For his new book, HG Nelson wrote about fairytales: specifically, those of a sporting nature. The Fairytale: A Real and Imagined History of Australian Sport, released last month, explores the idea that all great sporting moments are something of a fairytale. Because, as HG tells it, “only one horse can win the Melbourne Cup, only 22 players can win the AFL flag, only 17 players can win the rugby league. It’s not available to everybody.”

But The Fairytale also looks at ruthless competitions of a different kind: reality TV, or “the fairytale that we can all win Masterchef”.

“It is a fairytale, because you cannot imagine somebody actually progressing through all the stages to get to the place they don’t want to go to: elimination, or whatever it is,” HG explains through his trademark wheezing laughter. “Most of this is implausible rubbish. It’s doctored by the producers to tease out some sort of clickbait or faux drama. It’s just such a great fairytale.”

That having said, HG adds, “I could watch Matt Preston shove a fork in his mouth for hours because he’s just brilliant. Cravat and fork, you don’t need anything more. That is a show.”

HG also discusses some of the sporting careers of our political leaders, including John Howard’s attempts at cricket. The ball disastrously bowled by the then PM during a 2005 trip to Pakistan – an image still seared in the minds of many Australians – is the item HG claims he most regrets losing. Of course, as with all things Roy and HG, the truth of how corporeal HG’s ownership of said ball ever was is up to the audience. “The idea here, as with the book, is that you have to make up your own mind,” he says.

Here, HG (not Greig Pickhaver, the man behind the character) tells us about that legendary ball, in an in-character take on our Three Things column. Spinning tall tales like this is all in a day’s work for one half of the long-time Australian comedy duo, who, now in his 70s, does not consider himself anywhere close to retired.

“I’ll tell you what: write a book, start publicising a book, start reading a book for an audio book, then start answering questions you’ve never thought about, like, ‘what’s the thing you most regret losing?’ I consider myself flat out at work.”

What I’d save from my house in a fire

As a lot of people know, the great Australian icon Rooting King lives in Rooting King Lodge, which is in Lithgow. Rooting King is a well-established racehorse with a string of great victories over many, many years and if only authorities would still let him run in the Melbourne Cup, I’m sure he’d quid himself well.

Now, Rooting King Lodge backs onto scrub in the Lithgow area. And the Lithgow area is prone to fires. And we are, as a community there, worried that Rooting King Lodge may go up in flames and obviously the worst could happen. Recently, the army let off a few live rounds in the area and started a fire, and then there was the famous fire that took out the Zig Zag railway. So it’s not immune to fire; this is a serious threat in the area and we’ve had to train all the staff at Rooting King Lodge, including myself and Rampaging Roy, in fire drills. We’ve had to put in sprinkler systems. But we’re not completely convinced that with these elevated temperatures that we’re seeing in fires now, we’ve done enough.

So we guard against the fear every day that a wisp of smoke will curl above Rooting King Lodge and we’ll have to make a dash to rescue the King. It’s a very big and concerning issue, because it would be un-Australian to let the King go.

My most useful object

Here, I’ve got an idea of an object, and it’s the pencil. I notice the prime minister used the biro to underline passages in a book by Bill Gates which changed his mind about climate change. Now, that could be the most important pencil in the history of Australia.

And get this, in New South Wales at the moment, the pencil is used as a measure of what is a tree. As you may or may not know, there was a very ambitious program of planting trees, until the Berejiklian government realised it was going to cost a lot of money and reduced the size of a tree to a big biro, which meant they could plant a lot of them. And then completely ignore them with follow-up watering, etc.

The pencil is also very good for putting a line through dud ideas and creating good ideas, and drawing cartoons, obviously. It’s very old school but it does have a modern component: things like the Apple Pencil, which I understand is causing havoc in the artistic world as we speak.

The item I most regret losing

This is a bit of Australian history I’ve lost here. I don’t know how it happened, but can I blame a Marie Kondo clean-up emergency for losing it?

In 2005, there was a very bad earthquake in the north of Pakistan. Now, the Australian Defence Force sent a medical team to help with the rescue operations and as luck would have it, the PM John Howard was at a loose end and went along.

He loved getting into a green and gold tracksuit and representing Australia, but also loved cricket. One afternoon, they decide to have a cricket match. But there weren’t professional bats and stumps and so on as we have in Australia; it was very much like how we might play in backyard cricket, where you make do with what you’ve got. So the ball was a heap of local rubbish, which might have been old surgical gloves and plastic bags and bits of tubing, tied together with a lot of rubber bands. That, in this area of the world, is a very common thing.

Anyway, this proved to be a handful for the PM when he opened the bowling from the Everest end. He has a terrific action when it comes to approaching the stumps, but because of the nature of the ball, he couldn’t get a grip on it and it just goes all over the place. He could hardly get it past his toes. He couldn’t ask any questions of the Pakistani upper order or put the ball in the corridor of uncertainty, or anything like that. All he could do was try again. And so this over is etched in the mind of a lot of cricket lovers, and political people who had nothing to do with cricket – this implausible sight of seeing John Howard trying to bowl a ball that was largely rubbish tied together with rubber bands.

Now, obviously, the PM’s office knew my interest in cricket and knew Roy’s interest in cricket, having played at the highest level, and one thing led to another. Anyway, I end up with the thing. It comes to my place and I think, ooh, I’m guarding a bit of a historical artefact here. It really needs to be put into a museum. I had tried to make it available to Brendan Nelson when he was in charge of the War Memorial; I thought it would have been a great item to go in the foyer to demonstrate we’re not just about shooting people and killing people, we also live for cricket. Anyway, he turned it down. He said, “I don’t want any of that rubbish in my war memorial.” I said OK, fair enough, and put it on the shelf at home.

But of course, time goes on and I think, what am I saving this rubbish for? Inspired by Marie Kondo, I tidy up the joint and all of a sudden I’ve thrown it out. Afterwards I went out to the tip where I knew the council dumped their rubbish, asked the people and they looked at me blankly. “What do you want to do HG, you want to come in here and dig it up and find a bundle of rubbish in the rubbish? Why don’t you take some of the rubbish off the top and make your own ball?” I said I can’t do that; people would not allow me to do that. Australian cricket would not allow me to do that. So this is the item I regret losing the most.