Bean Is A Carrot, Author at Australian Tumbleweeds - Page 25 of 52
Satire’s hard problem
Clarke & Dawe returned to our screens last week and once again reminded us how satirists should be doing it: it’s about pointing out where things are going wrong. Satire only achieves what it’s there to do if it leaves the audience laughing, better informed and angry for change. And this is something that’s only... Read More »
Mychonny, Yourchonny, Everybodychonny!
Does broadcast TV have a future beyond the things that only it can do best: news, live coverage of sport and big budget “event TV”? With Netflix, Amazon, Stan and other streaming services offering drama, documentary, and films to watch anytime you want, should broadcasters like the ABC even bother? When it comes to comedy,... Read More »
Keeping it local, Behave Yourself!
It’s press release time! A major investment in locally produced, prime-time programming. (20 February 2017) Channel Seven will begin work on three locally produced programs, two of which are original formats. “The quality of the work coming out of our development team is exceptional,” says Seven’s Director of Network Programming Angus Ross. “The three commissions... Read More »
Hey Hey It’s Stop Laughing… This is serious Day
An obvious omission from the first series of Stop Laughing…This is serious was Hey Hey It’s Saturday. A show which in its day was hugely popular, but on reflection seems embarrassing. And we don’t just mean the Jackson Jive. It was impossible not to watch all the clips from Hey Hey… – and the various... Read More »
Comedy blap on the radar
Even in the risk averse comedy climate that is Australia’s, you’d think a show featuring Gina Reilly and Hamish Blake could get funding. But no, Ryan Shelton’s new web series How To Life has been funded by Britain’s Channel 4 and is currently available online as part of Comedy Blaps. Comedy Blaps is Channel 4’s... Read More »
Dumb deal = dumb satire – We analyse the parodies of Trump and Turnbull’s phone call
It’s been almost impossible not to stumble across a parody transcript of the Donald Trump/Malcolm Turnbull phone call in the past couple of... Read More »
Stop Laughing… we certainly did
The first series of Stop Laughing…this is serious was a worthy if largely unsuccessful attempt to cover the entire history of Australian comedy in three 1-hour programs. Now it’s back for a second series, and in the first episode, the topic was characters. At the start of the episode, the following theory was posited: Barry... Read More »
It comes but once a year
In word terms, 2016 was the year of “democracy sausage” and “post-truth”, but if the world of comedy had its say it’d probably go for “banter”, a term rightly mocked in The Yearly with Charlie Pickering for describing conversation that sounds funny but actually isn’t. Oh, the irony. But as joke after half-arsed observation died... Read More »
Whoa, Fancy Boy (wham-ba-lam)
We’ve heard more exciting comedy announcements than the one about Fresh Blood alumni Fancy Boy and Wham Bam Thank You Ma’am getting series. But when we tuned into ABC2 last night and discovered that only one of them was terrible, we found ourselves feeling slightly less Scrooge and a little more Tiny Tim. It’s a... Read More »
Cheap Laughs and a 30 Year Growth
Back in the mid-80’s, some people in the UK came up with an idea for an improvised comedy radio show called Whose Line Is It Anyway?, which was a sort of mash-up of theatre sports and stand-up, inspired by a regular improv night at London club The Comedy Store. Following the radio series, it was... Read More »