Australian Tumbleweeds
We wish it was vale, Question Everything
Question Everything’s been on a journey. Remember when it was part news explainer, part fake news debunker, with vibes of Hungry Beast? Now it seems to be trying to cut The Cheap Seats’ lunch, right down to showing clips from the very sources The Cheap Seats has brought to national attention. Like 7 News’ Tasmanian bulletin, where the banter between newsreader Kim Millar and weatherman Peter “Murph” Murphy is something to behold.
As we’ve pointed out previously, using clips from the same shows as The Cheap Seats, or even the same actual clips, doesn’t matter given that the crossover between people who watch Question Everything and people who watch the Cheap Seats probably isn’t huge. But if you do watch both shows, it’s clear who does it better: Mel and Tim.
The Cheap Seats may not be original – everyone and their dog has based a comedy show around funny clips from the past week. But they win the laugh war by having a simple formula: they focus all their energies on getting the most laughs out of the clips. This includes not just selecting good, funny clips, but adding their own jokes too.
Imagine how The Cheap Seats would have handled the 7 News Tasmania clip shown on Question Everything last week, where Murph says he’s afraid to open his door in case it’s Halloween trick-or-treaters, and Kim replies that he’d definitely open it if it was a wine delivery.
On The Cheap Seats you’d expect a few follow-up gags from Mel and Tim, including, presumably, one of Tim’s running gags about his hard-drinking Mum – who, we’re guessing, always opens the door in case it’s a wine delivery. So, what did Question Everything do? They took Murph’s Halloween humbug as inspiration and asked panellist Nath Valvo to have a go at being a grumpy weatherman.
And while “be a grumpy weatherman for a few minutes” is a comedic challenge with plenty of potential, the result…wasn’t great. Which isn’t necessarily what you’d expect from a comedian of the experience of Nath Valvo. Similarly, what was going on in episode three, where everyone seemed so desperate to get laughs that they got panellist Brett Blake to hold his breath for as long as he could? It seemed like a bit which wasn’t planned, so maybe we should cut the team some slack, but on the other hand, a lot of Question Everything doesn’t seem very well planned.
If you told us that the panellists turned up a few hours before taping and were told to prepare a parody weather report or something about holding your breath for ages, we wouldn’t be surprised. The lack of preparation and honed gags would certainly explain why so many parts of the show fall flat. But if someone spent ages on those segments, it’s not just the writers who should be sacked, but the producers.
You could suggest it’s an ABC budget thing, where they can only pay people for a few hours of improvisation, rather than days of writing. But, more worryingly, what if someone on the team thinks that off-the-cuff improvising will lead to a better product?
Honestly, there’s a lot going on with Question Everything. Another problem is that after four series, and following endless tweaks to the format, it still doesn’t know what it’s trying to be. It seems to have largely dropped the news explainer/fake news debunker stuff – and this could again be down to budgets, meaning they now don’t have to spend money on those graphics-heavy, pre-recorded segments Jan Fran used to host. But whatever’s happening, it’s now a panel show where people react to wacky clips, with only occasional nods to being the sort of news-literate comedy that the ABC used to do a lot more of. So, what’s the point of it anymore?
Also, has no one down at the ABC considered that maybe, after four series of failure, it’s time to drop this show and replace it with something better? Is Wil Anderson really that much of a draw that the ABC must keep this show on air? Are there are really no other viable ideas for comedy shows out there?
Meanwhile, we simply note that while ABC comedy suffers from a lack of funding, a risk-averse culture, and an addiction to established talent, over at 10, which has its own financial woes, risk-averse culture and preference for big names, they can produce some very good comedy based on the news. It might not be the sort of comedy that tells you much about the world, apart from that there’s a lot of weird shit happening on commercial television, but at least it’s funny.
More Like Audrey Sickburn
Audrey is an Australian comedy film that strictly follows the first – and only – requirement of an Australian comedy film: it’s hanging shit on the losers who live in the suburbs. Those bastards have had it too good for too long, what with all their stunted narcissistic dreams and malformed personalities reflecting the dark side of the Lucky Country and so on and so forth can we have a Film Australia grant now?
Audrey is about a typical suburban family, in that we’re introduced to the father as he wanks into one of those hand held fake plastic vaginas, only he’s interrupted by his family who are all horrified and then the dog runs off with it. At least now we know he’s a wanker.
There’s also two daughters. One of which is good looking so she’s a bitch, while the other is in a wheelchair but she’s also kind of bitchy so fair enough. The real story is the mother. She used to be a soap actress largely remembered for not being on any of the popular soaps but still giving a “suck it losers, I’ve made it” speech at the Logies right before it all fell apart.
The good-looking daughter is Audrey so you might think this is her story. But no. No sooner have we got to know her deal – hates her family, wants to run away with her sleazy musician boyfriend, is being forced into an acting career by her stage mum – than she falls off the roof and ends up in a coma. The big comedic twist is that this instantly improves everyone else’s lives.
Suddenly the wheelchair daughter is popular and famous and waving a fencing rapier around. The dad is off having gay sex with a porn producer while now also boning his wife (seems they’re in an open marriage, which maybe someone could have mentioned earlier). And the mum? Her acting career is back in business now that she’s pretending to be her daughter at some dodgy acting school.
Surprisingly, this is probably the best stretch of the movie. It turns out that seeing people be happy and successful is more entertaining than having them sling shit at each other and everyone around them.
Anyway, Audrey’s coma can’t last, we all know that. Nobody likes spoilers so lets just say you will in no way be surprised by anything that happens in the final third of the movie, unless you were actually paying attention to the first two thirds of the movie in which case there are a number of scenes that feel like the kind of thing that should happen but don’t actually flow on logically from anyone’s behaviour.
But who cares about story or character or anything like that. Is it funny? Yeah, nah. There are some semi-decent jokes scattered around the place. But a lot of the comedy is the kind of thing that you can imagine people saying “yeah, that’ll be funny” rather than actually laughing at.
For example, there’s a high school benefit concert for Audrey that’s the kind of thing Chris Lilley was doing 20 years ago and it wasn’t much chop then. Come to think of it, a pushy suburban stage mum is also pretty Chris Lilley. And while the Christian Porn the dad gets mixed up in is more explicit than anything Lilley ever got up to, the basic concept is very much in his wheelhouse. Remember “cringe comedy”? Sorry for reminding you.
So the comedy feels like an afterthought. It’s a collection of old gags from a previous generation thrown into the mix because they pitched a “dark suburban comedy” and now they have to follow through. Fortunately, a vibrating dildo is always funny, right?
There’s probably a case to be made that the real comedy here is the parody of Australian suburbia. But yeah, piss off with that. At (the very) best this is a parody of other, older Australian films. It’s a bunch of sub-Kath & Kim level cliches only with the heart replaced by a sneering dismissiveness and some jokes about acting school classes where you have to pretend to be a tree.
It’s weird to remember there was a period there where The Castle was seen by some as being patronising towards its working class suburban subjects. Presumably this was because people actually saw The Castle, unlike the dozens of other Australian “comedies” that treated anyone living more than 20 minutes from the center of a capital city as a tasteless dimwit driven by animal urges one step removed from the gutter. Australian film has a long and largely forgettable history of sneering trips to the suburbs and beyond to depict just about everyone who dwells there as some kind of freak, and calling your half-arsed Wake in Fright-meets-Strictly Ballroom remake a black comedy exploring the dark recesses of suburban narcissism or some shit doesn’t make it any funnier.
Mind you, considering the extremely slim pickings this year Audrey is still probably the best Australian comedy movie of 2024.
Vale Have You Been Paying Attention? 2024: The Kavalee Conundrum
So that’s it for Have You Been Paying Attention? for the year. As usual there’s not a whole lot to say. It’s the well-oiled machine that other well-oiled machines look up to, a finely honed gag-fest that’s been at its peak for so long it’s fair enough to wonder if it’ll ever drop off or simply not return after everyone involved gets run over by a rogue four-wheeled sponsor.
Week in week out it’s an hour of top-notch rapid-fire comedy. It even finds space for the occasional newcomer or overseas guest (who are promptly never seen again, but its the thought that counts). Maybe things’ll change next year when Sam Pang gets his own show. Maybe the show will air during the HYBPA?-free start of the year and he’ll just be on three prime-time shows (don’t forget The Front Bar) a year.
There is one question though that hangs over the show like a tall, freakishly muscled radio personality and commercial spokesperson firmly entrenched in the very back row: what’s going on with Ed Kavalee?
Up until this year, Ed’s comedy persona on the show has basically been “I’ll appear in your commercial if the price is right, and the price is always right”. Various other elements drifted in and out. He’s a fit guy (blame his wife). He’s a motormouth nerd. He’s been in commercials oh we covered that one. His work on commercial radio used to get a bit of a run, but being on commercial radio is the CV of around 60% of all HYBPA? guests. Anyway, he’s currently between jobs.
But in 2024 he’s been making a lot of jokes based on pretending* to be a fully on-board Sky-news watching member of the conspiracy-loving alt-right. Which is… a thing you can do now?
Beyond “it’s a laugh, innit?”, exactly why he’s doing it is a bit of a mystery. HYBPA? has always been relatively politically neutral – stupid behaviour is what gets the laughs, not calling politicans stupid. It’s not a show inviting Andrew Bolt or Gerard Henderson on to fire off some quips. The comedy from Kavalee’s performance is presumably coming from the fact we know he doesn’t mean what he says**. We hope.
It’s not like HYBPA? isn’t a showcase for people putting on an act either. One of the not-so-secret secrets to being asked back is to have a bit more going on than just an ability to press a buzzer and get off a zinger. Old drunks, old grouches, confused youngsters, deadpan weirdos, people who seem really nice until they get off a brutal one-liner aimed directly at a fellow panelist. They’re all part of what keeps viewers coming back each week.
Thing is, these are all basic comedy types that you can get across in a line or two. What Kavalee’s going for here seems a lot closer to an actual comedy character – Russell Coight rather than Glenn Robbins. And those characters need more room to develop than you get trying to add in an extra line or two after you’ve answered the question correctly and everyone else is moving on.
It’s not as simple as he’s doing a bit and the bit’s not working. Sometimes it does work – he’s definitely putting a lot of energy into it at least. And it’s possible that if he hammers away at it for a while, people will come to see him as a send-up of online right-wing guys and his bonus gags will just slip on in there.
But everyone else on HYBPA?, even when they’re doing a bit, are doing a bit that we either already know them for or is a natural extension of who they seem to be. Mick Molloy is a comedy drunk! Aaron Chen is off-the-wall! Kitty Flanagan doesn’t get modern life! They all naturally lead to comedy, while not leading you to want to run away from them.
Ed Kavalee as a online conspiracy nut eagerly awaiting the violent overthrow of the state? Eh, maybe not so much.
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*hopefully
**though considering he’s currently between radio gigs, who knows – maybe he’s pivoting towards hosting a talkback show?
No Risk with Fisk
Okay, we’re a week late with our Fisk review. But c’mon: if you need us to tell you to watch what is easily the best Australian sitcom this decade, you might as well send us your bank details and be done with it.
There are a lot of things Fisk isn’t. For one, it isn’t shit. But the fact that it’s not trying to be cool or edgy or dramatic or shrilly on-message when it comes to topical issues – or much of anything beyond being funny – is a reminder of just how far down the list of priorities “funny” often is when it comes to local comedies.
To be fair, even when local comedies are trying to be funny, the results are often… Well, let’s look at the most recent and most obvious point of comparison, the local version of The Office. Remember that series? Released at the end of last week, completely forgotten five minutes after the end of last week?
Like the local version of The Office, Fisk is largely set in an office. Unlike the local version of The Office, Fisk is smart, features jokes based on observations of how people actually behave, and feels like it was made by and for actual human beings. The cast of Fisk are playing characters written to their strengths as performers. The cast of The Office are barely playing characters at all. You get the idea.
Slightly less snarkily, Fisk treats its core characters as people we’d like to (possibly briefly) spend time with. They’re all annoying; They’re all also annoyed by the annoying behaviour of their co-workers. Nobody here is a two dimensional bad guy or cartoon foil. They just want things that sometimes clash with what everyone else wants – peace & quiet, a smoothly operating workplace, a jar full of biscuits, and so on.
Season three has opened up the ensemble a little: Ray (Marty Sheargold) has found love. Roz (Julia Zemiro) has her own clients with her dispute resolution business (plus a sideline making music). Webmaster George (Aaron Chen) has his side hustles and a hacker grandmother. Fisk (Kitty Flanagan) abides, though she does now have her own place.
Sitcoms often wear down their cast’s rough edges over time. Fisk herself now seems a lot more reasonable (at times she’s almost chirpy), but that may just be due to society’s overall decline. What seemed like a prickly personality in 2021 is now a delight to spent time with compares to the violent nutters that roam the streets in 2024.
Even if she has mellowed a little, having much of each episode’s friction provided by a steady stream of cranky clients and dodgy local business people (hey, Tom Ballard really does have a baby face) helps a lot. Who would have thought Carl Barron as Fisk’s surly neighbour would be the comedy find of 2024?
Thankfully, Fisk‘s core crew are too different to ever fully get along. Fisk herself might have finally gained couch privileges in Ray’s office, but it’s not like there’s going to be any kind of non-awkward group hugs any time soon.
We could go on, but you get the idea. Fisk is an instant classic that just keeps on getting better. You don’t have to consider the alternatives to know we’re lucky to have it.
Back to The Office
Various reviews of this country’s very own remake of The Office (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video) have been published in the past week which range from “Why bother re-making The Office?” to “What’s the point of re-making The Office?”. And fair enough, there are already two versions of The Office in English, and countless more in other languages. Why make another?
The reason, presumably, is that it’s harder to get a broadcaster or streamer to take a punt on an original concept, so why not just re-boot something from a few decades back that people remember fondly? The recent reboot of Frasier (which isn’t a patch on the original series, but still has some decent laughs it) is in the middle of its second season, for example. And wouldn’t be in that position unless decent numbers of people had subscribed to Paramount just to watch it.
But is the Australian version of The Office with Felicity Ward as Hannah Howard (the David Brent/Michael Scott role) going to inspire anyone to subscribe to Amazon Prime Video? Based on the first few episodes, absolutely not. It’s just not funny enough, and that’s partly because what people read as funny in 2024 has changed a lot from when The Office debuted in 2001.
Hannah Howard is a rude, self-centred, obnoxious, bullshitting, possible psychopath who shouldn’t be in charge of anyone, let alone a company employing at least 30 people. In the first episode, she ignores instructions from her boss Alisha (Pallavi Sharda) to close the office and let the team go fully remote, something the team want, and forces everyone to come in full time. In other episodes she belittles people, commits tax fraud and promotes her suck-up, power-mad assistant Lizzie (Edith Poor) to a role she is not cut out for.
And, yes, this kind of behaviour is common amongst senior managers, and we all have experience of it. So, we should all be laughing at The Office because it’s true, right?
Er, no. What the makers of this re-boot seem to have forgotten is that quite a lot has changed since 2001, when the original UK version of The Office debuted, and the central tenant of The Office’s comedy was laid down: that watching a bully belittle others is funny.
In 2024, people working in offices are no longer in the mood for this. Think of all the bullies, predators and fraudsters who’ve hit the headlines in recent years, and in some cases been sent to jail, thanks to their former subordinates outing them for abusing their positions. Think of the way that the workers who realised the advantages of working from home during the pandemic, are now quitting jobs that force them to come into the office five days a week. The antics of Hannah Howard are, at best, ill-advised, and at worst will lead to Melissa Caddick or Sam Bankman-Fried-type behaviour, but are not especially funny in and of themselves.
This is not to say there aren’t a few laughs in The Office. Hannah, with one eye on her reputation, makes a lot of decisions so that she doesn’t look like an idiot in front of the ever-present but never seen documentary crew. This leads to her doubling down on some obviously bad calls, like holding a wake for a recently deceased employee, who it turns out no one really knew. The resulting event is, naturally, a disaster. And a funny one.
However, there really aren’t enough scenes that are as good as this throughout each episode. This isn’t the original Fraiser, or even the above-mentioned, not-so-great reboot, where there are lots of funny moments in each scene, all working towards a big moment at the end of the show. The Office prefers to waste the audience’s time, by having a staff member tell the documentary crew how they’re feeling about the situation, when we’ve already seen how they feel about the situation from their visible reaction in the previous scene. Sometimes repeating something is funny, or helpful, to an audience, but in this case…why?
There probably is a way of re-booting The Office in Australia which breathes new life into the format, but this seems like it’s aping something which worked 20 years ago without significantly updating things or adding an original spin. Even the much-promoted fact that the boss is a woman doesn’t bring much to the party. Still, isn’t it great to know that women can be awful bosses too? Finally, feminism has achieved its goals!
An Australia version of The Office is something which didn’t need to exist and likely won’t make much impact with audiences. Because there are better locally made comedies which happen to be set in offices. More on that soon…
Vale Thank God You’re Here 2024
Fans of old school hip-hop know the rhyme scheme where one rapper says most of a line then the rest of the crew come in on the last word. C’mon, don’t look at us like that, you know this! Call and response! Every single (bad) social media joke about The Beastie Boys is based on them rapping exactly like that:
Thank God You’re Here is that joke, only they don’t tell the other rapper what the last line is meant to be and they have to make up something on the spot that’s funny. Over and over and over again.
Honestly, at this stage we’d rather listen to Paul’s Boutique.
Question Everything? Don’t Mind If We Do
Question Everything is useless. Every single thing it tries to do, something else does better. And that includes “giving Wil Anderson something to do outside of his stoner podcast”, because it’s not like they’re ever going to stop making Gruen.
Of course, we’re just pissing into the wind here. Now into its fourth season, Question Everything is the last show standing after that brief flurry of activity where the ABC decided it wanted back into the panel chat / quiz show game. You don’t remember that Question Everything used to be a quiz show? And not just one where every single answer was “get this shit off”?
The big problem Question Everything faces is that it is currently the third news clip comedy show of the week on Australian television. Third as in timing, third as in quality: it is not essential viewing. Have You Been Paying Attention? is top shelf. The Cheap Seats soaks up the crumbs. Then you get Question Everything, showing the same clips again only with shittier jokes.
You’d think this would be kind of awkward for the ABC. They hardly make any local comedy as it is: duplicating the commercial networks so blatantly ain’t a good look. So why bother?
The real reason they can get away with it is pretty obvious. ABC viewers only watch the ABC. All the clips you’ve seen used elsewhere? Brand spanking new to them. Unfortunately, this would be somewhat embarrassing for the ABC to admit – they’re supposed to be pulling in new audiences, remember. So there has to be another reason why they’re making a show that just duplicates what we’ve already had two hours of earlier in the week.
Enter “The Next Up Initiative“, which is like The Avengers Initiative only it leads directly to the dole queue:
Most people probably aren’t familiar with ‘The Next Up Initiative’. Can you give us a brief explanation of what it’s about?
One of the broader aims of the show (Question Everything) is to give less experienced comedians a chance to get a start in the industry.
I have always admired the way producers like the team at Good News Week or the legends at Working Dog have tirelessly tried to encourage new and diverse talent.
At Question Everything we have an intern program for emerging writers to give them experience of what it is like to work in a TV writing room, combined with a program to give newer comedians panel experience in a TV studio.
In practical terms what that means is each week, as well as the episode of Question Everything that goes to air, we run another version of the show with different panellists (the only difference being that there is no studio audience).
This gives comedians the chance to be in a studio, making a show, and see how it all works without it being the pressure of their first TV appearance.
We have used that process to bring new guests to the show, but also to hopefully provide comics with studio and writing experience that they can take to other opportunities outside our world.
Which raises the question: why bother broadcasting Question Everything?
Seriously, and putting aside our usual snark and outright hostility for once, but doesn’t this sound like a scheme that doesn’t actually require them to make Question Everything? The new talent isn’t getting a shot on the actual show that goes to air. Oh no: they’re working on a practice show out the back that doesn’t even have a studio audience.
If you just want to train new talent on something you’re not going to air, why not just do the fake show? It’d be a shitload cheaper for starters. And if you want to give new talent real experience, why not get them to work on the real show*? Anderson says he admires the way Working Dog helps new talent. Maybe he could follow their lead and actually employ new talent on his show? You know, give them real credits they can put on their resumes?
Of course, there’s always the chance that the new talent might not be quite as polished as the regular panelists. Which would be a problem for Anderson, because the entire schtick of the show is sneering at other shows for not being as good as the version of Question Everything that exists only in his head. When Working Dog pulls up a clip for a laugh, the laugh is usually because something funny happens. When Question Everything does it, the laugh is usually “look at this shit”.
Which is why having Wil Anderson hosting a new talent showcase makes no sense. He might be a top bloke away from the cameras, but on-camera? His entire comedy persona on the ABC is built around a kind of snarky one-upmanship that means he always has to have the last laugh. Other people get to say things on his shows, but he’s the one who swoops in with the big joke. Is Jan Fran still on this show?
In contrast Shaun Micallef, AKA that other ABC fixture who’s been speaking out recently about the need to nurture new comedians, has put two shows to air in 2024 where he’s played second fiddle to – hang on, this can’t be right – new comedians? The guests on Eve of Destruction and Origin Odyssey may not be complete unknowns, but a lot of them aren’t getting that kind of prime time push anywhere else on free-to-air television. And Micallef, as host and interviewer, is clearly doing what he can to present them in the best light.
Meanwhile, Wil Anderson is hiding them out the back making a show that isn’t going to air. But at a guess, involving the new talent with the real show would suggest that they might actually be able to have a career doing comedy on the ABC.
And that’s a position currently reserved for Wil Anderson.
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*some of the back room talent does graduate to the real show, which is great but doesn’t really answer the question of why a show that’s meant to be a new talent showcase won’t put new talent to air until after they’ve spent a few months in Wil Anderson’s comedy boot camp
Bask in more Tasks
Taskmaster is back for the second time this year, but is the second time the charm? Or the third time, given this is the third series of Taskmaster Australia.*
On paper, this is a strong cast, featuring popular and successful comedians from several generations: Peter Helliar, Rhys Nicholson, Mel Buttle, Aaron Chen and Concetta Caristo. But as always, it’s the format that lets it down, with many of the laughs coming from the post-task wash-up rather than the task itself.
Not that they aren’t trying. Strapping four yoga balls to the contestants as they play Tetris with giant blocks sounds like it’ll be heaps funny but sadly doesn’t result in a lot of laughs. In the end, it’s people trying to get some differently shaped blocks to form a square, and that involves seriously thinking through the problem, whether they’re wearing four yoga balls or not.
The same thing applies to the task where they have to hide traffic cones around the Taskmaster estate for Deputy Taskmaster Tom Cashman to find. Sure, there’s a kind of comic chaos as the comedians chuck the cones into the lake or wherever, but there are also lots and lots of better ways to make an audience laugh.
Filming an emotional scene on a drone was pretty funny, with Aaron Chen making a bizarre black-and-white German drama and Peter Helliar donning a dress and an unconvincing ginger wig to remake Saving Private Ryan. And doing the most epic wink also saw Aaron Chen excel, as an oddly charming dictator delivering a cheeky wink to the crowd from the balcony. But for every task which gives the contestants opportunities to be funny and creative, there’s also a lot of padding, and not of all of it was Taskmaster Tom Gleeson’s funny takedowns of their efforts back in the studio.
Taskmaster is one of those shows where the madness of having to make your bed whilst in it is framed as an acceptable substitute for well-thought-out, guaranteed-to-make-you-laugh material. It gives more of a chance for the comedians to actually do comedy rather than, say, having to spell some words, but it’s a way less satisfying or funny watch than a good sitcom or sketch show would be.
And while “shows the whole family can enjoy” are a good thing to have on free-to-air TV, it’d be nice if our comedians could do something other than this kind of thing. You know, the kind of thing where they have to do a thing which isn’t being funny.
* This is technically the second series of Taskmaster Australia as it was shot before the series which aired earlier this year. There are a bunch of theories about why the order was swapped, but the fact that the cast of this series is better known than the cast of the second series to air seems to have been a factor. There’s also a fourth series coming next year, which was shot last month.
Vale the ABC’s Current Wednesday Night Comedy Line-Up
Shaun Micallef’s Eve of Destruction went out the same way it came in: as a relatively engaging, definitely low-stakes talk show that managed to be utterly inessential viewing even by the standards of the genre. It wasn’t bad television, but was it really prime time television? Oh wait, it was on in the Hard Quiz slot. Hang on a second while we dial our expectations all the way down.
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with watching a couple of people have a decent chat. Especially when one of them’s Shaun Micallef, a man whose interviews skills have come a long way since the heady days of Micallef Tonight – a great tonight show where the interviews were never a strong point.
Now though? He’s keeping things on track but knowing when an aside is worth following up, maintaining a light touch and going for the laughs when they’re there while showing a real interest in the more serious side of things (and drawing a decent tree besides). Australia’s top television interviewer? Well, he’s looking better than most of our “serious” journalists, that’s for sure.
And yet, it’s still just a talk show, and a lightweight one at that. Either Australian television needs two or three of these shows running away quietly in the background as part of a healthy media environment, or ditch them entirely and put what little resources they consume into something with more substance. We’re not holding our breath for either – but we would like to see Micallef back doing something closer to comedy before the Destruction finally gets here.
*
Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont-Spelling Bee is a bit of a tricky one to pass judgment on. And yet here we are: let’s give it a crack. With a risky mix of comedy and what is pretty much the exact opposite of comedy, this seemed like the kind of show that would appeal both to comedy buffs and the boring quiz-obsessed stiffs who seem to compose most of the ABC’s audience these days. And yet!
It was hardly a surprise that the spelling stuff was played for laughs. Didn’t always get them, because spelling is boring. But the show’s commitment to complicated and firmly comedic set-ups for the various challenges really hammered home the idea that no, this was in no way a serious spelling competition. Suck it quiz show fans.
So comedy was the big winner, right? Depends what you mean by comedy. If you mean “a bunch of mates laughing at each others jokes and the general silliness of the show around them”, then yes. Comedy – in the form of the comedians on the show – won big. If you mean the audience at home got some good laughs, bad news.
Look, there were a lot of funny moments across the eight weeks. But way too often, the show felt like the kind of thing that’d be hilarious to watch happen live in front of you but didn’t quite translate that excitement to the folks at home. Comedians cracking up at their own jokes (or the jokes of the person next to them) is nice, but it tends to leave the audience shut out. If these guys are doing all the laughing, what’s left for everyone else?
Which, funnily enough, brings us back to Eve of Destruction. Micallef is pretty much the local master of the silly game show. Nobody’s excited about the idea of Talkin’ ’bout Your Generation coming back without him, even if that final season on Nine didn’t quite work. On that show, and on Eve as well, he’s always fully aware of the audience. When everyone else is getting wrapped up in their own witty japes, he’s the one pulling things back.
Micallef can and does do a lot of funny things on the seemingly endless run of shows with his name in the title, but he’s also always the host. His job is to make sure everyone – audience included – has a good time. If that means standing a little apart from the hilarity, that’s where you’ll find him.
Guy Montgomery’s a very funny guy. So is everyone else on the show: the big selling point was a relentless, freewheeling, anything can happen vibe. How else could you make a spelling bee funny week after week? And it was the contrast between the vibe and the dull-arse subject matter that made it work as well as it did. Not enough vibe? All you have is a spelling bee. If you put that much vibe into a comedy set-up? You get a big old mess – as proven by any number of wacky random lol shows over the history of television.
And yet, once you got past the whole “I can’t believe what I’m watching here” thing, Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont-Spelling Bee was still a spelling bee. It was an extremely well done, one joke show: “what if a spelling bee was as funny as humanly possible”. And now we know. Thanks.
Mind you, Aaron Chen sure can riff with the best of them.
Buried
The new web series Buried is marketed as a comedy about being a mother, but before you start having flashbacks to The Letdown, stop. Buried, it turns out, is an entertaining and occasionally funny horror.
Abi Cohen (Miriam Glaser), a stressed-out single mum of two, is trying to get her primary school-aged daughter Rosa (Audrey O’Sullivan) to school when a cyclist (Alex Yakimov) almost runs Rosa down. What follows is a pretty standard driver-cyclist interaction: Abi gives him a blast for not watching the road, he cycles off not caring what she thinks, and Abi gets into the car and off they go to school. Except whilst taking a shortcut, she encounters the cyclist again. And accidentally kills him.
With baby Leo (Hazel Howe) in the backseat crying, and Rosa moaning that she’ll be late for school, Abi feels she has no choice but to dispose of the cyclist’s body as quickly as possible. But it’s not as simple as popping him into the boot and driving out to the bush with a shovel, Abi has to dodge a seeming obstacle course of other people, who all threaten to uncover the secret she’s trying to bury.
Buried has a classic horror/thriller plot but set in the everyday world of solo parenting and suburban mores, and it ratchets up the tension well. Louise Siversen (Prisoner, The Games), Alicia Gardiner (Deadloch), Genevieve Morris (No Activity) and Michael Faaloua Logo (Colin from Accounts) are just some of the well-known performers playing characters who almost work out what Abi’s up to. Heather (Eliza Matengu) is another memorable person for Abi to dodge. She’s the mum at the school gate who seems to have it all – and be able to do it all – except she’s got a secret too.
Running over 5 x 7 minutes-long episodes, Buried far from outstays its welcome, leaving you wondering what might happen if this became a full 6 x 25 minutes series. It also leaves you wondering why so many people making comedy hybrid shows always seem to pair comedy with drama, leading to mostly disappointing results (In Limbo, Austin, White Fever… you know the kind of shows we’re talking about).
Horror pairs far better with comedy than drama, partly because it’s not meant to be serious and partly because, like comedy, it’s pretty good at surfacing ordinary human anxieties. So, maybe one of the shots in the arm that Australian screen comedy needs is less comedy-drama about suicide and “finding yourself”, and more comedy-horror involving ordinary people with chainsaws?
