Comedian, TV writer and podcaster Sam Smith joins Afternoons for this week’s Bookmarks.
Legally blind himself, Smith presents and produces Blind and Low Vision NZ's podcast ReVision.
He also writes for and warms up audiences for lots of TV shows including 7 Days, The Project and Taskmaster NZ.
Sam Smith Photo: supplied
His first song pick, 'The Set-Up', is by Reel Big Fish, his “favourite band in the entire world.”
Smith studied dentistry but can no longer practice due to his blindness.
“Most patients aren’t too keen on that.”
In 2015, Smith was diagnosed with MS and lost feeling in his hands.
“That’s another reason people don’t really want a dentist who does that.”
He was working some of the time as a TV writer for 7 Days and Jono and Ben and was able to put more focus on that.
“A couple years later, I had another MS attack – that’s how MS works, different attacks that you can sometimes recover from and sometimes you don’t – and I lost most of the vision in my left eye and a bit of vision in my right eye.
“I then couldn’t go back to dentistry at all, but luckily I started doing the warm-up on shows like The Project, 7 Days and a bunch of other things. This was my path to becoming a comedian, which is often a big step, but I kind of got forced into it. I’m quite grateful that it happened, weirdly.”
He says the blindness doesn’t affect his work too much, but he will often ask the name of people he’s known for decades. It also has its upsides.
“It’s a quite good excuse for getting things wrong and getting to make people feel bad about having me up on my spelling online. I will quite often be like, ‘oh yeah, cool, make fun of the blind guy for not being able to spell, that’s great.’”
Smith is regarded as a master of the very difficult art of warming up audiences.
“I come from an improv background so interacting with people and being nice is something I really enjoy and that seems to come across to people and they feel a lot more relaxed and will clap and laugh and do what the shows require.”
One of Smith’s favourite things is the podcast he hosts which highlights legends in the blind community, for instance, a blind woman who refereed a game of nude rugby.
“[The podcast] is to show that people in the blind community aren’t these write-offs. We’re still doing these wonderful things, we’re a big part of the community, we’re contributing. We’re just being that place where people who’ve been newly diagnosed with vision loss, like myself, have somewhere to go to learn that there are little tips and tricks to deal with this condition.”
Smith says he doesn’t really get bummed out about being blind.
“I feel like I’m quite lucky. This is just my natural positive vibes, it’s never really affected me too much at all. Anything bad that’s ever happened to me has kind of had a good spinoff at the end.”
Another podcast he enjoys is the official companion guide to Taskmaster UK, which is hosted by Ed Gamble.
“I write tasks for the New Zealand version of the show, I’m a huge fan of it. Taskmaster is one of the best shows on television.”
Onto books, Smith picks Sick in the Head by comedy writer and film producer and director Judd Apatow.
“Coming from someone with a chronic neurological condition, I thought Sick in the Head was an absolutely wonderful title. It’s actually the last book I read before I went blind so it will forever have a nice spot in my head.”
He explains that the book is interviews with comedy writers and comedians throughout Apatow’s life.
These days Smith listens to audiobooks rather than read and he’s discovered that someone has uploaded all the Alan Partridge books, read by creator Steve Coogan, on YouTube.
“You just hear him reading the book he wrote, he does all the voices, he does all the characters and it’s just seven hours of jokes. It’s wonderful, it’s glorious.”
As for TV, Arrested Development is Smith’s favourite show “in the entire world.”
“It is incredible. If you haven’t seen it, stop whatever you’re doing right now and go and watch it.”
