Treating the Host with the Contempt he Deserves

After 47 years and thirty five thousand episodes, there’s not a lot left to be said about The Weekly with Charlie Pickering. And even less to be said that’s positive. But in recent weeks we’ve noticed a trend that we can’t help but applaud: more and more often, the guests are treating Pickering like shit.

No doubt it began a while back and we just didn’t notice, what with being asleep on the couch and all that. We’re pretty sure Judith Lucy used to at least talk over Pickering back when she was a regular. No doubt many of the other comedy guests treated the host with something less than fawning respect during their appearances.

But it’s been Rhys Nicholson who’s really kicked it into overdrive this year with some thinly concealed (comedy) contempt for the man sitting across from him. He’s been talking over Pickering and telling him to shut it on a regular basis. Is it funny? You bet.

This week saw Nath Valvo get in on the act. Better yet, he called Pickering “a homeowner”, which is about as perfect a summing up of everything that’s wrong with having Pickering hosting a comedy series in 2023 as you’ll find.

But we can’t go too hard on Pickering here (for once), because having the guests treat him as a lightweight stuffed shirt is (for once) a workable comedy dynamic. It actually gets laughs out of Pickering’s on air persona, which is… not something The Weekly has been good at in the past.

To be blunt, Pickering has no authority or credibility – even just as a host, let alone as someone who’s funny. The only way to get laughs out of what he’s doing is to have funnier people treat him like some irrelevant obstacle barely worth the effort to tell to sit down and shut up.

Ironically, admitting he’s crap and using that to get laughs somehow makes him less crap. Who knows, maybe in another fifteen years they’ll figure out another way to get laughs and The Weekly might start to get close to being funny. Or not.

Yeah, let’s go with not.