Australian Tumbleweeds

It was announced the other day that Rove McManus has become the latest Australian to score a gig on American TV, and that’s all well and good but why him? There are lots of other far better Australian comedians having a crack in the US, why aren’t they getting gigs? One such example is Gristmill, AKA Wayne Hope and Robyn Butler, who we understand were (or are) planning to move to the US to pursue opportunities. And with quality work like The Librarians and Very Small Business behind them there must surely be plenty of opportunities for them to pursue…or are there? Because it’s all very well for a bland, solid everyman like Rove McManus to make it overseas, but Gristmill’s focus has always been on uniquely Australian characters – characters possibly too unique for the US market – so, despite their obvious talent, are they ever going to get anywhere?

Breaking the US market’s historically been a big challenge for Australian comedians, even now when hundreds of Australians in other parts of the entertainment industry are making it big there. Barry Humphries made a number of attempts over a 30 year period before he finally did it, and the progress of others has also been slow. Sure, Chris Lilley’s done extremely well to get HBO on board for Angry Boys, and FX are about to screen the US re-make of Adam Zwar and Jason Gann’s series Wilfred, but when an Australian comedy or comedian goes to America it always seems to be one which isn’t specifically Australian. Which kinda rules out Gristmill.

Gristmill’s brilliance in The Librarians and Very Small Business was their ability to highlight and parody elements of Australian society. Very Small Business was a subtle and clever attack on the attitudes and values of “The Howard Battlers”, and similar themes, mixed with a liberal dose of Catholic guilt, were explored in The Librarians. But while both were brilliantly funny series it’s hard to imagine them having quite the same resonance overseas. Particularly in the US, where a local version of Gristmill would be focusing on a rather different set of cultural attitudes and values.

In contrast, the characters in Angry Boys and Wilfred don’t necessarily need to be Australian, nor is the humour of Rove McManus, or indeed Rebel Wilson (such as it is), rooted in a specific Australianess. Kath & Kim, which like Gristmill’s work also focused on Australian suburban attitudes, did not travel well to the United States. Indeed those who remade it clearly didn’t understand why the show worked, and so failed to adapt it for local audiences (quite possibly the show was un-adaptable). And perhaps the same is true of Gristmill’s work: if your comedy comes from your observations of the immediate world around you, the same world you grew up in, then it’s unlikely to travel well.

The point of this article is not to have a go at Gristmill’s style or whatever plans they have to go overseas: they’re talented, there’s nothing wrong with having a go overseas, and comedians focusing their attention on who we Australians are and how our country works is a perfectly valid thing (in fact it wouldn’t hurt if more comedians did it). All we’re trying to work out here is why local talents like Gristmill haven’t (yet) made it overseas.

It’s also interesting to note that Gristmill’s most recent work is a series of videos featuring Robyn Butler as right-wing shock jock Arabella Twat, a character who despite being very much a comment on local pundits like Miranda Devine, Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones, could more easily be understood by overseas audiences than some of Butler and Hope’s other work. Either way, Twat (pronounced “Twart”, and very obviously both a twat and a tart) is another great creation and it will be fascinating to see how it develops. Gristmill’s website may list their US agent, and they may yet be heading to overseas, but Australian comedy would be all the poorer for losing them.

Okay, so over at The Age this just happened:

throughout Angry Boys the language is appalling, family interaction is wholly dysfunctional and there are repeated references to all manner of sexual deviations – dog-wanking and grandma-groping chief among them. If this is comedic genius, Rodney Rude and Kevin ”Bloody” Wilson deserve lifetime achievement awards.

It’s taken us a day or so to process the news that Spicks & Specks – a show we honestly figured that at this stage would keep on keeping on until at least the next Ice Age – will in fact be gone before the next Ice Age movie comes out. Not because we’re going to miss the actual show or anything, of course: S&S was in many ways the apex predator of panel shows, a format ruthlessly constructed to ensure that the really funny guests aren’t too funny while the totally shithouse ones are moderately tolerable. And there’s only so many times (we’ll say… three) you can watch someone whose work you really admire forced to play a bunch of lame party games before you put a foot through the television set.

Let’s not forget that, for a show that’s become that most dreaded of things, an “Australian Institution”, S&S was not only a thinly disguised knock-off of UK show Never Mind the Buzzcocks but was also commissioned minutes after the ABC passed on the lets-be-honest-they’re-almost-identical RocKwiz. Much as the three leads did a solid job of personalising the format, S&S was always generic committee-driven television at its finest, a show made by executives to be “good enough” without a trace of creative passion behind it.

Tho be fair (why start now – ed), S&S did do a good job of recreating the fun of a dodgy quiz night while providing a showcase for various musos and international acts to show off their ability to laugh at Hamish Blake. It also managed to do what most panel shows seem utterly incapable of doing: providing team captains who aren’t completely identical.

[we interrupt this drivel for a Public Service Announcement: hey, TV execs: if The Movie Show / At The Movies can survive for roughly a trillion years based solely on movie trailers - which the commercial networks throw away as ads because they ARE ads - and having two moderately different people who like different things occasionally argue, then maybe it's time to consider the idea that the folks at home like to watch shows where THEY CAN TAKE SIDES. No-one wants to see open loathing, but good-natured conflict is clearly a big, big plus when it comes to making watchable television and the fact you avoid it like crazy every chance you get is yet another reason why viewers avoid your shows like crazy every chance they get.]

Still, it’s not the loss of S&S itself that we’re sad about. It’s the loss of the locked-in, million plus ratings lead-in that we’re going to mourn. It’s hard to over-estimate how important all those loyal S&S viewers have been for Australian comedy over the last 5 or so years: thanks to S&S drawing huge crowds and then leaving them at 9pm with nothing else to watch but whatever half-hour comedy the ABC had lined up next (every other network having started hour-long shows at 8.30pm), a whole range of comedies that would have almost certainly struggled to draw a crowd had instead a ready-made army of followers.

Sure, this did mean that shows that deserved to have struggled in their early episodes instead looked like winners. We won’t name names (*cough* The Gruen Transfer *cough*), but you’ve got to take the rough with the smooth. In the wider scheme of things having S&S anchour the ABC’s Wednesday night comedy line-up was a massive, massive boost for television comedy – as anyone who remembers the days when the ABC would dump their local comedies anywhere and then wonder why they didn’t rate (and then, for a period in the early 00s, stop making them entirely) knows all too well.

So when Spicks & Specks finally leaves our screens due to (we assume) Adam Hills pulling out in the wake of In Gordon Street Tonight proving that people will watch him even when he’s not spitting out music-themed questions and kaking himself, we’ll miss it. Not because we could stand to watch more than the occasional five-minute snippet over the last four years, but because it did the heavy lifting that allowed a lot of other, better shows to dodge the ratings bullet. Which is a hell of a lot more than Good News Week has ever done for anybody.

The more eagle-eyed amongst you have probably noticed that we’ve put off reviewing Balls of Steel Australia for five weeks. But never fear, we haven’t come over all “rule of three” (or indeed five) round these parts. We just figured that as the original Balls of Steel (made in the UK) started off with someone placing hundreds of turds on the pavement of a heavily-congested London bridge just before rush hour and filming the hee-larious results, the Australian version would, at best, be equally bad.

So why even bother to cover it all? It’s on Foxtel, lots of people can’t watch it. Well, because we think it’s time somebody came out and said it: pranks aren’t funny. Whether it’s Matt Tilley making his infamous “Gotcha Calls” (these can now be heard on at least two Austereo stations around the country – another reason not to tune in!), Julian Morrow as the Citizen’s Infringement Officer handing out tickets to parents who’ve given their children “bogan names”, or Chris Lilley’s new character Gran telling a teenage inmate in her care that he’s about to be released and should pack his things and, oh wait, just as he’s saying goodbye to his cell mates…”Gotcha!”…well, there’s a reason why in real life this sort of thing would have you up in front of a judge. These pranks may be many things, but funny isn’t anywhere near the top of the list.

What pranks actually are is a barely acceptable form of bullying or harassment, where we the audience are supposed to cack ourselves sideways as an unwitting victim gets put through some entirely unnecessary pain or embarrassment that doesn’t turn out to be that funny anyway. In many ways it’s the equivalent of bogan or ranga jokes, a cheap, easy style of humour that has the moral equivalence of racist jokes, but without the potential to get Twitter in a tiz.

There should be more to comedy than such patronising button-pressing, and audiences shouldn’t get to a point about a quarter of the way through the first episode where they realise they could make something equally good on their mobile phones – or find something better on YouTube. Comedy on TV should be a quality product, which should knock you sideways with surprise, and provide you with one serious belly laugh after another. If broadcast TV wants to have a profitable future making comedy that provokes audiences to do little more than emit the odd shallow “ha” as some dickhead chucks chips on sunbathers isn’t the way to go.

Indeed, there’s a reason why there are hardly any comedians in the cast of Balls of Steel Australia: this isn’t a real comedy. A real comedy would at least try for a bit of light and shade, not broadcast roughly the same thing for half a hour. Even Craig Reucassel and chums worked that one out, sandwiching their lame pranks between studio segments and spoof ads. They also tried to give their pranks some sort of point, a notion which has so far not been explored by Balls of Steel Australia. And that’s probably just as well.

Oh, and while we’re here, is it just us or like on The Chaser’s War on Everything did some of the pranks on Balls of Steel Australia look just a little bit staged? There have been rumours. And if they’re true they only make the show even more pointless, because if the goal of a prank is to make the victim react in an over-the-top manner, then an actor with no emotional stake in the scenario (apart from their pay cheque) is probably not going to get that hilariously upset. Which would explain why most of the victims just look at the likes of The Annoying Devil and Nude Girl as if someone’s presented them with a turd on a platter. Oh wait, they just have. Isn’t it hilarious?

Half way through an Age article penned decrying the latest wave of internet dumbassedry, Melbourne comedy stalwart Dave O’Neil talks of breaking his leg trying to jump Ian “Dicko” Dickson on a BMX bike for his Vega radio show. “It was entertainment,” he writes, “But was it really?” Gee Dave, if you weren’t sure why’d you use the footage in your latest Comedy Festival Show?

The thrust of Dave’s article is… well, let’s let him say it:

Entertainment used to be carefully thought-out, constructed pieces. These days anyone can do it – lie horizontally on a rubbish bin, get the photo on your phone and you’re away.

Clearly Dave isn’t talking about his own career here, unless we missed the bit where standing around saying “Sausages!” or reviewing movies with Leigh Paatsch on The Mick Molloy Show or writing utterly shithouse films like Takeaway and You & Your Stupid Mate were “carefully thought-out, constructed pieces”. Actually, considering that Australia’s Funniest Home Videos has been going strong for well over 20 years based entirely on footage roughly equivalent to “lying horizontally on a rubbish bin”, what the hell is he talking about?

Dave’s been around the traps for a long time now, and stories about guys only realising they’re too old for this shit when they fail badly at something that used to come easily are hardly rare, or surprising, or new. In this case it seems that, having realised he can’t do dumb shit for laffs anymore, Dave feels no-one else should either:

Maybe after this planking tragedy, it’s time for all of us to make a pact to stop doing stupid things for the internet.

In contrast to doing stupid things for the radio? Is what he’s actually saying here just another variation of “c’mon guys, stop giving this shit away for free, I need to get paid over here?” In which case, get to the back of the queue behind everyone else in the media.

Anyway, to take his request fair more seriously then it deserves… uh, no. As much as planking itself is about as funny as sawing off your own foot – after all, 99.9% of all “viral” videos are so-called because just like real viruses all they do is give you the shits – they are still part of a long tradition of piss-farting about that, when done by people with a clue about what’s funny, can deliver honestly funny comedy.

The problem with Dave O’Neil is that he’s built a career around doing dumb shit, and now he’s just a little bit too old for it. Not “dumb shit” as in internet pranks and crazy stunts, mind you – we’re talking “dumb shit’ as in making a whole lot of jokes about eating too much and being kinda chunky. When you’re a young(ish) comedian, dumb shit works for you because hey, it’s funny. When you start getting on a bit, it starts getting sad.  Put another way, a Dave O’Neil gig used to leave you laughing at how he reckons he’s sponsored by Pizza Hut; now we’re just worried that he’s developing Type 2 Diabetes.

The problem with Dave O’Neil’s article is that while he’s bang-on about the stupidity and boring nature of “planking”, he’s banging on about it like it’s a universal issue and not just Dumb Shit Young People Do. This isn’t “maybe old people shouldn’t be doing sketch comedy” time – it’s more “hey, young folk piss-farting around is funny, but after a while you’ve got to take it up a notch or you’ll just look sad.” Cue footage of Sam Newman planking.

There are loads of old farts out there still getting laughs – they just shape their material to suit their changing status. In Dave’s case, the clock is clearly ticking: writing columns that might as well be headed “Stay Off My Lawn” isn’t a great start.

From Rowan Dean, on the ABC website The Drum:

…the new Chis Lilley show (zzz zzz zzz go the teeth of my saw slicing into the flesh of the branch) called Angry Boys (zzz zzzzz zzzz – I can feel the bough starting to give way under my weight already) which screened for the second time last night on the ABC (zzzzz zzzzz oh shit – here I go!)… well, sorry folks, but it simply isn’t funny.

SNAP! There! I’ve said it. Somebody had to. I know it’s not the politically correct thing to do. And I know there’s a legion of crazed fans just waiting with baseball bats raised high over their heads to club me to a pulp for even daring to suggest it, but I can’t help myself. Angry Boys just isn’t funny. Not even remotely.

Sure, the “somebody had to” is kind of insulting, considering we’ve been saying it for months – welcome aboard the bandwagon Rowan, might still be some room up the back – and come to think of it, the assumption that finding Angry Boys not funny is somehow swimming against the tide is more than a little out of date these days. Take Darren Devlyn, writing in The Herald-Sun over a week ago:

The first episode of Angry Boys had flashes of artistic brilliance, but I couldn’t help but feel disappointed that there weren’t more laughs.

Maybe as the series progresses it will gain comedic momentum and a sense of energy that wasn’t quite there in the opener. But maybe not.

Or Karl Quinn, writing for Fairfax online:

Chris Lilley’s Angry Boys is bold, aggressive, unafraid to trample on some very shaky ground. But on the basis of last night’s opening episode, it’s hard to conclude that it’s especially funny. Yet.

Quinn continues:

Clearly, Lilley is unafraid to stomp all over notions of what is acceptable in comedy, and to a large degree that is to be applauded. But breaking taboos, if that is what they are (or have become; let’s not forget that in many respects Benny Hill and Dick Emery were here decades before, albeit to different ends), is not much of an ambition in itself. It needs to go somewhere, to have some point, or at least to be really bloody funny, if it’s to count as great comedy.

It’s way too soon to judge if that’s what Angry Boys is, or if it is just a tired reiteration of the now-familiar tropes of Lilley’s ouvre.

[A swearing racist granny and some surly bogans are "stomp[ing] all over notions of what is acceptable in comedy”? Please. Acceptable on the set of Hey Dad..! perhaps.]

Anyway, even the video review on this Fairfax page is a wary one, and we all know how much Fairfax loves Chris Lilley – as the article itself shows:

Our comic controversies (for instance, the infamous Hey Hey It’s Saturday! blackface moment) usually aren’t edgy in the manner of Lenny Bruce or Bill Hicks. They don’t send a confronting social message. They aren’t speaking truth to power. To the extent mainstream Australian comedy enters genuine controversy, it tends to do so by accident and in ignorance. It’s not about breathing comic fire at the socially privileged on behalf of the alienated.

Does Chris Lilley take us there? Certainly not in an American manner. He’s no angry Aboriginal comic or explicit champion of any underclass. But perhaps he’s doing something similar in an understated way. His work is close to the edge, not because it presents us with characters that swear a lot, or indulge in deeply ingrained, casual racism and homophobia, but because it’s not immediately clear what attitude towards them he wishes to evoke in us.

This is about as close to a willful misreading of Lilley’s work as you can get. Lilley’s attitude towards his characters is plain to see from the moment they appear on screen: he loves them, and he wants you to love them too – warts and all. It’s not a matter of creating complex comedy characters, because that’s not what he’s doing: seriously, a swearing granny? A “street” rapper from a pampered background? A pair of boring, frustrated bogans? Lilley deals in stereotypes: the “conflict” is that while he loves them and wants us to warm to them, audiences are used to laughing at characters in a comedy. Because, you know, it’s a comedy.

If Lilley wanted to leave us to make up our own minds about his characters, would Gran have given her little speech about an inmate who hanged himself, then followed it up with her boring-as-hell-but-meant-to-be-touching care of the “dog-wanker” in episode two? Would Daniel & Nathan’s hurt and frustration at their dead-end situation be so screamingly obvious?

Sure, S.mouse currently seems like a jerk, but the pattern’s been set with Gran and the twins: the first time we meet a new character they seem like a dick, then as we get to know them their troubled, sympathetic side emerges. It’s a sensible way to pace a series like this – the new character gets laughs while the more established ones are revealed to be a lot less funny – but with only five characters and twelve episodes, that’s a whole lot of unfunny coming up ahead.

But enough critical analysis from us. For every reviewer that gives it the thumbs down for being unfunny, there’s someone who seems to think being unfunny is a plus when it comes to comedy. Take this review in The Australian:

It was brilliant, but to my mind, not because it was hilarious. There were funny lines. But Angry Boys was also terribly sad.

Then there’s this gem from the BBC, wording up the world on what they can expect:

Chris Lilley is so good because he is so deadly accurate. And like most really good satire, it operates just beyond the borders of most viewers’ comfort zone. It dares you to laugh, and it becomes almost a guilty pleasure to do so.

“Dares you to laugh”? If true – and it’s not – then it’s a dare that viewers are increasingly failing to take up. Considering how the coverage of Angry Boys has gone from “Lilley is a comedy genius” to “It’s not all that funny, is it?” in the space of a few weeks, it’ll be interesting to see how long before “boot this tedious drivel to a midnight timeslot” comes around.

That might seem a little harsh (and highly unlikely, even to us) but don’t forget, there’s two and a half months more of this to go…

About five seconds into Behind the Lines – the latest in a never-ending procession of sports-themed quiz shows – it suddenly becomes clear why Peter Helliar’s The Trophy Room - the second-to-latest in a never-ending procession of sports-themed quiz shows – tanked: the set!  With typical ABC logic, The Trophy Room‘s set was designed to look like a cosy sports clubhouse, only out in the real world “sports clubhouse” is the kind of place even sports fans run from: sports fans want bright lights, big spaces, a clear path to the bar and a pokie machine around the corner. And if there’s one thing you can say about Australian television with a straight face, it’s that Channel Nine knows sports fans.

[Not entertainment, mind you, or quiz shows or women or decent drama or niche programming or quality news or... well, you get the picture. But sports fans? Oooh yeah.]

So as much as it’d be nice to be able to lump Nine’s latest half-arsed stab at the cheap panel show format with previous winnaz like The Bounce, The White Room and The Trophy Room – and after an amazingly shoddy opening credit sequence featuring a “go team go!” chant unheard of on any sporting ground in the land, our hands were rubbing together with glee at the prospect of yet another trademark slag-off – we just can’t do it. Slick professionalism is pretty much all Nine has left on its shelf these days and while it’s easy – and important – to sneer at it when it comes to comedy, with this kind of show knowing what you’re doing is a bit of a plus.

Oh, what kind of show is it? Spick & Specks with Sport. Two teams (two comedians and a sportsperson each), a host, quiz questions, mild piss-farting about, dragged out over an hour which is too long but the half-hour commercial alternative would only clock in at around 20 minutes which isn’t enough. And that pretty much sums up the show as a whole: it’s easy to think of ways it could be a whole lot better, but there are a lot of examples of this kind of thing that are a whole lot worse.

To be completely honest, the first episode of Behind the Lines was always going to get the thumbs up from the moment they introduced Peter Berner, cut to a wide shot of the other team (the one with Mick Molloy and Ed Kavalee) clapping him – only while Mick and the female sportsperson were clapping away, Ed was just sitting there with a clear look of “what the fuck is this?” on his face. Having followed Berner’s career since BackBerner, we know how he feels.

The panel format’s many, many limitations are there to create uniformity of product – the show will never stink but it’ll never be great, as seven billion episodes of Spicks & Specks have proven. But as panel shows go, this gets a surprising amount right. Well, it gives everyone enough room to dick about, which is pretty much the only thing this kind of show can get right. There’s the usual dodgy gags when answering questions, but a lot of the time people just chime in with gags – crap dad gags, yes, but at least they’re trying. Which isn’t something anyone’s been able to say about GNW in living memory.

Yes, it’s about sport. Yes, it’s hosted by Eddie McGuire. Yes, it’s a product of that blokey Nine culture that actually said out loud “Hey, why not give Hey Hey It’s Saturday another go?” But if we have to have shoddy sports panel quiz shows – and considering how many of the damn things have been served up in recent memory, it seems that decision’s already been made in the affirmative – than we could do a lot worse than Behind the Lines. And if you wait a few weeks, we probably will.

[though if anyone can explain the somewhat sudden edit at the end of the Jesse Martin segment just after Ed says "there is no way he would have resisted-", that'd be great. The whole end of the segment - including whether Martin was telling the truth or not - seems to have vanished, presumably because if it was true Martin's 'round-the-world record would be in doubt. Which seems like the kind of thing that should have had some media coverage really... though that would've required people to actually tune in.]

So, episode 1 of the much-hyped Angry Boys has finally made it to air. For a show so keen to get laughs through realism it’s sure done a great job of proving that the exact opposite technique might have been the way to go. The more absurd moments in the show are the closest it gets to funny, and with so few of them on offer Angry Boys is just scene after boring, unfunny scene. But if you believe our nation’s TV critics this is a good thing, and makes Lilley a Barry Humphries-esque genius.

On the surface the Humphries/Lilley comparison isn’t a bad one: both are male comedians from Melbourne who play multiple characters, often improvise and like to include music in their shows. But beyond that the comparison falls apart, and it’s worth examining why.

Despite his reputation for being a great improviser, Barry Humphries scripts his shows, and when appearing on, say, a TV chat show, he draws on a series of pre-written gags. When he does genuine improvisation or hasn’t planned an appearance well, Humphries can often be pretty unfunny. Humphries also employs co-writers, for both his stage shows and TV series, and works with them to develop a good solid script which he can improvise around if he so chooses.

Chris Lilley on the other hand seems wedded to the idea that improvising is the be all and end all, building his TV shows from the best moments of take after take of on-set improvisation – a technique which usually results in a scattily-plotted storyline which the documentary style barely conceals. Humphries, as some of his film ventures in particular have demonstrated, isn’t necessarily a great plotter either, but at least he’s going somewhere with his stories. With Lilley’s past work, such as Summer Heights High, it often felt like he didn’t know how to end things so he just kept droning on.

It’s a bit early to guess whether there’ll be a grand conclusion to Angry Boys, as the first few episodes just seem to add another character to the mix each time, but it’s hard to imagine that there’ll be a satisfactory end to the stories of Nathan, Daniel, Gran, S.mouse, Blake and that Japanese skateboarder beyond Lilley establishing over and over again that they’re self-absorbed, bullying, dickheads. It’s even more unlikely that any of them will ever get the comeuppance they so richly deserve, or that there’ll end up being any real point to their existence. Which is kind of a shame, because if there’s a sure fire way to justify a racist character or a bunch of dick jokes it’s to inject some satirical intent. Just ask Barry Humphries.

Lilley, clearly, is not a Barry Humphries-esque genius. He’s too in love with his characters, and quite possibly too in love with himself, to do anything much beyond show-boating. Hey look! How edgy is he? One of his characters goes around yelling racist insults at the kids in her care. Is there meant to be a point in there somewhere? Only 11 more episodes to go before we’ll know for sure.

The reviews are in, and the verdict is clear: Chris Lilley ain’t funny. But don’t take our word for it:

“…as we delve further and further into the life of Gran and her distant grandchildren, the hick yobs Daniel and Nathan Sims from We Can Be Heroes who also take up much of tonight’s episode, two things happen: the laugh-out-loud moments become fewer and farther between and the parallel stories of unfulfilled, short-changed lives begin to entwine”

[Paul Kalina, The Age Green Guide, Thursday May 5th]

“Summer Heights High is remembered chiefly for Ja’ime’s manifold outrages, but it was the heartbreaking fate of Jonah that raised it from comedy to something so much more. Those same elements are playing out here”

[Melinda Huston, The Sunday Age M Magazine, May 8th]

“Though his comedic talents loom large, he also has the capacity to  weave seamlessly into his work plot lines that are confrontational or heart-wrenching”

[Darren Devlyn, Herald-Sun Switched On supplement, May 4th]

“Ricky Gervais does The Castle“, which means shithouse.

[A reviewer known to Team Tumbleweeds, quoted over the weekend]

“So what,” you might ask – presumably because you’d much rather talk about what the hell Huston means about raising something to be “so much more” than comedy (what, there’s an actual ranking scale of quality? A shithouse drama still means “so much more” than an excellent comedy?) – haven’t you ever heard of “you’ll laugh, you’ll cry”? And yeah, good point. You’re still wrong though.

Australian television critics are not subtle creatures. Their reviews, especially of locally-made shows, aren’t nuanced. If a show is not described along the lines of “hands down the most impressive debut /return of the year”, it’s almost certainly fatally flawed. So the trick is to focus on the negatives; if they rate the tiniest mention in the review, they’re certain to be glaring in the actual show.

So it’s good to see that our initial opinion of Angry Boys – that it’s Lilley basically disappearing even further up his own arse, indulging his penchant for trite drama and heavy-handed character moments over, you know, being funny – has largely been confirmed by the first wave of reviews. Of course, they haven’t actually dared to say it’s no damn good. But when you’re describing a comedy series and you actually say “laugh-out-loud moments become fewer and farther between”, what other conclusion could you draw?

Chris Lilley seems to have managed to create a wondrous new category for his work: unfunny comedy. Not for him the burden of having to make the audience laugh on anything like a regular basis; in fact, his inability / lack of interest in doing so is magically now a plus. Instead of being asked “where’s the jokes” by critics, he gets the thumbs up for creating a kak-handed soap opera featuring the kind of “drama” that’d be laughed off Neighbours, all the praise seemingly solely because he’s the one playing all the roles. So there are no 60 year old female actors in the country? No teenage male actors? No-one could play these characters as well as Lilley does?

Of course they could. Lilley is an extremely talented performer, but if he wants to make straight drama – and after the end of the very first episode Angry Boys is already going harder for the tears than all but the sappiest moments of Summer Heights High – maybe he should make room for some other cast members occasionally. After all, on the one hand he wants us to take his characters completely seriously, while on the other… well, one’s him in a dress bunging on an accent.

The problem with all the reviews praising Lilley’s serious character work is that he doesn’t bring anything at all to the table by playing all the characters himself. There’s never even the most obvious “we’re all the same under the skin” kind of justification for why he is the only person who can play these now largely serious characters. Did anyone watch, say, the recent Hawke telemovie thinking “this’d be much better if the same actor played all the lead roles”?

These reviews are simply pointing out what’s obvious: Lilley, and Angry Boys as a whole, simply isn’t that funny. Just because it’s a path he’s consciously chosen to go down doesn’t mean he’s automatically a success for doing so. The ABC must have their fingers crossed very tightly indeed hoping that audiences will stay interested in an unfunny comedy for three whole months…

Meanwhile, here at Tumbleweed central we’re more interested in how Lilley’s producer Laura Waters told the Green Guide with a straight face that “I marvel at anybody sitting down by themselves and writing a 12-part series” when a): all the initial publicity said Angry Boys was 10 parts and b): Lilley’s writing largely consists of him improv’ing scene after scene in front of the cameras. After all, it wasn’t exactly hard to spot the two episodes of 6-expanded-to-8-part-series Summer Heights High patched together from scenes the improv-crazy Lilley simply couldn’t bear to lose…

Ahh, the Logies; remember when they used to get comedians to host? Probably not – and if you do, chances are what you actually remember is the stock-standard chorus of “wasn’t that shit” the following day. Not because the comedians were actually all that shit – even the much maligned Wendy Harmer Experiment would probably shimmer like gold compared to the more recent attempts to concentrate boredom into a beam that could tunnel through Eddie McGuire’s ego – but because no-one commentating on the Logies seems to understand exactly what kind of show it is.

Let’s spell it out: The Logies is an AWARDS NIGHT. It’s not a comedy gala, it’s not a fashion show, it’s not a chance to see the celebrities at play or whatever collection of words they use to caption their photo coverage in the Herald-Sun the following day. It’s a bunch of people sitting around waiting to see if they’ve won something. That’s not to say it can’t be fun and exciting in its own way, but because of the whole “entertainment industry” angle, people seem to think the show itself should be more entertaining than every other example of the form. Two words: Brownlow Night.

This isn’t an excuse for the amazingly shithouse standard of “comedy” the Logies have been serving up in recent years. Even Micallef’s fine work last year with his acceptance speech shone to some extent because everyone knew the rest of the show was going to be bog-standard bland. But what else do you expect? When comedians were given the job they were roundly condemned even before the end credits rolled (with the exception of Andrew Denton, who was praised largely for putting on the kind of smarmy industry-baiting show that Logies organizers would be guaranteed not to want to repeat); no wonder that reportedly none of our professional funny buggers wants to go near the gig these days.

So until we can create some kind of virtual host whose dialogue is compromised entirely of real-time Logies tweets, everyone knows Bert Newton is always going to be the dream Logies host because he can tell a joke and… um, that’s pretty much it (so, in all seriousness, why not get Daryl Somers?). But it’s not like Australian television doesn’t have a whole bunch of other professional hosts out there – Adam Hills, Rove McManus, Andrew O’Keefe, even if two out of the three have already had an ill-fated stab at it [from wikipedia]:

In 2004, O’Keefe co-hosted the historic tri-network tsunami appeal Reach Out with fellow presenters Eddie McGuire and Rove McManus, which raised over $20 million for Tsunami Relief Efforts around Asia. The event was such a success that the three teamed up the following year to host another disaster, The TV Week Logies.

Again with the snark. Of course, it’s not like the people putting together the Logies want it to be an awesome night, because an awesome night would involve everyone getting drunk and acting up while the host pointed out how shallow, vapid and venal the television industry really is.

All we’re saying is, if we’re ever going to see a successful Logies night in our lives, then the Logies has to work out what it wants to achieve. If it’s all about the awards and celebrating what passes for talent on Australian screens, then a stripped back, no muss or fuss night focusing on the tension of who’s going to win what – followed by the stars making painfully earnest and dull speeches thanking people no-one’s heard of  – is the way to go.

If, on the other hand, it’s meant to be something regular people will want to watch, then get everyone drunk, bung in a bunch of bizarre musical numbers and incomprehensible skits and get Rodney Rude to host. Oh and tell the press to go to Hell when they report on “yet another dismal Logies night”; how is that any different from what Australian television serves up every other night of the year?