Australian Tumbleweeds

… seems to have been that “twitter killed Live From Planet Earth“. We’ve read a couple of year-in-review stories now and it has somehow become accepted fact even though it’s complete and utter bullshit. And you know we wouldn’t break out the italics unless we really meant it.

For those not in the know, here’s the Sydney Morning Herald‘s 2011-in-review take on what happened:

The post-birth struggle of new programs is never pretty but few endure the kind of savaging that was given to Channel Nine’s live sketch comedy from the co-writer of The Young Ones and Blackadder. It was barely out of the gate when the popular press knifed it, kicking it on to Twitter where the court of public opinion put it on trial, judged it and sentenced it to death. Elton tried to respond to the Twiticism the following week but by then the damage was done.

Seems fair enough… if you come from a planet where all television shows are created equal and it’s only media attention – or lack thereof – that creates fluctuations in viewing numbers. Hang on a second – could it be that all the media snark aimed at twitter’s supposed role in the demise of LFPE boils down to hostility towards a form of media ye olde journalists don’t control? Is all this is as simple as “we’ll tell you what’s good and what’s not, none of this getting together and making up your own minds, thanks very much”? Well duh.

The reason why we keep bringing this crap up – and just be grateful we’re not going on about how supposedly Angry Boys‘ ratings flop was because it was “too controversial” while we’re at it – is because it’s an attempt to impose a narrative on events that isn’t born out by the facts. Here’s what these stories want you to come away thinking:

A): Live From Planet Earth was destroyed by internet haters and (to a lesser extent) the tabloid press.

B): Without those haters, it would have been a success.

Therefore C): Twitter and the tabloid press are violent, out-of-control forces denying YOU good television.

Meanwhile, over in the sane corner, we have this:

A): Live From Planet Earth was arse.

B): Blind Freddy could have seen that.

Therefore C): After a second and third episodes that were only slightly better than the terrible first but rated much worse, it got the chop LIKE DOZENS OF TELEVISION SHOWS BEFORE IT.

Or put another way, remember Let Loose Live? It was the previous attempt at live sketch comedy on Australian commercial television. It screened back in the pre-twitter days of 2005 and – we hope you’re sitting down because we don’t want to blow your mind or anything – it was axed after two episodes. One less than LFPE got. Cue dramatic sting.

To be fair, it’s easy to see why the media keep running with this “twitter killed LFPE” story: it’s an actual story, while “dud show gets axed” most certainly isn’t. And these days, when the career of Fairfax-sponsored tools like Jim Schembri seem to be based entirely on talking shit so enraged readers will leave a comment on their blog, any vaguely controversial viewpoint is going to be hammered home over and over whatever its dubious relation to the facts.

But that’s where our charity ends: this is, by any reasonable measure, a massive distortion of the facts and the way it just keeps on being trotted out over and over is, quite frankly, giving us the shits. If anything, all the twitter chat around LFPE helped it by promoting discussion and getting awareness of the show out there. According to, oh, the last two hundred and seventy years of promoting entertainment – handily summarized as ANY PUBLICITY IS GOOD PUBLICITY – twitter did LFPE nothing but a big fat favour.

Well, unless you view making people aware of a show as a bad thing, which presumably the Fairfax press does. And maybe they have a point. After all, we are talking about a show featuring a cast largely culled from the aforementioned flop Let Loose Live and the dumping ground that was Comedy Inc. Why, if twitter hadn’t attacked LFPE so relentlessly, it’s obvious it would have simply plodded along week after week doing no harm to anyone. Apart from twitter, what could have possibly driven it off the air? It’s not like the people running Nine have any other way of measuring the numbers of people actually watching it per week… HANG ON A SECOND!!

We could go on and on. Obviously the number of comedy flops that didn’t get axed in the wake of LFPE – Good News World comes to mind, though The Joy of Sets might qualify too – tends to suggest that the commercial networks have learnt that a high profile axing is at least as damaging as letting a dud slowly fizzle out.  Sadly, they also seem to have learnt that axing a show before it airs is even less damaging, if the fate of The Games 2012 is any guide.

Our real point here will come as no surprise: there are a lot of vested interests out there who like to paint flops as hits and shift the blame for duds onto viewers rather than producers. That’s kind of the reason why we do the Tumbleweed Awards every year: to make it clear that some shows just weren’t any damn good. So hey, if you haven’t voted, get on board here. While there are no doubt many better ways to express your disapproval, this is the one right in front of you at this very moment. That has to count for something, right?

For those of you wondering why you haven’t been hearing much about the much-anticipated (by us) revival of John Clarke’s The Games, wonder no more:

The Nine Network has scrapped plans for a sequel to the Olympic-themed mockumentary The Games.

Nine announced plans at the end of 2010 for The Games: London Calling, a follow-up to the series which aired on the ABC in the lead up to the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games.

It starred comedians John Clarke, Bryan Dawe and Gina Riley as the Olympic Organising Committee.

After a number of delays, a network insider has confirmed to The Sun-Herald that the series will no longer proceed.

Instead, Nine has given Hamish Blake and Andy Lee a second series, which will see the comedy duo travel to London prior to the Games.

It’s unclear whether The Games: London Calling will have a future back on the ABC or another broadcaster.

While it’s tempting – oh so very, very tempting – to suggest that Hamish & Andy’s drive for a London-based series is what’s scuppered a show that, let’s be honest, would have been roughly a billion times funnier than yet another batch of re-heated feel-good stunts, let’s not forget where the real villainy lies: the Channel Nine boardroom. They’re the ones who’ve axed The Games, and any attempt to paint it as anyone else’s fault is utter bollocks.

C’mon, do you think Nine is only going to have one show providing serious coverage of the Olympics? They couldn’t put on two, obviously very different, sports-themed comedies in the one year? Hamish & Andy’s London drive probably didn’t help – in fact, it probably made the Nine bosses decision a lot easier – but in the end it remains the bosses’ decision no matter how many times news reports say we’re getting Hamish & Andy “instead” of The Games.

They’re the ones who don’t think you can cope with two comedy shows about sport in the one year, but feel confident you can handle The Celebrity Apprentice five fucking times a week. They’re the ones who axed or shunted to the graveyard just about every comedy show they aired in 2011, but just couldn’t shovel out enough episodes of The Block. Shit, we should just be grateful they didn’t get John Clarke to host a cooking show. Or a revival of Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush. Or a topless bar fight on Underbelly.

Voting is now open in this year’s Australian Tumbleweeds 2011. Now in its 6th year, the Australian Tumbleweeds hails the failures (and occasional successes) of this nation’s comic talent.

Your online voting form can be found here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/tumblies2011votes

You have until midnight on Sunday 1st January 2012 to vote. Please only vote once. Full rules and instructions can be found with the voting form.

The winners will be announced on or about Australia Day.

As always, the official Twitter hashtag is #tumblies.

Well, they sure do over at the ABC: as a couple of our readers have already pointed out, the ABC just plum forgot to nominate Chris Lilley’s Angry Boys for any of those highly regarded Logie Awards for 2011. All together now:

Ahhahahahahahahahahaha *deep breath* hahahahahahah *heavy sigh* heh.

This story alone is funnier than anything that happened across the twelve big weeks that Angry Boys steadfastly refused to develop into anything more than Lilley wacking off in the face of Australia, especially when you consider it’s basically the same as that “look – he’s pissing on stuff!” running gag except this time the ABC has pissed on Lilley’s dreams of scoring even more Logie-related acclaim.

Of course, outside of Lilley’s House of Sulking, does anyone actually think this is a bad thing for him? Could this not, in fact, be read as the ABC (accidentally or not) doing him a favour by sparing him the serious embarrassment of failing to scoop the pool this time out? After all, with his previous shows the Logies have basically run at him with their pants around their ankles ready to douse him with their love, but with Angry Boys doing an excellent job of shedding viewers week after week and a bunch of semi-decent comedy shows also coming out in 2011 it’s not exactly crazy to imagine that he wouldn’t have won a damn thing this time around.*

Not to mention that if he’d actually been nominated and failed to win, it wouldn’t just be a large reminder that Angry Boys was, how you say… shithouse? – it’d also be a direct rebuff to the narrative the ABC and Lilley’s fans have been creating about the series where, while ye olde ratings were down, viewers on the internet and on DVD more than made up for it. Those mystery viewers have all had plenty of time to get caught up and they all can fill out a Logies form: if the show had failed to do as well as his previous efforts at the Logies, dodging the “big fat flop” tag would become that much harder.

In short: Lilley probably is complaining more for show than for real. This way he can simply blame it all on the ABC, claim “I totally would have won, you guys” in the Ja’ime voice while wearing the wig for no reason whatsoever, and move on to planning an eighteen part series based entirely on the time he heard some kid at a bus stop say “totes”.

*hands up anyone who hasn’t heard the rumours that the Logies are largely decided by network publicists buying up copies of TV Week and sending in voting forms for the shows they want to win? Okay, now hands up anyone who thinks that this kind of “whoops, sorry, we forgot to put your name in” event may have started out as “whoops, sorry, we’re not going to throw our weight behind your Logies push this year”. That many? For shame, you cynical sods. Good luck to Adam Hills, by the way.

While we’ve been busy of late putting together the Tumbleweed Awards – don’t forget, you can vote for all the shows you loathe here – we’ve still managed to find time to check out the various other year’s best and worst lists that have started to pop up around the place. Well, clearly not that much time: we only just looked at this week’s Green Guide “Year in TV”  special, and it’s the usual quasi-hilarious mix of the creepy (the topless fight scene in Underbelly: Razor was listed in “Things to be grateful for about TV in 2011″, for fuck’s sake) and the just plain wrong (Gran from Angry Boys was one of the “Great TV Characters of 2011″ – as they put it, “fierce, loving, so wrong but, oh, so right”.  You utter prats). Oh, and they liked The Jesters, so it wasn’t all bad.

As you’d expect from us and our long-standing burblings against various Age personalities, three things stood out: first, The Hamster Wheel was praised for its “ruthless pursuit of shoddy on-line journalism”. Well yes, but didn’t The Chaser name the Schembri Awards after Green Guide writer and notorious on-line bullshit artist Jim Schembri? Was this latest comment a swipe at Schembri by a fellow Green Guide writer, or actually written by Schembri (who did contribute to the Green Guide‘s “Year in TV” special) in an attempt to shore up his dubious “they were supporting me” claims? Just fire him already.

Second, Angry Boys was one of the top 10 shows of the year. Uh, okay, whatever. You might want to make a better claim for greatness than saying Gran “was a monster we couldn’t quite believe, yet couldn’t take our eyes from” then point out in the very next line that “audiences seemed unprepared to invest in all 12 episodes” though.

As for “the conclusion that several vocal critics arrived at – that [falling ratings] somehow turned the whole enterprise into a wasteful flop – is risable” – no, the endless knob and gay jokes made it a wasteful flop. And the pointless, laughless surfer character. And making “pissing on things” into a running gag. And trying to making  S.Mouse’s “Grandmother-fucker” into a real-life novelty hit. And S.Mouse in general. And not actually having any actual storylines for any of the characters despite running for twelve long weeks. And we could go on.

[In actually funny Angry Boys news, this article from the Telegraph about his US push is gold, especially this:

Mainstream press reviews for the series, including responses to blacked-up character S.Mouse, are expected in the coming weeks.

Regardless of the response, Lilley's ability to make such strong inroads into the tough US market should be heralded as a brilliant achievement.

"Regardless of the response" you say. Wow, that almost sounds like you expect a racist shitstorm followed by a near total collapse in the ratings... kinda like what happened here. And we're just going to herald as a "brilliant achievement" someone's ability to sell shows to America now? The actual quality of the show itself doesn't count?]

Finally, they couldn’t leave Laid out of it, could they? Of course it was one of their favourite shows of 2011 – Hardy worked for them for years! Not that they mentioned that, of course, despite sniping at other shows’ “bloated self-promotion”. How many positive reviews did the Green Guide give Laid again? Seven? Eight? Plus a cover story? For a show that only ran six weeks?

Oh well, at least this particular gush-job said that Laid was “refreshingly difficult to categorise” – because it sure as shit wasn’t funny – and that “season one ended on a brutal cliffhanger, so hurry up already”… except that the press release for Laid 2 (you know, the one everyone at the Green Guide received months ago) listed the new seasons cast and THE LOVE INTEREST FROM THE FIRST SERIES WHO HAD THE POTENTIALLY FATAL ROOT WITH ROO IS STILL IN IT. So, uh, he’s not dead. Unless he’s a fucking ghost, which is the kind of twee bullshit you’d expect from this series really.

Either way, the fact remains: why is the Green Guide talking up a “brutal cliffhanger” when they – or anyone who looks up Laid on IMDB – already knows how it pans out? Unless, you know, they’re just trying to drum up interest in a mate’s poorly rating show. Again.

Our seemingly pointless griping here is the story behind this year’s Tumbleweed Awards. When the mainstream media in this country is quick to praise obviously sub-standard programs for reasons clearly unrelated to the actual quality of the program itself, we need an award designed to point out that yes, you were right the first time:  much of this supposedly “much-loved” and “critically-acclaimed” comedy is just plain crap.

Nominations are now open in this year’s Australian Tumbleweeds 2011. Now in its 6th year, the Australian Tumbleweeds hails the failures (and occasional successes) of this nation’s comic talent.

Your online nominations form can be found here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/tumblies2011noms

You have until midnight on Friday 16th December to nominate. Please make no more than 4 nominations in each category. Full rules and instructions can be found with the nominations form.

Voting will start on Sunday 18th December with the winners announced on Australia Day.

As always, the official Twitter hashtag is #tumblies.

Yeah, sorry about the delay with this one. But hey, it’s not like The Chaser really need anyone rushing to judgment at this point in their career. Their position at the ABC is about as secure as it gets at this stage of the game: if there hasn’t been a mention of what they’ll be doing in 2012, it’s only because everyone automatically assumes they’ll be back.

This apathy is slightly odd, because The Hamster Wheel was about as big a change in direction for the “Chaser Boys” as one could reasonably expect from a rock-solid ratings machine whose formula brings in the viewers even when the Murdoch press is all but claiming they set fire to an orphanage. For one, they dropped the stunts. For another… umm…

Okay, the differences are subtle but noticeable. The focus is firmly on the media – though not quite as much as you might have expected from the pre-release publicity, as Chaser 101 stuff like fake news and an opening monologue were still there – only they’re explaining its insanity rather than just reveling in it. We’re not the first to point out that in some ways Hamster Wheel is largely an expanded version of the “What Have We Learnt From Current Affairs” segment from The Chaser’s War On Everything, and as that was by far our favourite segment of that show you’ll notice we’re not complaining.

As always with The Chaser, there was also plenty to complain about. Even Shaun Micallef’s Newstopia struggled to make fake news funny so it’s no surprise the fake news here was, as Krusty the Klown put it, “always death”. Politics with Cats was an okay idea that only really deserved a handful of outings rather than a weekly segment, while the Schembri Awards for crap internet news fizzled out and ended up being dropped before the end of the series.

But overall, turning the focus on the media and making fun of its increasingly sleazy and desperate tactics proved to be a winner. Well, more of a winner than anything the superficially similar Gruen factory churned out, largely because Denton’s show is a thinly disguised celebration of the scumbag tactics advertisers / marketers / PR companies use to lie to us and rip us off (every campaign they look at is either “how clever” or “this doesn’t work – as an advertising person, I would instead do this”, where what it needs is the bit where someone goes “the very basis of this industry is bullshit”?) whereas The Chaser seem to hold the media in justifiable contempt for solid comedy results.

So where to from here? While the media’s ability to churn out tripe is endless their strategies for doing so are fairly limited, so a second season of The Hamster Wheel might see them struggling to find new rorts to expose. Not that the ABC would mind; after a decade of solid ratings success it seems safe to say that The Chaser could offer the nation’s broadcaster a show made entirely out of un-filmed outtakes from Packed to the Rafters and be sure of getting at least one season out of it. If they want to bring The Hamster Wheel back in 2012, it’ll be back; if they decide to do a show called The Chicken Shop about the business cards taped to the register of their local fast food outlet, we look forward to eight episodes of poultry-related comedy.

[Rumours that The Chaser's somewhat sudden return in 2011 - word about the show first surfaced around the middle of the year and it aired in October, whereas most ABC comedy series are usually announced months or years in advance - bumped the long-time-coming Outland back to 2012 remain just rumours. But if that was the case it'd also explain why At Home With Julia only ran for four episodes (the first time a prime-time comedy has had such a short run in many a year) instead of the originally planned six. If it'd been coupled with Outland we would have had the usual situation: the 9.30 Wednesday comedy timeslot featuring two shows at six episodes each across the final twelve weeks of ratings. Instead, as The Hamster Wheel ran for eight weeks, Julia was cut back to just four episodes and Outland was bumped to 2012.]

But what if they don’t come back at all? Chas Licciardello is already lined up to do the non-Chaser Planet America, a show covering the US Presidential election, while no doubt the rest of the team will pop up in various hosting gigs as they’ve done since the dawn of time itself. It’s hard to know whether 2012 will be the year when the team finally does drift apart as it occasionally threatens to do; then again, Chris Taylor and Craig Reucassel hosted drive on TripleJ for a while before returning to the fold and Dominic Knight’s been writing solo novels for a while now. Even the now long-gone and somewhat missed Charles Firth stuck around on the fringes after moving to America.

To be blunt, they just don’t seem like they’re passionate enough to get into the kind of angry artistic spat that tears a comedy team apart. If someone wants to try something different, away they go. If they want to come back, the door’s never fully closed. And by choosing to stick with the ABC instead of jumping ship at the height of their fame the ABC seems to be sticking by them as well, giving them the kind of career security that’s basically unknown in Australian comedy these days.

If there’s a down side to this, it’s that the programs released under the Chaser banner tend to be fairly predictable. The Hamster Wheel / Chaser’s War / Yes We Canberra format is clearly the kind of format they all agree on; meanwhile, the occasional hints of anything startlingly new or different tend to fizzle out to nothing. Not that the ABC wouldn’t be complaining about this consistency – running the same old same old until it gets old is how you get steady ratings. Which just leaves the folks at home who’re looking for something surprising and new…