It’s been a big week for comedy on Seven – unfortunately that week was from twenty years ago, as the network continued to ignore producing anything new in favour of saluting shows old enough to vote and performers old enough to be excused from voting. Seven knows audiences won’t tune in these days for regular... Read More »
The ABC’s 90th-anniversary program ABC 90 Celebrate! was a noble attempt cover nine decades of broadcasting but left some... Read More »
In a semi-recent interview to promote the return of Have You Been Paying Attention? – in the real estate supplement Domain, of all places – Tom Gleisner pointed out it was now a full decade since HYBPA? first aired on Ten, and that the first few seasons had been teetering on the edge of cancellation:... Read More »
Daryl Somers is not the absolute worse human being ever to make repeat appearances on Australian television, but he almost certainly is the worst person to host Dancing With the Stars which means he’s beaten out at least one confirmed racist. Isn’t Australian television great? Not that Daryl’s got a particularly clean record when it... Read More »
Three or four Prime Ministers ago, Tony Martin announced that he’d dropped off his collection of recordings of Martin / Molloy – the drive-time radio show he did with Mick Molloy in the latter half of the 90s – at the Australian National Film and Sound Archives (or NFSA). Fans rejoiced: aside from the three... Read More »
This week saw the two hundredth episode of Have You Been Paying Attention? and the show feels as fresh as it ever did. We say “fresh” but we could have gone with “timely”, or “thrilling”, or “topical”, or any number of words that don’t necessarily start with “t”: HYBPA? came out of the gate strong... Read More »
There’s never been a better time for broadcasters to plunder their archives to keep us locked-down folk entertained, but there’s been a disappointing amount of decent archive comedy dropping on the various streaming platforms. So, it’s nice to see that Stories from the Golf is on SBS On Demand. Originally aired in 2004, Stories from... Read More »
Everyone likes it when the cast and crew of a favourite old TV show reunite for a one-off special, right? But was a reunion of those responsible for the Andrew Denton-produced current affairs/comedy hybrid and new talent initiative Hungry Beast (2009-2011) something anyone apart from those involved with Hungry Beast asked for? We’re going to... Read More »
Remember Beached Az? That one joke online animated series from back when you could build an entire career around a single meme? It’s back! As the tenth anniversary of Beached Az loomed up, they decided to do another series. But this world is very different, and they could expect no more than a 24 hour... Read More »
Let’s be honest: last week we took it easy on sketch comedy. After all, Australia used to be good at it: for decades our skill at sketch comedy was regularly held up by the experts (TV critics who hated comedy) as world class. And they weren’t entirely wrong either – Shaun Micallef’s sketch shows were... Read More »