Dribs & Drabs

* Have You Been Paying Attention? is coming back after Easter as an hour-long late-night show:

CHANNEL 10 has shifted Have You Been Paying Attention? from its prime Sunday evening timeslot.

Ten says the comedy panel show hasn’t been axed. Instead it is set to be relaunched in an expanded one-hour version after Easter.

The new Have You Been Paying Attention will screen at 9.30pm but Ten won’t confirm what night it will air.

Have You Been Paying Attention? has been a ratings disappointment ever since it launched at 6pm Sundays on November 3 last year.

Recent episodes have hovered around 300,000 viewers across Australia’s five capital cities.

*Myf Warhurst is going to be a host on Triple J’s new digital network, where presumably her overwhelming niceness will finally be put to good use:

Finding music to shock listeners is going to be much more difficult and Loader says that all-important first song – which will be played by new presenter (and ex-Triple Jer) Myf Warhurst at midday on April 30 – is being hotly debated at Triple J as you read this. She says all suggestions are welcomed.

“We are not resurrecting [the old] Double J on air we are re-appropriating the name and that spirit… we think it will still be surprising for listeners.”

One way the new Double J will be at least progressive is that, as Loader says, it will have a strong female influence – handy timing after Triple J was attacked for perceptions of male bias in its playlist when only nine female artists made the station’s top 100 of the past 20 years last July.

The new Double J’s music director will be Dorothy Markek, Warhurst is the weekday day-time presenter, Dan Buhagiar is a senior music producer, Loader is the content director and “over half of the presenters will be women”.

*There’s a Kickstarter aiming to revive good old-fashioned radio (well, audio) comedy:

Night Terrace is a new, full-cast, eight-part science fiction audio-comedy series following the adventures of Anastasia Black, played by Neighbours’ Jackie Woodburne, and created by some of the people behind Splendid Chaps, ABC1’s Outland and ABC2’s The Bazura Project.

*The Roast is slowly crushing our will to live… sorry, there’s no link as we haven’t written our reviews yet. But for a team that the ABC is clearly positioning as “the next Chaser“, wouldn’t it be good if they were occasionally half as funny as The Chaser? The bar’s not that high, folks.

Also, anybody who says anything like “what can you expect with the pressure they’re under doing a nightly show” gets slapped.

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5 Comments

  • yoyo says:

    I thought the roast was hilarious tonight making fun of Carr’s book! uhhh just not for the reasons they might have liked. For a show that tries so hard to be ironic they downright misinterpreted the irony of Carr’s extracts.

  • BIlly C says:

    In all the time the Roast has been on I have never seen anyone share their stuff on social media. I really don’t understand why it’s still on air.

  • er says:

    The Roast just look like kids doing dress ups. I find it hard to take them in any way seriously. Also the not funny thing. The show’s similarity to Mad As Hell makes it doubly embarrassing.

    The radio play baffles me a little. How did it raise so much money? (Or ask for that much for that matter.) A loyal fanbase I guess. Good work, because it strikes me as likely not very funny and quite expensive to buy seperately.

  • er says:

    Really good point about not being shared on social media, Billy C. I’ve seen it happen once or twice on my Facebook over the years, that’s it.

  • BIlly C says:

    They do a Doctor Who podcast. There is a long tradition of Doctor Who audio plays, so their audience is familiar with radio stories and more importantly buying them. $25 for 8 25 minute episodes seems pretty reasonable to me. A proper studio and engineer isn’t going to be cheap and I’m assuming they’ll be post work for effects etc. They’re probably paying their cast something. If I’d listen to all their podcasts for free I would have given them some cash.