TV Critics

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 »

A Flaming Bag of FM-friendly turds

On JJJ a few weeks back, while talking up his upcoming ABC television series, John Safran described it as being full of pranks and making fun of people – basically, “everything people don’t want in comedy anymore”. And he has a... Read More »

No so much a backflip as a Somers-assault

With hindsight the upcoming return of Hey Hey it’s Saturday to our screens (link) was obvious, an excrement-laden juggernaught bearing down on an unwilling nation like a strident university student’s clumsy rape metaphor...... Read More »

Sometimes dead is better

So Daryl Somers wants to bring Hey Hey It's Saturday back- well, according to The Herald-Sun he does, on the back of a Facebook campaign to revive the ill-lamented series (here).... Read More »

Gerard Henderson vs The Chaser

If there was a running gag throughout this week’s Chaser, it was Andrew Hanson’s furious letter-writer character Phillip Harley of Adelaide complaining about how the the show wasn’t attacking enough religious groups. The Harley character has usually popped-up once or twice in each episode of the current series to complain about various non-issues, but it... Read More »

Gavan Disney’s wood

It’s long been an article of faith that the only Australian showbiz book better than a warts-n-all look behind the scenes of Hey Hey It’s Saturday’s 20-odd year run would be Tony Martin’s occasionally mentioned (and most likely a gag) examination of MMM management Wankers Away! But that was until the Gavan Disney sex... Read More »

yet again with The Chaser…

It was probably around the “Baby Day Spa’ sketch on this week’s episode of The Chaser’s War on Everything that I realised a couple of... Read More »

Never forgive, never forget…

Our love of The Mick Molloy Show isn’t exactly a secret – as the closest thing to an One True Successor to the genius of The Late Show, its demise at the hands of the tabloid press remains a true tragedy. So it was interesting to hear from a friend of a friend’s friend recently the following... Read More »

The Chaser is still exactly the same

A recent article which appeared in the Herald-Sun and various other Murdoch-owned newspapers and websites argued that The Chaser had “gone soft”, “looked tentative” and was now taking “aim at some easy targets”. It's hard to not ask where Vickery and Horan were during the first two series of The Chaser's War on Everything, or even the first two episodes of the current... Read More »

It’s in the stars

TV networks don’t like talent. They’re in the business of making programs, not making stars. Which is hardly surprising: once you’ve seen Eddie McGuire become a household name, clearly that side of things is in the hands - or tentacles- of some kind of morality- and sanity-free Lovecraftian Elder... Read More »