Australian Tumbleweeds

Last week’s ABC 2012 launch and other recent announcements have made us feel pretty positive about Australian comedy, which is somewhat of a strange sensation. Here’s the list of what’s coming up next year, tell us what you think about it in the comments.

Shaun Micallef’s new ABC show Mad As Hell looks set to build on his fine work with Newstopia and – on paper at least – sounds like the best sounding attempt at an Australian version of The Daily Show either proposed or executed to date. There’ll also be another series of Talkin’ ‘Bout Your Generation, although it’s hard not to wonder if it’ll be the show’s last.

Also coming to the ABC next year is Andrew Denton in Randling. Randling is apparently a word game of some description (a local answer to QI?), and will probably play quite well to the ABC’s base audience of wannabe sophisticates and the retired.

Last night’s final episode of Good News World was reportedly the show’s last ever – aaawwww – which is not much of a surprise given it rated poorly and had even hardcore GNW fans switching off. “A lot of people who have shit-canned Good News World haven’t watched much of it” a source told TV Tonight. “What they didn’t like about it was that it wasn’t Good News Week. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, but it’s been a tough year for comedy” they continued, showing how much they’d learnt from the program’s failure to come up with one single decent sketch. Next year Good News Week will return in a series of specials filmed in live venues, so make sure you avoid those.

The long-awaited gay science fiction fan sitcom Outland will finally air next year, as will a sitcom from Josh Thomas called Please Like Me, and Frank Woodley’s Woodley. There’s also Myf Warhurst’s light-hearted mockumentry Nice, and Agony Aunts and Agony Uncles which sounds suspiciously like a sort of a re-working of Grumpy Old Men and Grumply Old Women. There are some quite good people involved in that last one, though.

Returning series include Adam Hills – In Gordon Street Tonight, Lowdown, Laid and Gruen. We also wouldn’t be surprised if The Hamster Wheel comes back, although nothing’s been announced.

Also not yet announced is the air date for The Games – London Calling, John Clarke and Ross Stevenson’s 2012 reworking of The Games for Channel 9. Perhaps we’ll hear about that closer to when the London Olympics are scheduled to happen, which is 27 July-12 August?

The people behind Review with Myles Barlow have two new projects, the first being a sitcom called This Christmas, and the second being the sketch comedy website www.jungleboys.tv which is “holding a sketch comedy competition whereby people can contribute ideas and the winning entry will be produced and screened on the site”. “We feel that there is a lot of undiscovered and really funny talent out there who aren’t in the industry and we’re keen to provide an accessible outlet”, said Executive Producer Jason Burrows. Let’s hope he’s right.

Also making use of online for sketch comedy is Shannon Marinko from The Bazura Project, who made a great sketch recently which is a parody of The Bolt Report. Hopefully he and comedy partner Lee Zachariah will be back with something in the near future – this sketch proves they’ve got the talent to make comedy on all sorts of topics beyond film.

And with lots of shows having either ended or due to end very soon, we’re going to start turning our attention to the 2011 Australian Tumbleweed Awards. Nominations and voting kick off shortly!

Tonight Spicks & Specks died the way it lived: as a bland, largely forgettable chunk of televisual muzak that actively repelled any attempt to engage with it beyond the occasional glance at the screen.  Of course it was a massive hit watched by millions: how could it have possibly failed?

Just to make things very clear, we’re fully aware that creating a hit show is amazingly difficult and requires large amounts of both skill and luck. It’s even more impressive when said hit show relies to a large extent on looking like no-one involved is really trying all that much. So on that level – a level we really don’t care about all that much, being fans of shows that are, you know, actually worth our time – Spicks & Specks deserves both our respect and admiration.

On the level we do care about, Spicks & Specks was a ghastly waste of effort and talent. Week after week, year after year, the funniest comedians in the land – both local and on tour – would turn up and get to gasp out a couple of one-liners in between performing the kind of party games that get your house burnt down by disgruntled guests. Some of the games were funny; some of the performances even more so. THEY’RE STILL PARTY GAMES.

What Spicks & Specks was, both on stage and inside your home, was a complicated device designed to guarantee mediocrity. The games and quiz segments and musical numbers were so restrictive that the actually funny people were stifled and rendered bland; on the other hand, by being so restrictive the crap guests usually came out looking okay. If you want to watch a show that makes crap guests look okay, more power to you; we’d much rather watch the funny people being funny, thanks very much.

[which is probably why the really funny people - your Tony Martins and Shaun Micallefs - only made the occasional appearance. We did get an awful lot of Hamish Blake though, which isn't surprising considering he's pretty much the only high-profile radio talent around who can tell a joke. Considering it was a show built entirely around talking and music and jokes, imagine how good Spicks & Specks might have been if Australia had a functioning radio industry it could've tapped for talent...]

Beyond that, it was a show of cardboard depth: people sat there and answered questions and… yep, that’s about it. The aforementioned mediocrity ensured things never got too funny – if someone seriously started riffing they were cut short (all those people complaining about the obvious editing in The Joy of Sets clearly never watched an episode of Spicks & Specks) plus there was always Adam Hills handy to kill a joke with some over-egged laughter – and with nothing at stake in the quiz itself all that was left was the illusion of entertainment. Things happened constantly, they just never meant anything.

Against this backdrop, no wonder the hosts stood out. Not too much, mind you: Hills was Your Gracious Host, Alan Brough was The One Who Took Things Seriously, and Myf Warhurst was Australia’s Sweetheart. Seven years of having them hanging around for months and months on end and that’s all we got. That’s all we needed to get: anything more than that and people might have started paying attention. They displayed just enough personality for the folks at home to differentiate between them so they could pick a team to cheer on and no more.

[Well, no more in recent years; remember how a while back there was the occasional hint in the TV review pages that Brough was coming off as a little too serious about his desire to win? Looks like the ABC nipped that in the bud - even if he is the only cast member who hasn't had his own solo ABC series announced yet...]

What we will miss about Spicks & Specks is the way that it delivered around a million viewers week in week out to whatever comedy show the ABC decided to screen after it. Yes, this did mean that a lot of crap got a ratings boost it didn’t deserve – hello Gruen family of programs – but it also meant a lot of other comedy shows managed to rake in respectable viewing figures too, which helped create the impression that Australian comedy was actually popular out there amongst ABC viewers.

This might not seem like a big deal now. After seven years of Spicks & Specks the Wednesday night comedy block on the ABC is firmly entrenched, and while people complain about the occasional dud on the whole the idea of showing locally-made comedy on the ABC has general acceptance. But around the turn of the century the ABC had no fucking idea what to do with Australian comedy, and so for the most part decided not to make any and threw away the little they did.

Sure, Kath & Kim rated well, but anything that couldn’t pull in viewers on its own was left to sink or swim in a number of seemingly random timeslots. The first series of Double the Fist screened late Friday nights just before Rage; the first series of The Chasers War on Everything struggled with a Friday night start time that depended on whenever the UK murder mystery before it ended; Eagle & Evans was taken off air after three weeks and dumped months later in a graveyard timeslot.

The success of Spicks & Specks made it possible to find Australian comedy without having to search for it. It’s hard to underestimate how important that’s been over the last seven years. Without Spicks & Specks, Chris Lilley’s We Can Be Heroes (which aired after it in 2005) might never have found an audience… so yes, there’s a dark side to all this too.

If we’re lucky, the ABC will come up with a new series to anchor Wednesday nights. Ah, who are we kidding: there’ll be a string of also-rans and not-quite-theres and series two of Laid and eventually Wednesday will become the night for docos or UK dramas or whatever the hell crap it is the ABC shows on Tuesdays or Thursdays. The passing of Spicks & Specks is the end of an era: we only wish it’d had been a show more deserving of its’ success.

There’s a proper Vale Hamster Wheel post on its way, but we wanted to bring this up first: it seems Age TV critic Jim Schembri either can’t take a joke, or simply doesn’t get it:

For me – and this will come as no surprise – the biggest laugh came when their awards for outrageous online reporting were dubbed The Schembris. My deep hatred for the laziness, fabrications and irresponsibility of what occurs online under the guise of journalism is well-documented, and it was a tribute as humbling as it was hilarious.

Sadly for his version of events, Schembri’s one-man war on bloggers isn’t nearly as well-documented as the somewhat tangled mess that occurred late last year  (*edit* actually earlier this year, as Daniel G has pointed out) when he wrote an on-line review that contained a massive spoiler in the opening line. He then went back and changed it after numerous complaints, then pretended the original never happened, then claimed the whole thing was a prank he’d played on the internet, especially twitter users.

You can read the whole saga here and here. Or if you feel like giving your head a good scratching, you can read Schembri’s official version of events here. Please, if you can explain exactly what he was trying to prove (if his version of events was what actually happened), let us know.

So we have three options here. One, that The Chaser really are such massive fans of Schembri’s hither-to unknown efforts to stamp out internet flim-flammery that they’d name a running segment after him in sheer admiration of his good works. Unfortunately, it seems that in a decade of television The Chaser have only ever named bogus awards after people they wish to mock and make fun of. But who knows? Maybe after over a hundred episodes of televisiual satire they’ve decided that the whole comedy thing is for saps and have decided to just straight-out praise people they like rather than laugh at those they don’t. Maybe.

Option two: Schembri simply didn’t get the joke. Problem there is, if he’s missing jokes as obvious and as blatant as that one, what the hell is he doing writing about television (or film, his other job at Fairfax)? It seems unlikely that he’d have much of a clue about anything if something as screamingly obvious as that one got by him. How can anyone trust anything he has to say on anything if he can’t tell when he’s being made fun of ON NATIONAL TELEVISION BY PROFESSIONAL COMEDIANS ON THEIR OWN COMEDY SHOW.

Option three: Schembri knows full well the joke is at his expense and is trying to spin the coverage (or just muddy the waters – now his version of events is out there, even we have to pretend it’s moderately plausible) to make him look good. In other words, he’s lying to his readership purely for his own benefit. “Lying” might sound a bit strong, but how else to put it? If he knows they were making fun of him and chooses to say otherwise to his readership, he’s not telling them the truth. Of course, he’ll never admit it and we have no way of knowing what he really thinks. But for the sake of argument, let’s suggest that this scenario is at least plausible.

In which case, what the hell is he doing being paid to write about anything? This kind of media manipulation is rightfully scorned and despised by journalists when it’s practiced by politicans and corporations: what are we expected to think when we see one of them doing it for no other reason than for covering his own arse? Whether you laugh at The Chaser or not is a matter of personal taste: whatever your views on comedy, Schembri’s antics stopped being funny a long, long time ago.

Nice looking but dull, that’s how you might describe Rove McManus; it’s also not a bad description of his chat show Rove LA, which finished up the other night. Normally on this blog we wouldn’t bother with a chat show, but as this one had a fair bit of comic pretension and represents a very large percentage of Foxtel’s original comedy output for this year (the rest of it was local remakes of Balls of Steel and You Have Been Watching– way to go, Pay TV!) we felt it was worth noting.

Rove LA wasn’t a terrible chat show. It had decent guests, the host was pleasant to them, they participated in some segments and there were some laughs – look and learn, A Night With The Stars – it’s more that McManus failed to bring anything genuinely interesting out of any of the people on his sofa, or to get big laughs from any of his comedic schtick.

The wacky segments seemed influenced by British shows like The Graham Norton Show (and it’s possibly worth noting that Rove LA was produced by UK company Avalon Television), but the show didn’t seem to have any of the “out there” daring you get from the Poms. At least when Hamish and Andy’s Gap Year went to meet some crazy dog owners one of them pretended to be a dog, in Rove LA all Rove could manage was some mugging to camera as the obsessed owner showed him a wardrobe full of canine dress-up clothes.

Rove LA was slicker than Rove Live, but the same basic problem with Rove as a personality was still there: he’s just dull. And by transporting him to a town where it’s controversial to say anything that’s even slightly negative about another star, you basically compound the problem.

But what does it matter? Rove McManus’ ambitions lie in the US, and Rove LA is basically him killing time and fluffing up his showreel until Hollywood gives him a show. There will be another series next year, apparently.

The purpose of comedy, it is often said, is to speak truth to power. But comedy’s fatal flaw is that it needs to speak truths whilst also being funny, and once people are laughing they’re probably less inclined to overthrow the powerful. Those who argue that comedy is a conservative artform have a point – comedy may point out some truths about the powerful, but it also makes you feel a lot better about them existing (if only for a few minutes).

Comedy can still make the powerful quake in their boots, of course. Dictators aren’t big fans of dissident comedians and tend to imprison then for sedition, but censorship is a rather crude way of silencing comedy and one which will ultimately win you fewer friends. A much better tactic is to join in the fun – everyone will love you for having the gumption to take the piss out of yourself, and a surprising number of people won’t notice the difference between your officially-sanctioned comedy and a genuinely hard-hitting one by a satirist who hates your guts.

Which brings us to the various Gruen programs (no, really). Lots of people love them, yet ask those same people what they think of advertising executives and they’ll use phrases like “lying sleaze-bags” and “rip-off merchants”. Along with tabloid journalists, real estate agents, lawyers and anonymous bloggers, advertising executives are some of the most hated people out there. But present the public with a panel full of the cheery-faced fuckers, and make it look like they’re having a jolly wheeze of a time revealing a few trade secrets in between Wil Anderson’s gags, and it’s hello audience adoration, howdy-do ratings success!

The fact that large numbers of otherwise sane and rational people have come to love the advertising industry isn’t much of a surprise, perhaps – advertising executives don’t make it unless they know how to rebrand a turd – but the public’s four-year love affair with the show is quite something. Gruen may have undergone some format changes, but it’s still exactly the same show with the same host and the same panellists talking about the same sorts of subjects, often using the same observations and gags as part of some strikingly similar segments. Perhaps the show’s many fans have learnt nothing about the techniques of advertising – we refer you to our earlier point about how Gruen has merely made it look like it’s revealing trade secrets.

There was talk yesterday on a couple of websites, such as TV Tonight, that this evening’s episode of Gruen Planet could be the last Gruen ever. Don’t believe it – Gruen is not ending. It cannot be killed, and there’s no way in hell they’ve run out of slightly different versions of the original concept. Next year we’ll probably be invited to watch The Gruen Games live from London. Or there’ll be a Gruen look at reality TV, or gardening, or the rural economy. Too many people like it too much for this to be the end. This is merely adieu.

We’ve got nothing against The Chaser.

(and let’s just pause to reflect that, by saying we have nothing against them, we’ve made certain the rest of this post will prove the opposite)

In fact, while their current series The Hamster Wheel might be somewhat hit-and-miss, when it hits it’s probably the best thing they’ve done yet. But it’s worth nothing that this week (or maybe last week, our maths is a little shoddy) is the 10 year anniversary of The Chaser’s first appearance on the ABC.

Yep, (roughly) ten years ago, in October and November of 2001, The Election Chaser screened on the ABC, featuring a bunch of fresh-faced young comedians huddling under Andrew Denton’s wing as they took swings at both sides of politics in what would soon become their trademark style. And thus, with a few bumps along the way – reportedly they were pretty much sacked when the ABC didn’t renew CNNNN (hence Charles Firth heading off to the US), with The Chaser’s War On Everything basically being their comeback show – a legend was born.

Oddly, not much has been made of this anniversary by The Chaser themselves. Presumably it doesn’t mean much to them; they were doing their newspaper long before the TV show, and were working on the television show long before it aired. Still, The Hamster Wheel did start airing roughly on the tenth anniversary of their first appearance on the ABC: so where’s the party?

Perhaps pointing out that this is their tenth year on the ABC is something they’d rather avoid, considering they’re still occasionally described as “The Chaser Boys”. That’s not a cheap shot (okay, it’s not entirely a cheap shot): before The Chaser settled in for the long stretch, satirical comedy teams on the ABC had a life span of a few years at best. Australia You’re Standing In It had two series, in 1983 and 1984; BackBerner went four years, from 1999 to 2002. Perhaps the longest run prior to The Chaser’s was Max Gillies. The Gillies Report ran one series in 1984-85; follow-up The Gillies Republic had one series in 1986 and then nothing until Gillies and Company in 1992.

In contrast, The Chaser have made the following over the last decade : The Election Chaser (6 episodes, 2001), CNNNN (19 episodes, 2002-2003), The Chaser Decides Mk 1 (4 episodes, 2004), The Chaser’s War On Everything (60 episodes, 2006-2009), The Chaser Decides Mk 2 (2 episodes, 2007), Yes We Canberra (5 episodes, 2010), The Hamster Wheel (8 episodes, 2011). Pretty impressive stuff.

You can take this somewhat staggering amount of output two ways: either they’re impressive comedy technicians and the only people able to create material at the rapid and demanding rate required by the national broadcaster’s ceaseless desire for topical humour, or they’re hogging all the seats on the topical comedy bus and not giving anyone else a go.

Again, for a large part of their career we think they’ve done good work (and for the rest they were making The Chaser’s War on Everything under what seems to have been fairly stressful circumstances), but does anyone really think that for a full decade they’ve been the only comedians working in Australia who could make sketches about politics?

[we won't mention The GlassHouse if you don't. And anyway, that was a panel show]

It’s not like they’ve really changed up their material over the decade either. CNNNN cloaked their mix of topical references and media swipes in the guise of a fake news channel; after that it’s just been various members sitting at a desk talking about topical references and media swipes before throwing to segments about topical references and media swipes (and the occasional musical number). They used to do pranks; thankfully now, not so much. They used to do vox pops; again, thankfully not so much.

That said, good luck naming any comedian who radically changes their work over their career. Sure, there have been some, but not many, and not any in this country: Barry Humphries and Shaun Micallef, Max Gillies and Tony Martin are still basically making the same kinds of jokes they always have. Our problem – such as it is – isn’t with The Chaser making the same show over and over again…

[though actually, what happened to that sitcom they'd occasionally talk about? Why don't they try something different, at least format wise? Having a giant hamster as a desk doesn't count, and changing up the format might make the actual jokes seem fresh...ish]

… as it is with there being no other “satirical” comedy voices getting a go at the ABC for a full decade. What, The Chaser have set standards so high no-one else could possibly reach them so hey, don’t even bother? At this point we’d usually reel off a list of contenders for The Chaser’s job, but how can we? The whole point is that, by staying put for a full decade, no competing voices (and traditionally the ABC is the ground floor for TV satire, even if all the floors above have now been demolished) have been given a chance. Though the Restoring the Balance team on TripleJ have done a pretty decent job with political satire over the last few years – perhaps giving them a television special isn’t the worst idea ever?

Until The Chaser arrived a decade ago the satire slot on the ABC was relatively open with fresh faces cycling through on a semi-regular basis; now it’s a closed shop, no other applicants need apply. That’s not to say The Chaser isn’t worthy of the work, or that they haven’t been doing as good a job as any. But isn’t it time the ABC at least started to consider bringing some other voices on board before The Chaser Boys start getting around on walking frames?

When Marieke Hardy – writer / creator of ABC comedy series Laid and former breakfast presenter on ABC radio station TripleJ, amongst many other strings to her media bow – updated her blog on Tuesday, she promoted it via Twitter with these words…

I name and shame my ‘anonymous’ internet bully. Liberating business! Join me!

This tweet was then re-tweeted more than 100 times, which caused her blog site to be throttled to such an extent that anyone visiting on Wednesday night got only a “site quota exceeded” message. Then there was a new blog from Hardy Thursday entitled “Too much traffic equals blog meltdown equals…”. It’s contents were simply…

Enough oxygen. It’s a sign from the baby Jebus.

In Hardy’s site-crashingly-popular – and now pulled – blog she named and posted a photograph of a man she says has “had a bee in his bonnet about me for over five years”. She went on to describe how this man posted anonymous comments on her old blog, and then started up his own blog “seemingly with the singular purpose of letting people know what a tedious harpy I was”.

Upon reading the blog in question, we couldn’t help but agree with Hardy that the posts featured there are “rambling” and “poisonous”. They also seem to us to be written by someone with A LOT of problems, mainly about women expressing their sexuality. He may have some valid points in there somewhere about cronyism in the media, but it’s unlikely you’d want to wade through all the bile to find them.

Hardy says she was prompted to name and shame this man by the #mencallmethings campaign, which has been a much-discussed online in recent days and originated from two articles published in New Statesman and The Guardian last week. As these articles rightly point out, female writers, bloggers and opinion-givers receive an unjustifiable amount of personally abusive and sexually threatening comments from men online. A number of women writers have come out with shocking stories and spoken of how comments of this nature have made them want to give up writing. Clearly this is not a good situation, whatever you think of the work of the likes of Marieke Hardy.

What we question, though, is Hardy’s decision to name and shame this particular man. If she was at the point where she had evidence that it was him – and she says she’s known for months – could she not have gone to the police or lawyers? Did the #mencallmethings campaign just make her snap after years of anger, and then pull the piece when sense (or possibly wise counsel)* caught up with her? And what of this from her original blog:

Since discovering his identity I think any real potency behind [his] hate blogs has dissipated completely. He just seems like a fairly sad man who should probably find another hobby.

If that’s what she really thinks then why write the piece at all?

This is a difficult, complex topic. You have a well-connected but lacklustre writer who writes largely about herself and her sex life, whose work has attracted years of unjustifiable, sexist abuse from an anonymous man. The man in question has a couple of decent points to make, but seems only to be able to make them via the aforementioned unjustifiable, sexist abuse. And finally, there’s the legal system, which has proven time and time again to be incapable of dealing with sexual abuse of women without making those women victims suffer again and again for it. You can see why a victim might take the law into their own hands, but enlisting your online followers in this fight hardly seems fair.

As for why we in particular care… well, Hardy – in her guise as television writer – seems to have found a niche as a comedy writer with Laid. And as we’ve mentioned in the past, at the moment there’s a bit of a pushback from the comedy community against social media in general. This is an extreme and very personal example of it, but it’s an example nonetheless: someone’s gone online to rail against a comedian they don’t like, and the comedian’s swung back.

While we’d be the first to suggest Hardy’s writing isn’t all that funny – look up our posts on Laid and you’ll see we already have – in one way it’s easy to see why she’s been lumped in with actual comedians: like many of the best comedians, her work is intensely personal. For one, you can’t imagine anyone else writing much of her column work, though that’s mostly because pretty much all of it is about herself and her somewhat cultivated quirks (she loves Bob Ellis! she doesn’t mind getting her gear off!).

More than just about anyone working in Australian comedy at the moment, the focus of Marieke Hardy’s work is Marieke Hardy. She’s put a lot of time and effort into cultivating and promoting her “sexy / quirky / smart” image (there aren’t a lot of other comedians in this country putting out topless promotional photos of themselves), and we’re hardly the first or the only critics to suggest that lead character Roo in Laid was a very thinly disguised version of Hardy’s public persona. And as is often the case, when someone – in this case, someone who’s writing takes a deeply unpleasant tone – wants to take a swing at a comedian who talks about their personal life, their personal life is what they attack.

None of this in any way excuses anyone making a personal attack on her. We do think it’s worth pointing out that if someone’s entire act is based around “LOOK AT ME!!” right down to publishing a collection of stories about their relationships with a drawing of them on the cover (as shown here), then it’s even more important than usual to keep the focus on the work, not the person who created it. Those who dislike Hardy’s work should bear that in mind. She does have over 50,000 twitter followers she can sic on you, for one.

*Or perhaps the author of the Hardy-hating blog was telling the truth when he claimed (the day after Hardy’s post) that he in fact wasn’t the person Hardy named. Supposedly he’d used his top-level I.T. skills to shift blame / her attention onto an innocent third party, who he then suggested could cash in big by suing Hardy over her post.

Coda: It seems that Hardy’s brief attack worked: the blogger she targeted has announced he’ll be closing his blog down in a few weeks. He still claims to not be the person Hardy named & shamed though.

Hard as it might be to believe after his twenty-odd years in the spotlight, The Joy of Sets was Tony Martin’s first lead role in a television show. In fact, every other cast member of The Late Show (where Martin first made a serious TV  splash) has more up-front television experience than Tony Martin has. The Working Dog guys have made hundreds of hours of television by now; Jason Stephens is a high-level production executive with Freemantle media; Judith Lucy’s Spiritual Journey involved international travel, loads of interviews, sketches and so forth; Mick Molloy made eight episodes of The Mick Molloy Show and another thirteen of The Nation.

Before you start penning aggrieved letters to the editor, let’s also point out that Martin has written and directed a feature-length film, as well as directing a swathe of episodes of The Librarians and parts of Judith Lucy’s Spiritual Journey. We’re not saying he’s a newcomer to this television business by any means. We’re just pointing out that, even after twenty years of seeing him on other people’s shows and doing a ball-tearer of a job on radio not once but twice, it might have been wise to keep expectations somewhere around the middle of the range. Because that’s largely what The Joy of Sets delivered.

In the various interviews given pre-Joy of Sets Martin said once he was hired for the show (the format having been pre-sold to Nine before he came on board) he was left to his own devices as far as writing / choosing an on-air partner went. You could probably guess that Nine and / or production company Zapruder’s (makers of The Gruen Transfer) imposed the half-hour format instead of a two-hour one, but otherwise pretty much everything about the show past the basic “make fun of television” idea seems to be Tony’s work. Presumably the basic pitch to Nine would have been “an in-depth look at television… did we mention we already make a show that looks at advertising that does quite well?” and considering how far Joy of Sets is from any of the Gruen shows, it’s safe to say Martin was making his own show here, not an assembly-line Zapruder’s product. If there are problems with the end product, for once corporate’s off the hook.

One of the frustrating things about the early episodes of The Joy of Sets – it got better as it went along, about which more later – is that there was always glimpses to be had of the quality comedy Martin is known for delivering. While merely the sight of an oiled-up Warrick Capper didn’t exactly count as a laugh for us – and the law of diminishing returns kicked in hard with every subsequent appearance – My Monkey Baby more than made up for it. The jokes were often strong, the sketches even better (the send-up of The Block with Scott Cam was both hilarious and a reminder that almost every other sketch show on TV this year has been running on autopilot) while Martin and co-host Kavalee had decent chemistry out the gate despite the occasional clumsy moment.

And yet overall the early episodes felt stilted, as if a much funnier show had been edited down until all the oxygen was gone.

[numerous reports from tapings said the show was much, much funnier to watch in person. Great. Unfortunately, taping is merely part of the process to create a finished product, not an end in itself. While it's nice that those who made it to the tapings had a fun time, for those watching at home hearing that all the good stuff was cut out was cold comfort]

Much as many Get This fans hoped and wished for “Get This TV” after that radio show was taken off the air, The Joy of Sets suggests they may have been lucky their wishes weren’t granted. The show’s two biggest weaknesses in the early weeks were the two most obvious hold-overs from Martin’s Get This days: co-host Ed Kavalee and the weekly guest.

Kavalee is a decent television host (see TV Burp) and he can be great radio talent, but for the first few episodes of The Joy of Sets he often came across as stiff and forced. We’re not blaming him, mind you. The format itself was basically “radio with pictures” – when Tony was talking there was nothing for him to do but look attentive. Tony, no doubt due to years of panel work on countless TV shows, came off a lot better when it was Ed’s turn to speak. Still, two guys sitting on brown chairs yammering away doesn’t make for thrilling entertainment visually no matter how attentive you look.

The guests, on the other hand, never really worked. Sure, some had funny stories, some had loads of energy, and Pete Smith as always had both. But on a 22 minute show giving over the final third to an in-studio guest drained all the energy out of the room. The first 13-odd minutes would fire through joke after joke and clip after clip at a rapid-fire pace… and then suddenly everything stopped while someone new sat down and told a story. It was often a good story; it just slowed the show right down, and with only 22 minutes in the first place that proved fatal.

So why’d the interviews work so well on Get This? Our best guess is that on radio a guest just means the same chat-based show continues, only with an extra person chatting away. On television a guest means the clips go out the window and the third person turns a clip show into a chat show. Interestingly, the longer Joy of Sets ran, the more they squeezed in clips during the interviews in an attempt to keep the pace up. Not to mention the generic TV star guests got the boot in favour of comedians better able to keep up with Martin and Kavalee.

As you might have guessed from all the “in the early weeks” references, we thought the show improved a lot as it went along. Martin and Kavalee’s banter seemed more natural, the pace picked up, the moments where the show broke out of the format were always good but they got a lot better – Martin’s out-of-nowhere plea to the jury and his line-up with Denton and the “For Dummies” guy during the police TV show, for example – and even the Capper moments tipped over the edge into outright absurdity.

Unfortunately, it was too late. Much as ratings are no guide whatsoever to the quality of a show – we have no idea what The Bazura Project rated on ABC2, but we’re guessing “bugger all” might be a good starting point – we’d be fools to ignore the fact that, unlike 90% of the comedy we talk about here, The Joy of Sets screened on a commercial network where commercial considerations apply. Fortunately Nine let it run out the clock in a later timeslot and all eight episodes aired, but it looked a little iffy there for a while.

On the one hand, airing at 9pm on a Tuesday (traditionally Nine’s worst night) after Two and a Half Men was never going to make things easy for The Joy of Sets; on the other, they had over a million people check out the first episode. To be fair, most likely many of those viewers just stuck around after seeing the first Sheen-free episode of  Men and were never going to become regular viewers of The Joy of Sets. The fact remains: over a million people saw the first episode; less than half that number were watching when it was bumped back to 10.30pm.

[More ratings fun facts in the comments here]

Again, let us stress: we’re not saying ratings are in any way a guide to the quality of any program, let alone one as quirky as The Joy of Sets. What we are saying is that we thought the show got better as it went along and in its final weeks had moments as funny as anything that’s aired this year, only to have its potential – that is to say, a second series – snuffed out because of the bad ratings gathered in those first few weeks. We’re glass half empty people around here, in case you didn’t guess: rather than just being happy the show made it to the end of series one, we’re disappointed that a show with so much promise seems certain not to get a series two.

What we’re left with then is a bunch of what ifs. What if the show had screened on the ABC, where it could have stretched out in a full half-hour timeslot? What if the show had run for an hour on Nine (or more likely, Nine’s digital channel Go!)? What if they’d been given an initial order for thirteen episodes instead of eight and really had a chance to hit their stride? What if Australia as a whole had found Warrick Capper in gold jocks hilarious instead of pointless and mildly confusing?

Tony Martin’s style of comedy works amazingly well on radio. On television, given the freedom to stretch out and do what he likes over an extended period, there’s no reason to think he couldn’t do just as well. But while Get This thrived on minutes of improv and rambling away to stumble across classic running gags, on television these days there just isn’t the time for any of that. If Martin and Kavalee ever get to do another show – and no-one would’ve thought we’d see Kavalee back on TV after TV Burp fizzled so there’s always hope – maybe one day The Joy of Sets will be seen as the show where Martin learned how to adapt his style to television’s requirements; as that would require him to actually get another shot at putting together his own show, here’s hoping.

One of the biggest problems to stem from the collapse of sketch comedy in this country – and wow, how pretentious a sentence is this one shaping up to be – is the way that it’s downgraded the idea of actual jokes in comedy. With a thriving – or even just barely existing – sketch comedy field it’s impossible to ignore the fact that a lot of what makes people laugh is jokes. That’s because that’s pretty much all sketch comedy has to offer: jokes and plenty of them.

When “comedy” comes to mean “lightweight drama and panel chat”, as it currently does in Australia, then jokes take a backseat. Comedy becomes more about tone and attitude, and the methods of judging comedy drift close to those used to judge drama: that is to say, trying to make people laugh becomes less important than character arcs, quality camerawork, sassy back-and-forth chat, and so on. A “comedy” show becomes one where people merely say smart-arse things, not funny things. Trying to make people actually laugh gets dropped in the too-hard-basket.

All of which is why, for the moment at least, when you ask us what kind of comedy we have enjoyed in 2011 The Bazura Project is the show we’ll be pointing to. You can argue about whether you found it funny (we did), but what you can’t argue is that it was a show – a movie-themed sketch show even – that set out to actually be funny. There wasn’t just the occasional quip or wry one-liner: every scene contained joke after joke of every stripe, from broad face-pulling to obscure film references to wordplay to parody to character comedy to pretty much anything you care to name. Again, you can argue about whether the jokes worked (we thought they did), but you can’t argue that the jokes weren’t there.

What makes this even more impressive is that The Bazura Project is a show about film. If ever there was a subject ripe for the kind of “comedy” that was too cool and hip to bother trying to do something as obvious as work towards actual laughs, film would be second only to whatever the fuck Laid was supposed to be about. And yet stars / writers Shannon and Lee went out of their way time and time again to make a show that was accessible to pretty much everyone – yes, it’s time for that stat showing that more Australians go to the movies than watch sport, just in case anyone wants to pretend that movies are somehow more elitist than The Footy Show.

Bazura referenced obscure films, but they also straight-up introduced the viewer to obscure films, and then they made jokes about films everyone at least knows about, and then they made jokes that weren’t really about films at all (remember “staple gangster”? Still chuckling over that one). In contrast to a heck of a lot of ABC output, The Bazura Project was inclusive: rather than providing a pandering guidebook for clueless wannabe hipsters – something that pretty much sums up the Gruen approach to everything – Bazura‘s motto seemed to be “hey, come check out this cool stuff!”

(It didn’t hurt that there was a robot: we’d forgive pretty much everything we hate about Gruen if Wil Anderson was replaced by a robot. A killer robot swinging a chainsaw around wildly.)

We’ve heard more than a few arguments against The Bazura Project, and guess what? They’re all wrong. Being cheap and occasionally shoddy looking and having hosts who aren’t the most polished marbles in the sack are not drawbacks when it comes to comedy: they’re actually advantages. As stated in the opening, this trend of trying to judge comedy like it was a drama – that is, to judge it by polish and performance instead of by laughs – is rubbish. A crappy looking robot with a storage crate for a head is much, much funnier than a polished, art-designed, hundred-thousand dollar animatronic model: just go watch the movie of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy if you don’t believe us.

Lee and Shannon and everyone involved with The Bazura Project set out to make a fun show, and to an extent largely unheard of on Australian television, they succeeded. In a sea of shows where comedians explored whatever subject wasn’t already taken, Lee and Shannon pulled off the rare trick of actually seeming to like the topic they were banging on about. Reportedly the numerous movie clips used means there’ll be no DVD release, which is a damn shame (though it will be repeated over summer, so set your VCRs). This is the kind of show that really does demand a permanent record: it’s definitely been one of the comedy highlights of this year.

We were recently contacted by Joel Slack-Smith, who along with Heidi Regan, has written and produced a parody of inane tourist guide videos called London Wow. Joel and Heidi are Australians in London and their videos set in UK capital are well made and quite funny. Find them at www.youtube.com/londonwowtourism.

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Also available online is the new weekly podcast 5 Things with Nath Valvo, Stacey June and Sean Lynch (you may remember Nath and Sean from The Shambles). The episodes are short and pithy, and Nath and Sean are thick and fast with the cornball gags, but this is clearly an audition for a shift on Nova so if that sort of thing’s not your bag don’t bother.

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The Australian reported the other day that the remake rights to the 2001 Australian comedy film The Man Who Sued God (which starred Billy Connolly and Judy Davis) have been sold to a US company. The Man Who Sued God, as far as we can remember, wasn’t exactly a great piece of cinema. The idea of suing God sounds hilarious in theory but the script struggled to be both believable and funny, and the only decent lines seemed to have come from John Clarke, who wrote the original screenplay. We suspect the future for this project may be less Wilfred more Sit Down Shut Up.