Peter Helliar's Dreamboat Tour

You know Peter Helliar, dear reader. He's perhaps best known as Rove McManus' reliable foil, as well as a veteran of the Australian comedy circuit, and he's setting sail on his Dreamboat tour: a show which not only gives him a chance to return to stand-up comedy, but also to sport a very handsome cravat. "Well, cravats have proved to be very popular in the last 12 months, so I thought if some of Matt Preston's love of the cravat and success can rub off on the Dreamboat tour then who am I to stand in its way?" he explains. "And I'm hoping for cravat-based sales, to be honest."

Well, cravats are the T-shirts of 2010. Every gig's going to have piles of cravats at the merch desk.

"Exactly! In fact, Preston and I have an idea. I know noticed recently from the Twilight and True Blood success that there's no fat vampires around, so we're in talks to come out with the True Blood about fat vampires, who have to try to catch their prey."

That's for the future, though: the Dreamboat tour has little undead/vampiric content within it. In fact, despite the name, it turns out that it has equally little nautical content.

"It was pretty much an excuse to wear that jacket," Helliar confesses. "I've always enjoyed the term ‘dreamboat': it's just two words someone put together, almost like Facebook. If you didn't know what Facebook was, it tells you nothing about what it is. ‘Dreamboat' is similar."

It certainly harkens back to a simpler time.

"One of my shows a couple of years ago was called Frisky and that was because I used to love it on Happy Days when Mrs C used to say about Harry [sic] Cunningham, 'Harry's getting frisky', and it was my first foray into that kind of sexy talk. And ‘dreamboat' is similar: not necessarily raunchy, but it comes from a similar time, and I think it's even funnier that I'm trying to sell myself as a dreamboat. We were going to try and do that dreamy 1950-style headshots but we came up with the nautical theme. And the cravat of course. It all came back to the cravat."

Pity. The posters would have been comely, emblazoned with the Helliar visage, gazing winsomely off into the middle distance with a kiss curl plastered across the brow...

"Yes, the thousand-yard stare," he enthuses. "I've tried the thousand-yard stare. I made a movie, and the actors are talking about the thousand-yard stare, so I was practising and I think I probably got to about a 200 yard stare, so I'm still working on it Maybe by the time I hit the Opera House I might be halfway there, might get the 500 yards." Andrew P Street