Well, It’s About Time

Charlie Pickering’s been getting a decent kicking over the last week and honestly… we’re torn.

At Tumbleweed HQ, we’ve been hanging shit on Pickering for the last decade or more. You want to point out his many, many flaws? Welcome to the party, pal.

So of course we’ve been enjoying seeing him being put through the wringer. Stuff like this:

Charlie Pickering didn’t just embarrass himself at a Defund the ABC rally, he also perfectly embodied everything rotten about Australia’s legacy comedy scene: comfortable, captured, terminally unfunny and full of lame opinions that ridicule genuine champions of the people while kissing the boot of our masters.

Or this:

Pickering is Australian comedy. He encapsulates its nothingness like no one else. He is the Australian comedian you’d get if you fed the past 25 years of ABC comedy into an AI and asked it to come up with the perfect ‘late night satirical news recap’ host.

Or this:

In this episode, Jan and Antoinette react to news that Charlie Pickering’s swipe at Grace Tame didn’t breach ABC’s code of conduct, which leaves them very confused about who gets to have opinions at the national broadcaster and who doesn’t.

Is music to our ears (literally, in the case of that last link)

Okay, sure, there’s been a few people who think “The Weekly is a rip off of The Daily Show” is a devastating insult. Borrowing overseas formats is how Aussie TV works. Recognising where the theft came from doesn’t make you one of the cool kids. It’s not the shape of the container, it’s what you pour into it. And in The Weekly‘s case, that’s mostly raw sewage.

What many of these arguments boil down to is: Pickering’s bland, inoffensive comedy is bad because it – and we’ll stop you there, because that’s where the argument fails. Bland, inoffensive comedy is bad. No because needed. Pickering isn’t shit because he’s a “liberal Zionist Jew” or because he’s “a private school boy/former lawyer”. He’s shit because he’s not funny.

We’re not saying anything new here but we’re going to say it anyway. The rise of Pickering is an ABC problem, not a comedy problem. The ABC is a right-leaning organization actively opposed to *all* forms of political comedy (see our endless complaints along these lines). Everything bad about the existence of Charlie Pickering flows from the fact he’s not funny. Being unfunny is why he keeps getting work.

The problem is that the ABC wants “comedians” they can turn into panel show hosts and game show hosts and lightweight “both sides” political commentators. So any comedian with any kind of commitment to being funny – no matter what their politics – ends up being sidelined. Being funny leads to a large chunk of the ABC audience “not getting the joke”. Suddenly you’re too edgy to be hosting Drive radio. Which is the only kind of career progression the ABC can offer these days.

Last Friday, The Guardian‘s Amanda Meade took a look at this story:

The ABC undertook a fast-tracked investigation into whether Pickering had breached its code of conduct or its new public comment guidelines, and issued a statement clearing him. “Pickering made clear that the views he expressed were his personal views,” an ABC spokesperson said. “They do not affect his ability to perform his role or the integrity of ABC content.”

Pickering’s personal views do not affect the integrity of ABC content. That’s a damning indictment of at least one of those things.

Let’s be clear: as it stands, this will have no affect on Pickering’s career. Having online commentators like the ones we’ve quoted hate him makes him look even better in the eyes of ABC management – it means he’s “balanced”.

See also: him being unfunny. That’s what he was hired for! If it wasn’t him being piss-useless on a regular basis it’d be someone else. Just take a look at the roster at your local ABC radio branch and you’ll find more than one equally bland chump just waiting to step up.

The ABC has created a slot for a vapid, unfunny, furrowed-brow-because-he-cares host, and Pickering poured himself into it. Eventually the ABC will tip him out, and someone else will be poured in. The problem is the slot, not what it contains.

The real issue here – from our angle at least – is that ABC management, via tools like Pickering, has deliberately destroyed the idea of political comedy in this country. People get worked up when Quizzical airs on Sky News, but at least that has a (shit) point of view. When the ABC axed *all* their remaining satirical news comedy after Labor won in 2022 – if you don’t believe us, go check – they were making something very clear: political comedy has no place on the ABC.

The problem isn’t that Pickering kinda sorta attacked Grace Tame. It’s that someone who could make such a basic mistake has been groomed by the ABC for over a decade to be their public face. He’s going nowhere because they’re happy he’s the kind of chump who blunders into these situations. If he was smart enough to avoid them he’d be too smart for his job.