Question Everything, especially the promo interviews

In a recent appearance on Triple M’s Molloy to promote Question Everything, Wil Anderson said a few things which tell us more about why Question Everything is so deeply, deeply flawed.

I had to come to Sydney about seven weeks ago to do this show…it’s great to make a show during a lockdown, it’s always one of the greatest challenges in comedy trying to make a cameraman laugh with the same joke he’s heard five times in rehearsal. You won’t get a Logie for it, but you’ll earn it.

Wait, he was in Sydney working on the show for SIX WEEKS before the first episode went to air? What was he doing all that time? Clearly not writing decent jokes for his own links, that’s for sure. Links that are regularly less funny than the jokes of the newcomer comedian panellists.

Speaking of which, why is Question Everything full of young comedians you may not have heard of rather than the usual bunch of established comedians who always appear on these types of shows? Anderson explains:

The idea of it was…I was in lockdown, and I was looking at the comedy community, and was thinking what can I do for younger comedians? And when we started there was always these shows you could go on as a new comedian to get exposure… I wanted to design something; a panel show for brand new comedians…

Great, a new talent showcase. Well done, Wil. This is exactly the kind of thing a successful comedian with several decades of experience, and our taxpayer-funded national broadcaster should be doing: nurturing new talent, giving them a platform on TV to show us what they can do… Oh, wait… what was that Anderson said later in the interview?

So, I imagined [Question Everything] would be the return to live audiences… Get a full audience at the ABC, comedians from all over the country and then some stuff started happening in Sydney and New South Wales and I was…that’s fine, there are plenty of good comedians in New South Wales. And in the last few weeks, we’ve had a map on our wall of Local Government Areas in Sydney and where the guests might live and just crossed them off, one by one. It’s been great, mate. Perfect conditions to make a TV show.

So, Question Everything isn’t an exciting showcase of the next generation of Australian comedians after all. It’s a show where they book whoever doesn’t live in an area riddled with COVID. Well, that is awkward. And so very telling.

Maybe the Question Everything team should have thrown their hands in the air and admitted defeat like Tomorrow Tonight? If conditions are too hard to make a decent show, don’t make the show. Not that Tomorrow Tonight is a decent show. But that’s another story…