You wouldn’t want to say Australian comedy is dead, but the iron lung it’s getting around in is starting to look a little worse for wear. Oh sure, individual comedy series are still being made; people are even having careers in comedy, so long as you put quote marks around “careers” and “comedy”. But the... Read More »
“Necessary advertising”. Even Wil Anderson says it’s an oxymoron. And yet here were are in 2020 and Gruen is leading with a story about just how important ads – or as they used to be called but if they used the correct term then there’d be a distinction between important information and the blatant lies... Read More »
We started off last year’s Tumbleweed Awards like this: Maybe things will get better next year And people say we’re not funny. Honestly, if you really want to depress the hell out of yourself – and of course you do, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this – go back and take a look at the... Read More »
Last week a tweet was doing the rounds listing all the great things being done by ABC staffers now that they’ve left the ABC. The point was that they’d had to move on to get anything done, which was… fair enough? The ABC is a great training ground, but anyone able to do basic math... Read More »
Gruen‘s back! Yes, the show that somehow manages to violate the ABC’s rule against broadcasting advertising twice* is back once again to… actually, why is it back? Ignore, for the moment, the real reason; it still rates well and it’s not like the ABC has a surplus of those shows handy in 2019. The ABC... Read More »
Look, we all know News.com has an agenda as far as the ABC goes, and that agenda is “shut it down”. So despite us reprinting pretty much the whole thing because it’s hilarious, you should maybe take this shocking report with a grain of salt. FUNNYMAN Wil Anderson has been accused of being not funny... Read More »
So it took maybe ten minutes into 2018’s first episode of Gruen for someone to say “doing no advertising is silly” and fuck, how did that massive foot-shaped hole suddenly get in our television screen? And this was during a segment on the current banking royal commission, which – from our half-arsed reading of the... Read More »
If you’re one of the handful of people still watching the ABC’s main free-to-air channel, you might have noticed something a bit unusual over the last few days. So the ABC is promoting an upcoming line up; so what? For those of you without a calendar handy, here’s what’s puzzling: this new line-up is two... Read More »
For years now we’ve argued that we need more Australian comedy in general if we’re ever going to get more of the good stuff. Guess what? We were wrong. Our theory was that Australian television needed to make a lot of bad television before anything good would come along as the bottom 90% of anything... Read More »
Not long after voting opened for these awards, we were contacted by a cast member from an Australian comedy series we’d recently reviewed. While our review of their show was fairly positive – at least by our standards, but more on that later – this cast member was angry that we had characterised a portion... Read More »