Outrage Without Alcohol
Sam Simmons must be kicking himself. If only he’d done The Urban Monkey with Murray Foote in blackface, people might be actually talking about it... Read More »
Comedy TV
Neither black nor white
Reaction to the Hey Hey blackface incident keeps coming - and not just on this blog. Hungry Beast gave us Blackface for Beginners last night, a two and a half minute history of the genre, which is probably the best thing they've done so far, so kudos for that. Monday night's Media Watch also delivered an interesting insight or two; first they helpfully pointed out which part of the Commercial Television Industry Code of Practice you might like to mention in your letter of complaint to Channel 9, and secondly they explained why it has to be a letter. Meanwhile, on Wikipedia, the entry for Hey Hey It's Saturday has been edited and re-edited by users wishing to make sure their view on the incident was known, with mixed... Read More »
Short Thoughts
This week's Hungry Beast proved to be more of the same: unfunny sketches and stuff we already knew. (Snack bars for kids are packed full of sugar, apparently. What next? They tell us the world's round?!) But at least that netball group sex scandal sketch turned out to be a joke (and I don't say that because I agree with The Daily Telegraph that the sketch was an “outrage” and “poor taste humour” that “raise[s] new questions about the judgement of senior ABC staff” - the only outrage and misjudgements here are that a sketch so unfunny could make it to air), and anyway, as the Hungry Beast team gleefully informed us during the opening to episode 2, the real joke wasn't that netballers would get themselves caught in such a scandal, it was on us. Ha ha – fooled you! You thought we'd actually do a longer version next week! You idiot!... Read More »
The Nightmare Out Of Time
Here’s a question: what makes the Hey Hey it’s Saturday blackface controversy different from the controversy over The Chaser’s “Make a Realistic Wish Foundation” sketch, or Hungry Beast’s promo for a fake story about netball rape,... Read More »
A Beast of a programme
This week's most overlooked debut was Hungry Beast, which inevitably stood no chance against the Hey Hey reunion and the premiere of Celebrity Masterchef. That's probably just as well for those “19 newcomers to television” who are involved as “tell us something we don't know” - the show's motto - it... Read More »
Gilding the Lilley
Look what turned up in our inbox at the end of business Friday – okay, you probably already know all this, but it’s always fun to see the original press release so you can see just how little work in involved in journalism... Read More »
Burn GTV9, Burn.
There’s a long tradition in post-apocalyptic film and literature where the shattered survivors of a world after some unimaginable holocaust desperately attempt to escape into the... Read More »
Comedy Free Comedy
The number one thing a comedy has to do is make people laugh. But that’s kinda hard, so every few years there comes along a sweeping trend in comedy – one that doesn’t involve comedy at all. Instead of simply trying to make people... Read More »
We come not to praise Double Take, but to bury it
This week sees the last episode of Channel Seven’s sketch series Double Take. Unlike its former stablemate, the Ed Kavalee-hosted TV Burp, there are no calls for a second... Read More »
Comedy Mysteries: The Chaser’s War on Scheduling
Remember when the ABC cut back their order for the final series of The Chaser's War on Everything from eight episodes to six after the "make a Realistic Wish Foundation" sketch earned them a two week... Read More »