Australian Tumbleweeds

As Talkin’ ‘bout Your Generation edges ever closer to an indoors 2010 version of It’s A Knockout, it’s hard not to sympathize a little with those who’re asking “what happened to Shaun Micallef?” He used to be a low-key master of the subtle and surreal; now he’s hosting a show where Leo Sayer puts on a suit made of gravy and gets attacked by starving dogs*

But while it’s perfectly natural to wish Micallef was still doing sketch comedy a la The P(r )ogram(me) – AKA the best darn sketch show made in this country ever – let’s go against our usual wild idealism and face facts: sketch shows are a tough sell in this country at the moment. Commercial networks aren’t interested (especially after Double Take shat in the pool) and rumour has it that the ABC funds them under the “light entertainment” scale – that is, at the same level as something like Spicks & Specks. Which doesn’t have a (proper, structured) script, more than one set, costume changes, an actual cast…

So that’s out. What else is there? A talk show? Maybe. Except that Ten didn’t seem to be keen to turn Micallef’s excellent New Year’s Rave into a regular event, so that door seems slightly less ajar than it might otherwise be. How about bringing Newstopia back? Ahh, now things get interesting: Micallef’s often said he’d like to a): have kept doing Newstopia when he started on TAYG but scheduling got in the way, b): return to it at some stage in the future, most recently raising the possibility of doing it as a nightly (four nights a week) show.

Unfortunately for Newstopia fans – and while we had problems with the show, we’re firmly in the fan camp – these comments often sound more like keeping a door ajar than concrete plans for a revival. Newstopia certainly felt like a show running out of puff towards the end (the Inspektor Herring episode, while very funny, was hardly the thing a news satire show would do in its’ prime), and SBS seem to have given up on the local comedy side of things (that second series of Swift & Shift must’ve been a stinker) unless there’s a sports angle.

So we’re stuck with TAYG. On the plus side, its way, way better than any other similar show, thanks almost entirely to Shaun’s work. And much as it may depress some of us, “this kind of show” is what a majority of Australians want to watch when they put their feet up after a long day. Why should they be denied some Shaun goodness – or the chance to realise he’s a funny guy and worth following to whatever he does next?

It’s not like Micallef’s changed his act to make TAYG work either. He’s still clearly doing the same kind of thing he’s always done, and while doing it surrounded by people who, to be charitable, are nowhere near as funny and are often downright painful isn’t the best of all possible worlds, it does hold out some hope that when Micallef does move on, comedywise he’ll still be the same Shaun Micallef he was going into this lightweight game show.

It’s also hard to deny that TAYG’s success has helped Micallef realise some worthwhile side projects. The New Year’s Rave obviously wouldn’t have happened without TAYG’s ratings success. Same with that character-based comedy CD he put out last year, or his new book Preincarnate that’s out in a week or two. So he’s hardly asleep at the wheel when it comes to doing his own thing outside of the game show format.

More importantly, Micallef’s always seemed to be a guy who wants to try as many things as he can get away with. Sure, if he’s still hosting TAYG five years from now, that’ll suck – well, it’ll suck if they’re doing 30 episodes a year, if he’s doing 13 (and word is they’ll be scaling back production next year) and has time to do other stuff around it… well, most of us should be able to live with that.

And if he goes on to do something else different in 2011 – rumour has it he might be part of a new “variety” show Ten is planning, though his exact role is unclear – well, he’ll just have shown that he can be an awesome game show host as well as talk show host, comedian, writer, character performer, face-puller, etc…

*actually cute little puppies! awww

In a new, and no doubt soon to be highly irregular, feature of this blog, Bean Is A Carrot trawls through her collection of books about Australian comedy.

What makes a good book about comedy? As someone who’s read many I used to think the key was thorough research and good writing, but then I got my hands on a book about comedy which blew that theory apart.

Wanted for Questioning: Interviews with Australian comic artists by Murray Bramwell and David Matthews, published by Allen & Unwin in 1992, is both thoroughly researched and well written, yet thoroughly researched prose isn’t the book’s main feature – it’s interviews, conducted by either Bramwell or Matthews, with around 30 comedians. Each interview transcript is preceded by a short biography of the interviewee, and details of where and when the interview took place – and apart from a three-page introduction to the book, that’s it. It may sound potentially boring (or even that the authors were too lazy to write a proper book) but that’s not the case. This is the best book about Australian comedy I’ve ever read, and that the book consists almost entirely of transcripts (albeit slightly edited ones) is its strength. It’s 30 or so comedians responding to a series of questions in their own words, with no misinterpretation of those words by the authors, and no surrounding paragraphs of waffle.

Another reason for this book’s greatness is that Bramwell and Matthews timed it right. They conducted their interviews in 1990 and 1991 – the height of the so-called “comedy boom” – when Australian television was awash with that generation of comedians who’d started out in Melbourne’s cabaret and comedy club scene in the 70s and 80s. As such, many of those interviewed, although no one knew this at the time, were at the peak of their fame. Memories of The Big Gig are fresh in Jean Kittson’s mind because she’s in the middle of making it. Ditto Marg Downey and Fast Forward, or Andrew Denton and The Money or the Gun.

Those interviewed are also refreshingly candid and open about television and the comedy industry. Rod Quantock seemingly had no qualms about confirming those rumours about how the concept for Steve Vizard’s Tonight Live was developed:

…I was asked to do the preliminary work on Tonight Live. What Tonight Live did was to get lots of tapes of the David Letterman Show with no beg-your pardons. The whole concept is a foreign concept and used no local grey matter at all. They went through the motions I suppose but they ended up saying: ‘There’s an original idea that someone else had and it works, that’ll be fine for us too’.

Satirist and cartoonist Patrick Cook is equally critical, although this time of Channel 9′s approach to comedy:

I can’t believe that Channel 9′s had Clarkie [John Clarke] sitting on his bum in the backroom for five years and the most they’ve got out of him is doing the interviews – I can understand why that’s all he wanted to do. Channel 9′s been notorious for years for playing a spoiler role anyway. They kept The D-Generation in a backroom too, for a year and a half.

Can you imagine today’s equivalents of Quantock or Cook biting the hand that feeds them?

Then there’s the fascinating revelation from Marg Downey, that her place in the cast of The D-Generation wasn’t a given, despite having been in the university revue it grew out of.

…I had to audition. All the boys were automatically accepted. There were two girls in the show and the other one didn’t make it. And the producer didn’t want me. He said “That girl’s not funny; we won’t have her”. I had to audition and luckily, I got through somehow, by the skin of my teeth.

And that’s just scratching the surface. There are plenty more fascinating gems amongst the interviews with Barry Humphries, John Clarke, Michael Leunig, Paul McDermott, Max Gillies, Billy Birmingham, Greg Pickhaver and John Doyle, Mary Coustas and Nick Giannopoulos, Wendy Harmer, and many others. But should this article have inspired you to seek out a copy of Wanted for Questioning…, I should warn you that it won’t be easy. It took me about a year of searching on ABE Books for a copy to turn up. And while a quick Google reveals that Amazon.com currently have two available, the cheapest costs $61.38. So good luck finding a copy, or indeed one at a reasonable price. Maybe check your local library.

There’s nothing we like more than taking potshots at critics who (unlike us) are actually being paid to waffle on about topics they barely understand. But today’s target – Ben Pobjie, who recently took over The Age’s ‘Couch Life’ column in the Saturday A2 supplement – provides a slightly more difficult target than the usual Hey Hey defenders and Chris Lilley worshippers. That’s because his column “How to kill a mockumentary” (16/10/10) starts off with a semi-reasonable point: if you’re making fun of something, you want to make sure you do an accurate job of it.

Actually, he doesn’t start off with that – he starts off talking about The Office and bam! There’s a shit joke about how he’s required “by law” to say all American sitcom remakes aren’t a patch on the British originals, which might have been funny if most television critics who actually watch television on a regular basis seem to agree that the US Office is / has been at least as good as the UK version, albeit in a different (funnier) fashion.

Then he digs an even bigger hole for himself by saying “the great thing about the British Office was that it really committed to the comedy doco concept”. Really? That was the great thing about the show – that it focused all twelve episodes and two specials first and foremost on sticking firmly to the idea of the television documentary? That “it was like a real documentary, only funny”? Which, by the way, is the kind of thing someone who’s never actually watched a documentary might think – and even then they’d probably be smart enough not to say it out loud in case, you know, the director of Anvil: The Story of Anvil or Metallica: Some Kind of Monster happened to be walking by.

And then, just after basically burying himself alive with the “joke” that The Office was “so good, while it was on, other channels went off air out of shame”, he keeps on digging by suggesting that a show like Arrested Development set about “destroying the concept” of the mockumentary. What, by being piss-funny? But wait: here’s where his semi-reasonable point comes in. It seems his problem with Arrested Development isn’t that it wasn’t funny, but that it “never committed” to being a comedy mockumentary. It didn’t look like a real documentary, therefore it’s not as good as The Office. Ooooookay.

But still, if you squint your eyes and hit yourself in the face with a hammer you can almost understand what he’s trying to say. If you’re going to parody something, you have to copy that thing as closely as possible for the joke to work. Shitty, half-arsed swipes at something simply aren’t as funny as the tightly-targeted stab that gets right to the core of the matter. That’s not really a matter up for debate. Unfortunately, Pobjie then goes on to reveal that this isn’t what he was trying to say at all.

“Latter-day mockumentarians don’t have the courage to sacrifice the bedroom scene for the one-camera tableau.” There’s more, but you get the idea: he’d rather have a spot-on replication of documentary style than jokes that might bend the rules to get laughs. Yes, we’re talking about comedy: while sitcom writers the world over have absorbed the lessons of the mockumentary style and adapted them to demands of an audience that wants to laugh-

or as Anil Gupta, executive producer of The Office and the director of the pilot, put it in the BFI’s book on The Office “There was lots of angsty hand-wringing about how authentic or not it was. You want to get it right but with hindsight, what a fucking waste of time a lot of it was. Who cares in the end?”

- the A2’s TV columnist would rather his mockumentaries focused their attention on getting the camerawork right.

It’s the kind of argument you sometimes get from people who don’t actually seem to have a sense of humour. They can’t rely on their own gut reaction to a show to tell them whether a show is funny or not, so they have to latch onto technical aspects and base their judgments on them. The Office is better than Arrested Development or Modern Family (the target of much of his complaining here) not because it’s funnier, but because it looks more like a “real” documentary. Dear God.

And then he says the problem is that people don’t want too much “realism” in their comedies. “Though we fall in love with The Office, we’ll always feel safer with Modern Family”. Huh? The Office was too “real” for audiences? David Brent singing about the “Free Love Freeway”, doing a crazy dance and getting sacked while wearing an ostrich costume was “real”? Jesus fucking wept.

The really painful thing is, even this kak-handed discussion of comedy is head-and-shoulders above the usual standard of TV writing about comedy in Australia. Yes, he seems to even have the basics wrong and he’ll most likely be calling Chris Lilley a “genius” the first chance he gets, but at least he’s trying – failing, but trying – to make a point beyond “it’s holding up a mirror to multicultural society”. So who knows? If he ever manages to write a column talking about how comedy should try to be funny, he might actually be onto something.

How can you seriously hate Daryl Somers – yes, strap yourselves in, we’re off to Daryl-land again – when he says things like this: “I’d be happy playing drums in a jazz trio and doing a bit of singing. That would be terrific fun, but you can’t do that and a show like this, which is a 100 per cent commitment” (Switched On, The Herald Sun, 13/10/10). On the surface, fair enough: no doubt making Hey Hey is a full time job. But, uh… hang on, if Daryl would be happy drumming in a small-time band and the only thing stopping him from taking up the quiet life is his commitment to his show, what the hell was he doing with himself for the ten years Hey Hey wasn’t “a 100 per cent commitment”?

I don’t see “drummer in jazz trio” anywhere on his resume for the years 1999-2009 – you know, when he was actually free of the shackles of Hey Hey. What I do see is a man who took every chance he could get to spriuk for the return of his TV series, even going so far as to beg for its return on stage during the Logies one year and quitting a high-profile gig as Dancing With the Stars host because reportedly his then-employer Seven weren’t interested in bringing back Hey Hey.

[If I seriously thought that steady work in a jazz trio would keep Daryl off our screens I’d sell my house and yours to finance an indefinite tour of mining pits in Western Australia, but I have a sneaky suspicion that if Hey Hey doesn’t come back in 2011 Daryl’s spare time is mostly going to be spent complaining that Nine didn’t give the show a fair chance to develop an audience while trying to get another network to give him yet another chance to do the same old sh*t all over again.]

But that’s only the tip of the comedy iceberg in this must-read article on the return of Hey Hey, AKA yet another of Daryl’s trademark shotgun sprays at all those who oppose his vision of a unified comedy state under his benevolent Kim Jung-Ill style leadership. Seriously, even if you spent years hating on Somers you couldn’t make up a better quote than this: “You know there are some shows where the cast is trying to make out that it gets on. What is great about our show is that we have this wonderful chemistry.” So… Daryl runs a show where the cast isn’t trying to make out that they all get along? Sure, often this “great chemistry” he’s talking about seems to consist of everyone else looking scared as Daryl glares at someone who stepped on his punchline, or of everyone trying desperately to get a laugh out of Daryl so the show can lurch forward to the next segment, but… well, I guess you need great chemistry to create nitroglycerine.

If I was a bit more conscientious in my research I’m sure I’d be able to dig out an old comment from Daryl in the wake of the 2009 Hey Hey comeback specials where he talked about how those shows’ smash ratings were a great sign for the show’s future success – after all, why wouldn’t he say that? The show being a hit was the main reason why it got a full run this year. But as I don’t want to embarrass article author Darren Devlyn – who writes “Only those with waste product for brains would have expected Hey Hey to reach the same heights over an extended season in 2010” – let’s move on to the best part of any Daryl Somers interview: the bit where he takes a swing at his critics.

[yes, I do realise that by this stage every journo who interviews him must know that you’ll always get a good quote from Daryl about “his critics”, but that doesn’t mean those quotes aren’t worth having a chuckle over. ]

And this one’s a doozy: “There’s still an element who want to put the show in the ancient box,” he says. “Some critics said ‘it’s the same old bloody segments’ and I say that if you get rid of Red Faces, Plucka Duck, Celebrity Head, there will be an outcry and we are destroying the show. Stuff the critics. We’ll do the show we believe is right for the audience.”

Oh, where to begin? For starters, could there be a more disdainful way to refer to your critics than “an element”? I’m honestly surprise he didn’t stick “criminal” in front of “element” and front his own “the hoons who hate Hey Hey – tonight on A Current Affair” special. As for “the ancient box” – uh, Daryl? Hey Hey started in the late 1970s – as far as television goes, it’s not so much ancient as The Thing That Wouldn’t Die. It is kind of touching that Daryl believes there’ll be an outcry if he axed Celebrity Head though – after all, when Nine axed the entire f**king show back in 1999 there wasn’t so much an outcry as a barely perceptible shrug.

But the real gold is, as always, “Stuff the critics. We’ll do the show we believe is right for the audience”. It’s a familiar line from Daryl, but it does overlook one vital point: aren’t the critics part of the audience? If a regular viewer says “hey, maybe ditching some of the old segments might not be a bad idea to freshen things up – after all, for the first 20 years Hey Hey was constantly doing new things, and Plucka Duck and Celebrity Head only came in during the last decade or so of the show”, do they stop being “the audience” and become “the critics” in Daryl’s eyes? Is it as simple as a case of “you’re with us or against us”?

More importantly, is it actually possible to provide feedback to Daryl, or is he so committed to doing “the show we believe is right for the audience” – even when over half that audience stopped watching during its 2010 run to date, shedding a hundred thousand viewers a week for weeks at a time – that any suggested changes automatically get the thumbs down? I mean, it’s not like Daryl’s showing a firm grip of the state of television with comments like these: “We went out for 10 years and nothing replaced us. There have been ample opportunities for something to replace us and it never happened.”

Really? What the f**k was Rove hosting for the ten years Hey Hey was gone then? Live show, had celebrity guests, comedians, live music, pointless segments… oh wait, it didn’t have a guy in a duck suit running around dry-humping people. Totally different thing altogether then. Maybe Daryl is right then when he says without the slightest trace of irony or self-awareness “Hey Hey is still viable. I always thought it was viable and hence why we came back”. Sure, no-one else thought it was viable, but Daryl got it back on the air through sheer force of will. And if he can do that, who’s to say he can’t erase a nation’s memory of Rove’s entire career? No-one – not to Daryl’s face anyway.

It’s a sad fact, but in the current climate pretty much the last thing any of our television networks want their comedians to be doing is comedy. Hey, we don’t understand it either – presumably it comes down to producers finding themselves out of a job if they let the comedians put together their own shows, because it sure isn’t that audiences don’t like (good) comedy. The fact remains: in 2010 you’re going to see more of The Chaser’s Andrew Hansen on the astonishingly pointless Strictly Speaking than you will on The Chaser’s own TV series.

Just to add insult to grievous bodily harm, Strictly Speaking, while supposedly a kind of competition for up-and-coming public speakers – yeah, like that’s an employment niche crying out for new talent… guess they must be running out of people to ask those long-winded questions on Q&A – quickly proves itself to be little more than a training ground for crap stand-up comedians. Each week a bunch of stilted, relatively charisma-free types gather to judge a group of slightly more charming would-be public speakers. As always in Australian television, let the Aliens vs Predator catchphrase be your guide: whoever wins, we lose.

This is the kind of shoestring effort that should under no circumstances be shown outside of a Sunday afternoon timeslot, so I’m guessing the ABC programming department somehow thought Chris Lilley’s Angry Boys would require less than an entire calendar year in editing and slotted it in for early October – only to realise at the last minute that Lilley likes to take his time making sure he gets every single speaking role in his shows, so they had to throw on this below-broadcast quality effort to bridge the gap.

Seriously: it’s a televised public speaking competition that features (in the episode I watched) someone doing a fake sports call, someone cracking jokes about how “you can’t open the windows at the underwater observatory” and someone being forced to talk for two minutes about the game of rock paper scissors (though to be fair, judge Father Bob did get in a good joke about growing up too poor to be able to play rock paper scissors). It’s bad stand-up, filmed in a high school’s B drama center and judged by a panel whose advice seems roughly as useful as an inflatable safe.

And then there’s Andrew Hansen out the front hosting, trying his hardest to… well, that’s not really true, is it? He’s doing his usual semi-smarmy act, throwing the occasional limp joke out there to remind us that he used to be on a show classified as “comedy”, but otherwise this show could be hosted by a chair that was leaking stuffing and it wouldn’t really lose anything. Not that you can blame him – given the chance to be funny he usually takes a pretty decent swing at it (unlike, say, Chris Taylor, who’s hosting work has been both much slicker and much more successful at erasing any memory you might have of him being a comedian), so clearly the brief here was to turn the funny down. Because like it says at the top of this post, who wants to see comedians being funny these days?

The same question is dialed down to a niggling doubt watching the first episode of Tony Martin’s recent interview show A Quiet Word With… largely because Martin is a skilled interviewer talking to someone (Bill Bailey) whose career he’s clearly interested in. Honestly, simply seeing a lengthy interview conducted by someone who knows what they’re doing that doesn’t dissolve into shameless tear-jerking or blatant emotional manipulation is such a f**king relief that if this doesn’t win every single Logie available then the TV Week awards can no longer pretend to even the slightest vestige of credibility. Hang on a second…

That said, the harsh fact remains: it’s a show containing Tony Martin where Tony Martin isn’t constantly being funny. By definition, this is a little bit of a bad thing. It’s great that he’s getting to be on television, and it’s awesome that he’s doing smart and humorous interviews with interesting people. But there are other people in this country who could be doing that: to the best of our knowledge, there’s no-one else in the world who could have come up with, for example, Grant Spatchcock’s Gourmet Pizza.

No doubt the remaining five episodes of A Quiet Word With… (shown at irregular intervals over the next few months, so keep an eye on the TV listings) will be must-see television. After just one episode it’s already taken a somewhat large dump over roughly 90% of Enough Rope. Still, when next it returns to the screen it’ll be hard not to occasionally wish Tony Martin had a gig on television doing flat-out comedy, not simply dropping in the occasional pre-heated Andre Rieu gag during a pleasant chat. Because while television might not want to feature comedians doing comedy, there are still a few of us who feel otherwise.

Back in July we noted the announcement of WTF!, a send-up of fast-paced entertainment news shows created by ex-Chaser member Charles Firth. We were fairly sceptical about whether this show would be any good or not, and after two weeks of episodes on GO! (and the thecompleteandutter channel on YouTube) it seems were right to be so.

WTF! isn’t a “unlike anything seen on Australian television”, as TV website The Tube claimed it would be, more an attempt at parodying entertainment news shows which is so cack-handed and unfunny that you’re left wondering if it’s entertainment news fan fiction. Sure, the sketches get the look and feel of the kind of bullshit celebrity news stories they’re trying to send-up right, but when people like Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton are out there in the real world doing far sillier stuff than WTF! seems able to dream up, then the question is why bother?

There’s also pretty much no attempt to satirise the facile dreadfulness and all pervading influence of celebrity news culture, but given that any attempt to go down that path would probably be as painful as the rest of the show, that’s probably a good thing.

Occasionally there’ll be some bit of background business from one of the performers that raises a smile, but overall WTF! looks like the sketches from Hungry Beast without the earnest reports about military robotics technology surrounding them. And that isn’t a sign of quality – that’s a waste of time.