Vale The Weekly with Charlie Pickering 2025

It’s perhaps unfortunate that The Weekly with Charlie Pickering airs two days after Have You Been Paying Attention? and a day after The Cheap Seats. They all often use the same clips, and if you happen to watch all three shows, it’s clear that The Weekly… doesn’t have the funniest jokes about those clips. But moving The Weekly… to, say, Sunday nights, wouldn’t make it a funnier show, even if it would give them first crack at last week’s clips. The Weekly… as we’ve argued for more than a decade now (God, help us!), is a fundamentally flawed show.

Part of the reason is that its scripts are either bad or un-honed – does anyone seriously believe they’re doing multiple drafts of those lame gags and sketches? But what really makes The Weekly… a big fat dud is that it keeps trying to do satire (or at least to give the impression that it’s trying to do satire) without having the guts or ability to do it properly.

Real satirists take a current political story and critique it in a funny, incisive way. The Weekly… on the other hand looks at politics in a cute* way, through the prism of, say, Anthony Albanese’s dog Toto. (* That’s “cute” as in “superficial”, by the way. Not cute as in “appealing”, like Toto is.)

There was plenty to say about Labor and Albanese during the recent election campaign which had nothing to do with Toto – does anyone seriously believe Labor are going to take real action to help younger voters, say – but The Weekly… didn’t go there. Even doing something about the obviously freaky Peter Dutton and his obviously mad policies seemed beyond them. You could argue that the ABC’s editorial policies might have muzzled the show during the election period, except… The Weekly with Charlie Pickering is toothless all the time. Anyone looking for funny, harder takes on Australian politics needs to scour YouTube for clips of Mad As Hell, a show which ended almost three years ago.

When The Weekly… began, there was an audience for a show that treated politics as little more than posturing by a collection of small figures barely worth a long look at. Just look at Utopia, a series of similar vintage built around the idea that government does little more than waste money on studies into schemes designed to rort the system. Does anyone really think politics in 2025 are the same as they were a decade ago?

If nothing else, the election result has underlined the fact that most Australians have put at least some thought into the direction they’d like this country to take. Competing visions were on offer: one was soundly rejected. And yet The Weekly… faffs about each week, acting like politics is some interchangeable superficial fluff nobody really cares about or pays attention to. It’s not just bad at its job; it doesn’t even know what its job is.

Where The Weekly… does get decent laughs, sometimes, are in its “authored” segments. Rhys Nicholson is usually the highlight of the show, although that’s as much for the way he tears into Pickering’s bland everyman persona as anything else. Nicholson feels like he represents those people who put some thought into the direction they’d like this country to take. Zoe Coombes Marr, who made several good pieces on how people with ADHD experience the world, feels like that, too. But then there’s Margaret Pomeranz…

Does anyone need Margaret Pomeranz’s views on any subject in 2025? Not really, especially as The Cheap Seats, yet again, covers what she’s covering, but better. Mel, Tim and Mel not only have a great eye for funny clips from reality TV, but they also have great comic timing when they talk about them. Pomeranz, on the other hand, gives the air of someone doing it for the money, rambling through her autocue of scripted “hot takes” with all the sincerity of someone reading an advertorial for pest control on commercial radio. Although to be fair to Pomeranz, she likened Tom Gleeson to a ball bag last week, so she’s not all bad.

As always with The Weekly with Charlie Pickering, 2025 was a disappointing year. When The Weekly… started in the mid-2010s, you could at least rely on the fact that the show’s crapness didn’t matter so much because you could get good topical laughs elsewhere, from the likes of Shaun Micallef, Clarke & Dawe, Sammy J or the Tonightly team. But now, ABC topical comedy is just The Weekly with Charlie Pickering. Or, even just Charlie Pickering, given he’s recently taken over end-of-the-week topical quiz Thank God It’s Friday on ABC Radio (more on that soon!). It seems the national broadcaster’s desire to platform middle-of-the-road topical humour, and only middle-of-the-road topical humour, has no bounds. This blog is far from in the “Defund the ABC” camp, but given the state of ABC comedy at the moment, some sort of big shake-up is vital and necessary, or what’s the point of even trying to make topical comedy?