The Case of the Missing Press Release
Mysteries! We can’t get enough of them. Mostly because Australian comedy seems to be a whole lot better at them than they are at making, you know, actual comedy. Take for example, this:
It's all coming together on our new sports comedy show @feverpitchtv. The chemistry between our hosts is magic! #FeverPitchTV #LivSyd pic.twitter.com/xApNhX920D
— ABC TV Australia (@ABCTV) May 24, 2017
Which was announced in this press release:
Nicole Livingstone and Tegan Higginbotham to host new live comedy sport show on ABC
Wednesday, May 24, 2017 — Olympic champion and media all-rounder Nicole Livingstone and comedian Tegan Higginbotham have joined forces on Fever Pitch, a new one-hour live comedy sport panel show which will premiere on Friday, June 30 at 6pm (AEST) on ABC and ABC iview.
Filmed in front of a live studio audience in Melbourne, Nicole and Tegan will be joined by a regular team of athletes and comedians including former ABC ME star Amberley Lobo, comedian Dave Thornton and Paralympic champion Dylan Alcott to look at the world of sport from all angles.
Each show will feature guest interviews, field stories, comedy sketches and studio games.
Fever Pitch will air live on Friday nights at 6pm (AEST) on ABC and iview from Friday, June 30th.
Which all seems fair enough… except that the above wasn’t the first press release for Fever Pitch (originality: who needs it) that the ABC sent out. Their first stab at announcing this series read a little something like this:
ABC accidentally commissions wrong show!
ABC bosses put pen to paper this week commissioning a series entitled Fever Pitch first thought to be a 12-part medical drama about a feisty but flawed contagious diseases expert, Professor Pamela Pitch (played by Claudia Karvan).
The programming decision considered a “no-brainer” soon became a massive “brain-ache” for the ABC executive who inadvertently signed along the wrong dotted line. It seems that the ABC are about to spend an exorbitant amount of taxpayers money on an untried, untested and possibly unwatchable panel-style entertainment/comedy show based loosely around sport.
Only it seems that by the time it reached us someone at the ABC had gone “hmmm, maybe openly mocking our programming and executives isn’t the best way to promote this already uninspiring sports panel show” and made the press release vanish from the ABC site pronto. All that hard work, wasted; guess now they know what it feels like to write jokes for The Weekly.
Seems like it’s okay when The Chaser announce a new show with a zany “whoops, the ABC stuffed up and gave us a new series” press release, but everybody else better play it straight down the line. Which might be a sporting reference but we wouldn’t know anything about that. Hey, where’s our wacky panel show?
*edit* Oh yeah, this show is definitely going to be awesome.
WHAT just happened?
Football fans around the country flocked to their televisions Wednesday night to catch A-League champions Sydney FC play Liverpool only to find some of the most cringe-worthy pre-match presenting seen in sporting history.