Reading Between the Lines
Did anyone else see this article in the Fairfax press about Australian sketch troupe Aunty Donna? It’s the usual mix of information and (justified) praise for the guys ahead of their Melbourne International Comedy Festival show, but tucked away in paragraph four was this little gem:
They can now announce their selection as one of five groups to make a pilot through ABC TV’s Fresh Blood comedy initiative.
Can they now? It’s the first we’ve heard of the ABC actually commissioning pilots off the back of last year’s Fresh Blood program, and a hasty google search turns up a grand total of zero other announcements about these five greenlit pilots. And weren’t those short Fresh Blood series meant to serve as pilots anyway?
Despite the lack of independent confirmation, this article certainly seems determined to act like the Aunty Donna boys are working on a traditional half hour pilot:
“For us, the challenge is tricking people into thinking they’re not watching sketch. The Fresh Blood pilot tells the story of our fourth member, Adrian, leaving the group.”
…
Writing a TV-episode length narrative for Fresh Pilot is new for the men, who have been focusing their efforts on live performance sketches of about five minutes and YouTube sketches of 90 seconds.
And now you know exactly as much as we do.
Ok, so assuming all this is legit and the Aunty Donna guys haven’t totally jumped the gun with this announcement, does anyone have any ideas as to who the other four finalists are? Or when these pilots are meant to be going to air? The ABC certainly doesn’t seem to be in a rush to let us know…
Well if you do a twitter search for the Fresh Blood hashtag, it looks like the people who made Bed Head are another one of the pilots. If I remember, Aunty Donna was great. Bed Head… not so much.
I’ve heard about Bed Head, Fancy Boy, Aunty Donna and The Record (Steen Raskopoulos and Veronica Milsom).
They’ve been posting on their Facebook page about how they’ve just finished filming and all that, so it’s legit.
Turns out the ABC announced late last year that there’d be five Fresh Blood pilots in their 2015 line-up. Still seems odd they never got around to announcing who’d be making the pilots though.
Oh it looks like Skit-Box are the other one. Yeesh. https://twitter.com/SkitBox/status/578424806170853376
The original shows were a very mixed bag, but ABC could’ve made a couple of better choices for pilots there. I look forward to what Aunty Donna come up with though.