A few people today have noticed something we picked up on yesterday: Channel Ten’s pulled the plug on tonight’s comedy line-up. No Thank God You’re Here, no The Inspired Unemployed. And why? The sudden realisation that Australian comedy is in a death spiral and they were only prolonging the agony? Worse: they don’t want it... Read More »
After 47 years and thirty five thousand episodes, there’s not a lot left to be said about The Weekly with Charlie Pickering. And even less to be said that’s positive. But in recent weeks we’ve noticed a trend that we can’t help but applaud: more and more often, the guests are treating Pickering like shit.... Read More »
We don’t often link to profile stories but we think you’ll agree this one is something special: No-one cared who Jason Gann was until he put on the mangy dog suit. For 10 years, Jason played the misanthropic, bong-smoking dog, Wilfred, first in a hit comedy series in Australia on SBS, and then in a... Read More »
Wil Anderson has a new book to promote, and we all know what that means: talking about ways to get more young people on the ABC! Wait, what? In a feature headlined “Wil Anderson’s bold solution for the ABC’s youth problem” – presumably the bold part is that he’s not offering to give up any... Read More »
Australian comedy: what’s the point? Making us laugh, sure – but a fart can manage that. Which puts the collected works of Charlie Pickering in a pretty bad light. On the other hand, there’s this: Which was a timely reminder that, once upon a time, Australian satire used to go beyond just re-stating what was... Read More »
It’s got to be tough for Australia’s political comedians at the moment. Not only do they have to struggle with the whole “not funny” thing, but with a new Federal government in power they’ve finally got to come up with new jokes. Or do they? Remember last week’s The Weekly haha of course not. Here’s... Read More »
Probably the best way to look at Hey Hey It’s Saturday in 2022 is to not look at it at all. The second best way is to look at it as a shed out the back of Daryl Somers’ place full of dubious old crap he just can’t let go of. If he wants to... Read More »
One week into the official election campaign and… yeah. Remember when political satire was a central part of Australian culture? You do? Have fun down at Services Australia trying to claim the old age pension. Slightly less snarkily, these days any election campaign really drives home the shrinking opportunities for political comedy on Australian television.... Read More »
Well this was interesting: Sadly for us, because like everyone else in the Australian media we are little more than ravenous black holes of hate that require everyone else to suffer in order to even slightly relieve our pain, this wasn’t some massive scandal involving government interference or the ABC caving to outside interests. Instead,... Read More »
Hey, where’d all the scripted comedy go? When we started this blog the basic idea was to do two or three posts a week, because each week there was usually two or three shows on television we could talk about. There’d be something new, something in the middle of its run, maybe a press release... Read More »