Bad news, world

Crikey’s Laugh Track blog reported the other day that a promo video for the upcoming sketch show Good News World has been released on Facebook. Good News World, in case you’ve been trying to block out its existence (and this is something we do advise), is the revamped version of Good News Week, which promises to be “somewhere between The Daily Show, Saturday Night Live, and a hostage situation”.

“Judging by the trailer that they posted on Facebook, I’m gathering the television audience is the latter” writes Laugh Track’s Matt Smith. Quite.

But how can we convey the true horror of what’s in the promo video? Let’s start with these five words: Akmal Saleh as Colonel Gaddafi. Now here’s some more words, or more accurately a question: Is that a Masterchef parody written in the style of the Class Sketch? We can only hope that when the show’s actually broadcast the references will be slightly more up to date, as in not references to people who may be dead by the time the show airs, or not parodies of shows which finished up weeks ago. You know, like the program’s inspirations The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live might do.

As for the material being funny, well, that’s pretty unlikely. Perhaps the show’s fatalist of flaws is that the cast is almost entirely made up of people with virtually no decent sketch comedy credits to their name (Skithouse, The Comedy Sale, The Wedge, The Sideshow) – we haven’t seen this many hacks on the one show since the Hey Hey reunions.

Which is pretty sad for us here at Tumblies HQ, because if there’s one thing we’d like to see more of on television it’s locally-made topical sketch comedy – the kind of comedy that really nails it when it comes to politics, popular culture and everything in between. If we see any of that kind of comedy on Good News World we’ll be the first to laugh and applaud. More likely, this will be Live From Planet Earth awful, with not even Ben Elton’s topical stand-up or the one joke in Girl Flat to make up for it.