Oh, alright… The 2023 Logies was exactly what we’ve come to expect from the Logies: the occasional funny moment and deserved winner, but mostly a lot of awards going to shows and people who barely deserve a shrug.
Some early funny moments came from Sam Pang with a cold opening featuring former Logies hosts giving him advice, in which Wendy Harmer revealed she’s hidden in a cupboard ever since her much-derided hosting stint in 2002. This was followed by a strong opening monologue from Pang, peppered with gags about the various stars who turned down the hosting gig. Pang seemed to go down well with people on social media, thus saving him from joining Wendy Harmer in the cupboard.
The first award, for Most Outstanding Comedy Program, went to Colin from Accounts, beating Shaun Micallef’s Mad As Hell, Fisk, Summer Love and Taskmaster. Given this very strong list of nominees, it’s astounding that Colin from Accounts won. Sure, there is a market out there for romantic comedies but it’s hard to work out what exactly the appeal of this show is. The leads are not only boring and annoying but also unfunny. Naturally, the show’s creators and stars, Harriet Dyer and Patrick Brammall, later picked up Silver Logies for Most Outstanding Actress and Most Outstanding Actor.
Later, Shaun Micallef presented the Bert Newton Award for Most Popular Presenter, an award he was also nominated for. His introduction, deconstructing the art of television presenting, drew big laughs from the audience, but sadly he didn’t win. Still, at least the Mad As Hell crew seemed to be having a fun time.
There was better news for comedy later in the evening when Working Dog won two awards, first for Most Popular Comedy Program for Have You Been Paying Attention?, then Most Outstanding Entertainment Programme for The Cheap Seats. This resulted in some amusing acceptance speeches from the stars of both shows, including Ed Kavalee reading out a speech Sam Pang had planned to deliver had Front Bar beaten Have You Been Paying Attention?
Most Popular Entertainment Program went to Googlebox Australia, beating Gruen Nation and Hard Quiz, amongst others. While the In Memoriam segment included Karl Stefanovic paying tribute to Barry Humphries and Kate Miller-Heidke singing “Xanadu” in memory of Olivia Newton-John. There was also Pang’s amusing tribute to the shows we lost in 2022, including Rush, Blow Up and The Real Love Boat.
The Silver Logie for Most Popular Actress went to Fisk creator and star Kitty Flanagan, who beat fellow Fisk star Julia Zemiro and Wellmania’s Celeste Barber. Flanagan wasn’t at the Logies, as she was gigging in Adelaide, so Zemiro accepted the award on her behalf. Later, Flanagan celebrated her win in a local bar:
As the evening drew to a close, Sam Neill beat Colin from Account’s Patrick Brammell for the Silver Logie for Most Popular Actor, and then Daryl Somers turned up to present the Gold Logie, so all hopes of Shaun Micallef winning rapidly faded.
They say you get the government you deserve because you vote for it, and the same is true of the Logies. And Australia, it seems, doesn’t want to award TV’s top honour to a comedian who’s entertained us for more than 25 years. No, it wants to reward a woman who a tribunal found:
made “vilifying” remarks about links between the Muslim community and terrorism that may encourage hatred towards Australian Muslims
As the justified outrage about Kruger’s win gathered pace on social media, Kruger herself got up on stage and delivered a rambling and at times odd acceptance speech. She referenced her agent, she made a bad joke about something her agent had said about Hamish Blake, which Blake took surprisingly well, and then she mentioned a sign she’d seen backstage, which read:
Hosting is not about what you do, it’s about how you make other people feel.
Wow. She really has no idea how she’s made people feel at all. Worried for our Muslim brothers and sisters, who you got away with vilifying. Desperately sad that we missed out on what no doubt would have been a hilarious and memorable ending to the Logies had Shaun Micallef won the Gold. Tired because the Logies has run over and we’ve got working in the morning. That’ll do for a start.
Five years ago War on Waste was yet another of the ABC’s attempts to make consumer affairs television entertaining. Now it’s back, and it’s not even trying to be funny. So why are we mentioning it?
We’re all used to the ABC’s endless efforts to cash in on nostalgia for things we didn’t even realise were gone. Beyond that, War on Waste is an odd reminder of an period that once defined the ABC. We’re talking, of course, about The Chaser Era.
While today it’s just one of many websites that punch out satirical headlines at a steady rate, a decade ago The Chaser dominated the non sitcom-side of ABC comedy.
Topical humour? You had The Chaser’s War on Everything, The Hamster Wheel, and The Chaser’s Media Circus. Election comedy coverage? They had a special or series each federal election for fifteen years (2001-2016). Panel shows? The Unbelievable Truth (ok, that was on Seven). Consumer affairs? The Checkout. They were on radio, they put out books, they did live tours: the “Chaser boys” were everywhere.
And now they’re not. They’re not even behind The War on Waste (that’d be Lune Media, home of a bunch of similar comedian-fronted series including Shaun Micallef’s Brain Eisteddfod), though if you read the end credits you’ll see many of their members being thanked. Still, with its mix of facts, stunts – there’s a lot of big piles of garbage being dumped in public places – and host Craig Reucassel, there’s a touch of time travel in every episode.
Exactly why The Chaser faded from our screens is… well, not really a mystery. It’s just hard to nail down. Their attempts to introduce a “next generation” never caught on. Politicians wised up to their pranks. Moving to couch-based chat with Media Circus was a flop; shows like Mad as Hell and The Weekly edged them out.
And of course, once the Abbott / Turnbull / Morrison era began it became pretty clear the ABC didn’t want people making fun of the Abbott / Turnbull / Morrison era. The Chaser’s court jester act required the support of management and the indulgence of intelligent politicans. Uh oh.
The main difference between 2013 and 2023 is that The War on Waste, like just about everything on Australian television fronted by a comedian now, isn’t even trying to be funny. The formula once used to deliver middling gags about politicans is now presenting viewers with depressing stats about trash.
Much like this blog, come to think of it. Maybe we should get Reucassel to host.
Hey look, The Back Side of Television is back, and it’s so good we actually watched every episode before coming here to tell you about it. Yeah yeah, we’ll get around to watching those other episodes of Gold Diggers later – it’s just nice to be watching an Australian comedy where you come away thinking “more, please”.
But is it a comedy? As a look back at the weird and… well, mostly just weird world of Australian television, there are plenty of moments across the six half hour episodes (now all available on Binge) where you’ll laugh. But there are a lot more moments where you’ll be more like “huh, I did not know that” or “geez, they really trashed children’s television because of Fat Cat?”
This “documentary, but with snark” approach isn’t exactly a new trend – see our earlier coverage of The Betoota Advocate Presents – and while the growing lack of actual comedy in so-called comedy programs is a bit of a downer, at least in this case the show itself is so good it doesn’t feel like we’re missing out.
Each episode features a central topic or two surrounded by a few shorter segments that are just going for laughs; edit together enough bizarre intros to Unsolved Mysteries and you’re going to strike comedy gold eventually. Beyond that, the idea is to shine some light on how television in this country is (or was) made, whether it’s the way the networks often put good series in the bin, how what you see isn’t what you get with games shows*, or the feeling that an awful lot of Australian television seems to have been based on the idea of trying to prevent anyone else from muscling in on the producers turf.
Host Mitch McTaggart’s done his research and then some. There’s a lot of old press material backing up the unseen and long forgotten material here – shithouse sitcom for kids Carrots is only the tip of the crappy iceberg – to create a range of stories that are both well told and eyebrow-raising.
What there isn’t in this series is a lot of straight TV reviewing (that’s more of a Last Year of Television thing), but review-ish segments like the compare and contrast between shark-themed television (the recent Bite Club and the 80s Shark’s Paradise) are funny and informative. Like much of what’s on show in the rest of the series, they’re also a grim reminder that the local industry has really become a lot more bland and boring in the 21st century.
Obviously it helps a lot to be already interested in television, but this is quality stuff whichever direction you approach it from. The final episode is a bit of an outlier, being mostly a television-related true-crime expose (complete with re-enactments, featuring an orange turtleneck with Tony Martin inside). It’s a high point in a series that doesn’t put a foot wrong.
If McTaggart wanted to shift his focus to more popular subjects** and become a much bigger name, he could. This is a series that literally spells out how television news went from being educational and informative to a blatant attempt to terrify viewers because of ratings, so don’t think he’s not aware where the money lies.
For now at least, we*** should all be grateful he’s sticking with the small screen.
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*a segment that was memorable in part because, while it was having a go at the networks for being shonky, it also took the time to point out that a lot of the attacks on networks for being shonky were also in themselves shonky – the point here isn’t merely to have a go at bad television, it’s to hold bad television up to a decent standard. The enemy of my enemy isn’t my friend if they’re both as bad as each other
It’s been hard not to feel a little uncomfortable watching Utopia lately. Every week there’s a subplot about a culture war-type issue (training on respect in the workplace kills off a burgeoning romance, a staff member objects to a poster because it sends a non-inclusive message, an old photo surfaces of Nat wearing a Sombrero and this is interpreted as cultural appropriation) and the conclusion seems to be that caring about issues like sexual harassment, inclusivity and identity is, at worst, bad, or, at least, a waste of time.
And, sure, Utopia is far from equivalent to a Sky News rant on how “the woke brigade” are making the lives of “ordinary people” worse. But the basic conclusion seems to be the same: this stuff has gone too far.
Of course, how it comes across on the show and what it’s intended to be, might be different. Episodes in earlier series of Utopia included subplots making fun of the way in which a seemingly basic social event in an office, such as a morning tea, can take far longer to organise and involve far more people than it should. And arguably, the culture war-type subplots in the current series are an extension of that comic idea; groups of people in an office can devote more time than is perhaps necessary to something that is not an organisation’s core business.
Having said that, this type of comedy is probably the sort of thing you find funnier the further up the hierarchy in an organisation you are. If you’re in the lower strata of an organisation, a half-hour spent away from your desk chatting and eating cake is a good thing. As is having greater confidence that issues like sexual harassment, equity and cultural identity are understood by your colleagues.
Watching these subplots play out, therefore feels a bit uncomfortable. Especially as Utopia often isn’t a terribly funny program. You also start to wonder if the viewpoint Utopia seems to be expressing genuinely reflects the views of the writers, Tom Gleisner, Rob Sitch, and Santo Cilauro, three of the most prolific, successful, and respected comedy writers and performers in this country over the past four decades.
Utopia seems to be a far cry from the days of Frontline when Gleisner, Sitch, Cilauro and Jane Kennedy understood and perfectly satirised one thing that really has gone too far: tabloid journalism. The same tabloid journalism, such as the Murdoch-owned media and the Daily Mail, that push ideas about “the woke brigade” and stoke community fears about ethnic minorities (e.g., African gangs) or how the advancement of women is causing problems for men.
So, are these sub-plots in Utopia a reflection of Gleisner, Sitch and Cilauro’s point of view? Or is it careless or thoughtless writing? We suspect more the latter, and there’s no evidence that they hold racist or sexist viewpoints*. It also feels like the kind of comedy you write if you’ve, say, been running your own company for three decades, rather than, say, being a jobbing writer/performer.
It also feels like a direct response to observing phenomena like “cancel culture” and the so-called “New Puritanism” and imagining how that might play out in an office. And, yes, it’s true that people trying to tackle these issues do over-correct, but fixing the problem is important, and if you ridicule trying to fix the problem too hard it does tend to look like you prefer the status quo.
As the kids say, “Pick a side”. And in the case of Utopia, the side the writers have picked seems to be “this is bad”.
* Although the several examples of blacking up in The Late Show are a bit of a shock.
Brand new Mother and Son coming to the ABC in August
The ABC is thrilled to announce the highly anticipated, charming new eight part comedy, Mother and Son, will premiere on Wednesday 23 August at 8:30pm on ABC TV and ABC iview.
Combining the comedic talents of two of Australia’s most beloved comedians, Matt Okine and Denise Scott, this fresh re-imagining of an iconic family favourite is guaranteed to win the hearts of those who know and love the original and delight fans of contemporary Australian comedy.
Following a breakup from his long-suffering girlfriend, Dee (Andrea Demetriades), Arthur (Matt Okine) puts his future on hold to move back home with his widowed mother, Maggie (Denise Scott). Arthur and his older sister, Robbie (Angela Nica Sullen) – arguably ‘the favourite’ – attempt to care for Maggie, who may recently have almost burnt down the kitchen, but still runs circles around her children!
Joining the cast is Catherine Văn-Davies (The Twelve, Barons), with special appearances from Jean Kittson (The Big Gig, Fat Pizza), Virginia Gay (Safe Home, Winners and Losers), Tiriel Mora (Frontline, The Castle), Jenna Owen (Queen of Oz, Joe vs. Carole), Veronica Milsom (Shaun Micallef’s Mad As Hell, After the Verdict), Andrew McFarlane (Secret City, Glitch), Krew Boylan (Seriously Red), Justin Amankwah (Aftertaste, Shantaram) and TikTok sensation Zara Tate.
In collaboration with the original creator Geoffrey Atherden, re-creator and writer Matt Okine, Sarah Walker, Tristram Baumber and directors Neil Sharma (Heartbreak High) and Kriv Stenders (Bump, Red Dog) alongside the producing team at Wooden Horse, have created the perfect blend of wit, humour, and relatability, promising viewers an unforgettable and laughter-filled experience.
Mother and Son broadcasts weekly on ABC TV and streams on ABC iview.
TikTok stars! A main character who possibly has dementia! Re-created by Matt Okine! It’s not the future we were promised, but it’s the one we deserve.
Last week saw the final episodes of The Betoota Advocate Presents and Deadloch, two good shows made by funny people which were kind of serious. What does this tell us about the state of comedy in 2023?
For one it suggests that funders, broadcasters, streaming services, and whoever else gives the green light to these shows, seem perfectly happy to employ comedians, but not to employ them to make actual comedy. A TV show from the popular online comedy news site The Betoota Advocate, you’d think, would be along the lines of a topical sketch show or a current affairs parody. Like when The Chaser team moved from being the publishers of a cult newspaper to making parody election shows, and, later, semi-satirical prank shows.
Instead, The Betoota Advocate’s TV show consists of four serious Netflix-esque documentaries about scams and controversies from our recent past. They were good serious Netflix-esque documentaries about scams and controversies from our recent past, but they could have been made and hosted by anyone. If you’re getting Clancy Overell and Errol Parker from The Betoota Advocate to front them, you’re expecting some laughs, or at least something more than occasional commentary from two blokes in Akubras.
Having said that, when your topics include Hillsong and the Cronulla Riots, you’re already limiting the potential laughs. No one wants to see people making light of sexual abuse and race riots. The final episode, on the Fine Cotton Affair, looks at a more natural comic topic, especially when you get to the bit where they paint the horse, but even this was presented seriously.
Overall, and not as in Clancy, you have to wonder how this project turned out as it did. Were the Betoota team offered a TV show and then told “Sorry, we don’t have enough money for you to do a weekly topical sketch show. Why not make some one-offs?”. So, they ended up making these four documentaries? Or is there an active reluctance from broadcasters and streaming services to make comedy unless it’s dressed up as another popular format?
This brings us to Deadloch, the part comedy/part Nordic noir-esque murder mystery. Although, it at least feels like the kind of show that Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney wanted to make. It’s infused with their voice and humour, providing a commentary on sexuality, gender, food culture, racism and more, whilst the bodies of murdered men keep popping up around the small Tasmanian town of Deadloch.
The comic moments didn’t always work, with the jokes destroying some of the dramatic tension and plot momentum in the earlier episodes, but a better balance is found towards the end of the run. And the final episode, in which the murderer is revealed and several of the more pernicious townspeople get their comeuppance, is worth the wait.
Would we personally rather see McLennan and McCartney do more outright comedy? Yes, but Deadloch was a nice bridge (with echoes of The Bridge) between a popular detective genre and the kind of feminist/anti-racist comedy we saw in Get Krack!n.
The fact that TV seems to need such bridges, though, and doesn’t have the will, the guts, or the money to make sketch shows, topical satires, and many other types of comedy is more our gripe here. Who out there has got the impression that audiences don’t want to laugh? Who thinks we’re better off with comedians hosting cooking shows rather than doing comedy? And will today’s release of Mitch McTaggart’s new series of The Back Side of Television solve the problem, or just be more of the same?
Okay, so our expectations weren’t all that high for Gold Diggers. Australia’s proud history of proud historical sitcoms doesn’t quite begin and end with Bligh, but good luck topping the “big tits, small dicks” scene from The Olden Days. And both those examples are old enough to be historical comedies in their own right. Why doesn’t someone try to make a sitcom set in the hilarious 90s? But we digress.
And with good reason, because otherwise we’d have to engage with Gold Diggers, a sitcom that doesn’t exactly waste a mountain of potential but rarely comes close to living up to it either. So what’s the joke? We were hoping you knew.
At first it seems like the comedy premise here is that our heroines – Gert (Claire Lovering) and Marigold (Danielle Walker) Brewster – are party girls who have shown up at the goldfields circa 1853 looking for rich dudes to relocate them onto easy street. Only they seem pretty picky for seemingly desperate women, and they’re not interested in lowering their standards either. Good for them!
Not so good for the show though, as after a few scenes where things don’t work out, the rest of the episode mostly involves them wandering around being brash and in-your-face in between being puzzled as to why this approach doesn’t seem to be working.
You know what else isn’t working? An approach to comedy that’s roughly 80% “wouldn’t it be hilarious if people in the 1800s talked like they did today, well not how everyone talks today just comedy dickheads?” Going by this kind of sparkling dialogue, no it wouldn’t:
‘All right, sis, are you ready to do this?’
‘I’m not not ready.’
‘Fire up, bitch!’
‘Fire up, bitch!’
‘Vibe check?’
‘Honestly, vibe is pumpin’.’
We’re not going to throw this one entirely under the Cobb & Co coach just yet, because it’s obviously a first episode where they’re setting up a lot of stuff and some of the dynamics – Eddie Perfect as a burly bartender who can’t seem to get it through to our (possibly time-traveling because how else to explain their lack of basic knowledge about society?) leads that women can’t drink in public bars in 1853 for one – have potential.
Also, everybody around the Brewster sisters seems to find them annoying, which is a sign that the series creators have realised they’ve created a couple of annoying characters. All they have to do now is realise that annoying is not the same as funny.
Any way you slice it, this feels like a first episode that’s woefully underdone. If the Brewster’s are schemers after rich husbands, make it a sitcom about that! But we also get a bunch of hints that the sisters are on the run, which is fine – but if they’re here because they’re on the run and hiding out and trying to make a go of it, make it a sitcom about that, because that’s not the same as being gold diggers.
(hands up anyone else who gets the feeling that the creators came up with the “gold diggers” pun and then half way through writing the first episode they realised that gold diggers is an offensive stereotype they didn’t want to perpetuate and oh shit now they have to rework the whole premise even though the only joke they had is the premise)
In fact, this bends over backwards to make sure you realise the two leads are actually sticking it to the man – well, all men, in the form of the patriarchy, via an awful lot of dialogue about literally taking on the patriarchy and other cliche internet feminism 101 lines (don’t worry, even the other female characters think they’re full of shit).
This could all possibly be meant to be funny in a “yeah right, as if people 170 years ago talked like this” way except it just comes off as the writers wanting to make sure we realise that despite their dire plight and violent surroundings our heroines are in no way going to be taken advantage of or lose their agency or be threatened in any real way.
Which is exactly what you want in a comedy. Only, you know, done better. A lot better.
Gambling ads have been in the news recently, what with an exciting new proposal to ban them because they’re pure fucking evil.
“Gambling advertising and simulated gambling through video games is grooming children and young people to gamble and encourages riskier behaviour,” she said. “The torrent of advertising is inescapable. It is manipulating an impressionable and vulnerable audience to gamble online.”
So what did the advertising experts at the newly returned Gruen have to say about all this back in 2021?
Well, there’s a lot about how amazingly effective gambling ads are, a bit about how gambling works to get you addicted, and one line about how… hell, let’s go to the screenshots:
Protecting people! Yes!
Ohh, so close.
To be fair to these bloodless shills for an industry that is a malignant cancerous growth on society, they skate right up to the idea that there should be restrictions on gambling advertising, and then rapidly swerve back onto how gambling itself is a bad thing but you know, you’ve got to admire how they know how to really focus on the bad and bring that out and purify it until it’s utterly toxic… gambling that is, not advertising.
So you know, apart from the vibe of watching one group of war criminals admiring the activities of another group of war criminals, good job Gruen! You almost – but not quite – admitted advertising is making a serious social ill even worse.
(never fear, there’s next to no real threat of gambling ads being banned all together – as that article helpfully points out, “The federal government, which is not required to implement the committee’s recommendations, is expected to face significant pressure from the country’s biggest sporting codes and media companies not to adopt them.”)
There’s a lot to dislike about Gruen and we’ve gone on about it a lot over the years. Even just on the level of entertainment, it’s dull and lazy, full of hacky jokes from Wil Anderson – what’s that Wil? You smoke dope? Who knew! – and weirdly skewed segments that claim to be tackling the big issues through the lens of advertising but constantly seem to skirt any of the angles that might unsettle the vested interests seated around the table.
The flaw at the heart of the series from day one has been a massive one. It’s a show about advertising that’s only interested in showcasing the views of insiders. Advertising doesn’t exist solely in the coke-addled boardrooms and HR nightmare offices of advertising agencies: it goes out into the world and fucks up the lives of regular people. Good luck finding them on Gruen.
Every time one of the generic smugsters around the desk talks about the effectiveness of this ad or the impact of that ad, there should be a half dozen people behind them pointing out that advertising is when they hit mute on their televisions*, or start texting, or do literally anything else because advertising is a boring pointless intrusion on our lives at best and outright theft of our most valuable commodity – our time – at worse.
Ads are shit, and so is Gruen.
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*at a guess, the real reason why nobody on Gruen is going to say “ban gambling ads” – aside from the sheer insanity of expecting a bunch of advertising executives to ever suggest there should be even the tiniest of limitations on their boundless reach – is because gambling ads are pretty much the only thing propping up large expanses of free-to-air television. For some bizarre reason, Gruen is a show lazer-focused on television ads despite the fact that nobody under 50 seems to still be watching television with any kind of regularity… unless it’s sport. Remind us again: who advertises during sport?
For comedy to be funny it needs to be believable and it’s hard to find anything much believable or funny in the new locally made Catherine Tate comedy Queen of Oz.
Princess Georgiana (Catherine Tate) is the gaff-prone daughter of the current British monarch. Having screwed up one time too many, by vomiting on a schoolgirl presenting her with a model of Buckingham Palace, her family send her to Australia, where she will found and lead a local monarchy.
Wait, what? We know this is a work of fiction, and watching it involves some suspension of disbelief, but Queen of Oz is expecting us to buy that the Australian government agrees to let our current (foreign) monarch step aside in favour of their wayward daughter, thus establishing an Australian monarchy, rather than, you know, becoming a republic? That’s the kind of plot you write if you still think Britain’s former colonies just accept that kind of thing. Like it’s the 1940s when the abdicated Edward VIII got packed off to be Governor of Bermuda because he had Nazi sympathies and the British wanted him out of Europe.
But let’s be generous to Queen of Oz, set all that improbability aside, and accept that this is plausible. It’d be really funny to have a drug-taking, smoking, drinking, shagging mess-up as monarch of Australia, right? Ummm…
Look, let’s just say the scripts aren’t great. Or, possibly more to the point, the show is dominated by Queen Georgiana and Catherine Tate plays her as a snooty, bitchy bin fire turned up to 11, and if you don’t find that character and her performance funny and interesting then you’re out of luck as pretty much no other character gets a look in.
And this is a shame, as Queen of Oz has a solid supporting cast of very able performers, including Jenna Owen (The Feed) as the Queen’s PR/social media whiz kid Zoe, Marc Collins (Mystery Road) as the Queen’s bodyguard Marc, Robert Coleby (Patrol Boat) as the Queen’s private secretary Bernard, William McKenna (The Messenger) as the Queen’s assistant Matthew, Rachel Gordon (Blue Heelers) as Prime Minister Rebecca Stewart, lady-in-waiting Anabel (Niky Wardley) and David Roberts (Please Like Me) as media mogul Richard Steele. Yet, apart from the odd scene, we get almost no sense of who these characters are. And not one of them ever gets to drive a plot or create laughs.
Even in the second episode, where Georgiana tries to woo media mogul Richard in the hope that his outlets won’t lead with her latest blunder every day, the focus is kept very much on Georgiana. Which is an error, as great sitcoms which have centred on nasty or blundering characters, like Fawlty Towers and Blackadder, always got major laughs from the supporting cast. And amongst the above-mentioned supporting cast, there are several potential Sybil Fawlty-esque thorns in Georgiana’s side (e.g., media mogul Richard, republican Prime Minister Stewart), and several Baldrick-esque idiot off-siders (e.g., nervy assistant Matthew, lady-in-waiting Anabel).
But why make a well-rounded ensemble sitcom when you have major international star Catherine Tate? Having her dominate every scene of Queen of Oz with her screeching wreck of a central character will be great. It worked brilliantly for Chris Lilley.
You have to wonder whether the show’s funders, which includes the likes of Screen NSW, are proud of Queen of Oz – the ABC haven’t exactly been promoting it – especially when you read this little nugget, hidden away on the show’s Wikipedia page:
Catherine Tate first began developing the idea for the sitcom in 2017, after being approached by Canadian producer Borga Dorter. Initially, it was supposed to be set in Canada and was unsuccessfully pitched to local broadcasters as Queen of Canada.
Canada may have exported most of its great comedy talents (Mike Myers, Dan Aykroyd) but they made the right call here.
You know what they say – you cannot kill what does not live. And so trying to shovel some dirt over The Weekly once again proves to be utterly pointless, because across 19 episodes the whole thing showed about as much life as your average Dodo and yet it’ll somehow be back again next year like a real-life Walking Dead spin-off. Shit.
If we had to nail down what’s wrong with The Weekly, it’d probably involve using actual nails because the show has tried so many different approaches over the years and they’ve all been shithouse. The one common factor has been Charlie Pickering, but surely we can’t blame it all on him… can we?
Yes, he is utterly useless whether he’s playing at being a host, a sketch performer, an interviewer or just a method to extract oxygen from the air and replace it with carbon dioxide. He’s a newsreader, but shit. And yet, all he has to do is read some jokes and occasionally mimic a human being: can’t the rest of the show get by without him?
Unfortunately, that would require there to be a “rest of the show”. The Weekly with Charlie Pickering is barely a television show, and we’re living in an era where having a bunch of smug tools sit behind a big desk agreeing with each other is prime time viewing (on an unrelated note, Gruen is back this week). This is like that, but with only one person at the desk he’s forced to agree with himself, which going by Pickering’s vibe shouldn’t be a problem at all.
But seriously: how crap is Pickering? So crap that pretty much the closest thing the show has to a running joke is that everyone else treats him like trash – Rhys Nicholson, that scary lady who hosts 730, Pickering himself canceling that segment where he canceled stuff.
“Yeah, we know, he sucks” is the underlying message. “But hey, comedy!” Only there is no comedy. The only satisfaction comes from the blunt stating of obvious facts: Pickering ain’t great.
And the rest of the show has to operate on his level. It’s hard to imagine just how bad the jokes are on The Weekly unless you’ve watched it, and you shouldn’t watch it. This week they made a joke about a big umbrella, because big umbrellas are something people at the golf-
-and here’s another problem: The Weekly‘s slogan is something like “we watch the news so you don’t have to”, which logically leads to the idea that we’ll be getting a run down of the important issues of the week. This week’s lead story: a golf tour is merging with another golf tour. Say what?
In fact, pretty much all the stories covered – with the exception of Kochie’s retirement, used largely to (once again) make fun of Sunrise, and the latest rate rise from the RBA, used largely to (once again) make fun of A Current Affair – were international. New York smoke haze, Trump, UK politics… you know, the things already covered a hundred times better online and overseas.
Then again, it’s not like The Weekly‘s audience actually go online or know about overseas comedy.
But in a week when the big, real, actual, important local news was about sexual harassment (at best) at the nation’s capital, first with the LNP going Labor for some scandal that was totally definitely going to take down a minister before oh shit, one of the LNP senators was being accused of actually doing bad shit, how did it all go so terribly wrong, The Weekly said: nothing.
Even if you think The Weekly is perfectly fine comedy-wise (if you actually do think this, seek professional help), this should be a sackable offense. How can you pretend to be a news satire program when the biggest news story of the week – a local story, a serious story, a story that took place days before your deadline – gets no coverage while a fucking golf tournament for millionaires gets the lead slot?
