Ok, The (AFL) Footy Show has got the axe, and not a minute too soon. So why should we care? Well, some of the seemingly endless articles looking back over the history of Nine’s The Footy Show – and who doesn’t remember the best running gag in Logies history where the much less popular NRL... Read More »
Just over two years ago we lost John Clarke, if not the greatest satirist the Southern Hemisphere has ever produced then certainly in the top two. Clarke was best known for writing and starring in the sitcom The Games and for his weekly sketches with Bryan Dawe, but he did an awful lot of other... Read More »
The problem with reunion shows is that fans of the show are so pleased the reunion is happening at all that it kinda doesn’t matter what’s in the actual show. Still, if you’re a fan of Spicks and Specks, you were presumably satisfied by the Spicks and Specks Reunion Special, with its all-star line-up of... Read More »
Three episodes in and we’re increasingly unsure about Back in Very Small Business, the reimagining of the brilliant 2008 sitcom Very Small Business. The original, largely a two-hander between Don Angel (Wayne Hope) and Ray Leonard Leonard (Kim Gyngell), was an “odd couple” comedy, in which insensitive, boorish, “Howard battler” Angel owned and operated a... Read More »
The return of All Aussie Adventures last night comes at a time in TV history when broadcasters seem to be increasingly looking to the popular favourites of the past to draw in an audience (Roseanne, that proposed re-boot of Hypotheticals, that proposed re-boot of Frasier). Which is all well and good if it’s entertaining and... Read More »
If there’s a genre of comedy that Australia doesn’t make a lot of and probably should do a bit more of, it’s animated comedy. Sure, we had Pacific Heat about a year ago, and Fresh Blood produced Koala Man, which is being made into a series, but that’s kinda it. So, it was nice to... Read More »
While we were noodling around on SBS On Demand the other day, we came across some of the pilot shows from Comedy Runway, a 2014 SBS comedy pilot scheme that we’d completely forgotten about. And because some of the shows are about to disappear from SBS On Demand quite soon, and we’ve never reviewed them,... Read More »
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 »
Ok, so it’s not all-new episodes of the much-loved movie-based comedy program The Bazura Project, but it’s close: the Bazura team have finally got their website up and running and it’s a doozy. We shouldn’t be surprised really. The Bazura Project always was a show that took a fairly obsessive view of a subject much-loved... Read More »
If you thought the Australian television comedy scene was dead at the moment, well, sometimes dead is better: Get patriotic on the Aussie comedy day with Open Slather (Seasons 1 & 2), Just for Laughs Australia 2015, Best of the Sydney Comedy Fest 2016, and Melbourne Comedy Festival’s Big Three-Oh! 2016. If you missed Open... Read More »