Comedy TV
- Comedy TV
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- October 12, 2009
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- Comments Off on 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 »
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 »
- Comedy TV
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- October 05, 2009
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- Comments Off on 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 »
- Comedy TV
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- October 04, 2009
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- Comments Off on 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 »
- Comedy TV
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- September 30, 2009
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- Comments Off on 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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
- Comedy TV TV Critics
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- September 09, 2009
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- Comments Off on The Flim-Flam King of the Rim-Ram Room
Press releases are supposed to be full of over-oxygenated waffle designed to fan the flames of interest in a program that otherwise would barely rate a grunt as your average viewer clicked past it to repeats of Seinfeld... ... Read More »
- Comedy TV
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- September 06, 2009
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- Comments Off on Vale TV Burp
So farewell then TV Burp, the bought-in British format that could have worked. Some have argued that TV Burp wasn’t good enough to care about but, while it wasn’t the funniest thing ever, it was getting better. It certainly got more praise than its partner show Double Take (admittedly, not difficult), hence Seven swapping the... Read More »
