Australian Tumbleweeds
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.
Vale Jonah from Tonga pt 2: On the Screen
Jonah from Tonga marked a big step forward in Chris Lilley’s career: it was the first time in living memory he gave characters not played by himself serious air time. Ok, by “serious air time” we mean “an occasional solo moment”, but by Lilley’s standards that was massive. One of our biggest complaints against Lilley’s work pretty much right from the start has been the way he’s totally dominated every series, turning scene after scene into nothing more than an extended monologue with – occasionally – other characters trying (and failing) to get a word in. Even when the characters are meant to be part of a double act he hogs all the glory; does anyone remember anything about the son of the Asian mother from Angry Boys? Or Ja’mie’s teen girl rival in Ja’mie: Private School Girl?
So by making Jonah’s high school teacher a foul-mouthed abusive thug with a heart of gold, Lilley seemed to be showing at least some awareness that his characters don’t exist in a vacuum (anyone remember any of Ja’mie’s teachers?). Lilley’s refusal to share a scene with any other character has been a huge limitation on the kinds of comedy he’s been able to do – when you’re the only one allowed to speak it’s hard to make snappy comebacks, for example – so any sign that he’s realised this is extremely welcome.
And yet, Jonah from Tonga was still massively shithouse in just about every way possible. Part of the reason Lilley had to let other characters get a word in is that Jonah from Tonga was a straight do-over of Jonah’s subplot in Summer Heights High, which involved him a): being a fuckwit, b): kind of coming around thanks to a tough love teacher before c): fucking up badly enough to get into serious trouble. Having an entire six episodes to fill, Lilley – who wrote, produced, and co-directed the series – expanded things a little, so we got two “caring” teachers (a grumpy one and a “down with da kids” Tongan youth worker), and when Jonah’s screw-up landed him in prison, there was a warm-hearted prison guard waiting for him there.
Wow, for a kid who’s only attributes are swearing, making crap jokes and being a dickhead, grown-ups sure do seem invested in trying to help him turn his life around! Lets not forget that alongside the aforementioned paternal figures there was also a nun and his art teacher and Jonah’s male relatives all watching over him kindly. They might not get much of a character, or even any decent dialogue, but at least we know they care for Jonah. You know, that foul-mouthed loser who thinks it’s funny abusing kids on the basis of their hair colour.
Normally in a sitcom you’ll create a small number of rounded-ish characters and then hopefully you’ll get laughs not just through the situations they’re put in but how they interact with each other. In Jonah from Tonga, you get one rounded-ish character, a lot of very sketchy and/or improvised ones and some situations that don’t form a cohesive plot because they’re all built around the one central character. If Lilley was willing to break away from his teen fixation, this formula could work: he’d just have to play an adult who could move from place to place and situation to situation, meeting different people on the way. But because he instead chooses to only play characters trapped in one (or a very small number) of locations – basically, teenagers (or teachers) in school or prison – he actually highlights the weaknesses in his approach. He wants to make shows focused on him that are also about teenagers with no variety in their lives; if you want to entertain people, you can’t do both.
Meanwhile, Lilley’s commitment to reality – or just to making sure the focus stays firmly on him – means he stacks the cast with non-professional actors. Let’s be blunt for once: these guys just aren’t that good. Having teachers playing real teachers and so on probably seems like a decent idea if you’re an idiot, but there’s a reason why for the last three thousand years of Western Civilisation we’ve had these strange creatures known as “actors”: performing on stage – or in front of cameras – is a specialised and difficult task that, if you’re planning to make a real show and not just film yourself in some creepy game where you surround yourself with real teachers and students and force them to pretend you’re a teenager half your real age, requires specalised performers. Otherwise you just have something that looks sloppy and amateurish.
But the weirdest thing about all this – because really, pretty much all Jonah from Tonga‘s problems can be explained away by it being made by someone given total control to act out his fantasies of a never-ending teenage dream – is the way the whole thing ends up being a massive slap in the face to the character of Jonah even though the whole show is clearly bending over backwards not to offend anyone. Remember, this is a show about a machete-weilding armed robber who means well.
Let’s do a quick comparison with Lilley’s last show, Ja’mie: Private School Girl. They’re both shows about horrible self-obsessed people (yes, Jonah’s not as bad as Ja’mie, but neither of them are people you’d willingly spend time with). With Ja’mie, we’re given a range of reasons to justify her behaviour: over-indulgent parents, a school system that instills an sense of unearned privilege, her massive wealth. These are things that Lilley blames for how she’s ended up; they’re the causes behind the unpleasant character he plays.
With Jonah from Tonga though, while Jonah himself is a racist bully and an armed robber, his flaws are all internal. They have to be: Lilley goes out of his way to make sure that we see Islander culture as decent and a moderating force (which has no impact on Jonah because he’s a dickhead) while his school teachers try to steer him onto the right path and even his prison guards are responsible people who care for him. Lilley doesn’t want to seem racist, or to be having a swipe at over-worked and under-resourced public servants, so they’re all living saints who only want the best for Jonah. Well, apart from his dad, but even then having to put up with Jonah for fifteen years is more than ample justification for his occasional rough edges.
All this would be an interesting political message – Ja’mie’s wealth cushions her from the consequences of her behaviour while Jonah has to deal with every single slip-up he makes – except that Lilley is so desperate to not be racist or blame the school system with Jonah from Tonga that all the blame for Jonah’s bad behaviour is put back on Jonah himself. Ja’mie is part of a system that encourages her bad behaviour so it’s not her fault she’s bad: Jonah is part of a system that’s actually trying to turn around his bad behaviour, so when he remains a dickhead it’s all his fault. There’s no-one else to blame.
Oh wait, we’ve been overthinking all this way too much. Society has no influence on who you are and the situations you go through in life have no effect on your personality whatsoever because Chris Lilley doesn’t believe people change.
‘Most of my characters never change as [a series] goes along,” says Lilley. ”There’s a familiar structure to television where the character is a certain way and then they go through a certain experience and they become different, but I like the idea that people don’t change. That represents reality more.”
No wonder he still acts like he’s fifteen years old.
Comedians in Comercials: Never Remotely Funny
Well, doesn’t this just sound dandy:
Optus has recruited comedian Josh Thomas to promote its “live more yes” positioning as it seeks to amplify its ‘Yes’ branding through new price offerings and services.
It’s hard to know what’s more depressing in that sentence: the idea of “amplifying branding”, “promoting positioning”, or calling Thomas a comedian.
Sure, you can go and click that link, but why bother? You can pretty much guess what kind of advertising they’re planning (hint: it involves cuddly kittens). And “live more yes”? Remember the days when Thomas fans would occasionally mention that his live show was full of hardcore gay sex jokes? Guess nobody told Optus. Unless they’re asking people to say yes to a variety of acts illegal to show on free-to-air television.
Anyway, here’s a Bill Hicks quote:
By the way, if anyone here is in marketing or advertising…kill yourself. Thank you. Just planting seeds, planting seeds is all I’m doing. No joke here, really. Seriously, kill yourself, you have no rationalisation for what you do, you are Satan’s little helpers. Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself now. Now, back to the show. Seriously, I know the marketing people: ‘There’s gonna be a joke comin’ up.’ There’s no fuckin’ joke. Suck a tail pipe, hang yourself…borrow a pistol from an NRA buddy, do something…rid the world of your evil fuckin’ presence.
Vale Jonah from Tonga pt 1: Behind the Scenes
Was there ever a television series more utterly unnecessary than Jonah from Tonga? Even in the darkest days of Ja’mie: Private School Girl at least we knew that Ja’mie was always going to cruise through life, an eternal and unchanging sitcom character where what little laughs there were came from dropping her in different situations. Even Mr G and the Sims twins were characters he could safely bring back, being one-note comedy characters with no real story to tell.
But Jonah was different: back in Summer Heights High he was the only one with an actual plotline as his dumb antics eventually caught up to him and he slipped through the education system’s cracks, resulting in him finally being shipped off back home to an undetermined but seemingly unpleasant fate. Presumably, knowing what we know now, having at least some kind of story was why Jonah was the real success of Summer Heights High; it’s funny that Lilley hasn’t given any of his characters an actual story since.
Well, obviously it’s not that funny, because we’ve had to sit through 24 hour long episodes of formless crap since then. The more control over the end product Lilley has gained over the course of his career the less impressive that end product has been; as far as we know, he hasn’t worked with another writer since Ryan Shelton (who co-wrote We Can Be Heroes) helped out on Summer Heights High. And it shows.
Without the involvement of an actual writer, and with the show written, co-directed and produced by someone increasingly only interested in creating opportunities to dress up and hang around with teenagers, it shouldn’t have come as anything close to a surprise that Jonah from Tonga was nothing more that an over-extended do-over of Jonah’s story from Summer Heights High. Yet clearly it must have shocked the ABC: how else to explain their bizarre marketing efforts?
First they put the entire series up on iView for a weekend before the first episode aired. How airing the entire series was meant to work as a promotion for the series remains a mystery to us – perhaps they hoped people who watched the whole thing would let others know it wasn’t as rubbish as Ja’mie: Private School Girl had been. Only trouble with that theory is that it was pretty much exactly as rubbish as his last series, so previewing the entire thing seemed more like an attempt to screw around with the iView rating figures – increasingly the only way the ABC can claim people are still interested in Lilley’s work.
So now they had to try and get viewers for a show that hardcore fans – increasingly the only fans Lilley has left – had already seen. At first when the iView figures were soft, they could claim they’d expected the numbers to be low but once you added the inital iView figures it wasn’t that bad. But then the free-to-air ratings collapsed: by the final episode Jonah only had “a dismal” 246,000 viewers.
But wait! The ABC had an excuse there too – they’d released the Jonah from Tonga DVD two weeks before the show finished airing, so obviously all the viewers had… ahh, even they didn’t bother trying that one. Releasing the DVD early smelt like what it was: a last ditch attempt to try and recoup something from what has to have been one of their biggest flops in recent history. Everything they tried to do with Jonah from Tonga – even the briefly announced then cancelled live Q&A sessions at cinemas – has been about trying to cash in on Chris Lilley’s reputation as a comedy legend while avoiding the fact that audiences have no interest whatsoever in the material he’s churning out now.
Let’s just pause on that for a moment: Lilley has lost over a million free-to-air viewers between the start of Angry Boys in 2011 (it rated 1,368,000 – the ABC’s biggest show for the year) and the end of Jonah from Tonga. The ABC had iView back in 2011 too, so those million people didn’t merely take their viewing online. The ABC had a goldmine in Lilley, a bonefide superstar with international appeal, and now he’s nothing. Gardening programs rate better than he does now.
We’re fond of hyperbolic statements, so here’s another one: Someone should have been sacked for this total mismanagement of a vital resource. Someone should have said to Lilley “hey, constantly doing the same old same old with a bunch of unlikable characters who never change is going to eventually get boring”. In our society whiny, self-indulgent, annoying, spoilt teenagers are told what to do by grown-ups and then expected to do it: why the ABC and production company Princess Pictures decided to give one free reign in this case remains one great big puzzling mystery.
Should we blame the director?
With the second series of Please Like Me coming up in August this isn’t an entirely bad time to dig out our DVD of Roy Höllsdotter Live, an early-ish short film by Please Like Me director Matthew Saville. Saville has a long history of directing both comedy and drama – TV and film – and his credits include Skithouse, Big Bite, Hamish & Andy, We Can Be Heroes, The King, Cloudstreet and The Slap. Roy Höllsdotter Live was an early TV project for Saville which aired on SBS in 2003. It won five awards including an Australian Writers Guild award for the script and an IF award for best short film.
Roy Höllsdotter (Darren Casey) is a Melbourne stand-up comedian with problems. He’s brilliant on-stage but a failure off-. When he’s not ripping the room apart with his stand-up he pines for his ex-girlfriend Cate (Asher Keddie) and hangs around in a late night takeaway with mate Simmo (Luke Elliot). Roy drinks heavily, snorts coke and pulls bongs, and as the film progresses we see him driven mad by his empty life and the creative process, making feeble attempts to feel better about himself and generate new material by taking up photography and furiously scribbling down ideas in notebooks.
Shot in the Gershwin Room at St Kilda’s Esplanade Hotel, the film captures the reality of life performing on Melbourne’s live circuit. The sequences of Roy performing are funny and fast-paced, and there are some amusing cameo appearances from comedy notables such as John Clarke (as Mike the venue manager), Costas “Farouk from The Castle” Kilias (as the takeaway shop manager) and Arthur “Mini Mick from The Mick Molloy Show” Serevetas (as a heckler), but the rest of the time the film meanders. There is little real action and a lot of padding, and this is essentially a directionless (not to mention depressing) portrait of a man having a breakdown.
Of some interest are Matthew Saville’s other short films, which appear as extras on this DVD. The best of these (in comedy terms) is Rhonda and Nigel, about an inexperienced director’s attempt to film a wedding. Using (well-faked) footage shot for the wedding video, it charts the rapid deterioration of the relationship between bride and groom Rhonda (Angela Twigg) and Nigel (Simon King), and director Arthur (Aris Gounaris) as Arthur’s over-zealousness repeatedly ruins the couple’s day.
In Rhonda and Nigel and the stand-up scenes in Roy Höllsdotter Live, Saville shows he can make a funny script in to a funny film and direct any moments of drama well. Where he struggles is making shows with comedically weak scripts, like We Can Be Heroes and Please Like Me, funny. Perhaps he’s spent too much time also making drama? Perhaps We Can Be Heroes and Please Like Me are just meant to be like that and we should get over that opinion we have that comedy should be funny rather than “real”? After all, it would be wrong to blame Matthew Saville entirely for the failings of these shows – the writers and global dramedy trend that’s blighted comedy for more than a decade deserve far more of the blame. But it’s interesting to ponder what would have happened to We Can Be Heroes and Please Like Me if a “comedy director” rather than an all-rounder had been in charge. Might they have been funnier?
Speech! Speech!
So last week we went to see the Working Dog play The Speechmaker, and just to make it clear from the start: we’re not regular theatre-goers. Sure, we occasionally visit the theatre district to check out a live performance – usually featuring Shaun Micallef – but it’s fair to say that our knowledge of theatre is, much like our knowledge of stand-up comedy, hardly exhaustive. So even more than usual, what follows is an opinion you should take with a grain of salt.
It’s kind of surprising it’s taken Working Dog – Rob Sitch, Tom Gleisner and Santo Cilauro are the listed authors – so long to write a “proper” play. They started out in comedy doing live reviews (basically, live sketch comedy), but unlike some other members of the then D-Generation (specifically Tony Martin and Mick Molloy, who left after The Late Show in part because they wanted to do more live work), these three never really went back to live performance after the television and radio gigs started coming in. So is this a long awaited homecoming? Uh, no.
The plot of The Speechmaker is relatively straightforward: In the wake of a rousing Christmas Eve speech based on the feel-good topic of “humanity”, the US President (Erik Thomson) boards Air Force One for a top secret surprise visit to London to, um… well, it’s a little unclear, but it basically seems to be a PR visit with a side dose of showing support for the USA’s number one ally in the War on Terror.
Also on this flight we have: the President’s political advisor (Kat Stewart), security advisor (Jane Harber), chief of staff (Nicolas Bell), and speechwriter (Toby Truslove), along with a perky media handler (Sheridan Harbridge) and a very attentive flight attendant (Brent Hill). Oddly, even early on no really effective double-acts make themselves known – there’s no natural comedy parings here, no characters that set each other foibles into high relief.
A stop partway into the flight sees the arrival of the defense secretary (David James), a vaguely sinister policy wonk (Lachy Hulme), and a Marine colonel (Christopher Kirby). If they sound like slightly more serious types, that’s because, after an opening that sees to be about the vapidity of current politics (the President’s big opening speech is given in such a way that we can read his teleprompter, complete with stage directions like “REAL EMOTION”), the story takes a shift when “chatter” reveals there may be a terrorist attack aimed at a major Western leader on the horizon.
[VAGUE BUT NONETHELESS VERY REAL SPOILERS: It’s been suggested that this might be yet another attempt by Working Dog to crack the US market (after the failure of The Dish), what with the US-centric characters and storyline. And this is a very US-centric storyline: without giving too much away, despite the darker turn events take this has the firm message that the US is a colossus astride the globe, nothing of import happening without its involvement or consent. It gives the story its old-fashioned tinge – people might have believed this in 2004, but in 2014 it’s fairly clear large parts of the world do what they like without the US doing shit – and whatever The Speechmaker might say about how that power is used, it’s still fairly flattering to the US to even suggest it still has such power. END SPOILERS]
There’s plenty of good things to be said here. It’s a great cast, and they sell every joke – there was never a single moment where it felt like the writing was being let down by either the cast or the direction. The set itself rotates, so while the entire story is set on Air Force One the shifts between various parts of the plane – The President’s office, the back seats, a conference room, even the cockpit – is all handled seamlessly. And there’s a lot of shifting around; while there are a number of longer, more traditional scenes with many of the cast gathered in one place, there are also numerous shorter scenes, and even sight gags between cast members as we “cut” from one scene to the next.
[a more cynical reviewer might suggest here that this is less of a work designed for the stage and more of a low-budget movie script that they – after the utter failure of Any Questions For Ben? – thought they could make happen by first generating interest via a successful stage run. With its numerous short scenes and varied locations inside the one set, it’s in some ways a more natural fit for the big screen than the stage.]
The big problem here – aside from the theatre it’s being presented in itself (which is not a great fit for this kind of sight-gag using comedy, especially if you’re up the back) and your chances of getting a ticket (the current run is all but sold out, with only a few midweek matinee tickets left at the time of writing) – is the script. We said going in if what we got was the equivalent of two late-series episodes of The Hollowmen, we’d be happy.
We got early series episodes. That’s not so good.
For a comedy, a lot of the characters aren’t all that well defined. The President starts off seeming like a comedy buffoon, only to develop something of a spine as events progress. There’s maybe a comparison to be made here with Frontline‘s Mike Moore – another Working Dog character who occasionally acted like he had the courage of his convictions – but Moore was a clueless TV host: by the time you get to be President even if you’re an empty suit there’s a pretty good chance you already know just how far you’re going to go in the defense of the free world.
The supporting cast are equally ill-defined. Jane Harber’s been getting a lot of praise in the reviews we’ve been reading and rightly so, but that’s largely because she’s playing an actual character: a stick-up-the-backside security chief with a very Hilary Clinton look, and-
– we heard an interview somewhere (it may have even been this one) where Tom Gleisner said that they’d been working on the idea for The Speechmaker for a while now, dropping it every time a new President came along then realising that it was as relevant as ever. This is not true: this is a play that is coming to you live from a period between 2002-2009, when the War on Terror was a living thing and there was still an idea that America’s war against its enemies could possibly somehow go too far. The whole thing feels just a little too behind the times and a little too obvious in a world where the current US President is murdering people via remote-controlled robots.
– a nice line in comedy befuddlement. Just about everyone else remains a little too fuzzy around the edges: the hard-nosed Defense Secretary is, a brief dalliance with Spongebob Squarepants aside, basically played straight, the political advisor is colourless, the chief of staff comes off as a faded West Wing memory and the speech writer seems like he’s going to be a pivotal character early on but he just fizzles out.
Lachy Hulme gets a lot of prominence on the posters but he has a fairly small role in the play itself, though he’s getting a paragraph all to himself here because it becomes increasingly clear that he’s meant to be the Doctor Strangelove character: a vaguely sinister intellectual who explains that, by the logic of the nightmarish world we live in, the unthinkable is in fact inevitable. He even puts on the tinted glasses at one point.
Unfortunately, this is no Doctor Strangelove. With the characters largely ill-defined, a lot of the character-based jokes don’t get the traction they need to really hit home, while the later, more dramatic scenes don’t have the requisite gravity due to the “old news” nature of the revelations about the War on Terror. A handful of running gags work and on their own just about every scene is perfectly serviceable as comedy and as drama. It’s just that when every scene is just pretty good you don’t end up with a great play.
As we said at the start, we’re not regular theatre-goers. It’s perfectly possible that our standards are too high here: we’re comparing this with previous Working Dog efforts, not other stage plays. But as a Working Dog effort it has a lot of the flaws seen in some of their more recent scripted work: a cast over-stuffed with fuzzy characters (for a 90-odd minute play, ten characters seems a little much), too many low-key “realistic” performances, a stress on story realism over laughs (the days when they used to do gag-packed crazy radio “drama” serials is long gone) and a steady stream of jokes that are funny without any of them really standing out.
It’s still good, mind you, and definitely an enjoyable night out if you can find someone else to pay the (on average) $90 a ticket. And if you can’t get to see it, don’t worry too much: if they do end up turning it into a movie it’d be a shitload better than Any Questions For Ben? and if it tours nationally there’s a good chance they’ll give the script a decent polish.
And come on, we shouldn’t have been so surprised it wasn’t a laff riot. After all, it’s called The Speechmaker for a reason; fingers crossed their next play is called something closer to The Gagmeister.