Let’s get Quizzical

Sky News Australia’s current relationship with comedy is being clipped and joked about on The Weekly with Charlie Pickering and The Cheap Seats, but can it generate its own laughs with the new weekly comedy quiz show Quizzical?

Er, no. It cannot. And based on its first episode (which aired last Sunday, 17th May), it can’t even produce an entertaining half-hour-long quiz game.

Let’s look at its various problems…

First up, Quizzical is cheap. Which isn’t usually a problem with other shows – in fact, lack of budget can sometimes work in comedy’s favour, forcing the cast and writers to be inventive with what they have. Except here, it looks like the format and the quiz questions were put together by a couple of overstretched Sky News staffers who didn’t have time to create unique and entertaining segments. Which is why the show consists of a grab bag of rounds well-known from other quiz shows (Who Am I?, Real or Fake, Fast Money).

And, yes, these rounds turn up, with slight variations, in lots of quiz shows, except today’s quiz shows do a bit more with them than have two teams of two sitting in a row answering the questions. Even Sky News’ devoted fans are familiar with the gloss and, we guess, excitement of The Floor, Tipping Point or The Chase, and they will take one look at Quizzical and think it’s something from community television.

But again, sometimes the cheap and cheerful approach can work in a show’s favour. Except for that you need good talent and on Quizzical’s first episode, the host was Sky News’s James Macpherson, and the panel were Lucy Zelic, a Liberal devotee, a “SaveWomensSports advocate” and regular panellist on Sky News, Michelle Stephenson, a Liberal councillor and Sky News journalist, Kel Richards, an author, lay Christian and lexicographer, who often goes on Sky News and talks about unusual words, and Joe Hildebrand, long-time News Corp journalist and right-leaning controversialist. Unsurprisingly, the laughs weren’t plentiful here, although they did try.

Before the taping, the two teams of Lucy and Kel and Michelle and Joe had presumably been told to be high energy, do banter with each other and get in there with snarky comments about the Left, but…these are not funny people. Their idea of humour is to call Greens voters “lunatics” and to make insensitive remarks about Elliot Page. And maybe that would be enough to keep the average Sky News After Dark viewer entertained, because at least they had the quiz to fall back on if the jokes weren’t firing. Except, see above. The quiz sucked.

Honestly, the most interesting bit of Quizzical was seeing how hard the show leaned into what people who don’t watch Sky News After Dark imagine it’s like. Such as non-stop baiting the Left (What about all those Labor broken promises!), or bigging up figures associated with the Right (there were questions about Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest and Sydney Sweeney). The nadir of this, naturally, involved the current US President, with each team being able to play the ‘Trump Card’ in a chosen round to double their points*.

But in the end, that’s what Quizzical is presumably about. Not about being the best quiz team on the day or creating something entertaining – hell no! This is about winding up the right-leaning audience and inspiring them to vote for the right people when the time comes. And an opportunity for the panel to be so great at sucking up to The Donald that they’re whisked off to the US to live out all their right-wing dreams.

* This is a tragic rip-off of It’s A Knockout’s Joker card – Ed.