Here’s the thing: on the day after the final episode of Randling aired we went through all the major metropolitan newspapers looking to see on which page they announced the winner. A 27 week prime-time competition featuring many of Australia’s premiere comedians and social commentators had all been building up to one big result: of... Read More »
The funniest thing about watching Randling at this stage isn’t just the grim suspicion that you might be the only person on Earth doing so; it’s the knowledge that all the people you’re seeing on-screen have no idea of the train wreck this series has turned out to be. In case you’ve spent the last... Read More »
If you like comedy and didn’t have reason to dislike the inordinately smug Andrew Denton before now, thanks to a recent interview he gave to Fairfax, now you do: In a perfect world, Denton says, Randling would have been a companion piece to the popular music-trivia show Spicks and Specks. But two weeks after pitching... Read More »
As probably the only Australian comedy format of the 21st century with any nostalgic value attached to it (can’t wait for the Randling revival), we shouldn’t have been surprised that Thank God You’re Here finally made a comeback. But did the magic return with it? Well, that depends: was there ever any magic there in... Read More »
In a semi-recent interview to promote the return of Have You Been Paying Attention? – in the real estate supplement Domain, of all places – Tom Gleisner pointed out it was now a full decade since HYBPA? first aired on Ten, and that the first few seasons had been teetering on the edge of cancellation:... Read More »
The last episode of the first Australian series of Would I Lie To You aired on Monday night. As usual, it was…okay.... Read More »
Hey, where’d all the scripted comedy go? When we started this blog the basic idea was to do two or three posts a week, because each week there was usually two or three shows on television we could talk about. There’d be something new, something in the middle of its run, maybe a press release... Read More »
When the ABC’s new news quiz Win the Week was revving up, we were asked by some smartarse how long it would take us to make a comparison with the ABC’s last attempt at a celebrity-led quiz, the notoriously shithouse Randling.... Read More »
Daryl Somers is not the absolute worse human being ever to make repeat appearances on Australian television, but he almost certainly is the worst person to host Dancing With the Stars which means he’s beaten out at least one confirmed racist. Isn’t Australian television great? Not that Daryl’s got a particularly clean record when it... Read More »
This week saw the two hundredth episode of Have You Been Paying Attention? and the show feels as fresh as it ever did. We say “fresh” but we could have gone with “timely”, or “thrilling”, or “topical”, or any number of words that don’t necessarily start with “t”: HYBPA? came out of the gate strong... Read More »