So this stirred things up a little over the weekend: Between Hannah Gadsby’s Emmys win, Becky Lucas and Rhys Nicholson landing stand-up spots on the US show Late Night with Conan O’Brien and Demi Lardner’s Best Show nomination at the Edinburgh Festival in August, Australian comedy is having a world-class moment. Not that you’d know... Read More »
TV Tonight’s recent article on the all-time best Australian TV comedies got us thinking…what are the all-time worst Australian TV comedies? Having been blogging about this for more than a decade, we think we have the answers. First up…sketch shows! If you grew up pre the late-90s, sketch shows were something you saw on TV... Read More »
If you thought the Australian television comedy scene was dead at the moment, well, sometimes dead is better: Get patriotic on the Aussie comedy day with Open Slather (Seasons 1 & 2), Just for Laughs Australia 2015, Best of the Sydney Comedy Fest 2016, and Melbourne Comedy Festival’s Big Three-Oh! 2016. If you missed Open... Read More »
It’s unusual to hear a TV executive say anything like what we’ve been saying about Australian comedy for years, so we wanted to note this interview for TV Tonight with Foxtel’s Brian Walsh: Last year Foxtel rolled a big gamble on its sketch comedy series Open Slather produced by Laura Waters and Rick McKenna. Despite... Read More »
Ever get the feeling you’re running in place? That was Australian television comedy in 2015. Not just in the usual “the only way forward is to bring back Fast Forward” sense either, even though once again hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent in the firm belief that the only comedy “mainstream Australia” will embrace... Read More »
The final episode of Open Slather aired quietly a few weeks ago, and despite the many twists and turns in its production history it ended how it started out:... Read More »
So it seems How Not to Behave has been bumped for its final episode: What appears to be the final episode of How Not to Behave will air at 10pm on ABC this week. The show has made way for the return of Kitchen Cabinet this Wednesday. Meanwhile, the final five episodes of Open Slather have been... Read More »
Remember Open Slather? The show that was going to revitalise Australian sketch comedy by harking back to the golden age of the late 80s and… well, that was pretty much it. But the late 80s! When comedy was funny! Not all the quasi-racist material mind you, and a lot of the stuff about women looks... Read More »
Is it just us still watching Open Slather? Assuming so, we can report the following: despite the fact that they’ve sacked a large proportion of their original writing team, and that there are now a lot less Downton Abbey sketches…it’s still crap.... Read More »
Amongst the former Open Slather writers not to contact us about the recent writer's cull was Doug MacLeod, who's previously written for Full Frontal, Fast Forward and various other well known... Read More »