Us Two: Jono and Ben - 'We're like a married couple'

MEDIA WORKS
TV3's banana-boat riding, celebrity embarrassing and general mischief makers comedy duo of Ben Boyce and Jono Pryor will broadcast their 100th episode on Friday night.

With television and radio shows, Jono Pryor and Ben Boyce spend more time together than with their own families. Jono and Ben recently hit 100 episodes, but making a hit show is not all about flour bombs and gags, there is serious talk too.

Jono: It would have been about 10 years ago that I met Ben in the office, he used to write ads.

He wrote the bloody "Oh Novus - show us your crack" jingle. Everyone's either floored or angered at that news, that he's annoyed them with the world's worst jingle for over a decade.

Television hosts Jono & Ben.
Television hosts Jono & Ben.

He likes everything in order, to be organised, and he has very sanitised hands. You will never meet someone who uses so much hand sanitiser.

You'll get emails from him at 1 o'clock in the morning about stuff which is six weeks away.

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Television hosts Jono & Ben.
Television hosts Jono & Ben.

If we go to events he'll be the one saying "here are the suits" and "here's where we've got to be".

He just likes to be planned and do everything properly, whereas I'm the exact opposite.

He brings in his lunch each day, he's the smelly lunch guy.

Television hosts Jono & Ben.
Television hosts Jono & Ben.

We'll be out filming so he'll carry this lasagne around with us and then when we do radio in the afternoon he puts it in the microwave.

He's a very skinny man, one of those people who can eat anything but stay skinny, he can shop at Pumpkin Patch.

I'd say both of us probably disappoint people when they meet us because we're just sort of normal, serious people.

Television hosts Jono & Ben.
SUPPLIED
Television hosts Jono & Ben.

I personally lead a bloody boring life outside of this job because you spend 90 per cent of your week doing unusual things, so for me just mowing the lawn and drinking a beer is really good.

We have a lot of discussions about the show's content, tone, where it's heading.

I suppose if you're just watching it for an hour a week it looks like it's sort of slapped together and all a bit of a laugh, but there's a lot of serious work that goes into it.

Television hosts Jono & Ben.
Television hosts Jono & Ben.

We've probably spent every working minute of the day together for the last five years so generally we spend weekends at home with our families.

Ben never wants to hurt anyone's feelings, to the point where he'll go to a crap movie and try find positives and say, "It was okay, there were some good points, the camera work was beautiful, there was a beautiful scene with a tree".

I've never seen him fired up, which is weird because one day hes going to go ballistic and we're all going to know about  it .

Television hosts Jono & Ben.
LAWRENCE SMITH/FAIRFAX NZ
Television hosts Jono & Ben.

He's just so easy to get along with and work with, and that makes the job enjoyable.

 

Ben:  We've known each since radio days, and along the way we've done quite a lot together.

Jono was actually the one that shaved off my dreadlocks for charity just before we started Jono and Ben.

He always has time for everyone, even when we are in a rush trying to go somewhere and we're 20 minutes late, he'll still stop for someone. We both will, but he'll go on and on.

We talk about our job all the time and we're like a married couple, we do spend way too much time together, more time then we spend with our actual families.

We're on email in the morning from about 5.30ish trying to do our radio prep, and then spend all day from 8am until 7pm together, and then sometimes night shoots, weekends, and we travel.

One thing that shows Jono's commitment to crappy gags is the skit when he put post-it notes all over my house, there was a team of 8 or 10 of them and it took 8 hours one Saturday. It was a bit like, who's the joke on here?

We have a lot of fun with our job, but you do take it seriously.

We love what we do and we have conversations about work and what we're trying to do and how we can do better, we're not always pulling each other's pants down or shooting each other with a flour gun or anything like that.

I don't think you could be friends with someone who did that 24-hours a day.

For someone who's very social, Jono doesn't really like to go out in the weekends, and if he does, he'll do that classic thing where he leaves the party without you noticing.

One time, he tried to climb out a bathroom window at a party and ended up hanging from a two story window because he doesn't like awkward goodbyes, he'd rather leave secretly.

Now and again, we do hang out in the weekends, but I think we've had every conversation that two people could ever have. I mean recently we spent 30 hours on bumper cars trying to break a world record and it was like, we have talked about everything.

There's nothing about each other's lives that we probably don't know by now.

Something interesting about him that I can't get my head around is that he doesn't eat during the day.

He'll have breakfast in the morning and basically refuse to eat anything from 8am til about 7pm. Even if you go out for lunch, it's like we're all sitting down to have a meal, and he won't eat. He reckons he's trained his body to do it.

It takes quite a lot to wind Jono up, but one thing that did annoy him was when he broke his collarbone in a skit, and he constantly reminds me.

We're very thankful that as mates we get to make something that goes on the telly every week, and have a lot of fun and laughs together.

With media being the way it is, it could all be over tomorrow, we definitely don't take it for granted.

 

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