TEAM work
For a while now we’ve been enjoying the occasional, but very much worth the wait, podcasts from the TEAM Effort team. That’s T for Tony Martin, E for Ed Kavalee, A for Ash Williams, M for Lawrence “Moonman” Mooney and Effort for, um, the guests, who have included the likes of Tom Gleisner, Leigh Sales, Jane Kennedy and Hamish Blake.
The TEAM Effort team – Ed Kavalee, Lawrence Mooney, Ash Williams and Tony Martin
If you liked Get This, this is very much the Martin/Kavalee reunion you’ve been waiting for; they’re even playing clips of Rex Hunt saying “How good is this?”. And amazingly, given how Get This ended (it was axed by Triple M in circumstances that suggested management weren’t exactly fans of the show), the TEAM Effort is made by Triple M and produced by Triple M Melbourne’s Hot Breakfast producer Jay Mueller in the studios of Triple M.
It probably helps that Kavalee’s a big name at the M’s these days, being the co-host of the Brisbane breakfast show, but even so, it seems like a miracle that this show actually exists. This is a Triple M production where no one talks about sport or tries to appeal to whatever tradies are supposed to be into. How did this slip through the net? Are the TEAM breaking into the studios at night and bribing the security guards to keep schtum?
However they managed to get it out there, the TEAM Effort is exactly the kind of freewheeling chat you’d expect from a podcast involving four men talking to each other, but made with the sort of quality and care and attention that only a group of people with decades of broadcasting and stand-up experience between them are going to turn out. Oh, and to get back to our wonder at how the hell this is managing to go out under the Triple M banner, much of the conversation in recent episodes seems to have been about executives that various members of the TEAM have encountered at Triple M or its parent company Austereo. This is exactly the kind of sailing-close-to-the-wind material that presumably got Get This axed – how good is this?!
In fact, the TEAM Effort is a show that’s rapidly putting many of the other well-known comedy podcasts to shame; its most recent episode made it to number 12 in the iTunes Australian podcasting charts. Not a bad effort, TEAM Effort, not bad at all.
Been listening to this since it started, and to say that it is literally exactly what I always hoped podcasting could be is a huge understatement.
I was an enormous fan of Get This – one of the most pioneering radio programs put to air on the commercial dial, mystifyingly axed by a network that clearly valued tedium and uniformity over talent and ratings. And when it disappeared I always entertained the notion that Martin, Kavalee and Richard Marsland would turn up together on their own podcast, freed from the obligations of playing whatever squalid musical chum was clogging the station playlist that month, and able to just let loose on whatever flights of fancy they liked. Sadly that wasn’t to be – no doubt because they had much more in their careers to be getting on with at the time; podcasts hadn’t quite caught on as a profitable enterprise yet; and possibly Martin was just sick of all that shit for a while. Who knows? Then the passing of the beloved Richard Marsland shocked everyone, it seemed like it might never happen.
Sure, they flirted with it a few times. There was a Nova summer podcast, if I recall, and I think a summer Triple M one with Mooney and Kavalee, but nothing that had any sense of recurring on schedule.
But now this – like some wonderful pirate radio, straight out of the heart of the beast that killed them the first time around. With Kavalee as host this time, providing a decidedly more ripping, sarcastic tone to the whole affair. And it’s just what I had always hoped for.
A rotating bench of extremely funny people, many from Working Dog, all eager to have a genuine, hilarious, uninterrupted chat about whatever they like. There’s still some obvious editing and censoring going on (particularly, it seems, whenever Mooney is on), but some of the longer form round tables they have here, calling back on previous jokes, building them out further, become sublime. Even dipping back into the Get This stuff – the Rex Hunt audio, and some tales from the old days – doesn’t strike as lazy pandering so much as just building on the absurdity.
Do I wish it was a weekly release? Shit yes. But after waiting for literally years, this drip feed of goodness will do just fine.