Celebration of a nation
The ABC’s 90th-anniversary program ABC 90 Celebrate! was a noble attempt cover nine decades of broadcasting but left some... Read More »
Tag: Jonah from Tonga
Lunatics: the first two episodes
You’d have to think Netflix would be a little disappointed with Lunatics. Not because it’s crap, though it is: being an internet company rather than a broadcast channel, Netflix’s business model is all about getting you to watch rather than quality. They love grabbing up past-their-prime big names because the residual fame is enough to... Read More »
How to Solve a Problem like Chris Lilley
So there’s been a bit of attention over the last few weeks drawn to the fact that Jonah from Tonga is, as the French say, racist as fuck. First this: New Zealand’s Maori Television has dropped Jonah from Tonga from broadcasting Which led to this: The narrative never really shifts in Australia: to admit that... Read More »
Australian Tumbleweeds 2014 – The Results!
Australian comedy in 2014 did pretty much what it was expected to do: not all that much. The days of any local comedy connecting with a mass audience seem to have ended with the mass audience realising Chris Lilley only ever had one idea, while the ABC’s other crowd-pleasing mainstays either tossed off a half-arsed... Read More »
Vale Jonah from Tonga pt 2: On the Screen
Jonah from Tonga marked a big step forward in Chris Lilley’s career: it was the first time in living memory he gave characters not played by himself serious air time. Ok, by “serious air time” we mean “an occasional solo moment”, but by Lilley’s standards that was massive. One of our biggest complaints against Lilley’s... Read More »
Vale Jonah from Tonga pt 1: Behind the Scenes
Was there ever a television series more utterly unnecessary than Jonah from Tonga? Even in the darkest days of Ja’mie: Private School Girl at least we knew that Ja’mie was always going to cruise through life, an eternal and unchanging sitcom character where what little laughs there were came from dropping her in different situations.... Read More »
Jonah Week 5: Caged Heat
Oh look, it’s the episode of Jonah where Chris Lilley reuses all the “Gran” stuff from Angry Boys rather than reusing the “Jonah” stuff from Summer Heights High. A few years ago Lilley opening an episode with two non-Lilley characters talking to camera for an extended period would have been hailed by us as a... Read More »
Jonah Week 4: The Sound of Silence
Hey, where’d everybody go? Two weeks ago we could pad these reviews out with loads of quotes from various articles denouncing Jonah as racist tripe or praising it as cutting edge comedy from Australia’s favourite satirist, and now… nothing. What gives? Oh, that’s right: Chris Lilley’s career is over. Actually, it was over a couple... Read More »
Jonah Week 3: Running in Place
So, exactly how much of this week’s episode of Jonah from Tonga was just a bunch of schoolboy dickheads running around hiding from authority figures? We’re not saying that kind of thing can’t be funny; we are saying that when you’re Chris Lilley and the only string you have to your comedy bow is your... Read More »
In Comedy, Timing Is Everything
Press release time! ABC TELEVISION HEAD OF ONLINE AND MULTIPLATFORM MOVES ON Arul Baskaran, Head of Online and Multiplatform has advised that he is leaving the ABC to pursue new opportunities in digital media. Baskaran was instrumental in launching iview, Australia’s first on-line TV catch-up service which remains the country’s leading video-on-demand platform to... Read More »