Vale Question Everything 2024

There are a lot of questions around Question Everything. Fortunately, most of them have pretty obvious answers. Well, except for the big one, but we’ll get to that.

Question one: did they deliberately set out to make a show this shit?

Well, no: originally Question Everything was clearly an attempt at something akin to Gruen News, a look behind the curtain explaining why fake news and lazy coverage is the order of the day.

Question two: hang on, doesn’t the ABC already have Media Watch?

Sure does – that’s why this has stand up comedians! Thus defeating the entire purpose of the show and rapidly turning it into yet another panel show making jokes about news clips.

Question three: but a panel show about news clips doesn’t have to suck, right?

Sure doesn’t – and we’re lucky enough to have The Cheap Seats and Have You Been Paying Attention? to remind us of that on a regular basis.

Question four: so why does Question Everything suck? Wil Anderson has been funny in other shows and a lot of the panelists seem decent enough?

This is where it gets tricky. Traditionally the big problem with ABC comedy panel shows is that they don’t have enough comedy. They’re quiz shows, or they think they’re serious discussion programs, or they’re staffed entirely by smug ABC lifers nobody likes. But Question Everything is news comedy with decent guest comedians. Bullets dodged.

Instead, Question Everything seems designed to stifle anything close to decent banter. We get a news clip, then Anderson poses a question to one of the panelists – often a question barely related to what was funny in the news clip – and they cough up a slab of pre-fabricated material that would probably be okay in a completely different setting.

The problem is that, throughout the show’s development from semi-serious news quiz to whatever it is now, nobody has yet figured out a decent way for the comedians to interact with the clips. HYBPA? is a quiz show, no problem there. The Cheap Seats is just the hosts or the guest reporters presenting clips and then making jokes about them, also pretty easy to grasp.

But Question Everything has two hosts plus a panel. Anderson makes the usual jokes about the clip we’ve just seen, and then he… randomly throws to a panel member to… do something slightly related to the clip that’s just had all the comedy wrung out of it? They’re not news experts, they’re not experts on whatever the clip was about, and Anderson’s just done a bunch of jokes about the clip. What are we hanging around for?

Question five: aren’t I the one asking the questions?

Yeah, sorry about that.

Question six: aren’t you guys always going on about how Australian comedy just needs more shows, no matter whether they’re good, bad or average? If you’re constantly saying that we need a lot more forgettable shows if we’re going to build a sustainable industry that can deliver the occasional memorable comedy, then why isn’t Question Everything just another average show where people can learn about television and hone their skills?

Short answer: because it’s not good enough even for that.

Slightly less dismissive answer: a lot of the publicity for this year’s Question Everything was based on the idea that the show was really a training ground for up-and-coming television comedians. You could quibble with aspects of it (and we did) – the people being trained weren’t actually working on the real show, for one thing – but sure, why not.

Question Everything provides the TV training, Fresh Blood gives people a chance to make their own shows, there’s your production line right there. Only the production line leads directly to an ABC that is much more interested in training new comedians than putting to air shows that feature new comedians.

Bottom line is, the ABC doesn’t need any more comedy training grounds. What it needs to do is make more comedy.

When reviewing a series, “training ground” is code for “cheaply made with low standards”. But so what if these shows are sloppily crafted and hosted by tired faces? The real benefit for audiences comes down the line when a new generation of highly trained comedians are… well, they’re not on the ABC because the ABC only makes a handful of dramedies a year now and all the “entertainment” programs are hosted by middle-aged men who’ve already been hosting on the ABC for a decade.

When the ABC wants to train the next generation of journalists, they don’t invite them to pitch news stories or work on a fake news show out the back of 730. They hire them as cadets, pay them a proper wage, and send them out to cover the news (in some low stakes area under professional supervision). If the ABC was serious about comedy, they would hire fresh faces to work on their established comedy shows. Oh wait, they don’t have any left.

Question seven: So if all their comedy programs are now training schemes, why isn’t the ABC a registered training organisation on the Centrelink myskills website?

Fucked if we know.