Australian Tumbleweeds
Negotiable Affection
Remember how we were slightly puzzled about an article by David Dale in the Fairfax press a week or so ago that was talking up the amazing comedy prowess of the current ABC Head of Comedy? You know, this kind of crap:
In the first half of the year, the ABC scored handsomely with local drama, pulliing audiences above a million for The Doctor Blake Mysteries, Jack Irish: Dead Point, Carlotta and Old School. In the second half, it’s hoping for equal success with a slew of local comedies – the result of intensive efforts by its Head of Comedy, Rick Kalowski, appointed a year ago to end the laughter drought.
Kalowski, a former lawyer who wrote for Comedy Inc, Big Bite, Double Take and At Home With Julia, commissioned and encouraged a surge of comic creativity. Over the next four months he’ll deliver second seasons of Upper Middle Bogan, Please Like Me (cofinanced by the Pivot network of America, where Josh Thomas is more popular than he is here) and It’s A Date (with Lachy Hulme, Shaun Micallef, Deborah Mailman, Kat Stewart, and a returning Lisa McCune, who was the standout in season one).
Do we need to point out that of the three shows listed here as part of his “surge of comic creativity”, a grand total of three of them were commissioned by his predecessor?
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. Maybe he needs the cash to fund a second series of Wednesday Night Fever? You know, his most recent hands-on comedy effort? Strange the aforementioned article oddly failed to mention it as one of his shining achievements.
Oh right, it was shit.
Anyway, this glowing praise for a man still largely untested in his current position and who’s most recent work was both a failure and complete rubbish puzzled us until we read this column from David Dale:
As I was making concluding noises, this conversation broke out:
Bradley: “I wanted to tell you, David, that I like The Tribal Mind, your acerbic comments on Australians’ TV watching habits. There’s so much fluff in the media today. It’s good to have people who kind of cut through that bullshit, that actually write stuff that isn’t fodder for posters or publicity. There’s not many of you left.”
That’s right: Dale wrote a column in which he quoted an interview subject telling him what a great job he was doing.
It seems safe to assume the bit about not writing fodder for publicity doesn’t apply to promoting himself – clearly he’s not a man to let his readers make up their own minds about the quality of his work. Or, come to think of it, the work of the current Head of Comedy at the ABC.
But at least now we have an answer: clearly Mr Dale is a man at least slightly susceptible to flattery – why else would he include such naked praise of himself in his own column? And if we know anything first-hand about the current Head of Comedy at the ABC, it’s that he doesn’t mind doling out a bit of flattery towards comedy critics when he wants to get them onside. And who can blame him? On the available evidence it seems that there are very few television critics out there who’s heads aren’t easily turned by some kind words and smooth praise from such an important figure on the local comedy scene.
Ahem.
Anyway, the reason why all this stuff is important is because when you feel like it’s your job to talk up and be supportive of the Head of Comedy at the ABC, you’re not doing your real job, which today involves this:
Australian comedian Josh Thomas asked a simple question with his comedy series Please Like Me. He has his answer: they do.
The ABC and the US cable channel Pivot have commissioned a third series.
So far, so straightforward news reporting. Sure, “Please Like Me” isn’t actually a question, but we’ll let that slide. Where it gets a little iffy is this:
The ABC’s head of comedy Rick Kalowski said the deal to proceed with a third series before the second had aired was almost unprecedented.
“And yet fitting for a show which has become our most watched original ABC2 comedy series, and put Australian TV comedy on the world stage as never before,” Kalowski said.
“ABC TV couldn’t be prouder to continue our association with Pivot in the US, or of the new season two, which is a cracker from start to finish.”
Because this is a news report, the closest they can get to the actual story is this single solitary line:
The US cable channel Pivot came on board for the show’s second season and helped propel it to success in the US.
So let’s break it down: despite the utter bullshit that is the line “put Australia TV comedy on the world stage as never before”, which must have come as something of a massive fucking shock to Chris Lilley but we guess his star is firmly on the wane under the new regime, what this story is actually telling us is that Josh Thomas is making a show for US television that the ABC has rights to broadcast. And fuck-all else rights-wise we’re guessing, as Please Like Me series one is pretty much the only ABC series of recent times to be released on DVD on a label outside of the ABC’s own.
If Pivot hadn’t come on board, we might have still had a second series of Please Like Me – we did eventually get one of fellow ABC2 comedy Twentysomething. But let’s not forget for a single solitary moment that Please Like Me was and is the only ABC comedy show to be bumped from ABC1 to ABC2. Not exactly a stirring vote of confidence in the material there.
It also had a long history of behind-the-scenes faffing about: Thomas was playing a straight guy in the pitch that the ABC originally accepted, the show was initially announced as part of ABC1’s 2012 line-up before eventually airing in early 2013 on ABC2, and Thomas himself didn’t mind taking a swing at the ABC over their treatment of his show:
“They told me it (the switch to ABC2) was a compliment. I don’t believe them,” Thomas says. “I don’t know if what they were really saying was, ‘Josh the show is a bit s—’ or, ‘Josh the show has too much suicide and gay sex in it’.
“People have suggested to me that (too gay) is why they did it (put it on ABC2). I would be shocked if that’s why but I also wouldn’t be.”
It’s not like the first series was a ratings blockbuster either:
The premiere of Please Like Me was 176,000 across 2 episodes and might have been higher had it been coded as 2 shows.
Hands up who’d forgotten that ABC2 initially broadcast the episodes back-to-back in what is universally recognised the world over as the “let’s burn these episodes off and pretend this never happened” approach to programming?
So you’ll forgive us if we think the fact Thomas has received a big chunk of overseas change to keep making Please Like Me has a shitload more to do with it continuing on the ABC than anything anyone actually at the ABC has said or done. One thing’s for certain: it wasn’t Thomas that got a free flight to Sydney so he could be personally told his ABC career is finished…
Let’s get real
TV loves a formula, so the news about a new ABC panel show in this story from Sydney’s Daily Telegraph isn’t that surprising…
Across on Aunty, former Triple J breakfast presenter Tom Ballard has scored his first TV hosting gig, fronting a new ABC panel show Reality Check (to air later this year), which will take a blowtorch to the belly of reality television.
The co-production with Cordell Jigsaw Zapruder will see Ballard joined by three industry experts, from producers to ex-contestants and judges, each week “who will share their war stories and reveal what really happens behind the camera”.
Meanwhile, the official press release features the usual limp self-promotion. Does anyone really think the reason why Stephen Spielberg is “a genius” is because he makes people cry?
“Reality is TV’s 800 pound gorilla,” says ABC Head of Entertainment Jon Casimir. “It’s the most successful cultural force of the last decade. It’s the ABC’s job to examine the world we live in. We hope Reality Check will give ‘Reality TV’ its due, acknowledging its drawing power and asking why it works and what that says about us.”
“Reality is dramatic, funny, poignant, and in many ways, reflects our community more accurately than any other genre. This series examines how it works and asks the question: if Stephen Spielberg is a genius for making audiences cry, why shouldn’t reality producers be lauded for doing the same thing?” says Nick Murray, Managing Director CJZ.
As Australian Tumbleweeds reader Daniel G points out, it sounds a little Gruen doesn’t it? Which makes us wonder a few things…
- Who’ll be the Russell Howcroft/John Hewson “break-out star” of Reality Check? Hotdogs? That bum dance woman who was in Big Brother more than a decade ago?
- What amazing Gruen-style, not-at-all-news-to-anyone-with-a-brain revelations about reality TV will the panellists reveal? “It’s mostly scripted and put together in the editing room.” “We deliberately cast contestants who are so fame hungry that they’ll have sex with other people on the show without encouragement from us?” “We keep the temperature in the Big Brother house high so the housemates will strip off.”
- Will they award a trophy to the weirdest reality TV program at the end of every episode? (No, wait, we know the answer to that, which leads us to…)
- How many examples of weird overseas reality shows will have been previously discussed by Charlie Brooker in either his Guardian column or Screenwipe, or on the UK or Australian version of You Have Been Watching? We’re going to guess the answer is “a fair number” but at least it’ll be hard for them to crowbar in that footage of E.V.B. Sampson.
So yeah, don’t expect this to be anything more than the Gruen concept applied to a different topic. Something which is fittingly cynical when discussing reality TV.
The Fresh Blood Sausage Factory – part 2
After all the comments this blog got asking where our review of Fresh Blood was, we assumed we’d be so overwhelmed with feedback after the part 1 that this blog would crash. Um, no. Turns out no one gives a shit about original niche content on the web after all. Who knew?
Anyway, here’s part 2…
Donnatelegrams is a sort of anti-singing telegram service in which Donna and her accompanist turn up to special occasions to deliver the bad news. In one sketch it’s a bit like the scene from Extras where David Bowie sings “Little fat man who sold his soul” to Andy, except it’s a wedding and Donna’s telling the groom his bride isn’t coming. Surprisingly, these sketches have continuity: the second sees her branching out into disco as her fame grows, the third has her grabbed by bikies as part of a torture scheme. It’s too one-note (ha!) to really satisfy – the musical numbers would have to be a lot better for that – but at least Donna herself is an actual comedy character here.
Whatever happened to our favourite fairy tale characters? Fabled has the answer, and if we say “Hansel and Gretel” you can possibly guess the rest… This sketch really doesn’t need to be five minutes long, and when you’re doing a sketch about Jack and the Beanstalk, do you really need to spend the first minute getting us up to speed on “Jack and the Beanstalk”? If we didn’t know it before, we’re not going to laugh now.
It’s just stand-alone sketches in Fancy Boy, where Luke McGregor drops himself in offbeat situations – the first sketch has him pretending to be a “chalk” addict for a television interviewer in the hope of scoring $20,000 (cue him eating chalk on camera and having to confess his “addiction” to his disgusted co-workers). Unfortunately, these sketches tend to be a little too drawn out and rambling; for example, in the third he has trouble reasoning with the contract killer he’s hired with slightly hilarious consequences. This is one of those sketches which might work as a scene in a sitcom between a well-established character and a skilled guest star, but as a sketch in isolation it’s at least two minutes too long.
Dislike sport, sports programmes and the blokey-bloke men who bang about sport all day? Had a gutful of our relentlessly white media with it’s refusal to shift outside of a narrow range of stereotypes? Enjoy someone bunging on a “Hughsie” voice? Then you’ll love the relentless mockery from Mediacrity. The punchline to that second sketch needs some work, though.
We know $10,000 isn’t a great deal of money to spend on making three sketches and paying the cast and crew, but you’d think The Comestibles could have put together something with higher production values than waving household objects with eyes stuck on them in front of drawn backgrounds. They certainly didn’t spend much on the script!
The team from I’m With Stupid consists of a group of Sydney-based actors who’ve chosen to make a parody of a Christian band’s music video. This is an otherwise well-made sketch which is let down by it being unclear what the central conceit actually is. Are the band selling out and going sexy or not? Even after watching the separate “making of” sketch (built largely around the twin comedy classics of “Christians are clueless about sex” and “religious people trying to be cool are lame”), we don’t really know. More importantly, we kinda don’t care because this group seems far more interested in putting on a glossy show than making people laugh – that Gay Hunter sketch might have meant well, but there’s only so many times someone can say “Rayshell” before the joke is dead.
You know how this is supposed to be a new talent initiative, where people you’ve never heard of get a chance to have their work seen by thousands of people? Well, what the hell are Axis of Awesome doing here? They’re already an internet hit, who’ve released DVDs, performed overseas and appeared, amongst other things, on the BBC’s biennial Comic Relief broadcast. Can it really be that hard for them to find the money to get some more videos made?
Having said that, it’s nice to see the kinda established Touched By An Angle Grinder get a shot here. They’ve done some good stuff online and made shows for Melbourne’s Channel 31 where they’ve displayed the ability to cram a bunch of jokes into a short space (see the “learning to walk” sketch, a recursive look at physical rehabilitation, prank shows and puppetry), so it’s nice to see them given the opportunity to introduce a wider audience to the weird world of Pops.
The third part of our review of Fresh Blood is coming soon.
Time to Crack Open a Kinne
When various right-wing dickheads start ranting about “entrenched left-wing bias” at the ABC, we tune out because they’re dickheads. That doesn’t mean there’s no bias at the ABC, mind you – it’s a proven fact their news is actually more right-wing than the commercial networks – but the bias we’re interested in today isn’t so much about obvious political values as it is about cultural ones. In short: it’s a long time since we’ve had a sketch show on a commercial network in Australia and watching Kinne is (amongst other things) a reminder that the ABC’s idea of comedy isn’t the only one out there.
The sketches in episode one of Kinne – named after Troy Kinne (pronounced kinnee), the show’s writer, producer and star – are generally pretty straightforward. There’s a voice-activated car stereo that, when a near miss sees Kinne shout “fucking wanker”, plays Kanye West. The opening sketch sees Kinne making a bunch of rapid-fire “regretful bets” along the lines of “If I ever cry at an episode of Offspring, I’ll get a dick tattooed on my forehead” (cut to him with a dick on his forehead). The Actual Bachelor takes clips from the Bachelor and then replays them according to how Kinne thinks they’d really play out. Things Said By Couples Assembling IKEA Items is both self-explanatory and sweary.
Clearly he’s not aiming to compete with a Shaun Micallef sketch that starts out as a political interview and ends up a Blade Runner parody. Nor is he covering the same turf as Josh Thomas talking about gay sex in a sing-song voice for two minutes. But it’s not really fair to say he’s aiming low here either. It might seem like obvious lowbrow comedy turf being covered by a guy who looks like a rugby player, but compared to a lot of the ABC’s recent sketch output he’s a master of nuance.
The Actual Bachelor sketches do a pretty decent job of covering both the highs and the lows of what we’ve seen so far. The first is based on a scene that involves The Bachelor getting a girl to close her eyes before he rubs a rose over her face; in Kinne’s version, when he asks her to close her eyes then guess what he’s holding in front of her… yeah, you can probably guess. Not that funny. The second one has the Actual Bachelor cooking for all the women in the house; while in the real version it all goes smoothly, in the Actual version… not so much.
But while the joke looks like it’s going to be “oh look, all the women want different things for breakfast and they’re really fussy” – and yes, that is the joke – Kinne also works himself up into a blokey “stay away from the barbie” style rage. It’s hardly groundbreaking stuff, but it does at least add another layer to the sketch and get a few more laughs out of it, and these days – remember all those Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting sketches that established a premise then just stood around for two minutes? – that’s not half bad.
Kinne himself comes off as a pretty blokey guy (he’s said Paul Hogan is a big inspiration) and this is a bit more obviously “male” than a lot of recent sketch comedy. But unless the very idea of male sketch comedy is a turn off to you he generally manages to get in enough swipes at the guys that it doesn’t feel too offputting. A bit titled “Things you never hear in a male share house” is pretty much a predictable series of gags about cleaning, doing washing, paying rent and so forth, but just because it’s obvious doesn’t mean there’s not some truth to it. Because guys are slobs and they suck.
There’s two ways to be really funny: either come up with a few great gags, or come up with a whole lot of average gags. Seriously everyone, how hard is this to figure out? Not to harp on about this, but the amount of Australian sketches we see that coast for 90 seconds on one average joke is ridiculous. Anyway, Kinne has figured this out and has decided to go down the second route, with three separate sketches here basically being rapid-fire lists of quick gags on a subject. None of the lines are classics, but there’s enough of them to make these bits work.
Still, Kinne isn’t immune to dragging a sketch out. A street prank segment where people go to bus stops or street corners and say “vaguebook” social media status updates (you know, stuff designed to get attention like “just when I thought today couldn’t get any worse”) to see if anyone responds isn’t a bad idea, but it could have lost a few examples. The “Impromptu Lifeguard” has a couple of good bits – repeatedly falling off a pier worked for us – but it still stuck around too long.
Recently a terrible article in the Fairfax press said – inbetween somehow forgetting to mention that the current Head of ABC Comedy “appointed a year ago to end the laughter drought” (huh?) was also the “brains” behind the laughter-killing shitheap Wednesday Night Fever – this:
Kinne is 21st century speedy. His aim, he says, is to have sketches which can deliver “15 gags in 30 seconds”. For an example of how he does that, click on “Never said during the Olympics”.
Yeah, outside the list sketches he’s not there yet. But he’s still doing better than a lot of other people out there. Including that new Head of ABC Comedy, who repeatedly mentioned in the run-up to Wednesday Night Fever his desire to put to air a more mainstream kind of comedy than we’d been previously getting in Australia. You know, like the stuff Kinne is doing. Only unlike the unlamented Wednesday Night Fever, he’s kind of funny and not mostly shit.
It’s easy to point at a half-dozen other online comedians and say “those guys deserve a show more than this guy does”, but most of the decent Australian online comedians are going for the ABC demographic; quirky, thinky, pop culture references, you know the story and we’ve already got Shaun Micallef. Kinne is solid, basic fare that seems novel in the current comedy environment, and while its approach to getting laughs is “it’s funny ’cause it’s true” (for male, anglo, suburban values of “true”) for a commercial network that actually needs people to tune in Kinne is far from the worst way to go.
The Fresh Blood Sausage Factory – part 1
Fresh Blood is finally here. You remember Fresh Blood…
ABC TV and Screen Australia will commission 25 projects for Fresh Blood, an initiative to find the next generation of comedy performers and producers.
The successful 25 projects each receive a budget of $10,000 to produce three, 2-5 minute short form comedy sketches to premiere on ABC iview this year.
All the sketches from each of the 25 teams are now on iview, with a selection also available on the ABC iview YouTube channel. So, what do we think? Well… Don’t get us wrong, we’re in favour of new talent initiatives, but some of these people have some work to do if they want to take it beyond online videos. Here’s the first batch of our sketch-by-sketch mini-reviews:
We quite liked Aunty Donna when we reviewed them a year ago, and their funeral sketch is definitely one of the better ones in Fresh Blood. It’s a nice, well-made parody of internet LOLZ and therefore perfect for iview and YouTube. There’s a couple of times across their run of sketches where what seems like a fun line or moment (the sting after “I got my hair cut in this shirt”, the surly teen prankster saying “I smashed all me Pogs”) ends up being run into the ground, but they’re good lines nonetheless.
The Australia Think Tank is four people sitting in an office in Canberra being one of those pointless departments the government will probably ban if it ever discovers them…which might be a good idea. In one sketch the Think Tank debate which amphibian creature should be declared Australia’s national frog. Their other sketches are about as funny, based largely on a slowed-down form of riffing around a central idea (ie, what to get Andre Rieu?). Isn’t this the kind of thing you’re supposed to do before you film the sketch? Still, not every single joke sucks; if the fifteen minutes were edited down to 90 seconds, it’d be a pretty good 90 seconds.
Still think bogans are hilarious? Really? The crime investigation parody AZIO – The Bogan Spy Agency might convince you otherwise. The problem with the conceit of these sketches – that bogan crimes need a bogan investigator – is that the bogan investigator in question couldn’t investigate his way out of a flannelette shirt factory…except that’s not the joke. The “joke” is that he’s a bogan who calls everyone “Bra…” and is quite confrontational. Right…
The series of BedHead sketches starts with a modern spin on the classic will they/won’t they plot, in which a girl stays over at a guy’s place and sleeps in the other half of his bed. As they both try to fall asleep we hear both their thoughts Peep Show-style. Except that unlike Peep Show the awkward moments generated by this situation aren’t that funny, whether you can hear inside the characters’ heads or not. This one gets five episodes (instead of the usual three) to explore the vagaries of modern relationships, only much of the time it feels like the writers are yet to actually have a relationship. A sex scene that features a woman saying to a man “is it in?” is not something to be proud of in 2014.
Another team who’ve probably been watching too much British comedy, but this time of the “dark” variety, is Corn Cobs. In one sketch they get a bit League of Gentleman (or Psychoville) when a lost boy turns up at the food truck and has to be gotten rid of. Generally speaking, there’s no circumstance in which dumping small boys on suburban buses comes across as anything other than not hilarious. And that proves to be the case here. Other sketches show a similar enthusiasm for “odd” rather than “funny”, which is great unless you’re not stoned, in which case “pointless” is probably what comes to mind.
#Couples is a series of sketches about over-the-top comedy character couples who are probably going to break up soon. And there were we thinking This Is Littleton was our lot for this type of comedy in 2014. Having a sketch where one person in a relationship acts completely crazy for the entire sketch before calming down and saying “get some rest, you’ve got your mother’s funeral in the morning” might seem hilarious if you have literally never seen another sketch in your life, but when you’re lumped together with 20-odd other sketch groups, you need to aim a little higher.
Crazy Bastards is an 80’s version of Mad Men set in Sydney. But resemblance to the much-admired American series ends there, as this is an out-and-out broad comedy. In one episode we discover the “real” origin of the famous grim reaper bowling AIDS awareness ad, another has the team trying to sell “fizzy water” Solo to men. Across all three episodes we see the characters wearing awful of-the-era clothes and drinking heavily. Despite these promising comedy ingredients it isn’t particularly funny, though the idea of “secret origins” of 80s icons is the kind of idea that could pay off given a bit more polish.
If you think it’s taken a long time for someone in (relatively mainstream) Australian comedy to do a Kickstarter parody then Crowd Failure, a series of short sketches about ludicrous inventions, makes up for it. For this kind of thing they’re impressively diverse – they really do feel like they’re coming from a variety of different sources thanks to the variety of film styles (and casting), and they aren’t just variations on a handful of narrow themes. In theory they could pump these out forever, and as this was one of the better Fresh Blood offerings that’s fine with us.
A few general observations after our first batch of reviews:
1): Even three minutes is a LONG TIME. You need a lot of funny material to fill three entire minutes, and way too many of these sketches have one decent idea and a lot of padding. Often less is more too: there are a lot of funny lines here that would be great as a one-sentence laugh. As 40 seconds of sketch comedy, not so great.
2): That rake joke from The Simpsons really ruined comedy forever, didn’t it? Yes, occasionally if you do something for long enough it goes from funny to unfunny to really funny; most of the time though it just becomes massively boring.
3): Pretty much everything here was better than The Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting. Even the bad sketches here felt like they were made by people who were actually interested in sketch comedy, not in adding another line to their resumes while waiting for a callback from House Husbands. If the ABC learns nothing from this beyond realising that when you’re hiring people to make sketch comedy it’s a good idea to hire the people who want to make sketch comedy, it’ll still be a success in our book.
Up next: we tackle the next eight Fresh Blood entrants. Will they be better, worse, or meh?
Geography Keeps Repeating
Wacky foodstuffs? “Sports” that involve sneaking up behind people as they walk down the street? It must be the latest Hamish & Andy’s Gap Year! Or any of the previous ones, it’s not like anyone can tell the difference any more.
“C’mon grumbleweeds,” says a totally fictitious person gleefully resurrecting a pun we first heard in 2008, “the loveable comedy duo are totally up to something different this time around! For starters, it’s called Hamish & Andy’s South American Gap Year! Because they’re in South America! And they’re wearing tuxedo tracksuits. Oh wait, they always do that. Yeah, I got nothing.”
We’ve said it before because there’s really nothing else to say about Australia’s top comedy duo: they’re repeating themselves in an amazingly sustained way. You’d think they were grizzled old vets the way they refuse to take even the tiniest step outside of their pre-defined limitations with each and every Gap Year… and considering they’ve been doing extremely well for themselves for the best part of a decade, maybe we really should be looking at them as grizzled vets entitled to rest on their laurels. They’ve lasted this long; if it ain’t broke, they sure ain’t broke either.
And it’s not like they haven’t tried to do things differently on occasion. The very first Gap Year, let’s not forget, was basically a tonight show complete with desk and guests; it wasn’t until that tanked that Hamish and Andy returned to the formula of wandering around some strange place making dicks of themselves that had served them so well back on Channel Ten.
Plus Gap Year is only six weeks out of the year in 2014. That leaves forty-eight weeks for them to experiment with pushing the boundaries of comedy, taking advantage of their massive fan base to try new things and… oh right, they just do radio one day a week and it’s basically exactly the same as everything else they’ve been doing since 2009. Great.
This is the point where usually we’d say something like “there’s no doubt that this formula works”, but does it? Even if this series of Gap Year rates as well as all the rest, eventually there has to come a point where doing the exact same shit in a different location fizzles out. If nothing else, they’re running out of continents to piss-fart about on. If another nothing else, they aren’t getting younger: their current act only works if they’re two young guys playing pranks on each other, and the “young guys” part of the deal isn’t something they can hang on to forever.
Their career seems to have taken them from fresh-faced up-and-comers to tired old professionals without ever getting to the part where they do any classic, memorable work. Gap Year increasingly feels like a retirement lap for Hamish and Andy, the thing they do before they stop doing what it is they do. They’ve been doing it for so long that it just doesn’t seem all that likely Australia will be interested in them doing anything outside of it*.
Maybe they’ll just keep on finding different parts of the globe where they can cook lasagne inside a volcano, and eat worms, and strap fireworks to their heads, and play fake sports that involve them creeping up behind people walking down the street. Maybe they’ll never settle down, or grow old, or die. Maybe they’ll do something really funny.
We’re not holding our breath.
*Not that they even seem to do anything outside of Gap Year these days. Remember when Hamish used to turn up on panel shows and the occasional movie? Remember when Andy had that famous girlfriend? Remember when Ryan Shelton had a solo career?
At Last, the 2004 Show
We all knew this day was coming, and it seems “this day” is this Wednesday:
Did you notice? No, not that ABC2 is repeating Mad as Hell – too much Micallef is never enough in our book – but that the Wednesday night ABC1 comedy night is no more.
Yes, there’s a repeat of QI at 8pm. Yes, there’s a repeat of Julia Zemiro’s Kitchen Rules at 10.13pm. But inbetween? A documentary about Lance Armstrong? What’s so funny about that?
So time for a moment’s silence for the ABC’s Wednesday night Australian comedy line-up. From its origins back in 2005 with Spicks and Specks and We Can Be Heroes, through the glory days of The Chaser’s War on Everything (season two), The Gruen Transfer and Summer Heights High, to the ABC taking a massive shit all over it with Randling, The Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting and Tractor Monkeys, it at least made it easy for fans of Australian comedy to know where to look.
We’re guessing that the ABC will try and keep Wednesday night comedy ticking over once Gruen and The Chaser are back – you know, shows that would rate well no matter where the ABC scheduled them – but as for newcomers… yeah, good luck. Without the Wednesday night stronghold you’ll have to sink or swim on your merits. Which, considering the general public’s perfectly justifiable attitude that most Australian comedy is unfunny try-hard crap, basically means you’re screwed.
And so we return to the dark days of the early 21st Century, when the ABC scheduled comedy anywhere they had a gap. Remember the Monday 8pm comedy slot occupied by The Games? What about Tuesday nights at 9.30pm, when the ABC would ditch halfway decent UK stuff like Spaced? Or even Thursday nights, which is where the first four episodes of Eagle and Evans ran in 2004 before it was pulled off air for two months before resuming late night Fridays?
Whatever you think of The Chaser quality wise, you’d be hard-pressed to deny they’ve been a major comedy asset for the ABC over the last decade. So maybe now’s a good time to point out that they were basically dumped by the ABC after CNNNN, and when they returned to do The Chaser’s War on Everything it was broadcast on an “unstable” Friday night timeslot – basically, it aired whenever the UK murder mystery shown at 8.30pm wrapped up. Ratings were good for 2006 but not great; around 800,000 at the peak.
So for 2007 they were moved to the 9pm Wednesday timeslot after Spicks and Specks. Hey presto, ratings doubled: 1.5 million was not unheard of. Was the second series twice as good as the first? That’s a no. In fact, a few high profile yet pointless stunts aside (this was the time of the APEC Motorcade stunt), the second series seemed repetitive, worn-out, and heavily reliant on cheap stunts. But it rated twice as well! Because people knew where to find it!
The ABC won’t be making that mistake again.
There Just Aren’t Enough Grains of Salt Out There
News! Well, for internet values of “news”:
Australian cult comedy blogger David Thorne has confirmed new forays into TV, with an eight-part HBO series and a one-off snowboarding mockumentary with Chris Lilley.
Hmm, guess that answers those “what will Chris Lilley do now that his career is over” questions. Let’s read on.
The Lilley project is a one-hour mockumentary starring the pair, called Cold Feet: America’s Bunny Slopes. “It’s about two individuals who embrace the snowboarding culture to the fullest extent but do not know how to snowboard,” says Thorne.
“Chris plays Derek, a Shaun White devotee to the extent of dying his hair red, while I play his best friend Josh who spends more time trying on different outfits and buying new gear than on the snow.
“Chris and I first met a couple of years ago at a function and share a similar sense of humour. In his words, ‘We’re like peas in a pod. Except I’m talented and famous’.”
Wow, sounds great! So of course, we decided to try and find out more because we’re actually interested in this stuff and not a mainstream media organisation that just prints quotes from self-confessed “internet pranksters” about how they’re going to be working with people way more famous than they are. And look what we found:
The 40-something has also been working with Australian comedian Chris Lilley on a mockumentary called Cold Feet; America’s Bunny Slopes, due for release around September.
“I’d been a fan of Chris Lilley since seeing Summer Heights High so when he emailed me to say he’d read an article I wrote (Missing Missy) and we should work on a project together sometime, I was fairly stoked,” Thorne says.
“We played with a couple of ideas but nothing progressed until Cold Feet; America’s Bunny Slopes.
“It’s a one-hour mockumentary about two individuals who embrace the snowboarding culture to the fullest extent but do not know how to snowboard.”
We’re not really surprised that someone might forget the details of exactly how they first met their friend and artistic collaborator. We’re slightly more surprised that no-one seems to have bothered to actually ask Chris Lilley about this – or even phoned the production company he works with exclusively, Princess Pictures, who you can reach here. Then again, who has time to do such things in today’s fast-paced world? Even if it’s, you know, their job*?
Meanwhile, not so long ago, Chris Lilley said this:
”Everyone is like, ‘Why don’t you go to Hollywood and get in some big show like Modern Family?’. But to me that’s boring,” says Lilley. ”Why would I want to read someone else’s lines when I can write my own, then edit them, and decide what happens?”
And from the same article:
When Lilley is in Los Angeles to liaise with HBO, he sometimes meets American comedy producers and stars who invariably ask him how many writers he has working on his show. They usually assume the answer is 10 to 12, but as Lilley explains, it’s just him. He writes by himself, and only about the characters that excite him.
So it looks like we’re going to sit on our hands just a little longer before we start getting excited about Cold Feet.
*This is a downside of being seen as “a reclusive genius” who doesn’t announce his projects until the last minute – journalists assume you won’t respond to inquiries so they don’t even bother making them.
It’s Like They Don’t Even Want To Win
Good news, everyone! Spicks and Specks is back! In fact, it seems to be on every night of the week at 7pm on ABC2 and… oh wait, that’s the old version. Sorry. Easy mistake to make.
This was going to be a regular old “Vale Spicks and Specks” until we realised that when you’re trying to launch a new version of a much-loved classic, you should maybe stop showing the classic version five nights a week. One of the big challenges the revamped Spicks and Specks had to deal with was getting audiences to accept it as something new… so the ABC kept showing the old version on high rotation? Seems odd.
And while we’re raising an eyebrow quizzically, where were all the repeats? When Randling was struggling the ABC was repeating episodes twice a week; earlier this year Mad as Hell was being repeated weekly both on ABC1 and ABC2. But Spicks and Specks? Nothing. Not even the traditional comedy repeat slot of Friday night just before Rage. In fact, until recently the ABC was repeating episodes of proven dud and total ratings zero Randling there rather than giving Spicks and Specks a second swing at pushing its ratings up. And then they replaced it with Dirty Laundry Live, which is fine with us, but still.
Considering how important the success of the revamped Spicks and Specks was supposed to be to the ABC, and considering how happy they’ve been in the past to game the system when they want to try and create a success – what, no mention of the “massive” viewing figures on iView? Guess only Chris Lilley gets that treatment – it just seems a little odd that it, of all the comedy shows the ABC put to air in 2014, was the one told to sink or swim.
It’s hard to even see who profits from not giving it every possible chance. Is Adam Hills so beloved inside the ABC that sinister forces worked to ensure his legacy wasn’t eclipsed by a Hills-free Spicks and Specks? Was the fact it was an in-house production mean that various ABC minions wanted it dead as a sign of goodwill towards the independent television producers they hope to move on to? Did someone think “hey, maybe we could better spend this money on new and exciting comedy rather than just a moderately well-done panel show that no-one was ever passionate about either way?”
Ok, now we’re really off in fantasy land.