Australian Tumbleweeds
Well, Now We Know Why The Roast Got The Chop
From the ABC’s press release trumpeting their 2015 line-up:
Comedian CHARLIE PICKERING returns to ABC to present a news comedy show that promises to be opinionated and outspoken
Well, at least they didn’t say “funny”. According to websites much closer to actual news sites than ours:
Humorist and self-avowed political junkie Charlie Pickering will host 20 episodes of a news comedy show.
And that’s where the 2015 budget for The Roast went. We wouldn’t have thought it was possible to do worse than The Roast, but then 7.30 did their bit for dumbing down the news media of this country last night and now all bets are off. Who knew Australia’s news was so hilarious? It mostly seems to waver between car crashes, outbursts of racism and politicians trying to distract us from the fact that they and their business cronies have decided Australia is a place that grows shit in the ground or digs shit out of the ground and everything else can go to hell. Laugh? We barely know where to begin.
Ah bugger it, here’s the whole spiel from the press release:
A decade and a half after he began his broadcast career at Triple J, Charlie Pickering, political junkie, former lawyer, elegant gentleman and seriously funny stand-up comedian, is back where he belongs at the ABC. In 2015 he will premiere a news comedy show, a tonight show, a chat show and a panel show all in one. Sharing the set with guests and fellow comedians, Charlie will get back to his comedy roots calling bullshit on newsmakers, special interests, politicians and other charlatans. Hilariously outspoken, it will shamelessly turn the hypocrisies and idiocies of the world into the least cheap laughs the Australian taxpayer can afford.
Feel free to pick holes in it yourselves, we’re not in the mood.
Of course, the ABC has a bunch more stuff lined up for 2015, and much of the hilarity in the Fairfax coverage is their “but where are these shows, hmmmm?” tone, which suggests they plan to spend a large chunk of 2015 asking the bleeding obvious. To wit:
Notable in their absence from the extensive list were series including Upper Middle Bogan, Kitchen Cabinet, anything from The Chaser team, the ground-breaking series Black Comedy, and more.
Let’s answer this for you: Kitchen Cabinet is an idea that’s both run its course and is too small to hold the break-out star that is Annabel Crabb; The Chaser have seemed increasingly disinterested in actually putting on a television show this year and presumably the ABC have noticed (plus they’re moving into behind-the-scenes production)(and their shows are often announced later on, as they tend to appear towards the end of the following year), Black Comedy was a one-off experiment that was on ABC2 (*correction: it’s still airing on ABC1) and so will struggle like crazy to get a second series like everything else there – apart from Please Like Me s3, which has already been bought and paid for by Pivot in the US so of course it’s coming back – and as for Upper Middle Bogan, may we direct your attention here:
Also, scurrilous gossip time: a rumour currently doing the rounds of at least one capital city’s comedy scene is that the aforementioned new Head of Comedy flew the producing team behind one of those three shows to Sydney to inform them that he was not only not a fan of their series, but that he is so big a not-fan of them and their work that under no circumstance will there be a third season of their series – and this before the second has even gone to air.
And in more good news, despite the aforementioned scurrilous gossip Gristmill do have a comedy series lined up for 2015 – only it’s aimed at kids:
LITTLE LUNCH – a comedy about what happens in the primary school playground at snack time
The other big news so far is that Shaun Micallef’s doing a sitcom:
Shaun Micallef stars as our third longest-serving prime minister in THE EX-PM – a narrative comedy that fixes its beady eye on the world of grounded high-flyers struggling to stay relevant
And from the press release thingy:
As our third longest-serving prime minister, Andrew Dugdale (Shaun Micallef) was a man who mattered. He dined with presidents and kings, co-hosted world summits and changed the lives of millions of his fellow Australians. But since his publicly-mandated retirement, this not-so-elder statesman has far too much time on his hands and no one to waste it on. What’s a former Man of the People’ to do? This narrative comedy series fixes its beady eye on the world of grounded high-flyers and benched heavy-hitters. How do they make sure their elephant stamp on history remains indelible? What do they do when someone goes through their cupboards and finds all those skeletons? And does anybody want anything from the shops? A tale of redemption somewhere between House of Cards and One Foot in the Grave. THE EX-PM is created, written by and stars Shaun Micallef.
Mad as Hell is also going to be back, but probably just for the one series – got to leave room for Pickering’s new show, after all. Gruen (in some form or another) will also be returning, as will Utopia.
New ABC1 series include Judith Lucy is All Woman (“It’s a timely exploration of where women are at in modern Australia – and what that means for men – told from the unique perspective of someone who’s been a woman for most of her life.”) and Sammy J & Randy in Ricketts Lane (it’s a six part sitcom), while on ABC2 we’ll be getting (finally – these have been a while coming) 8MMM Aboriginal Radio, a comedy set inside an Alice Springs community station and Maximum Choppage, a comedy series written by and starring Lawrence Leung.
Also of interest to us and hopefully you is the three part doco Stop Laughing, This is Serious:
In the mid 1980s Australian comedy was booming. Emerging from the margins of theatre, circus, vaudeville, cabaret and pubs, our comedy scene exploded. This series tracks the comedy revolution in this country and explores the way it has intersected with Australian culture, politics and identity through stand-up, sketch, panel shows, sitcom, musical and variety. Featuring some of our leading comedians and drawing on an extensive television archive, this series explores the maturation of Australian comedy, unpicking our cultural cringe, poking fun at our national identity, confronting hard truths and uncovering our taboos with our greatest weapon – our ability to laugh at ourselves. Stars Barry Humphries, Paul Hogan, Judith Lucy, Andrew Denton, John Clarke, Tim Minchin, Noeline Brown, Denise Scott, Kevin Kropinyeri, Jane Turner, Mick Molloy, Wendy Harmer, Julia Zemiro, Chris Taylor, John Safran, Nazeem Hussain, Dave Hughes, Sean Choolburra and Shaun Micallef.
Is it just us, or is that line-up surprisingly light on figures from the D-Gen / Late Show / Comedy Company / Fast Forward / Big Gig? You know, the pointy end of all this 80s comedy hoo-ha? Plus there’s a few too many fresh young faces there to explain to the kids why this comedy stuff used to be important for our liking: just show the Fast Forward clip of Steve Vizard corpsing while trying to say “fukirri rug” and they’ll get the point a lot quicker.
Still, they did also manage to say “drawing on an extensive television archive”, so fingers crossed it’ll be heavy on the classic clips and light on the “our greatest weapon – our ability to laugh at ourselves” malarkey. When was the last time a comedy show even tried to make us laugh at anything even remotely taboo? Good luck even pointing out that any non-flagpole-related use of the Australian flag has largely been co-opted by racists or that our refugee policy is blatantly built around the government running concentration camps, let alone making jokes about that stuff.
Guess that’s what they hired Charlie Pickering for.
Take This Quirk And Shove It
Press release time!
KIRSTEN DRYSDALE JOINS
7.30 TONIGHT
After years of researching, writing and reporting for acclaimed ABC programs such as The Checkout, Hungry Beast, Gruen Transfer and The Hamster Wheel, the extraordinarily talented Kirsten Drysdale joins 7.30 tonight.
“I’m absolutely thrilled to be working at 7.30,” Kirsten said.
“It’s my dream job, I hope I can meet the program’s high journalistic standards and only resort to silly costumes in extreme circumstances.”
Kirsten is renowned for her quirky take on serious subjects.
And tonight she turns her unique talents to the much anticipated “shirt-fronting” prize-fight between Prime Minister, Tony Abbott and Russian President, Vladimir Putin, when the pair is expected to meet today on the sidelines at the APEC summit in Beijing.
The build up has promised so much – but will the showdown match the hype?
Find out tonight on ABC at 7.30.
And here we were concerned the ABC would run low on shitty news jokes after axing The Roast.
Obviously we disapprove, because we disapprove of pretty much everything. Well, not of Drysdale herself – she’s been good in all the shows listed in the press release (was she on-air on Gruen?), and if this was a straight news appointment we’d be fine with it. It’s this that’s set off the warning claxons in the Tumbleweeds bunker:
Kirsten is renowned for her quirky take on serious subjects
Ugh.
Mostly what we disapprove of here is this numbnuts idea that adding comedy to news somehow isn’t just a massive waste of everyone’s time. Does anyone seriously think the funny stuff in Mad as Hell is the news coverage? Looked at another way, has there ever been a “comedy news program” which has been halfway as informative as the actual news?
Wacky news coverage where the news comes first – where they have to try and make fun of the big stories of the day rather than having leeway to cherry-pick the stories that can be made the most fun of – almost always sucks arse because information and comedy are two completely different things. That old line “it’s funny because it’s true” is an old line because a big part of comedy is comedy of recognition – people get the joke because it’s about a situation they’re familiar with.
But to make fun of news (especially when the news is timely and being presented to an audience for the first time) you first have to inform the audience as to what’s going on. You know how jokes are shit when someone explains them to you afterwards? Imagine how shit a joke is when someone has to explain it to you before they can even tell it.
And yet this kind of thing is bound to continue in the Australian media, as the television audience dwindles and more and more shows are expected to be all things to all viewers. At least in the old days the funny stuff – John Clarke & Bryan Dawe take a bow – was the capper at the end of the week: after having watched four or five nights worth of news about the current political situation, they’d come along and put some spin on the stuff you now knew.
Yes, you needed to be informed to get the joke, but it was also a stand-alone segment (as we’ve since seen after 7.30 gave it the heave ho). If you missed it you still had a dose of perfectly good straight news from the rest of the show, and if you just tuned in to see them presumably you were already informed about the weeks goings-on from elsewhere.
But forget all that, because now news is all about a “quirky take on serious subjects”. And who knows? Maybe combining quirk with news will bring in fans of both quirk and news, rather than pissing off news fans because they take news seriously while also setting fans of quirk (in this equation that’s us) to teeth-grinding because the quirk on offer is deliberately feeble and half-hearted in an attempt to not completely piss off the news fans.
Long story short, mixing comedy with anything only gives you watered down comedy; don’t we already have enough of that on our screens?
…
*edit* And having now seen the segment in question… well, it’s not exactly the best environment for comedy when after your segment the host says “there is a serious side to this story though”.
Black Enough For Ya
It’s taken us so long to get around to reviewing Black Comedy that we might as well just cut to the chase: it was pretty good. Any sketch that features Moses saying “These laws are the word of God, dickhead” is a winner with us, and while – as most of the online reviews we saw pointed out – the show was fairly uneven quality-wise, that’s (to us at least) something of a strength in a sketch show. The whole point of doing sketches is variety: if you’re trying something different each time, you’re bound to have an uneven result.
Of course, there’s uneven where the difference is between great sketches and brilliant ones, and then there’s uneven as in the first episode of Black Comedy. But even then we’re talking about sketches that were, you know, actual sketch comedy. Housewives of Narromine might not have been built around a brilliant idea – a bitchy mum discusses how selfish her daughter-in-law is, and by “selfish” she means “gave birth when the mum wanted to go to bingo” – but an ending where everyone makes repeated tisk tisk sounds like a Skippy the Bush Kangaroo impersonation competition was a capper to what we’d seen and funny in its own right. Pay attention, Australian sketch comedians: sometimes it’s a good idea have an actual punchline.
The other big strength of Black Comedy is that it’s making jokes about real things. Much as we love the work of Shaun Micallef, he could be considered a bad influence on a lot of sketch comedy in this country: he can make surreal twists and random asides work because he knows just when to use them (and doesn’t use them all that often – it’s just that “release the Kraken!” and having his science advisor be a charred skeleton are the kind of things people remember). But if you don’t have his skill to back it up – and you’re already a fan of the kind of whimsical comedy the UK’s been punching out ever since a whole bunch of guys misunderstood the work of Chris Morris – it’s way to easy to just make random jokes that don’t mean shit.
So there’s a reason why “Blakforce” was the sketch that people were talking about from Black Comedy: jokes about the idea of “acting black” are funny because it’s a real thing in our society – and most of us are aware, if only vaguely, that while there isn’t an actual police force driving around enforcing it, it is a rule that our society takes seriously. Australia in a lot of ways is just a big country town, and in country towns everyone has to know (and stay in) their place. It didn’t hurt that they built up to it with a solid minute’s worth of dead serious reality police-style television just to make it hit home harder. Plus trying to smuggle your mates into the footy in the boot of a car is the kind of real (and real dumb) thing that’s a solid capper to a sketch where a guy’s forced to dance to prove his blackness.
That said, there was plenty of the usual “LOL random” stuff going on here too – you’ll know it when you see it – and while it’s not to our taste we did say something earlier on about sketch shows needing variety and we can’t deny that having a couple of gay guys gyrating around constantly saying “what’s dis den slut” is probably the kind of thing someone (else) finds funny. And a restaurant sketch? Guess there’s a few people who didn’t get a lifetimes’ worth of those back in the Full Frontal days.
So while overall this was good rather than great, the stuff that worked on the whole worked pretty well. After the nadir of The Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting and This Is Littleton, we’ve had a few sketch shows now (well, this and Kinne) that seem to have realised it’s not simply enough to have a quirky point of view – that point of view’s got to be grounded in real life situations.
Black Comedy isn’t quite up there with the 80s classic BabaKiueria when it comes to pointing out the cultural divide in Australia, and as sketch comedy it’s more on par with Kinne than The Micallef P(r)ogram(me). But we laughed and we’ll happily watch it again: for a sketch show on the ABC that’s a pretty decent result.
Usually It Takes Longer For Grapes To Turn This Sour
Remember The Roast? Remember how it started in 2010 as entertainment show parody WTF! before turning up on ABC2 and Foxtel’s Comedy Channel as a daily two minute news parody before being expanded this year to a full ten minutes four days a week? Remember how to any of the hundreds of struggling comedians in this country the chance to make that much comedy on a regular basis would be a massive opportunity? Remember how comedy is such a tricky business to get even a toe-hold into that loads of provably decent comedians go years between television shows? Remember how bonafide comedy geniuses like Tony Martin can’t even get their own show on television? Remember how when The Roast got the chop after four years they said this:
“we were hoping because we were the lowest budget production in the history of the planet and produced more original comedy content than any other show in the country right now, we’d skate through unscathed.”
And then this:
“We’d also like to wish young, promising comedians like Shaun Micallef and The Chaser the best of luck as we pass the torch down to them.“
Remember when you first realised The Roast really were the smug unfunny jerks they appeared to be on their own smug, unfunny show?
Look, we get that having your show axed is tough, especially when you give off every indication of being overly entitled upper-middle class types who’ve never been told “no” in your lives. But seriously, what is wrong with these guys?
“Lowest budget production in the history of the planet” they say, seemingly never having even watched a single second of the literally billion times funnier work of John Clarke & Brian Dawe. “Original comedy content” they say, somehow confusing “original” with “funny” while also confusing “original” with “the same kind of half-arsed news parody everyone’s been doing since the dawn of time”. At least they haven’t pulled out the old “we’re giving the next generation of satirists a chance” line yet, so we can’t point out it’s been the same core team since the show started so that “new generation” they’re talking about is themselves yet again.
It must be difficult putting together a shithouse news parody at a time when Shaun Micallef is consistently making a really good one. And also when Shaun Micallef is a comedian who’s succeeded through hard work and years of effort, constantly working to hone his comedy skills, always out there trying something new in the rare periods when he’s not working on his own regular comedy gigs. And also when Shaun Micallef isn’t, for example, some utterly unremarkable guy in a suit whose only comedy work seems to have been on a show that only lasted this long because the ABC could buy it in bulk.
Oh yeah, and despite The Roast dropping hints a-plenty that they were dumped for budget reasons, other more reliable sources seem to suggest it was because the ABC finally watched an episode:
While decisions about ABC programming are being affected by looming government funding cuts, Fairfax Media understands the axing was part of the normal programming review process.
In an announcement on the program on Monday night, The Roast team said: “It’s still unclear what show will replace The Roast on ABC2 but being ABC2 we can assume the current frontrunners include insightful documentaries like I Married My Staircase, My Penis Is A White Collar Criminal and Dawn Porter: Almost Fell Over in the Shower Today.”
Christmas Came Early This Year
Yeah, you heard us:
The Roast won’t be back on the ABC next year. If you want a ridiculous parody of a news show, you’ll have to watch the Bolt Report #roasttv
— The Roast (@TheRoastTV) November 3, 2014
Who knew there was an upside to massive budget cuts? Guess even entrenched failure cruising on autopilot can’t last forever.
*is lynched by an angry mob while leaving Tumbleweeds HQ*
Ok, look: in theory the demise of any comedy show is bad news – it means less comedy, after all – but after literally years and 100’s of episodes which started out as a thick slice of smug shit from untalented blow-ins then failed to improve in any real way (trust us on this, we were watching Charles Firth’s pet project back in 2010 when it was an entertainment parody on Go! called WTF!), it’s clearly for the best for all concerned that the cast and crew of The Roast are now free to take on new challenges. Like filling in a dole form.
Oh wait, they’re all young white Sydney guys from upper middle-class backgrounds: they’ll be back with a new series of “viral videos” within a fortnight. And it’s not like the team don’t have other ways to earn a quid.
And yes, we noticed how they made it clear they wouldn’t be back “on the ABC”. Someone’s not letting the dream die just yet…
Radio – Suckers Never Play Me (2014 remix)
Hang on a second, just let us get open the bumper book of media cliches… ah, here we go:
It’s getting to that time of year where Australian radio stations all start playing musical chairs. Only the music they’re playing sounds a lot like Nickelback. Still, the use of the word “beloved” in this story is pure comedy gold.
HUGHESY and Kate have been poached by a rival radio network to take on Hamish Blake and Andy Lee.
The beloved duo of Dave Hughes and Kate Langbroek will be heard nationally in the drive timeslot on Kiis FM, switching from their long time home at Nova.
The pair quit Nova’s breakfast show after 12 years in November last year.
Scoring the pair is a costly coup for Kiis, who will use their new stars to re-brand the network currently known as Mix in Melbourne.
Kiis did the same thing last year when they lured Kyle and Jackie O from a rival network for their Sydney breakfast shift.
It means Dave Hughes and Kate Langbroek will go up against Hamish and Andy, who announced their return to drive radio for Austereo last week.
Oh yeah, that:
After weeks of speculation, Southern Cross Austereo today announced that from July next year Hamish and Andy will return to the lucrative national drive timeslot (4pm — 6pm) that they dominated so convincingly for five years until 2010.
…
“We are taking an actual break,” said Hamish to news.com.au.
“We’ve made the decision to not officially commit to another TV show next year … but we just haven’t had a bit of time off in a very long time. Between doing radio and TV for the last few years we just wanted a bit of space and to work on a few other things that we’ve got bubbling along that may or may not amount to anything.”
The radio duo wouldn’t say how long their new contract with Southern Cross Austereo is but Andy did suggest that he’s keen to tweak the show slightly before they kick things off in July.
“I’ve put in an application to have it changed to Andy and Hamish,” he joked.
Hamish and Andy quit the drive show in 2010 after five years, during which they broadcast from Afghanistan, travelled around Australia in ‘Caravans of Courage’ and even crossed the Bass strait in a tall ship.
But they’re sure they’ll be able to come up with new ideas that can top what they’ve achieved in the past.
“At the end of every year I always felt like we were out of ideas,” said Hamish.
“And then by the sheer process of turning the mic’s on and turning up each day and having a chat with each other, funny things just seem to arise, mostly driven by our listeners.
“You can’t write out five years of ideas on paper now but that’s what we love about radio, that once you start doing it adventures arise and it’s a great format that you’re able to explore those adventures in.”
Hang on a sec – didn’t that first story say:
Hughesy and Kate will get a crucial head start, with Hamish and Andy not on air until July, after they’ve filmed another chapter in their travel TV series.
What happened to taking “a bit of time off” to “work on a few other things that we’ve got bubbling along”?
There’s two ways to read this. The first is that News.com.au got their facts wrong and just assumed Hamish & Andy are filming another instalment of their travel show when in fact they really are taking a break. Seems fair enough. Move along folks, nothing more to see here.
The second way is that when you’re talking about Australian commercial radio you can never ever go wrong expecting more of the same. Look at the names in those stories: they’re the same old tired pros, perfectly capable of churning out the same old bland radio they’ve been doing for the last decade or more. When was the last time anyone even realised they were listening to Matt Tilley? Who would have guessed those shithouse “gotcha” calls were the only trace of personality he had?
“that’s what we love about radio, that once you start doing it adventures arise”. Who is Andy Lee trying to kid? Once you start doing radio in Australia your soul dies. And that’s the way pretty much everyone involved likes it. Why else would every show sound exactly the same – thirty seconds max between songs for the hosts to bark at each other about what they did on the weekend then it’s time to take some calls! But first three minutes of ads back-to-back and a bunch of Taylor Swift songs only slightly sped up and with the last 30 seconds faded down so we can get back to the ads.
These days the hard-core nutter fanbase of Get This – maybe give the Rex Hunt and “people want ducks” references a rest guys, it has only been seven years – has largely overshadowed just how funny that show was. And it was a radio show! That was popular and rated well! But who wants to put in that kind of effort to make good radio comedy these days? Better to just hire yet another double act who ran out of things to say to each other a half decade ago and get them to take a bunch of slightly awkward calls from the kind of people who call into radio shows to talk about the weirdest place they had sex.
Ugh, we’re even depressing ourselves here. Let’s give the last word on Australian radio to Tony Martin:
‘I’ve never met Kyle Sandilands and he certainly does a different kind of radio from what I have done, but I will say for Kyle Sandilands: there is nobody that says more true things about how commercial radio works.
”People in commercial radio are generally terrified to speak honestly until they’re sacked, whereas Kyle Sandilands said something a few years ago, which no one in commercial radio had been brave enough to say, which is that commercial radio is the only job where your boss is someone who has failed at your job, which is literally the case. I think a lot of people cheered when he said that.”
You News, You Lose
You know what the problem with satire is? Eventually someone upstairs goes “hey, if all the kids are getting their news from comedy shows, then our news shows should have some comedy in them!” And then you get crap like this:
If the new Friday night show is approved, it will include elements of 7.30, according to a planning workshop agenda obtained by Fairfax Media. It is also likely to feature Kitchen Cabinet’s Annabel Crabb and comedian Dan Ilic.
It will involve major political interviews, investigative reports and feature stories alongside “quirky”, “funny” and “human” stories. It may feature a live audience, a desk and some “amount of comedy and chat”.
Obviously, by “comedy” we’re not referring to Dan Ilic. Or anything else taking place on this show – unless, of course, they wise up and give Clarke & Dawe a regular slot (and with word out that there’s to be a new DVD collection of their work released in time for Christmas, maybe their profile at the ABC is once again on the upswing). Oh wait, Leigh Sales is going to be hosting, forget we mentioned Clarke & Dawe at all.
We’ve said this once before but it bears repeating now: when people – young, old, dead, whatever – watch a comedy news program, they’re not watching for the news; they’re watching for the comedy. That’s because comedy (which is difficult to make and extremely enjoyable when it does work) is of a higher value than the news (which is easy to uncover, at least in its basic television form, and at best leaves you pissed off or outraged). If you’re putting together a cheap & cheerful time-filler, it’s actually easier to make a decent-ish news program than it is to make a quality comedy show – which is why even news dead zone Australia has a number of 24 hour news channels but only a few hours of new television comedy a week.
And since when was The Project something to emulate? Forgive us if we’ve misread the ratings for the last few years, but hasn’t it been something of a dud kept on-air because a): it’s a great cross-promotional vehicle for Ten, a network which b): has been struggling so badly in the ratings they literally had nothing to replace it with? And this is the ABC’s brave new cost-cutting scheme?
Here’s an idea: why not just put on repeats of Dad’s Army? With the PM wanting us to be increasingly vigilant about the threat of home-grown terrorism, it’s never been more topical. Plus there’s a new movie version out soon – surely the ABC could get the film distribution company to kick in a few bucks for cross-promotion?
Basically, this crap is the worst of both worlds: unfunny comedy smeared over half-arsed news, hosted by people telling us to lighten up while providing a service that’s not quite as professional as the guy giving the ComSec report. And seriously, Dan Ilic again? Sure, A Rational Fear had its moments, but did everyone else from Hungry Beast die when we weren’t looking?
Soul Brother Number One
“When it comes to sodomi, you can’t afford to be a tight-arse”. Would you look at that: an actual joke on an Australian comedy shown on ABC2. And from one of the guys behind Beached Az! We should just pack up and quit, clearly we’re in a world where all the old signposts mean nothing. Holy crap, an “Accidentally Kelly Street” reference! “Karl Drogo”! This show’s a goldmine.
We’ve never been fans of The Bondi Hipsters, mostly because we enjoyed UK series Nathan Barley when it did the exact same thing only better a decade earlier. Plus being “an internet sensation” tends to turn us off for a number of reasons, largely to do with the level you have to pitch your comedy at to cut through online. So it’s fairly safe to say our expectations for Soul Mates were… not all that high.
And now that we’ve seen the first episode? Well, we’re still on the fence, but we’re slightly more towards the middle of it. Having four separate plotlines is a good way to keep things moving along, especially as it’s clear from the start that none of the storylines could support an entire episode on their own. The caveman one, this week at least, is basically just a “how dumb were people before they knew how things worked?” joke that barely holds up across the brief time it gets.
The Kiwi Assassins one presents a different set of problems: jokes about NZ accents and riffs on 80s action movies are funny for about 30 seconds the first time you encounter them, and then it’s move along folks, nothing to see here. Ok, your personal mileage may vary; let’s all just agree that they’re not a bottomless well of comedy, and that it’s a well that for pretty much anyone not still giggling at “fush n chups” or the idea of a three minute training montage set to a fake generic 80s pop hit (seriously guys, the joke died a death at the 60 second mark) the well has run dry. Plus New Zealand has been serving up some pretty decent comedy of late (the vampire comedy What We Do In The Shadows is funnier than any Australian film of the last five years, for one thing); getting laughs from how they speak when they’re getting laughs from actually being funny is not a great look.
The Time Travel Agents bit had a couple of decent jokes beyond “the future, where they dress funny”, so we’re going to put it in the “positive” column. The Yoko Ono one was helped by largely playing out in the background while other stuff was going on – the idea of having even two things going on at once seems to be one that Australian comedy has largely forgot. That’s one of the advantages of a TV show made by people who came to comedy from making their own sketches (in contrast to stand-up) – they have a better idea of how to get laughs beyond simply having people saying funny stuff (the future guy’s bottomless carry bag being an honest-to-god visual joke).
As for the Bondi Hipsters… well, as we said, this stuff was funnier when Nathan Barley did it a decade ago. And again, hipsters are an easy target. But at least here there were the hints of an actual comedy dynamic (the meek guy and the aggressive, slightly out-of-wack guy) which just made us even more depressed to realise a lot of Australian comedy can’t even manage that these days. Different personality types can be funny when played off against each other! Who knew?
Overall then, Soul Mates was better than we expected. We just weren’t expecting very much. Let’s call it “competent” for now: there were a lot of broad and easy jokes, but at least they were jokes, and giving the leads various comedy personas went some way towards diluting the smug annoyance that the Bondi Hipsters have generated on their solo outings. The real trouble is going to be stretching all this out across eight episodes, especially as the preview for next week didn’t hold out the promise for a lot of change – guess the cavemen are just going to be puzzled by pretty much everything we take for granted, huh?
The characters could get funnier the more we get to know them, or this could be one of those series that start out strong but by week three they’re just spinning their wheels. The future! It’s not just where you get to make jokes about how robots piss.
Vale Please Like Me series two
In Helen Razer’s recent examination of the history of the laugh track for The Saturday Paper –
– which is something of a must-read, if only for the part where she says:
It is not so much that the laughter is immediately infectious – psychological studies indicate that a laugh track or an enhanced “live” track, such as that used to augment sitcoms filmed in front of a studio audience, does not prompt viewers to laugh.
Then two paragraphs later:
The value of a joke, then, is determined by the inhuman mechanism of a laugh market and our laughter, heretofore a spontaneous physical reaction, becomes labour. Comedy becomes less a matter of jokes than it is of biopolitics. Just as a prisoner is required to undertake certain physical actions at certain times of the day, any poor sod doomed by habit to watch the immensely unfunny The Big Bang Theory is led by the culture’s wardens to chuckle at nothing.
Prompting us to wonder if anyone – editors, the publisher, Razer herself – read over her story before publishing it, because last time we checked it’s hard to see how the “chuckle wardens” of the laugh track could lead anyone to do anything considering she just said a laugh track does not even prompt viewers to laugh, let alone “chuckle at nothing”, c’mon people this kind of garbled rambling garbage is just the kind of shit we need to-
*deep breath*
Ahem. Sorry about that.
Anyway, in that article she also writes this:
This nation’s most artful comedy in years is Josh Thomas’s heartbreaking Please Like Me, whose sad-funny season finale this week was made possible by a production team that would not even pitch the show as comedy let alone remind audiences of the constraints of the genre by the use of enhanced or artificial laughter.
Please Like Me wasn’t pitched as a comedy? Somebody should have told the ABC, as we went back into our archives and found this press release from 2012 with “COMEDY” stamped all over it:
JOSH THOMAS show goes into production for ABC1Filming starts today on the new comedy series PLEASE LIKE ME, written by and starring comedian Josh Thomas (Talkin’ ’bout Your Generation). PLEASE LIKE ME will be shot on location in Melbourne and will air on ABC 1 later this year.
Inspired by Josh’s award-winning stand-up comedy, PLEASE LIKE ME is a 6 x 30 series about growing up quickly, and about realising that your parents are not heroes, but dopes with no idea what’s going on – just like you.
Award-winning stand-up comedian Josh Thomas is the Generation Y team captain on Network Ten’s Talkin’ ‘bout Your Generation. He has appeared on The 7PM Project, Good News Week, Rove, ABC TV Q&A, and as host of the 2011 Melbourne International Comedy Festival Gala. In 2010, he was nominated for a TV Week Logie Award for Most Popular New Male Talent and won the GQ Comedian of the Year Award. He was the curator of the Inaugural Brisbane International Comedy Festival.
Josh Thomas says ”I feel a little bit guilty about all of these very talented people running around doing all this work because of what I typed up on my laptop late at night whilst drinking wine and probably also watching Hairspray.”
As well as writing the series, Josh Thomas stars in PLEASE LIKE ME as Josh, alongside his cavoodle, John. The series also stars Debra Lawrance (Home & Away) as Mum, David Roberts (Offspring) as Dad, Judi Farr (Unfolding Florence) as Aunty Peg and Caitlin Stasey (Tomorrow When The War Began, Neighbours).
ABC Head of Comedy Debbie Lee says “We’re so happy to be bringing Josh’s world to ABC TV in what promises to be such a funny and surprising series. PLEASE LIKE ME will show Josh’s talents in a whole new light.”
>Producer Todd Abbott says “We’re thrilled that the ABC have been such staunch supporters of this project, and that we’re going into production while it’s almost feasible for Josh Thomas to play a 20-year-old.
“The scripts that he has written have attracted a top-shelf crew and a dream cast.”
PLEASE LIKE ME is directed by AACTA and AFI award-winner Matthew Saville (The Slap, Cloudstreet, We Can Be Heroes) and produced by respected comedy producer Todd Abbott (Judith Lucy’s Spiritual Journey, Rove, The Dream with Roy & H.G.). Executive Producers are Todd Abbott, Kevin Whyte, Josh Thomas, Debbie Lee.
Heaven forbid we suggest that Thomas and everyone associated with Please Like Me – including its many fans in the media – were more than happy to call it a comedy right up until the moment they noticed people weren’t laughing.
Or, going by the ratings this season, watching: no-one seems to have made public the ratings for the last few episodes that we can find, which tells us it wasn’t in the top 20 digital channel shows. Considering the massive amount of promotion it received, that can’t be a good look.
On the positive side, with series three of Please Like Me already locked in thanks to the show being bought and paid for by US cable network Pivot, there’s a strong chance it’ll be shown on ABC1 whether the ABC likes it or not:
As a longer-term measure, the ABC is expected to closely explore shutting down multi-channel ABC2 and moving its youth-focused content to its main channel or online catch-up service iView.
Still, more comedy on ABC1 is always good news as far as we’re concerned… oh right, Please Like Me isn’t a comedy, is it? Razer’s incoherent drivel highlights a perpetual problem with this kind of dramedy: it’s not funny enough to be a comedy, not good enough as a drama to stand as a drama, and largely supported by people who lack both a sense of humour and even a rudimentary idea of how comedy works.
[for example, the real reason why Please Like Me doesn’t have a laugh track, above and beyond stylistic reasons – a laugh track would make it extremely difficult to claim it was a drama, for starters – is that, by being a single camera sitcom (that is, one filmed like a drama, and in contrast to traditional three camera sitcoms like Seinfeld and Friends, which are filmed in front of a studio audience), there’s simply no plausible place for the laughter to be coming from. Single camera sitcoms don’t have laugh tracks because there’s no audience there to be laughing (or not): Razer’s article about “oh no, laugh tracks are coming back, what does this mean for our culture, damn you capitalism” totally ignores the fact that what she’s really talking about is a drift back to three camera, studio-based sitcoms and away from the single-camera format that shows like Larry Sanders originated and later efforts like Scrubs popularised.]
As a result, Please Like Me ends up being praised simply for what it is: it’s about young people living in the inner-city, Thomas is playing a gay character that isn’t a stereotype, it combines jokes with drama to make both stand out against the other, it takes a thoughtful approach to the subject of mental illness. All this is true as far as it goes; unfortunately most of the discussion around this season hasn’t reached the point of “is any of this any good?”
We’ve probably said way too much about Please Like Me this year, so we’ll cut this one short. Suffice to say, for us combining comedy and drama isn’t some kind of magic act that conceals the fact that neither the drama or the comedy were good enough to stand on their own. Mix in a lot of sloppy writing, erratic characterisation, an emphasis on “funny lines” rather than actual jokes, and an approach to drama largely built on “people dying is sad”, and you have an effort that, to be honest, we’d rather forget.
So we’ll probably be writing more snark about it any day now.