I'M ABOUT to press the buzzer on Charlie Pickering's front door and I'm scared. Not because the host of The 7pm Project is an intimidating character (he's not), but because I've just finished reading the book he's written about his practical-joker father, Ron, who is inside the house with him, and I'm wondering whether the Pickering family's love of a wheeze extends to putting one over on visiting journalists.
I tense as I press the buzzer. No electric shock. Good.
I hold back as the door opens. No pail of water. Whew.
I hug the hallway wall. No barrage of paintballs. What a relief.
I reach the lounge room and I realise I'm safe. There's Charlie and his dad on the couch, the younger Pickering's seven remote controls lined up on the coffee table in front of them. They seem positively placid.
''I can blame Dad for the fact I'm a comedian,'' says the younger Pickering, who studied law before turning to comedy in 2000. ''He taught me from a young age that a laugh was the most important thing in the world, so it's perfectly understandable that I never took my legal career that seriously.''
The book he has written, Impractical Jokes, is an expanded version of a stand-up show he has been performing since 2007. ''When I was approached by the publisher, I thought, 'I've already typed this show onto my computer. How hard can it be?','' he says. ''They wanted 60,000 words. I did a word count and realised I had about 4500. 'OK, this is going to be a lot more work than I thought'.''
Not for the reader, though. This is the breezy tale of an escalating campaign where Ron Pickering and his best mate Richard Opie were locked in a tit-for-tat exchange of elaborate stunts for more than a decade.
Actually, it's still going on, though with Ron now 66 and Richard, the Moriarty to his Holmes, now 64, the pace and scale of their sorties is a little diminished lately.
The war of attrition began at a family barbecue, at which Richard pushed Ron into a pool. Ron retaliated by turning a water pistol on Richard in a restaurant. Richard retaliated by storming a dinner party at the Pickering house with very realistic water-squirting machineguns. He came during a power cut with an accomplice, balaclavas and cries of ''this is a stick-up''. Clearly, a little more sophisticated - not to mention fraught with danger - than a whoopee cushion.
Ron says he got his fondness of a practical joke from his father, and developed his particular style as a hard-scrabble kid in Footscray. As Charlie collected anecdotes from his father, not all of which ended up in the book, he started to realise that to some degree he was capturing a slice of Australia that simply doesn't exist any more.
''Maybe it's just nostalgia, but I found myself thinking, 'God, childhood seemed to be a lot more interesting back then than it is today'.''
''Times were different,'' Ron responds, not always better, however. ''I had a friend who drowned in the Maribyrnong, another was electrocuted and one was killed at Mount Mistake near the Western Oval, all while mucking around.''
Charlie also thinks there's something in his story about what it means to be a father in Australia, as opposed to a father anywhere else. ''I think Dad represents a little bit the time and place he grew up in, and how an Aussie dad is a bit different to dads from other places.''
But, he adds, ''All I really wanted to do with the book was to give a fair representation of my dad, to say this is what I feel about my dad, and this is what he's like as a guy.''
Charlie Pickering's Impractical Jokes will be launched by Shaun Micallef at Readings Carlton in Victoria on Sunday at 2.30pm.
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