Bean Is A Carrot, Author at Australian Tumbleweeds

Get voting now in the Australian Tumbleweeds Awards 2024!

Do you have views on Australian comedy in 2024? Of course you do or why are you here? Well, now’s the time to express them as you vote in this year’s Australian Tumbleweeds Awards. As always, the categories are: Plus, you get the opportunity to rant about how awful/great each show/film was, with the best... Read More »

A dog of a Christmas

What could be more Christmas-y than a dysfunctional family, mental illness and a dying dog? That seems to be the thinking behind Nugget is Dead?: A Christmas Story, Stan’s Australian-made Christmas movie for 2024, anyway. Written by and starring Vic Zerbst and Jenna Owen (The Feed and the upcoming sitcom Optics), this sees Zerbst as... Read More »

The ABC’s structural change has been bad for scripted comedy

The ABC’s 2025 upfronts announcement last week says a lot about why the ABC makes the scripted comedies it does. And it’s all about where comedy programming sits within the ABC’s corporate structure. A couple of years ago the ABC restructured and split its operations into two areas: Content and News. Content oversees comedy, drama,... Read More »

We wish it was vale, Question Everything

Question Everything’s been on a journey. Remember when it was part news explainer, part fake news debunker, with vibes of Hungry Beast? Now it seems to be trying to cut The Cheap Seats’ lunch, right down to showing clips from the very sources The Cheap Seats has brought to national attention. Like 7 News’ Tasmanian... Read More »

Back to The Office

Various reviews of this country’s very own remake of The Office (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video) have been published in the past week which range from “Why bother re-making The Office?” to “What’s the point of re-making The Office?”. And fair enough, there are already two versions of The Office in English, and countless... Read More »

Bask in more Tasks

Taskmaster is back for the second time this year, but is the second time the charm? Or the third time, given this is the third series of Taskmaster Australia.* On paper, this is a strong cast, featuring popular and successful comedians from several generations: Peter Helliar, Rhys Nicholson, Mel Buttle, Aaron Chen and Concetta Caristo.... Read More »

Buried

The new web series Buried is marketed as a comedy about being a mother, but before you start having flashbacks to The Letdown, stop. Buried, it turns out, is an entertaining and occasionally funny horror. Abi Cohen (Miriam Glaser), a stressed-out single mum of two, is trying to get her primary school-aged daughter Rosa (Audrey... Read More »

Puppet for destruction

Randy Feltface, sometime collaborator with Sammy J on shows like Sammy J & Randy in Ricketts Lane, has a new radio series on BBC Radio 4, Randy Feltface’s Destruction Manual (available in Australia on BBC Sounds). And while putting a puppet on the radio seems like a funny idea out of the blocks, the UK... Read More »

Fresh Blood 2024: Sorting the middling from the good and the bad

It’s press release time! It’s always fun when a press release puts the word ‘fresh’ in (sarcastic?) quotation marks so we don’t have to. Seriously, though, is there anyone out there who thinks these were the three most deserving of this year’s Fresh Blood pilots? If we were ranking them in order of how funny... Read More »

And the comedy Logies go to…

The winner of last night’s 64th TV Week Logie Awards wasn’t television, or even Sam Pang, who seems to be becoming the Bert Newton-esque go-to-guy for Logies hosting. Oh no. The winner of last night’s Logies was Working Dog, who won every single one of the four comedy awards. As Australia’s leading and probably most... Read More »