It's all something of a game with Ruby Wax, MICHELE HEWITSON finds, with the showbiz psychology sleuth on the winning side.
Ruby Wax is being interviewed by a man wearing the sort of pre-lycra gym gear that, if taste had anything to do with it, should have died with the 80s.
He is wearing a headband.
They might be in a gym, tossing each other those large, garish exercise balls. Who will catch? Who will drop the pass? But the game here is to get inside Wax's head.
There is something wrong with this picture. By rights, this sort of caper should be against the natural order of things.
Wax, as anyone who watched Ruby Wax Meets will know, is the one who gets to rummage through knicker drawers (Fergie's), to ask questions about breast-feeding when you have implants (Pammie Anderson's), to get stabbed by a banana (OJ's.)
Just on the off-chance that you hadn't noticed: Ruby Wax is in town. In town means a suite on the 28th floor of the Metropolis Hotel. There is a platter of fruit - she ate the banana, didn't know what to do with the feijoa and almost broke her $10,000 dollar teeth on slabs of marble posing as brownies.
There is an interview schedule blowing in the breeze of the open balcony doors. "What are you doing here?" John Campbell has asked earlier in a pre-recorded, 30-minute interview for his Saturday morning show for Radio New Zealand.
"You know what I'm doing here," says Wax. Oh, but we have to pretend. Because we're doing an interview. We are. We all are - courtesy of that interview schedule that shows that this show-pony has garnered almost every camera, microphone and sound desk in town.
Not bad for an American who fled the United States for Britain at the age of 19 because she was "a sad ugly American," was "a freak."
She is the child of immigrant parents whose mother replaced her dead dog with another smaller one.
Her grandmother died: "Can you imagine how scared I was?"
She wouldn't have had a career in showbusiness in America, Wax says. But she has made a career out of lampooning American celebrities and examining the psychology of fame - depending on who's doing the watching.
Wax was fascinated by fame. "I just took it to a more academic level. I didn't want to stoke the fires, I wanted to figure out what it does to people."
Wax did, after all, train to become a psychologist. Her fashion of figuring it out, though, is not so much psychology as a pre-dig through the archeological ruins of Baywatch and the House of Windsor.
Consider it sifted through and categorised, Wax says. "I don't think it ultimately makes you so happy. Ultimately, people have a high price to pay for it. Whatever you get - greed or money or fame - you want more, and that's the ultimate punishment. It's never enough."
Wax is taking time out from the media treadmill to pedal away some of that infamous cellulite on a bike in the hotel gym. "My dream," she has said earlier in the day of the life of Ruby Wax "is to not shave my bikini line, or to put my celullited butt in the air." She is referring to that Pamela Anderson interview where she did both of these things.
Fame. It can only exist without irony. It was in search of irony that Wax left for Britain (she lives in Notting Hill.)
Any theories on why America is irony deficient? "It's about being the centre of the universe," Wax says. "The losers are always the funniest."
So Britain developed its sense of irony as the empire dwindled?
"Iwould think so," says the woman who, without any apparent sense of irony, is being photographed lifting weights in the gym of a swanky hotel.
She never got to interview Princess Diana, who she thinks grew into and deserved that elusive aura of real celebrity. Fergie's famously porky thighs were fair game. Fergie is in hell, Wax says. And serve her right. "She got addicted to fame. You could see her little face panting."
You're famous now, I tell her. Is that ironic now that she's no longer interested in fame?
"I'm not that famous," she says.
Well, it looks like she is here.
"I know - to you poor little people," she deadpans. "It's not Sharon Stone. Let's be honest. But, yeah, more than my neighbour."
No, not Sharon Stone. But, let's be honest, Wax woos them. She's enamoured of that lovely John Campbell.
Her: "He's like James Stewart."
Him: "There is no doubt in my mind that Ruby Wax is a sexy woman."
She tells Paul Holmes what good interview he gives. Ditto Campbell. And Jon Bridges, from Ice As (formerly Ice TV), the bloke in the gym gear, gets the full Wax treatment. She stuffed some "Kiwis" down those tight pink shorts and invaded his nasal passages with a twisted stick which passed as an arrangement from that fruit platter.
"Why," he muses," would I sit here and let you poke a stick up my nose?"
She who pokes the stick controls the show. And there's no doubt that Ms Wax is one clever comedian.
"What a brain," says John Campbell looking faintly exhausted.
And that, folks, was just the foreplay.
Wax will be back in town for a two-hour comedy show in mid-July, interviewing herself about the meaning of life.
It's all something of a game with Ruby Wax, MICHELE HEWITSON finds, with the showbiz psychology sleuth on the winning side.
Ruby Wax is being interviewed by a man wearing the sort of pre-lycra gym gear that, if taste had anything to do with it, should have died with the 80s.
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