Always Was The Weekly

While we were still working on the 2025 Australian Tumbleweeds Awards, the ABC aired the new one-off, satirical, First Nations-led tonight show Always Was Tonight. And new episodes of The Weekly with Charlie Pickering. The contrast between these two structurally similar, topical comedy shows could not be more stark.

The Weekly…, as we’ve long documented, continues to be a toothless affair, with little to say about the major issues facing our nation and the world. Parliament gets recalled early as the government tries to rush through new national security legislation, which may affect our freedom of speech? The Weekly… takes the piss out of what Members are turning up to Parliament wearing. Later in the show, a segment on President Trump’s Board of Peace was about as hard-hitting. But let’s face it, almost anyone looking at that dodgy, $US1 billion-a-seat, United Nations alternative, can see right through it. Even The Weekly… team.

But forget about that, it’s the 10th anniversary of that time Anthony Albanese appeared on Tom Gleeson’s old Hard Chat segment! So, let’s get Tom and Albo on again so Tom can ask the softest-ball questions ever.

Always Was Tonight took a rather different approach. And they didn’t need to make big claims that they were going in “hard” on the big issues. They were too busy presenting the hardest satire the ABC has aired since it axed Tonightly. This was comedy that was a mix of funny, such as the sketch in which an Indigenous academic is talked over by a white ally, and genuinely uncomfortable. In particular, the final song, a re-working of Peter Allen’s I Still Call Australia Home, in which a First Nations children’s choir sang about Indigenous kids being imprisoned and forced to wear spit hoods.

Airing it directly after The Weekly only invited comparisons (like we needed an excuse – ed). While it’s possible to imagine defending Pickering’s show by saying, for example, that with only a week between episodes, you can’t expect it to be as polished or as pointed as Always Was Tonight, those excuses don’t really stand up.

The Weekly almost never makes actual jokes about the news it covers. It makes comments; often they’re nothing more than re-stating part of the story in an incredulous voice. The idea of using humour to highlight what’s going on with an issue or event doesn’t get a look in. Even when a sketch is looking at morning television segments, the underlying assumptions of those segments are never questioned beyond “can you believe this crap?”

And while some of the sketches in Always Was Tonight were pretty obvious – what’s that you say, white voices are privileged over those of Indigenous people in Australia? – they had two things going for them. Firstly, they were actual observations about reality. You know, that thing comedy is based on but that The Weekly hardly ever bothers with because they’re too busy getting Margaret Pomeranz to review reality television?

Secondly, they were the result of funny people sitting down and thinking “what would be a funny way to express this insight into how Australian society operates?” Here’s a tip: the answer to that question is never “get Charlie Pickering to pretend his mother sent in some random news story about it”.

Airing the two shows back-to-back was yet another reminder that The Weekly is a show with no opinions, no views, and no desire to rock the boat. It’s a satirical news show that’s only fit to report on weirdly shaped vegetables and outsized novelty hats: on a good night it’s an insult to the word pathetic and it hasn’t had a good night for a long time.

Aside from being well thought-out, well-made, well-performed, and the work of people who actually know how to be funny, what else did Always Was Tonight have going for it? It was angry, and rightly so. And naturally, it upset someone in the Liberal party who presumably thinks locking up kids is totally fine:

The shadow communications minister, Melissa McIntosh, has sent a letter of complaint to the ABC managing director, Hugh Marks, demanding a full investigation into Always Was Tonight, a satirical news program that aired on the broadcaster on 21 January.

The complaint claims the content of the show may have breached the ABC’s content, broadcasting and editorial responsibilities.

“[The ABC] has an important duty as a trusted public institution to protect our multiculturalism, promote social cohesion, and not seek to broadcast content that divides our nation,” the letter says.

“In the light of the horrors that have confronted Australians over the last month from the Bondi terrorist attack, now more than ever we cannot tolerate offensive content which stokes further division.”

Under the public broadcaster’s charter, the ABC must inform and entertain the community, reflect cultural diversity and contribute to a sense of national identity.

There is nothing in the charter that requires the broadcaster to promote social cohesion.

…

McIntosh’s complaint said the knowledge that the child actors used in the segment would have been encouraged and coached to depict such scenes was “grotesque and a clear contravention of the ABC’s Code of Practice”.

The Liberal party, as anyone following the news knows, has plenty of its own problems, and McIntosh is presumably trying to distract from these, whilst appealing to the party’s base of old whiteys who don’t like First Nations people.

But more generally, this is something those on the right have form on. Ever wonder why the ABC makes almost no satirical comedy these days? It’s because every time they do, some right-winger complains. Does the Liberal Party actually care about social cohesion or child exploitation? Of course not! Have you seen their policies? But if it’s politically expedient for them to claim they do care, they will, killing off our right to enjoy proper satire in the process.