Old News is No News

As previously mentioned, currently Australian television is serving up one (1) new Australian comedy series: The Weekly with Charlie Pickering. One show. Across all of Australian television. Real solid foundation we’ve got for a blog there.

This perhaps wouldn’t be quite so big a problem if The Weekly was any good at its job. As we’ve detailed in the past, across the show’s nine year history that job has remained somewhat unclear. Charlie’s in a suit, he’s out of a suit, first there’s a team of co-presenters, then suddenly where’s Briggs? You get the idea.

One thing that has remained the same is the title: The Weekly. It’s a show that covers the week in news. One week’s worth of news, one episode of The Weekly. We thought that was fairly clear. Seems our mistake was in assuming the week in question was the week just past and not, oh, any old random week from a few months back.

How else to explain why the latest episode of The Weekly – which went to air March 6 – featured a segment collecting Scott Morrison’s ten “greatest” media appearances. Scott Morrison, you may recall, stopped being Prime Minister in 2022. So these clips? Almost all of them were over two years old. Topical! Even more topical considering he stopped being relevant two years ago! Next week: former PM Malcolm Fraser caught with his pants down in 1986.

But hold on, The Weekly had an excuse: Scott Morrison just quit Parliament. Perfectly reasonable to take a look back at his greatest hits, right? Well, Scotty from Marketing announced his departure January 23; he finally hauled arse Wednesday Feb 28 – the same day as last week’s episode of The Weekly.

Remember, this was just a collection of old clips cobbled together to commemorate an event announced well ahead of time. Was there any reason they couldn’t have aired it on Feb 28? Was there just too much comedy gold that week to fit it in? Is it just another sign of a show that might as well be retitled Can’t Be Arsed?

Guess we’ve got the whole week to think about it.