Michael Webb, aka ‘Magic Mike’ (not the stripper). Photo: Michael Webb Magic.
Michael Webb still remembers the first time he realised he might just have a knack for trivia. It was more than a decade ago, crammed into a “sh*t house” in Canberra with a bunch of uni mates, living off beans and rice and earning $18 an hour.
But he’d discovered Mix 106.3’s daily $1000 quiz – and that he could game it.
“We would have played 50 to 100 times, I reckon,” he says.
“Winning wasn’t that easy … but we did win a few times. And every time we won … we’d buy an inflatable spa and all the stuff that you do at a shared house.”
Those early mornings with his mates around and his phone on speaker, racing against the clock to name capitals and boat kitchens and obscure historical assassinations, kick-started a full-time career in trivia and magic tricks.
Magic Mike has hosted hundreds of trivia nights at various venues across Canberra over the years. Photo: The Property Collective.
He earned his first job at Hotel Realm – after weeks of pretending to work there as a staff magician, going around tables and performing card tricks for patrons.
It’s led to him landing the ultimate gig: hosting Hamish and Andy’s new weekly trivia show. The first episode drops on their podcast feed on Thursday, 11 December.
Webb, better known as ‘Magic Mike‘ (not to be confused with the stripper though), grew up in Canberra, studied economics at ANU, and cut his teeth performing at Woden’s Hellenic Club and fundraisers across the city.
“Over a couple of years, I hosted three big trivia nights that sold out that room upstairs,” he says.
“One was Simpsons questions only. One was Friends questions only, and one was Seinfeld.”
These days he lives in Sydney’s Bondi and disappoints fellow members of the local sauna if he turns up without a trivia book in hand.
“I have this set of trivia questions I take into the sauna – you need something to distract you,” he says.
“It’s got to a point where in my local sauna, people expect it. When I get in there without the book, they’re like, ‘Where’s the trivia questions?'”
But even on Hamish and Andy’s show, he says many of the questions will still originate from Canberra.
“I have six older brothers … we’re all very competitive, particularly with trivia,” Webbs says.
“One of them, Chris Webb, a Canberra boy … very kindly said, ‘Let’s start a WhatsApp chat. I’ll help you come up with a lot of questions.'”
But long before Hamish and Andy came calling, the two Webbs – alongside other mates in the uni share house – learnt to master the daily Mix 106.3 quiz.
“We slowly got more and more answers right … the only way you get the $1000 is if you get all 10,” he says.
“We had a system.”
That system originally included housemates Googling answers off-mic and his brother Chris feeding real-time responses through a phone – until they discovered the show’s question writers were pulling material straight from the Qantas inflight magazine.
“I remember just one episode … I came back to my desk at work and my boss had put a trivia book on it, and question four was the exact question I got wrong that morning,” Webb says.
“It was the source.”
Webb discovered Mix 106.3 was using questions from the trivia section in the Qantas inflight magazine. Photo: Qantas.
Once they realised they could download each month’s online Qantas magazine a day early, the house became a training camp.
“Me and my housemates would sit around, have our beans and rice, and practise and practise and just go through the question set – to the point we knew it all,” he says.
For those about to head over to the Qantas website, the radio station has long since changed how it does the show.
Webb and the comedy duo of Hamish and Andy go back about a decade, to a night in a Sydney pub where Magic Mike was performing for patrons before eventually doing tricks for the pair.
They got talking, bonded over AFL, swapped details and stayed in touch. When Webb later moved to Sydney, Hamish became a regular teammate at pub trivia.
“He’s a bit of a weapon actually,” Webb says.
“We have messaging groups where every Saturday we do this certain quiz and send our scores around. He’s pretty competitive.”
So when Hamish and Andy decided they wanted to launch a 12-episode summer trivia challenge, they didn’t spend long debating who should host it.
“Hamish goes, ‘You know what, we need to have a host – and I got the guy for the job,'” Webb says.
“I was so keen.”
The weekly trivia show first airs in the Hamish and Andy podcast on 11 December. Photo: Screenshot, Spotify.
Each week, Webb throws fast-paced questions at the duo – and listeners are invited to play along.
“I might say, ‘Who was the president before Bill Clinton?’ and give five seconds of thinking music,” he says.
“Then you hear Hamish and Andy discuss who they think it is and lock in an answer … the idea is try and beat them in your own mind.”
The episodes run for about half an hour, and, true to form, Webb wrote all the questions himself (well, with some help from his brother).
“Coming up with the questions was tricky,” he says.
“But turning up and actually recording it is a blast. I’m just laughing the whole time.”
The series will roll out weekly across summer, releasing every Thursday from 11 December, on all the major podcast platforms.
