Josh Thomson and his dad David. Photo / Facebook
You know that phone call or email with your parents that usually starts with the weather and ends with you "saying hello" to the cat?
Kiwi comedian Josh Thomson is making a TV show out of that exact moment.
When Thomson's mother passed away, he and his brothers made it a "very strict" rule that their dad, David, email them once a day so they could make sure he was okay and taking proper care of himself.
"It became kind of therapeutic for him. But then the thing about an email a day, it gets pretty banal," says Thomson.
His dad would go from talking about whether the wheat would germinate or not (despite the fact he didn't actually have wheat on the farm) to taking makeup to the neighbour's house.
"But there's no context. We're just like, which neighbour? Why have you got makeup? What's going on? Then he'll just go right back to talking about germinating wheat."
But things took a turn when one of the brothers' main niggles was addressed in a totally unexpected fashion.
"The one thing we were always worried about was him getting sunburnt because he never used to put sunscreen on his head. So then he realised after about three weeks that he'd actually been putting almond milk on his head. He'd somehow got this almond milk from the 90s in this glass bottle," laughs Thomson.
That was one of the first stories he started telling people and one of the stories which made him think he was on to something.
About to go Whitebaiting. What can go wrong in a flooded river mouth?
Posted by Subject: Dad on Thursday, 20 October 2016
"You know you've got a banger when it comes through. Like he made an air cannon - you freeze a hook in a tube and fire it into the ocean. It's incredibly dangerous," says Thomson.
But that's nothing on the time David went hunting rabbits, put down some traps, started wondering around with a gun and then forgot where he'd actually put the traps.
Then there was the time he went a little nuts on TradeMe and started buying damaged canned goods and expired wine - and half a pig's head.
The list of stories is endless and outlandish, so much so that Thomson says none of his friends believed they were true until they met the man himself.
"They came to the farm and were like, 'oh my God, you're not making up funny stories, this is just your life'," he laughs.
And it's that which is the premise for the entire show. In Subject: Dad, Thomson gets together with his pals (fellow Kiwi comics Dai Henwood, Urzila Carlson and more) to read the emails and try to decipher just what was going on.
DAD: Hey take this bit of railway track up to Auckland to use as an anvil ME: You want me to put an anvil in my suitcase? DAD: Yeah ME: Alright
Posted by Subject: Dad on Sunday, 23 October 2016
The show also comes complete with dramatic re-enactments, after Thomson took a crew to the farm and filmed his dad acting out his own emails.
"The farm's just a magical place. It's a real death trap - I don't know how I managed to survive high school, there's a lot of dangerous stuff there. But it looks really beautiful in a rusty, about-to-kill-you kind of way, so it's a great place to film," says Thomson.
"[The show] is very nostalgic and Kiwiana. And being able to share him with everybody...I think it's too much fun to waste, it's too enjoyable just to keep to myself."
LOWDOWN:
What: Subject: Dad
Who: Josh Thomson and his dad, David
When: Friday, 9.45pm on Three