As the host of Hard Quiz and Taskmaster Australia, Tom Gleeson isn’t often serious on TV. But there are moments in his episode of Who Do You Think You Are? where he can’t be anything but.
Tom explains at the start of the episode that he grew up on a farm near Tambar Springs in NSW. When he was about 15 and at boarding school, the bank took over the farm and his parents had to start again from nothing. Tom tells TV WEEK the loss of the farm had a big impact on him, but he’s only realised it as he’s grown older.
“At the time I was in high school and I was upset that we had to move off the farm,” he explains, “but at the same time, I was in my late teens, so moving to Sydney was also exciting because it was the big city and I had lots of friends there.
“But later in life I’ve realised that having a home that you know is not going to get taken away from you has become really important to me.”
Tom, who is married with two children, recently began renovations on the family home.
“We’ve had to move to the neighbours’ house, and I’ve started to realise that moving house is really stressing me out,” he says. “I reckon it’s because I’ve lived in that house for 15 years and the idea of having to move was bringing back all these memories of being forced to move house when you don’t want to.”
The 51-year-old comedian and TV WEEK Gold Logie winner feels he owes a lot of his success to his parents. He says his dad was a good storyteller and the life of the party, but he thinks he got his “seething sarcasm” from his mum.
“Amongst our extended family her reputation is that she can say one line and absolutely get to the heart of things,” he adds. “So maybe I got that devastating ability to cut someone down in one sentence from her.”
Tom says there was only one reason he said yes to going on Who Do You Think You Are?, the SBS series about family history.
“I didn’t do it for exposure or publicity. I purely did it for my mother. I used a network to do family research so I could basically deliver the TV show to my mother so she could enjoy it.”
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