Australian Tumbleweeds
All The News That’s Fit To Paste
Press release round-up!
ABC Mental As… reaches Australian audiences on TV, radio and online and raises $1.47 million for mental health research
It was the week the ABC went dotty and audiences answered the call to support ABC Mental As… On TV 5.9 million Australians tuned in during mental health week and $1.47 million has been raised for mental health research to date.
The biggest cross-platform programming event the ABC has ever held, ABC Mental As… saw the broadcaster start a national conversation about mental health issues and engage its audiences in a very important issue that affects the majority of Australians in some way during their lifetime.
The challenge was to use the ABC’s storytelling resources to lead the community in breaking down some of the stigmas associated with mental illness, raise awareness of those issues and to in the process help raise some much needed funding for mental health research.
The week culminated in the Friday Night Crack Up, a live broadcast that saw some of Australia’s finest entertainers and celebrities from every network band together for this great cause.
The Friday Night Crack Up achieved a combined metro and regional reach of 2 million across ABC and ABC2 while ABC TV Mental Health programming had a combined metro and regional reach of 5.9 million viewers between 5 to 12 October. One in four Australians tuned in to ABC TV during this landmark week of programming. (Source: OzTAM and RegionalTAM)
There’s a lot more after that, but we’re all about the comedy here. Wow, who would have guessed a comedy-based variety show would rate so well? Ok, Daryl Somers for one, but his idea of “comedy-based variety” and the general public’s part company around the time he says he wants to host.
Still, that’s a fairly impressive figure, and while no doubt a lot of the audience drawing power came from the various one-off bits from high profile comedy types (Rob Sitch as Mike Moore, Shaun Micallef and Frances Greenslade, etc) – and having it be the capper to an entire themed week wouldn’t have hurt either – you’d have to think someone somewhere at the ABC is thinking of a way to keep the ball rolling. Compared to pretty much anything else on television, live variety is still relatively cheap; even if all the ABC’s attempts at it in the 21st century have first stunk then sunk, if at first you don’t succeed…
THE CHASER’S MEDIA CIRCUS
The Chaser team returns to ABC TV this Wednesday at 8.30pm, with a brand new format, The Chaser’s Media Circus, which turns the news game into a game show.
Each week, host Craig Reucassel and two teams of guests dissect the week’s news together with Chas Licciardello, the one-man media brains trust who is a sort of cross between Dickie Knee and Rain Man.
Joining the Media Circus this week for Team Australia are Ben Jenkins (The Checkout), Waleed Aly (The Project) and Andrew Hansen (The Chaser). ASIO has been informed that Alex Lee (The Roast), journalist Ellen Fanning and Chris Taylor (The Chaser) are officially part of Team Evil.
The Chaser’s Media Circus: the news game where everyone loses. Wednesdays at 8.30pm on ABC.
Wow, the more we hear about this the less interested we become. If it didn’t have the Chaser name on it we’d be worried it was shaping up to be The Gruen News; having someone from The Roast on board doesn’t exactly raise our hopes for sparkling satire. Still, The Chaser have been solid comedy performers these last few years. The benefit of the doubt remains in effect.
JULIA ZEMIRO’S HOME DELIVERY
New series starts Wednesday October 15 at 9.00pm, ABC
Julia Zemiro returns to walk our favourite funny people down memory lane, and back home to their old stomping ground. With each step uncovering the people, places and events that shaped them into the person we know today.
Shot entirely on location, this nine-part series – six in Australia and three in the UK – features home-grown guests: Dave Hughes; Wendy Harmer; Julia Morris; Nazeem Hussain; Sam Simmons and Stephen Curry. The Home Delivery UK episodes star Bill Bailey, Ross Noble and Ruth Jones.
Julia Zemiro is an interviewer of great charm, wit and depth. She puts her guests at ease with her genuine curiosity and warmth, and they respond by opening up and sharing parts of their lives not usually revealed to interviewers. She plays along with her comedic companions in a way that delights and entertains but she is also an astute and sensitive listener, willing to probe and ask the difficult questions.
Each trip back in time is as different as the performers are themselves. Some revel in returning to place they grew up and may not have seen in years and share happy memories and heart -warming anecdotes. For others, returning to the scenes of their formative years is a more complicated and bittersweet experience.
All guests set off on their ‘day of Delivery’ willing to go deep. They reveal personal stories from their childhoods to the present day. They open up about their Mums and Dads, brothers and sisters. They spill their guts, share their stories both happy and sad and give the viewer real insight into the performer within and the person they are.
The series starts on 15 October with Dave Hughes, followed by Wendy Harmer, Ross Noble, Julia Morris, Bill Bailey, Sam Simmons, Ruth Jones, Nazeem Hussain and finally Stephen Curry.
This one’s a dilly of a pickle. The first series was a bit of a disappointment to us, though it lifted its game as it went along. The big problem seemed to be that it largely relied on the guests’ ability to tell their own stories, rather than being based around a strong interviewer as host. Zemiro’s recent ABC interview with new Doctor Who Peter Capaldi didn’t exactly convince us that she’s been developing her skills in that area, so this could shape up to be a bit more hit and miss than we’d like.
Of course, we’d also like it to be about how the guests developed as comedians, not a bunch of random heart-warming or -wrenching tales of youthful suffering, but it’s from the folks who brought you the blatantly manipulative Enough Rope: even we know you can’t zoom in on those award-winning tears if they’re not there.
Not This Old Shit Again
We go on and on about this so often even we’re sick of it. No, not Josh Thomas: the twin evils of Australian criticism – critics siding with their mates instead of the viewing public, and critics who think the best way to support the local industry is… oh wait, since when was “supporting the local industry” even part of a critics job? Now retiring film critic Margaret Pomeranz has come out swinging against the harsh hand the local press dealt Josh Lawson’s recent sex comedy The Little Death:
The latest manifestation of our apparent cinematic self-hate has been around The Little Death, Josh Lawson’s take on sexual fetishes. Australian critics have almost universally condemned the film, which stands in contrast to its rave reception at the Sydney Film Festival, where it premiered and was second-most-popular film with the audience, and at the Toronto Film Festival, where it was launched – and widely sold – internationally.
Among those Australian critics who have “universally condemned” The Little Death were, um, us:
It’s basically a collection of lame sketches that’re only slightly better than The Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting, in that once they explain the basic set-up (they’re all based around couples with a specific fetish – one woman is turned on by her husband crying, another has a rape fantasy, a guy only gets turned on by his wife when she’s unconscious, etc) they just wander around for a while then fizzle out. Off the top of our heads, of the four main storylines two end in a pregnancy, one ends in marriage and one in divorce. They might be legitimate relationship milestones but they’re hardly surprising or funny.
So yeah, not big fans.
The thing to pay attention to in Pomeranz’s somewhat incoherent article – first she talks about local films that received solid reviews but were shunned at the box office, then she blames poor reviews for the bad box office of Australian films… so Australian films should be given good reviews even though by her own argument good reviews don’t help at the box office? – is this bit that comes a mere ten paragraphs after she starts defending The Little Death:
A disclaimer is in order here. I was unable to review the film because my elder son was one of the executive producers. But that connection means I can see up-close the anguish of putting a film out there only to have it so dumped on locally.
So she’s not speaking here as a reviewer, or even as a supporter of the local industry: it’s the mother of one of the producers saying “stop picking on my son’s movie”. Why did this even get published?
Only kidding: we all know that blaming reviewers for when a local movie or TV series tanks is a national pastime. No matter that when critics do come out in force to support something that the audience clearly isn’t interested in – oh look, more articles on how Please Like Me is “the best show you’re not watching” – it makes fuck-all difference. Critics should side with the local industry at all times, even if that means (as has arguably been the case with the career of Margaret Pomeranz) the general public becomes aware of their bias and ignores them. Because hey, if the public are ignoring critics, they’ll probably pay more attention to actors and film-makers telling them how great Australian films are, right?
We’ve been doing this long enough to know just how much power critics have in the real world, and it’s pretty much bugger-all. The only time we can influence anyone’s decision is when they’re a): open to the idea of watching something but b): haven’t made up their mind as to what to watch. When it comes to Australian films, after years of duds – duds critics like Pomeranz talked up hard for “the good of the industry” – the audience has made up their mind. Unless it actually looks really good – and honestly, how many Australian films can you say that about – they’re not interested*.
As for Pomeranz, turns out she’s just another “critic” who sides with the big boys instead of the viewers who turn to her for advice. It’s no surprise that she came out with this twaddle having already announced her retirement; now she doesn’t even have to pretend to be objective about what she wants to peddle. This is the kind of ingrained bias that puts people off both critics and the media they shamelessly promote. At this stage of her career, she’s doing more harm than good.
*other real problems with getting people to see Australian films include: poor marketing, limited availability, and lack of audience drawcards. C’mon, we’re talking here about a middle-class sex sketch comedy with Josh Lawson as the star: it’s a wonder they got anyone out of their houses to see that.
Vale Utopia (the Australian one)
The fact that the final episode of Utopia involved the Nation Building Authority missing out at an awards night was yet another might big clue that whatever Working Dog were seeking to achieve with this sitcom, a bluntly realistic look at the infrastructure management of this once-great nation probably wasn’t it.
(ok, sure; there probably are – well, almost certainly, but don’t expect us to do the research – awards handed out to public service organisations. But they’re hardly the kind of thing you’d mention up front in a “realistic” look at infrastructure management.)
Instead, we got pretty much exactly what we want from Working Dog in sitcom form: someone smart but largely ineffectual becoming increasingly exasperated as the seemingly logical but astoundingly stupid people around them browbeat the very idea of “change” into the ground. It’s not a particularly complex set-up, but it’s a great way to generate jokes: we’ll take it over “a bunch of interchangable people are mildly snarky to each other, then someone dies” any day.
“Why would anyone agree to something so stupid?”
“It was an election, it got away from us, the PM signed a Memorandum of Understanding.”
“Why?”
“I don’t think he understood it.”
Sure, it’s a cheap joke, but it’s a joke. Australian television comedy has never really been writer-driven – even back in the 80s most of the big shows (Mother & Son aside) were writer-performer led – but there once was a time when writing was actually seen as kind of important to making comedy work. Working Dog, being more on the “writing” side of the writer-performer scale (and not just because they write actual books), tend to create writer-driven comedy: situations are chosen because of their comedy potential, characters are designed to be funny – whether on their own or in their interactions with others – and so on.
To the untrained eye – which seems to cover an awful lot of the current crop of Australian television critics – this kind of thing can seem old-fashioned and quaint. The current fad in comedy as far as they’re concerned is for “realism”: characters are vaguely defined (just like real people), they drift in and out of mundane situations (just like real life), and they don’t say jokes – just vaguely amusing things every once in a while (just like real life). Unfortunately, this makes for shit comedy. Just like 99.9% of real life.
Why this isn’t plain for all to see remains a mystery to us. Maybe it’s because with a show like Utopia it’s easy for pretty much anyone to see how good it is – which is pretty good but not quite a classic. There are lots of jokes, some pointed observations, a bunch of broad performances –
– actually, if you were looking for problems with Utopia, the performances might be a good place to start. None of them were actively bad, but very few of them were all that good. We’re going to blame the writing here: having Rob Sitch playing an exasperated straight man (a role he did effortlessly) felt like a waste of his talents, while pretty much everyone else (with the exceptions of Kitty Flanagan’s forceful yet disconnected PR flack and Lehmo’s brash governmental liaison) was playing a character without any real character. They got the jokes out there, but there was never much going on with the personalities behind the jokes; the idea that a situation would become funny simply because we could anticipate how a character would react to it didn’t ever get much of a look in here –
– and that’s pretty much it. Don’t get us wrong, it’s extremely difficult to get even that much right and we’re not downplaying the skill that’s gone into Utopia in the slightest. We’re just saying that it’s a broad comedy that’s clearly trying to be funny: to a large extent it’s a case of you laugh or you don’t, which tends to leave critics with not a whole lot else to say.
Of course, it could just be that Utopia had the misfortune of being a show about the way the government uses infrastructure to divert attention from its problems just at a time when the government was using the threat of terrorism and military action to divert attention from its problems, thus making what should have been a sure-fire topical comedy seem just a little adrift. Fingers crossed that for all our sakes things are back on track for (the inevitable, and much-anticipated by us) second series…
Something To Think About
Twitter time:
PMJG questioning why ABC isn't making an At Home With Tony if it wasn't another gendered attack on her #GillardMelb
— Comtesse de Illyrie (@OliviaIllyria) October 7, 2014
“PMJG”, in case you were wondering, is Julia Gillard, currently giving a talk in support of her autobiography. And while we tend to think the brief existence of At Home With Julia may have had more to do with politics rather than gender – the ABC is constantly sucking up to the Liberal side of politics, because that’s the side that’s happy to rip the guts out of their budget – it’s still a good point.
So hey, why did we have to wait until we had a female PM before we got a satirical show focusing on a serving PM’s home life? Or has Gillard – and everyone else – forgotten this comedy gold from Rove Live:
Just be grateful we couldn’t find any clips of Wednesday Night Fever‘s “Downton Abbott”.
Turning Up Your Toes
And so Greg Fleet’s long awaited sitcom Die On Your Feet died the way it lived: ignored by pretty much everyone. Hey, members of the Australian media rabbiting on about how Please Like Me is “the best comedy you’re not watching”; how about mentioning the comedy starring actual big comedy names like Greg Fleet and Adam Hills?
But of course, a show that’s actually trying to be funny isn’t what Australian comedy is about these days. Die On Your Feet was in many ways a throwback to the mid-00s, when the sitcom everyone wanted to rip off was Curb Your Enthusiasm: people sitting around making jokes and being mean to each other in a realistic setting. Hang on, isn’t that Please Like Me? Oh wait, we said jokes.
Snark aside, the Curb-model for sitcoms was a quasi-documentary approach to people whose careers involved being funny, and that seems to have been what Fleet was going for here. What he actually got was a bit of a mess: many of the individual scenes across the eight episodes worked well, but they barely hung together as individual episodes and as an entire series… well, like we said, some of the individual scenes were funny.
Which isn’t something we could say about the cast. Fleet has done a lot of acting over the years, and this contains some of it. Hills and Corinne Grant were either terribly misacast or extremely good at playing shape-shifting aliens who never quite got the hang of humanity. Which, again, is partly the fault of the quasi-documentary style: presumably Fleet wanted comedians in the lead roles (and the numerous talking to camera about comedy scenes do usually work ok), and not every decent comedian out there is also a decent actor.
The really disappointing thing about this generally somewhat disappointing show is that there’s a lot of stuff here that isn’t disappointing. If Fleet had somehow fashioned all the jokes here into a novel – or even a very lightly-plotted movie – it’d be a winner for sure. It does a really strong job of capturing the sense of a bunch of mates piss-farting around trying to top one another with quips and one-liners; it just doesn’t work at all when it comes to making those mates feel like actual human beings over the course of four hours. Which is a long time to spend with characters with so little depth they vanish when they turn sideways.
Plus the show was just shabbily made. The big build up at the end of ep 7 was one of the central characters was going to kill himself. Ep 8 starts with everyone else sitting around talking about someone who’d just killed himself, but then TWIST: the previously suicidal character comes in and it turns out it was someone else who topped themselves. Only – and yes, this could be our problem more than the show’s – it just felt confusing. So wait, the guy we saw writing a suicide note and staring at a noose at the very end of the previous episode just… thought better of it? Eventually it was all explained, but a confused audience is not always a laughing audience.
Die On Your Feet ended up being a reminder that putting together even an average sitcom is really difficult and you need pretty much everything to be firing to make it work. Usually when a comedy series fails it’s because the writing’s bad and it drags everything else down; here the writing (especially the funny stories and jokes) were so good it almost made everything else worthwhile. The moral here? If you fill your sitcom with characters who make jokes about everything in their lives, eventually you’ll have a show with a lot of jokes.
So if you’re willing to throw out just about everything most people watch a sitcom for, up to and including the situations – much of the show felt like they’d just filmed hour upon hour of chat in a handful of locations then spread it out across the eight episodes – then what’s left here is actually pretty good. If you were to put together a YouTube collection of the show’s funniest scenes and present them in random order with zero context, you would have a funnier and more enjoyable viewing experience than Die On Your Feet.
Though maybe leave out all the last episode suicide stuff. Even for a show fond of going bleak, that was bleak.
Le Petite Mort à L’arrivée
So Australian comedy actor Josh Lawson has turned writer-director and made a film called The Little Death. But how to get your small quirky comedy noticed in a cinema marketplace where half a dozen films from overseas debut every week? Maybe like this:
Why is Josh Lawson bashing Australian cinema? You’d think that a guy who’s leveraged his success in local television and film into prominent roles in American films like Anchorman 2 and television series like House of Lies would have some loyalty to the industry, but apparently not. Promoting his directorial debut, sex comedy The Little Death, Lawson has seemingly stumbled on a convenient marketing catch phrase – “If you are an Australian who doesn’t like Australian films, this is the film you should watch, because neither do I” – that he’s been throwing around in his interviews.
Unfortunately, the reviews once people actually saw it were more like this:
But how does The Little Death — Lawson’s first feature as writer and director — fare when it comes to walking the walk?
Let’s just say it ain’t got the legs.
As Lawson has pointed out, it is clear there are millions of movie misanthropes in our midst who’d rather stay home and wash their hair than go out and watch an Australian production.
However, The Little Death isn’t going to be the one that stops many of them reaching for the nearest shampoo bottle.
Which led to a result like this:
Josh Lawson’s The Little Death generated a tonne of media coverage and mostly favourable reviews after selling to the US and multiple other territories- so why haven’t Australian audiences been more aroused by the sexy comedy?
That question is being debated after the saga of the secret sex lives of five Sydney couples rang up $77,700 at 34 screens last weekend and $83,500 with previews.
Having seen it on this very tight-arse Tuesday, here’s our answer: it’s just not very good.
It’s basically a collection of lame sketches that’re only slightly better than The Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting, in that once they explain the basic set-up (they’re all based around couples with a specific fetish – one woman is turned on by her husband crying, another has a rape fantasy, a guy only gets turned on by his wife when she’s unconscious, etc) they just wander around for a while then fizzle out. Off the top of our heads, of the four main storylines two end in a pregnancy, one ends in marriage and one in divorce. They might be legitimate relationship milestones but they’re hardly surprising or funny.
The trouble with sketch comedy in this country for a long time now is that the old idea of “it’s too hard to come up with a punchline so getting out when you can is good enough” has mutated into “it’s too hard even developing an idea past the initial concept so… yeah”. A woman is turned on by her husband’s tears, so she comes up with ways to make him cry. That’s it. It just escalates until it ends. No twists, no surprises – and even worse, no insights: what would it actually be like to only feel sexually attracted to the person you love when they were in actual distress? Don’t expect answers here – all we get is someone playing tricks on her partner over and over so she can get her rocks off (as the kids say).
(there’s a minor subplot about an old guy who goes around door-to-door handing out baked Golliwogs, then when everyone is distracted by nostalgia he informs them he’s a sex offender. It’s the same joke three times, then on the fourth appearance he arrives during a fight and says “I’ll come back later”. This is the kind of throwaway running gag that could work in a movie packed with rapid-fire jokes and cut down to a minute tops: when it’s a slow burn spread out over what feels like minute upon minute of dead air, you’re just wasting everyone’s time)
There’s been a bit of flack sent Lawson’s way for the rape fantasy storyline, but for us that was actually one of the more sensitively handled plots: how do you go about fulfilling your partner’s sexual fantasy when it goes against everything you believe in? Of course, the storyline doesn’t actually answer any of those questions and the resolution is a massive cop-out – basically, so long as he thinks he’s done a good job it’s all good, while her unfulfilled fantasy is basically filed under “I’ll just pretend I got what I wanted so we can move on with our lives” – but in and of itself it’s not handled offensively.
Mind you, it’s not handled funnily either.
As for Lawson slagging off Australian film in general, who can blame him? For the audience this is aimed at he’s probably right. But that’s like complaining that Australian film isn’t making enough sketch comedy movies so no wonder people aren’t going to the cinema any more because clearly sketch comedy is what the mainstream wants. If people want this kind of thing they can get it elsewhere and better: Australian film is, on the whole about the kind of stories people can’t get anywhere else. Usually because all the stories with mainstream appeal have been grabbed by television or overseas film.
So this kind of stuff from the producers is a big load of crap:
“There is no doubt that we have a brand issue here, and what we’ve seen is a few key critics dig the boot in and causing a great deal of harm in an environment where our product needs nurturing,” Hilton said, “especially when we have a film that could break out and resonate with audiences. If we were reviewed 4 or 5 stars across the board and people still didn’t come, we could have pointed to a brand issue, unfortunately that’s not the case here.
“This film is for audiences, it’s not an ‘important’ story with serious message, it’s a comedy. And it’s the only thing a comedy needs to be, hilarious. What’s most disappointing about the soft opening is that the film works. We’ve seen it work for 90 minutes, every time we play to a full theatre.
Yeah, good luck getting those full theatres now. Because whatever this film is, unless you’re someone who giggles at the word “rape”, it sure as shit ain’t hilarious.
Still, we’re talking about a director who, when faced with criticism, responds with “how many films have you made, champ?” The real problem with film-making in this country is that we have a shitload of directors and producers who don’t seem to understand that perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to actually spend a few bucks on a script editor so they didn’t end up filming something that was arse.
Going by his first film, Lawson is a halfway decent director and the cast is pretty sharp across the board. But the script is an aimless mess, congratulating itself on its bravery for discussing sexual fetishes while having nothing of interest to say about them. Making a bland film aimed at an imagined white middle-class Australian mainstream isn’t breaking new ground, or giving the people what they want. If you want to do that and you’re making a comedy, maybe you might like to start with a couple of decent jokes.
Critical Failings (part 17 of a seemingly endless series)
It’s a sad indictment of the mental prowess of the people who run the Australian media that they seem to think hiring people who work in an industry to comment on that same industry is in any way useful to their readership. Oh sure, we can see how they’d come to that conclusion: who better to dissect the foibles of a specialist area than someone intimately involved in that area? It works for sports coverage after all, right?
Jesus fucking wept. Look, in sports coverage you’re hiring old farts who no longer play the game to cover a game they know well. When you hire Jazz Twemlow of ABC2’s The Roast to comment on television, you’re asking a guy who still plays… wait, “Jazz Twemlow”? Give us a minute here.
And we’re back. Anyway, thumbs down to The Guardian AU for hiring a working television performer – ok, yes, at least two of those three words are optional extras in this case, but you know what we mean – to write a hefty chunk of their television coverage. Did no-one think this would give off the appearance of someone favouring his mates and taking a swipe at his foes in the business of which he is a part? “Conflict of interest” is still a thing, right?
Sure, he’s focusing his ire on soft targets like reality television and overseas imports, possibly to avoid such a conflict. But what if the readers of The Guardian AU want to read about local comedy? Even if he could somehow guarantee that his coverage was 100% fair and balanced and not even slightly tainted by, say, the fact that if The Chaser and Mad as Hell were both to somehow get the chop The Roast would obviously yet pointlessly be promoted to the big time on ABC1, the people behind the other shows would be entitled to be somewhat pissed at having a rival pass judgement on them. Unless he only ever said nice things, and we’ve already got enough of those “critics”, thanks.
And yet this screwing over of readers and rival shows is a regular feature of the Australian television critical community, mostly because most of the members of the Australian television critical community are desperately working to remove the word “critical” from their CV. Is it general knowledge that Fairfax daily TV critic Ben Pobjie is a contributing writer for the ABC series Reality Check? You’d think it’d be the kind of conflict of interest they’d mention in every single one of his reviews, but it seems not.
Again, this is the kind of thing where people say “as long as he’s not reviewing his own show, where’s the harm?” Here’s a clue: it means that Fairfax’s TV critic isn’t reviewing a program being broadcast on the national broadcaster. Reviewing doesn’t run along a scale from “this thing is awesome” to “no comment”, despite what a shitload of people out there would like to have you think – including, it seems, the nations top movie critics. Sometimes a negative review is appropriate. And with Pobjie writing for Reality Check, it’s not going to get one from him.
“But what about you losers,” a fictional tough guys says, lurching out of the shadows and gesturing wildly at us, “we don’t even know who you really are – you could be Rove McManus for all we know!” Good point. Fuck, but The Project is shithouse, ey? Guess we’re not Rove then.
The big difference between us and these guys is that we run a blog about Australian television comedy and to the best of our ability we cover as much Australian television comedy as we can. You can read our opinions and decide if we’re right or wrong. These guys are professional television critics who seem to be deliberately ignoring at least some of Australian television comedy due to conflicts of interest.
Hey, here’s a crazy idea: maybe next time, hire television critics who can actually do their damn jobs.
We’ll Take It For As Long As It’s On Offer
Nice things: we just can’t say enough of them about Shaun Micallef. It’s not just that he (and his trusty regular cohorts, co-star Francis Greenslade and writers Gary McCaffrie and Michael Ward) are funny: he’s hard working too. Not for him vanishing for a few years in some behind-the-scenes gig or personal project no-one ever sees – he’s constantly churning out television shows (twenty episodes this year alone), with books and CDs and dozens of appearances everywhere else in between. Which is lucky, because at times it feels like he’s holding up the quality end of Australian comedy all on his lonesome.
There’s not a great deal new we can say at this stage about Mad as Hell, AKA the best comedy show on Australian television. Everything good we’ve said in the past seems to still apply – personally we’d probably prefer a few more sketches but with twenty episodes a year the interview format is clearly working just fine when it comes to giving the gags structure. And with a cast this strong just having them on-camera talking crap is good enough for us.
So for now, let’s just say we’re glad as Hell to have Mad as Hell back. If it feels just a little like Micallef’s skills would be better used elsewhere (news satire might be difficult to do, but it’s still entry level comedy and Micallef has proven multiple times that world-class sketch comedy and sitcoms are within his grasp), at least he’s doing us all a massive favour by keeping The Roast back on ABC2 where it can be safely ignored. Because all too soon Micallef will move on and the ABC, determined to have a regular news parody program no matter how low the level of quality, will bump The Roast up to prime time. And then where will we be?
It’s All Fun & Games Until Someone Gets Hurt
Press release time!
ABC APOLOGISES FOR THE CHASER’S MEDIA CIRCUS
ABC TV has today issued a pre-emptive apology for the whole series of the Chaser team’s new show, The Chaser’s Media Circus, which starts on ABC on Wednesday 15 October at 8.30pm and continues for 8 weeks.
“Looking forward a few weeks, we’ll definitely have to admit that in retrospect it could have been prevented,” said the ABC in a media release with an intentionally misleading headline.
“This is a group that not only does evil, it revels in evil,” said Prime Minister Tony Abbott in comments which appear to have been taken out of context.
The Chaser’s Media Circus is a new format by the team’s production company Giant Dwarf, makers of The Hamster Wheel, The Checkout, and election specials Yes We Canberra and The Hamster Decides.
“The Media Circus format is kind of like The Hamster Wheel… of Fortune,” said host Craig Reucassel. “It combines the Chaser team’s take on the week’s news and current affairs with the satirical comedy and media analysis of The Hamster Wheel and chucks it all together in the form of games. For the Chaser team, news really is a game now.”
“We’re hoping it will be a new low in the decline of news into entertainment,” said executive producer Julian Morrow. “We can’t destroy news, but degrading seems achievable.”
Filmed in front of a live studio audience each week shortly before broadcast, The Chaser’s Media Circus sees a mix of journalists, comedians and members of the program’s team (including writer/performers from The Checkout Ben Jenkins, Zoë Norton Lodge and Scott Abbot) dissect the week’s news and media through games like:
● Out of Order: Where teams have to organise news stories in the order they appeared in a TV news bulletin. Which is deemed most important – Syria’s civil war, the AFL results, or a neighbourly dispute over a garage roller door?
● Press Pack: Where a team member plays the part of a public figure at a press conference defending an embarrassing gaffe. Or whatever Jacqui Lambie said that particular week.
● Evil Mastermind: A fun game for the whole family where you have to decide whether a quote about “evil” is by Tony Abbott or a cartoon super-villain.
Each episode of Media Circus will also feature Chas Licciardello in the role of a one-man media brains trust, a sort of cross between Dickie Knee and Rain Man.
“It’s a shame that all the ABC’s good work for Mental Health Week (5-12 October) will be immediately cancelled out by the return of the Chaser team,” said ABC Director of Television Richard Finlayson.
The Chaser’s Media Circus is a Giant Dwarf production for ABC TV. The Executive Producers are Julian Morrow and Martin Robertson. ABC Executive Producer Sophia Zachariou.
Nice to see the ABC press department is still running with that whole “pre-emptive apology” gag when it comes to announcing The Chaser’s new projects. Also, it’s going to be more of a game show? Yeah, we’re not exactly loving that news, but we’ll hold fire there until we’ve actually seen how it turns out.
So what have we learnt from all this? Well, it seems like the long-held dream of The Chaser (core membership) to step into the background a little and pass on the performing duties to a new generation (AKA the guys from The Checkout) seems to be finally taking place. Making this series slightly more important than usual for The Chaser: if there’s any serious drop in ratings or interest, it could be taken as a sign that viewers only want “original brand” Chaser. What that would mean for the future of the team – would they break up, give up, or stick to doing their on-air work themselves – would remain to be seen.
Working Dog is usually the model for this kind of transition, but those guys hit the ground running with new cast members with Frontline (which was also a clear break from The Late Show) – this is more like the rumoured plans to keep The Late Show going with new cast members, only that never happened because most of the original cast bailed and wanted to let the format die. For a comparison with something that actually happened, this seems like the rolling casts that the various Fast Forward – Full Frontal series had throughout the 90s, and the quality there was a lot more variable – once the quality performers left, the audience fell off too.
The reason why Australian television comedy is all about the writer-performers is largely down to money. The whole Saturday Night Live model of a big team of writers plus a big team of performers has never really happened at the ABC (seriously, we’re struggling here – maybe stuff like The Sideshow?), so it’ll be interesting to see if The Chaser (which is a pretty big comedy team even with all but one member also appearing on-air) manage to pull back to behind-the-scenes stuff. Andrew Denton managed it for a while, but apart from him Australian comedy has largely been a performers’ game – if you’re not willing to stick it out in front of the camera, it’s time to find a new line of work.
Speaking personally, we’re not all that worried. The Hamster Wheel has been the most consistent (and impressive) work from The Chaser to date, so if the writing team remains the same (yes, we know that’s a biggish “if” based on that press release), we’re confident the on-air material will also remain decent. And it’s not like The Chaser have ever been universally strong on the performance side of things; it’ll be interesting to see if different performers put a different spin on their work.
As for that whole “it was going to be ten episodes but due to ‘scheduling’ it’s been cut back to eight” deal, let the rampant speculation begin…
Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number
How to explain this?
Currently halfway through its ten-episode second season, Please Like Me steadily gaining the attention of local audiences. Perhaps it was ‘Josh Thomas baggage’ – as cultural critic Dion Kagan dubs it in his wonderful Metro Magazine article – that kept local audiences away.
“Josh Thomas Baggage”. There’s the name of our new grindcore band right there.
That’s actually one of the better Please Like Me reviews we’ve read, in that it actually talks about things taking place in the show that the author likes, rather than just a bunch of vague hand-waving about how “adorable” and “quirky” and “heartfelt” the show is. If the relationship between Thomas and his on-screen mother is what you like about the show, we’re not going to argue with you: it might not be all that funny, but at least it’s an actual part of Please Like Me.
But then we get to this:
Thomas – equipped with skinny jeans, bow ties and an outspoken attitude – is a deliberately whimsical presence (think ‘adorkable’, then hate me for making you think of that word). These traits, when combined with youth, can ostracise audiences.
We won’t deny that “whimsical youth” is pretty much a synonym for “annoying”. But it’s also a little annoying when it’s assumed that the reason why audiences are being put off Please Like Me is his quirky youthfulness and not the way that large chunks of Please Like Me – while clearly well-meaning when it comes to mental illness – aren’t very funny.
We understand that it can seem a fine line between dismissing someone simply because of their youth and dismissing someone because they’re not very good – or at least, it is when you decide that saying someone isn’t very good is really just your way of saying you only like comedians that have spent years honing their craft. Wait, that is what we’re saying. Oh God, we’re prejudiced against the kids now.
Let’s put it this way: twenty-seven isn’t young enough to excuse a show this bad. Chris Lilley was barely 30 when he did We Can Be Heroes, and whatever that shows flaws it was a lot sharper than Please Like Me. But to be fair, Australian comedy has been aging a lot since the turn of the century – when The Chaser are still the up-and-comers of ABC comedy you know something’s not right – so it might seem legit to suggest that Thomas should be supported simply because he’s not pushing 40 like all the other comedy “young guns”.
But for those of us with long memories – or working DVD players – it’s fairly easy to compare the twenty-something Thomas with a whole lot of twenty-something comedians from Australia’s comedy past. And it doesn’t take all that long to realise that by twenty-seven you really don’t have many excuses left for not being really funny. How old were the Doug Anthony All-Stars in their prime? How old were Tony Martin and Mick Molloy on The Late Show? Hamish Blake is only 33: you didn’t hear anyone making age-related excuses for him when he and Andy Lee had the biggest radio show in the country back in 2009 – when they were both twenty-seven.
Come on, Josh Thomas might not be an old comedy pro but he’s certainly old enough for his work to be judged on its merits. The core of Working Dog were barely in their 30s when they made Frontline: there’s a shitload more than five years separating that and Please Like Me.