Bean Is A Carrot, Author at Australian Tumbleweeds
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 »
Let us bee the ones to spell this out for you
Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont-Spelling Bee seems like a safe bet. It started as a Zoom/YouTube show during the pandemic. And it’s since morphed into a series of live shows at various comedy festivals and an eight-part New Zealand television series (with a second season of eight episodes starting next week!). Now, there’s a local version... Read More »