Six Days in a Weekly

So The Weekly isn’t funny. No news there. You know what else contains no news? The Weekly itself.

Wait, hang on a second. The selling point of the current version of The Weekly is that “we watch the news so you don’t have to”. As the ABC Youtube channel put it:

“Charlie Pickering takes all the news and puts it back together again to make sense of the nonsense.”

The entire point of the show is that it provides a week’s worth of news – only, you know, funny*.

So this week we tuned in to see… well, we tuned in to see Guy Montgomery, because he really is funny. Turns out the ABC are planning an Australian version of Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont-Spelling Bee with Aaron Chen as co-host! We hate comedy game shows and yet we love this idea. Kinda weird to announce something funny on The Weekly though.

But besides that, it’s also been a big week in local news, what with there actually being some local news these last few days. Not exactly cheery comedy news, but like they say,

“Charlie Pickering takes all the news and puts it back together again to make sense of the nonsense.”

Not seeing any qualifiers near “all the news” there. No suggestion that it’s only the light, frothy news. All the news. All. Of. It.

Come their coverage of Saturday – a somewhat news-heavy period in the Sydney region – and what did we get? The by-election for Scott Morrison’s old seat, because The Weekly likes few things more than making the same three Scott Morrison jokes everyone else stopped making two years ago.

And Monday? A segment on Bluey followed by “let’s roll into Tuesday”. It may have been a big few days for edged weapon attacks and mass chaos in Sydney, but on The Weekly? Hey, South Korean election coverage doesn’t just happen, y’know.

Sarcasm aside (there’s a first time for everything – ed), obviously it’s a massive relief that the crack team of gagsters at The Weekly steered well clear of a couple of serious news stories. Imagine just how impossibly shit their attempts to find an angle on a mass stabbing would be. On second thought, don’t.

But it’s not like this version of The Weekly is in any way amusing. There’s nothing at all wrong with only covering soft news – so long as you make it funny. Half the time they don’t even seem to be trying. “Let’s get Margaret Pomeranz to review yet another TV game show!” Yeah, that’s some comedy gold right there.

So if they aren’t funny, and they are claiming to cover “all the news”, why not just have an actual serious segment? They used to have them all the time. Remember when Pickering would appear in some fake cosy home office and explain some serious news topic in a slightly informative fashion? Those segments weren’t much good, but at least they weren’t trying to be funny.

Once again, the result is bland, nothing, pointless viewing. The Weekly could try to be funny… but no. The Weekly could try to actually cover the news… but no. “To get good, you have to be bad first,” Montgomery said during his appearance. But what if you just keep on finding different ways to be bad?

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*not funny