing that performing wasn’t a career option.
She studied occupational therapy until an astute lecturer observed that she might be happier studying theatre. And she was, even when any prospect of financial stability went out the window: “I found it so exciting to be constantly working a dossier of crap arts jobs – making costumes, helping in my friend’s improv show, teaching workshops in high schools. There was a lot of chaos and panic. And I loved it.”
There are new disquieting challenges in comedy these days. “Social media is now so important and I don’t think I would have thrived in that. I was always such a nerd about the craft,” she says.
The rise of comedian podcasters (like Hooper, whose podcast I’m the Worst asks funny people to confess the most terrible thing they have ever done), has led to a shift in live comedy audiences. Anecdotally, some comics report that those who come via podcasts laugh out loud less, perhaps too used to listening at home or in the car. Hooper can hear the difference. “There is a sense that people are watching me on stage like they would watch the TV ... It’s not all comedy people any more.”
Being cast as a host on Bake Off, alongside Mel Buttle, was “an actual dream come true” for Hooper, “but honestly, we were surprised to get five seasons out of it.” When judge Maggie Beer announced she was leaving, Buttle and Hooper knew their roles would likely be recast too. Still, they spent months in limbo waiting to hear, while knowing that many of their friends were being asked to audition for their old roles. “All our friends were getting screen tested, but nobody had told us anything,” Hooper laughs, without an apparent iota of resentment.
Eventually, her close friend Cal Wilson and Natalie Tran got the job. “Honestly it could not have gone better – if you are going to lose your job, lose it to your best friend,” she says.
The morning’s cool air has disappeared and we are getting steadily sweatier as we ascend a hill in Jones Park. Her daughters love playing on this rather boring mound, for all the unknown reasons children sometimes prefer to scale rocks over a playground. Sheena, a greying little dog, is watching us lazily in the sun. Hooper can’t resist: she used to bring her dog Dusty, an energetic kelpie-staffy cross, to run up and down the slope.
“When I was a kid, I used to tell my parents that when I grew up, I would get a ‘wrong dog’ – meaning, a dog that no one else could love,” she says, scratching Sheena’s head. “I think caring for a pet reminds you to care for yourself. Before I got Dusty, I was working on a weekly television show and gigging at night, and I would have no reason to leave the house some days. I didn’t realise that I wasn’t doing well until I got him.”
Dusty died last year aged 19. “He was the best,” Hooper says. “I lost Dusty in August. I’d never realised how lucky I’d been to not lose anyone before. And then only a few weeks after that, Cal went into hospital and didn’t come out.”
Wilson, Hooper’s close friend of two decades, died suddenly in October, having been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. Hooper visited her in hospital just before her death.
“I can’t help comparing the two losses,” Hooper says. “Dusty was under foot every day and we were actively caring for him. When he went, we buried him in the back yard and it rained that night …” Her voice fades.
“I’m so sorry,” she says, weeping. “But I remember thinking, ‘I’ve got to get him out of the ground and bring him inside because he’s getting wet.’”
We stop walking while she gathers herself. The two deaths left her adrift in different ways: Dusty was old and ill so his death was painful but expected; but Wilson’s death was so sudden and unforeseen that Hooper still can’t believe it happened.
“She went to Sydney for work and never came home,” she says. “It is surreal. It feels like I’m being drip-fed grief, like my brain knew that I couldn’t get through that all at once. It is still not quite real. Could you take that being real all at once? I don’t think you could.” I know she is not asking me.
“If I couldn’t lose my dog who was old and needed to die, how could I possibly lose a close friend that I really loved?” she says, wiping her eyes.
We mooch about on a nature strip, recovering. A dam has been breached. On some deep level, part of her has always feared grief, she says. “I always instinctively knew that this horrific thing was lurking and when it came, I just knew, this is it, the monster I felt lurking all the time.”
She has calmed now. “Sorry that I cried,” she says. “But we are surrounded by people we love that we will have to lose. Now I know this, I think, how are we not crying all the time?
“Which is a great way to do comedy,” she scoffs, some cheer back.
***
“There is a very silly little path down here,” she says suddenly, ready to move on. “Want to go down it?”
We clamber down into what could be best described as a fairy path, running along the creek bank; I’m being taken to some Hooper family favourites, I realise. As we negotiate a path better suited for much littler people, we talk about people we both know who seem to always know what they want from life. “Life’s better when you know what you want,” Hooper says, straddling a branch. “The longer you stand at a crossroads trying to decide, the more of your life you waste. Most of my life I have been like, ‘Wow how great is all this?’ Maybe I should have been more ambitious.”
Lately she has been mulling over her future – partly due to her looming 50th birthday, but partly because of Wilson. “I find myself thinking, is there something I haven’t done yet that I should be trying to make happen?” she says. “I feel that I’m going to run out of time.”
Time for what? “I don’t know,” she says. “I’ve got such a fun, lovely, privileged career. But I am desperately afraid that I will regret that I didn’t do the things that I thought I might enjoy. Cal and I talked about projects we would do together one day. And she rightly assumed she could just work up until she was 100.”
“I liked walking blindly through my life and smiling at every butterfly I saw,” she says. “That was heaps better.”
Claire Hooper’s stand up comedy show So Proud, is at the Adelaide Fringe festival, Melbourne comedy festival and Canberra comedy festival
