Hard Questions

Press release time!

We’ve seen some press releases that made no sense over the years – the ones that suggested Randling might be something people would want to watch come to mind – but this one is a real head-scratcher.

For starters, who quits a steady job hosting a quiz show to do more stand up? While we have no specific knowledge of the shooting schedule of Hard Quiz, we do know a little about the shooting schedule of numerous other no-budget ABC light entertainment shows over the years, and while being burnt out because you had to shoot a months worth of episodes in a day is a reasonable reason to quit, needing that one day a month to go do stand up? Say what?

It gets stranger: why is this news coming from the host and not the production company? Presumably they knew this was coming – it’d be a whole new level of weird if he just put this announcement out himself – but even so usually there’d be at least one layer of insulation between the host and the news his show wouldn’t be coming back. And if he wanted to take full responsibility, that’s what having a quote saying “I take full responsibility” in a press release someone else wrote is for.

Questions start coming and they don’t stop coming. If he needed more time to go do his stand up, why stay on at The Weekly, a job that most definitely takes up more of his time each week? Why suddenly decide to quit now, when Hard Quiz has been off the air for weeks and wasn’t planned to be back for ages? Why make Hard Quiz in the first place? Oh wait, that last one was just something we’ve been asking ourselves for years.

This has got to be a blow for the cash-strapped ABC, what with smarm and insults being basically free. But if it opens the door for something else – say, a quiz show with a host who actually wants to be there – it’s hard to see a downside.

Vale Hard Quiz. You’ll always be a slightly shitter Einstein Factor to us.