Australian Tumbleweeds
Jonah Week 5: Caged Heat
Oh look, it’s the episode of Jonah where Chris Lilley reuses all the “Gran” stuff from Angry Boys rather than reusing the “Jonah” stuff from Summer Heights High. A few years ago Lilley opening an episode with two non-Lilley characters talking to camera for an extended period would have been hailed by us as a positive step in his comedy development, but Jonah from Tonga is so repetitive and stale it just doesn’t matter anymore.
If putting Jonah in juvie initially seemed like an opportunity to do something – anything – new with this series, those hopes were rapidly dashed as once again we got even more of Jonah slinging out crap insults, impressing little kids with his “swagger”, making up new ways to insult the other inmates, pissing off his father and, of course, hilarious comedy racism (this weeks insult de jour: “Abos”). Oh, and practicing his “dance moves”. Yeah, that never gets old.
“What did the dick say to the shit? Why haven’t you got balls.” Remember how this stuff seemed kind of funny back in episode one? Lesser comedians would have established Jonah’s fondness for shit “jokes” in the first ten minutes and then only occasionally referenced it later on, aware that this kind of thing becomes less funny the more the audience hears it. But not Lilley: he understands that doing the same thing over and over and over and over again is, uh, well, something that he does. A lot.
And then there’s all the “heart-warming” stuff about Jonah the troubled teen. Here’s a tip for all those confused Australian television reviewers out there: if something’s not even trying to be funny, what is it doing in a comedy? If you really seriously think that Jonah works best as a dramatic portrait of a troubled Islander youth, then why is noted middle-aged white man Chris Lilley playing Jonah?
Way, way back in We Can Be Heroes, one of the jokes – often the only joke – was that it was the same man playing all these different characters. Now there’s not even that. Just a bunch of serious dramatic moments that wouldn’t pass muster in the Neighbours writers-room involving Jonah confronting his own failures and insecurities stemming from the death of his mother.
Get the fuck out of here. We wouldn’t call this stuff “blackface”, but if there are serious stories about Islander youth to be told Chris Lilley is not the one to star in them. There’s a license you get doing comedy that you just don’t get if you want to tell a story straight, and while pretty much anyone with their head screwed on properly would give a comedy series some wriggle room when it comes to playing a scene seriously, pretty much the second half of every Jonah from Tonga episode to date has been nothing but Lilley going for all-out drama. It’s not the kind of thing that makes the comedy funnier by contrast; it’s the kind of thing that makes you realise you’re not watching a comedy at all.
If the show itself wasn’t so dull – as a comedy it’s not funny; as a drama it’s a great comedy – it’d be worth watching just to try and figure out what the hell Lilley was thinking. It’s just an extended vanity project at this stage, the work of someone who spends his nights staring at himself in the mirror and muttering “I AM a serious actor!” Even though he’s a forty year old white man who wants to pretend to be a fifteen year old kid from Tonga.
The ABC has made some strange scheduling decisions around Jonah from Tonga – there were those cinema Q&As that were mysteriously cancelled and the series DVD was released with two episodes yet to air – which all make sense once you realise that the idea of “Chris Lilley” is a lot more popular than what he’s currently creating. Out there in the media and in the minds of many of the general public “Chris Lilley” is still a hilarious comedian and satirist. It’s just that whenever they actually watch anything he’s made since 2007, they drift away, never to return.
So of course the ABC are going to try and get as much money out of you up front as they can. They put up the entire series online before the first episode aired on television; every week they delayed releasing the DVD is a week where more viewers would decide they really didn’t need to buy a copy. Eventually all this has to catch up to Lilley and then his career will be over. Going by this weeks episode of Jonah from Tonga, that day can’t come soon enough.
Another One Bites The Dust
Can we blame the dead weight that is Jonah from Tonga for this one?
Retro TV music quiz show Spicks and Specks got its name from a Bee Gees song and just like the lyrics of the top 10 hit, “it is dead, it is dead”.
The ABC on Friday confirmed the reboot of the show would be axed after just one season because it has not “resonated” with viewers.
“There aren’t plans for the show in 2015,” the spokeswoman said.
While we’re kind of disappointed in this turn of events – we’ve never been fans of Spicks and Specks in any of its incarnations but at least the current one seemed roughly as competent at being Spicks and Specks as the previous one – this wasn’t exactly difficult to see coming:
This month alone, the four episodes on ABC1 averaged 415,000 viewers with a peak of 490,000, and 20th place overall in the ratings on May 21.
The low point was Wednesday when it was 29th with 331,000 viewers.
“We believe this year’s Spicks [and Specks] was every bit as entertaining as its long-running predecessor, but we sadly accept that it hasn’t resonated with viewers to the degree we had hoped,” ABC programmer Brendan Dahill said in a statement.
So clearly the bar has been set: rate less than half a million viewers on a Wednesday night and your fate is sealed. Unless you’re Jonah from Tonga, of course.
The trouble is, outside of a few legacy programs – Gruen, whatever The Chaser get up to – can the ABC cough up anything that will rate that well on a Wednesday night? The whole idea behind bringing Spicks and Specks back was that it would be a strong-rating program that would prop up the rest of the night: without that, they don’t really have a Wednesday night left.
Obviously this is the time to lay blame, so let’s get to it: dumping the original Spicks and Specks at the height of its popularity was a mistake obvious even at the time. Partly it was shut down because Adam Hills wanted to go off and be a talk show host: how’s that working out for him? Oh right, he actually is a successful talk show host… in the UK. And partly it ended because the ABC didn’t want to make any of their programs in-house… so now they have to pay big money to outside contractors to make their duds for them.
[Funny how various right-wing types don’t want the ABC to waste money yet demand they outsource all their production because yay free-market competition even though it’s more expensive. Coming up with what, three failed panel shows to replace one successful in-house project certainly has been expensive, right?]
And then the ABC decided to replace Spicks and Specks with Randling. Do we need to remind you just how rubbish “word-based-game-show” Randling was? Or how bad the Randling replacement Tractor Monkeys was? These shows were so awesomely awful the ABC was forced into reviving Spicks and Specks despite telling everyone who’d listen back in 2011 that the original S&S team were so brilliant there was no possible way any replacement could live up to their high standards.
ABC’s head of arts and entertainment Amanda Duthie said that [Red] Symons, radio show Dave O’Neil and comedian Wil Anderson are not being considered as replacements because the show wouldn’t be the same without Hills and his co-stars Myf Warhurst and Alan Brough.
She told the Herald Sun: “The success of Spicks and Specks has been very much due to the relationship between Adam, Myf Warhurst and Alan Brough. It’s not just a format – they are the show.
“They’ve left very big boots to fill, and we wouldn’t attempt to replace the magic.”
And guess what? Seems like the viewers believed them.
Much as Spicks and Specks‘ failure is disappointing – seriously, the ABC have no tricks left when it comes to making a long-running, broadly popular panel show, and without one their overall comedy slate is going to suffer no matter how many gaps they plug with “Old QIs” – it wouldn’t be a serious problem if it wasn’t just the latest of a long line of comedy cock-ups coming out of the ABC since 2011. Comedy is meant to be something the ABC does well; good luck persuading audiences of that these days.
[Surprisingly, the largest of those failings – we’re leaving out Wednesday Night Fever because that was more of a massive artistic failing rather than a ratings car crash – have been the result not of poor central planning or of ordering badly thought-out revivals, but of the ABC exercising no editorial control over “much-loved” creative figures: Andrew Denton (with Randling) and Chris Lilley (with everything from Angry Boys onwards). It’s not hard to figure out why this happens, and why newcomers get the exact opposite treatment: if a newcomer fails it’s the fault of whoever was silly enough to let them on the air, so they’re micro-managed to within an inch of their lives by bosses who actually have something at stake. But once you’ve delivered a hit (Enough Rope, Summer Heights High), a rock-solid excuse for failure is in place. Their last show was amazing; who could have possibly predicted their next show would be a massive, audience-shedding dud?]
The failure of Spicks and Specks is a shame, as the ABC could really use a ratings lynch-pin right about now. But realistically, it was always going to struggle. Channel Ten now sees Wednesdays as their night for lightweight comedy-drama; with them constantly putting up shows that draw on the ABC’s audience for that night (ie Offspring), any new ABC series that isn’t already a massive drawcard is going to have trouble drawing a crowd.
So let’s say it again; letting Spicks and Specks go in the first place was the real mistake. It opened the door for Ten, gave the other networks a chance to push their reality shows past 8.30pm that night and now Wednesday is a night where the ABC now generally rates a third of what S&S used to draw in.
Remember what we said when Spicks and Specks was first axed?
If we’re lucky, the ABC will come up with a new series to anchor Wednesday nights. Ah, who are we kidding: there’ll be a string of also-rans and not-quite-theres and series two of Laid and eventually Wednesday will become the night for docos or UK dramas or whatever the hell crap it is the ABC shows on Tuesdays or Thursdays. The passing of Spicks & Specks is the end of an era: we only wish it’d had been a show more deserving of its’ success.
If only we could focus our amazing predictive powers on next week’s lotto numbers…
Jonah Week 4: The Sound of Silence
Hey, where’d everybody go? Two weeks ago we could pad these reviews out with loads of quotes from various articles denouncing Jonah as racist tripe or praising it as cutting edge comedy from Australia’s favourite satirist, and now… nothing. What gives?
Oh, that’s right: Chris Lilley’s career is over. Actually, it was over a couple of weeks into Angry Boys, when it became clear that the success of Summer Heights High was more about a mix of crowd-pleasing subject matter (schools) and a wider audience’s unfamiliarity with Lilley’s extremely limited bag of tricks, but the Australian media being what it is we had to put up with endless catch-up articles praising his genius for the next few years.
Now finally the truth about Lilley’s declining ratings seems to have sunk in. The final episode of Summer Heights High rated 1.5 million viewers; if Lilley could pull even a third of that for Jonah from Tonga he’d be a very happy man. Blah blah iVew blah blah: Is Jonah from Tonga getting a million hits on iView a week? No? Then his ratings are going down.
Despite our snooty tone, we’re hardly comedy insiders. So we have no real way of knowing if Lilley is a much loved figure within the comedy and television community here in Australia, or whether he’s seen as an arrogant, self-obsessed control freak who’s alienated pretty much everyone he’s worked with. We can certainly take a guess – wow, sure has been a lot of comedians taking swings at him in public these last few months – but we have no real hard evidence either way.
Which is a shame, because it’s really starting to look like Lilley is going to need some friends aside from Princess Pictures’ head honcho Laura Waters in the coming months and years. You wouldn’t say his solo career is over after the flop that’s been Jonah from Tonga – rumours persist that a Mr G series is either planned or underway – but after Ja’mie: Private School Girl failed to hit big in any real way it became clear that an exit strategy was needed. He simply couldn’t keep going on the way he had: his attempt at creating new characters in Angry Boys had failed, and now the old ones weren’t crowd-pleasers either.
It’s no surprise that most of the press coverage being pimped by Lilley’s social media is coming from overseas; the man himself gets less impressive the more you see of him, and Australian audiences seem to have had enough. It’s astonishing to us that the criticisms we levelled at Lilley back during We Can Be Heroes are just as relevant today. He burst onto the comedy scene basically fully-formed, and has refused to learn or change his act in the slightest for a decade. Well, ok, maybe his comedy songs have gotten cruder. Not sure that counts as “developing” though.
So instead of discussing this weeks episode – oh no, Jonah messed up big time and is in remand, does anyone else think it’s weird that Gran from Angry Boys didn’t make an appearance? – we went way, waaaay back and found the first ever review by a member of Team Tumbleweeds of a Chris Lilley show, which would be We Can Be Heroes back on the Cook’d and Bomb’d forum where we all first met. See if you agree that this could basically have been used to review everything he’s done ever since.
Oh God, we’ve wasted our lives.
I’ve seen the first episode of We Can Be Heroes, and… okay, here goes. First off, I expected it to be a series of episodes focusing on individual characters, but nope – we get five minutes of each of the five characters in each installment. It’d be interesting to know if they planned it this way for a reason or whether it was a decision taken afterwards – it seemed logical to have each ep concentrate on a single character, but after seeing the first one splitting them up is definitely the way to go. Because – and prepare to put on your comedy ‘shocked’ expressions – not all of them are that interesting, most notably the Brisbane cop (who decides to go into motivational speaking after a brief brush with fame after a bouncing castle he was in floated away and got stuck on power lines ) who is pure 100% David Brent. As I said, I’ve only seen the first one, but five minutes of him was more than enough.
Fortunately, things do improve. The Chinese-Australian uni student doesn’t start out that much stronger, but the high school girl sponsoring 80-something Africans was worth a few chuckles (seeing her abuse her power and treat her sponsor cases like toys was both funny and a little disturbing, which is two more things than most current Aussie comedy can manage). The outback teen donating an eardrum to his brother was good old-fashioned bogan humour (with plenty of ‘shits’ and the occasional ‘fuck’ thrown in), while the rolling mum was a decent enough silly idea for five minutes but I’m not sure if it (or she) will go the distance.
Good points: Chris Lilley is actually pretty decent in all five roles – he seems at least as interested in creating believable characters as he is in going for cheap laughs, which for mine makes this kind of show funnier. The writing didn’t seem all that strong, but it was a lot closer to reality than anything on Comedy Inc and I did laugh here and there… which again, is yet to happen with Comedy Inc. Best of all, I wasn’t bored: considering watching local comedy has felt like doing a homework assignment for the last six months, this is high praise indeed.
Bad points: The cop is David Brent. I’m not convinced these characters can stay interesting for six episodes. It’s the kind of show that anyone following recent UK comedy has already seen a dozen times before (as Bean pointed out, it not only sounds very People Like Us, it is very People Like Us). Against an international field, it barely rates a pass. Against the local crop, it’s the stand-out show of 2005.
[and then, a few weeks later]
… The more I think about WCBH, the more I think that after basically losing a comedy generation in this country – unless you count Rove, which I don’t and never ever will until he dies in an amusing manner – it’s probably about as good as we could hope for from someone new(ish). We’ve gone so far backwards and lost so much comedy skill that this shoddy collection of half-hearted cliches really is the best Australia can produce (sob).
Bogan’s run
The notion of the “bogan” has evolved and changed over the years. When we were kids a bogan was more like a dag, someone who was still sporting tight jeans and a mullet in the ‘90s. Bogans were people who didn’t have much money, and were possibly unemployed and on the dole, but no one really remarked on them. We lived in a world where it was broadly accepted that sometimes people ran in to life problems, or lost their jobs, or struggled to get one in the first place, or were simply happy walking around with a haircut that was a decade out of fashion. Sure, there were plenty of jokes about “lazy dole bludgers” but no one really cared about bogans, and there wasn’t quite the level of analysis, or of hatred and loathing, of anyone who didn’t have a job, a modest house in the suburbs, and a haircut and wardrobe that were a sensible attempt to stay on trend.
Or was there? Because let’s face it, we Australians aren’t exactly known for our tolerance of anyone who isn’t “normal” or “decent”. Decades of Australian comedy from Barry Humphries to I Love Green Guide Letters has mocked our tendency towards wowserism, and the way in which many of us feel the need to express strong opinions about people who are different to us, or to complain about, say, TV shows where people swear and have sex. Elections have been fought and won, and newspapers have been kept profitable by politicians and journalists appealing to the shocked and appalled talkback radio caller within us all.
But what’s changed in the past decade or so is the way in which condemning bogans (and anyone else who hasn’t got much money) has extended beyond the wowsers and the snobs, and become an accepted thing to do out there in mainstream society, amongst people who are relatively small L liberal. You know, people who don’t particularly have a problem with, say, gay people, sex and swearing on TV, or ethnic minorities. And that’s weird because once upon a time we Australians prided ourselves on not being snobs or having a class system – wasn’t that something our ancestors left behind in mother Europe?
Reacting against mainstream society’s newfound distaste for bogans is something Paul Fenech prides himself on. His shows Fat Pizza, Swift & Shift Couriers, Housos and now Bogan Hunters are, he says, celebrations of ordinary Australians, and if you don’t like it he doesn’t care if you ring up and complain about all the swearwords because this show’s not for you. Furthermore, if you earn a reasonable salary and live in a reasonable suburb there’s heaps of TV for and about you, but if you’re an ordinary Aussie there’s just his shows.
On his recent Logie win for Housos, Fenech said:
We’re from the real fringes of Oz, we’re real people, we just get out there and have a go. This is a great win for the true people of Australia. Not the fake stuff that’s out there, but the real battlers.
And while he’s kind of right, isn’t he forgetting something really important about television? TV networks don’t make shows because they want to give reviled groups a voice, they make shows that will attract viewers and sell advertising slots. And Bogan Hunters is exactly the kind of televisual click bait that will get the sort of middle-class suburbanites advertisers are keen to target expressing their shock around the water cooler with colleagues (“Oh my god, did you see the guy with no teeth? Rank!”).
Bogan Hunters, for all its pretence of being a show for ordinary Australians that sticks it to political correctness, is actually just a series of kinda dull clip packages featuring (drunk) people who happen to like drag racing or motorbikes or smoking bongs. Some of them are petty criminals, some of them have bad teeth, some of them have what you might call a chaotic lifestyle, and some of them are very happy to tell you about their favourite sexual positions, but in a lot of cases they’re playing it up for the cameras and therefore aren’t even remotely “shocking”.
Proof positive that this program is essentially 7Mate’s way of enticing potential customers of their advertisers away from Buzzfeed, is that the competition element of Bogan Hunters – in which Fenech and chums are travelling the nation looking for Australia’s biggest bogan – is barely mentioned. There are eight judges of the bogan “contestants” but we barely see or hear from them, and we’re given no understanding of what they’re looking for in a winner. But we do get lots of footage of that toothless guy in the flanno who starts drinking at 10am plus a pile of vox pops with bogan chicks who all seem to like doggie, and if there’s anything that’ll get us middle class suburbs-dwellers spitting out our organic lattes and posting about it on Facebook it’s that!
Jonah Week 3: Running in Place
So, exactly how much of this week’s episode of Jonah from Tonga was just a bunch of schoolboy dickheads running around hiding from authority figures? We’re not saying that kind of thing can’t be funny; we are saying that when you’re Chris Lilley and the only string you have to your comedy bow is your ability to replicate various teen foibles, it’s probably not a great idea to spend large chunks of your show just running around.
Then again, what else was he going to do? Jonah’s been firmly established as a one-note dickhead, and with last week pretty much seeing the end of his “hilarious” string of schoolboy bullying, this was the episode where he had to redeem himself before once again going off the rails next week. So we got a lot of running away, some occasionally half-hearted attempts to court Lilley’s much loved “edgy comedy” by having Jonah be kind of attracted to his hot cousin, and eventually the Fob-alicious crew learnt about the evils of bullying and made a heart-warming anti-bullying video. Take that, the very idea that Jonah could possibly be a bad influence on the kids!
Oh wait, then he went and lay on the road in front of oncoming traffic. Eh, the was a safety warning up the front, kids aren’t that stupid.
If none of that sounds particularly funny, collect a gold star. Lilley’s rightfully very aware that he’s in dangerous waters with his portrayal of Jonah, what with Jonah being an Islander and Lilley being white, and it’s increasingly clear that while he’s never going to be able to defuse the argument that he simply shouldn’t be trying to tell Islander stories, he’s trying his hardest to make sure no-one can claim that Jonah is a negative picture of a troubled youth. He’s just a really boring one.
In theory, this episode balances out all the horrible stuff Jonah was up to in the first two episodes, saving him from just being an annoying shit like Ja’mie was. Great! He’s a character we can like again! Oh wait, we’re back to the whole “not funny” thing again, aren’t we? Because Lilley only ever makes one joke, and that joke is “look how outrageously horrible these people treat everyone around them” so when he makes moves to redeem his characters all the comedy drains out of the show in an instant.
It’s this kind of basic fatal flaw that’s made Lilley’s career so frustrating to watch over the years. Even when he fixes a lot of the problems in his same old, same old act – Jonah from Tonga actually gives non Lilley-characters lines, which you’d think wouldn’t be a big deal but it really is – you still run up hard against the wall that is his near total disinterest in actually creating a decent comedy.
There’s a very good reason why these days the “mockumentary” format is largely just treated as a loose set of guidelines rather than a firm commitment to documentary reality: unless you’re really good at it, it’s hard to smuggle jokes into it. If you watch any mockumentary stuff made before The Office (UK) – People Like Us, The Games, the work of Christopher Guest – it’s obvious that the fake documentary approach is just a way of selling a bunch of really good jokes. How hard would it have been to film Fawlty Towers as a behind-the-scenes mockumentary set at a dodgy hotel? Not that hard if you think about it, but the good stuff – the underlying comedy, the stuff that makes it a great show – would have been basically the same.
Post The Office though, “realism” became the selling point for mockumentaries. Let’s just pretend we could be bothered dredging up that Ben Pobjie quote where he berated Modern Family for not doing mockumentaries “right”, ok? People latched onto one idea – that the more accurate a show was, the funnier it would somehow be – and for a bunch of years there, refused to let go. This is the world that Chris Lilley has decided to stay in: one where even moderately well-crafted jokes would fracture the fragile “realism” that he prizes so highly.
So most of the comedy in this episode comes from Jonah making up and telling increasingly shithouse “jokes”: “What did the bowling alley do to my dick? Give me balls.” Occasionally sure, this stuff is funny. But this is all Jonah’s got. It’s a comedy so realistic the only way it can get any laughs on screen is by having the lead actually tell jokes. Only because it has to be realistic, the jokes have to be shit. If you’re doing that, you’re doing comedy wrong.
Oh, the ratings went up a little this week:
ABC News (762,000) led ABC1 then 7:30 (681,000), QI (605,000), Spicks and Specks (490,000), QI 6:30 (351,000), Jonah from Tonga (348,000) and a repeat of Upper Middle Bogan (212,000).
Shame everyone came running back for what was easily the least funny episode to date.
In Comedy, Timing Is Everything
Press release time!
ABC TELEVISION HEAD OF ONLINE AND MULTIPLATFORM MOVES ON
Arul Baskaran, Head of Online and Multiplatform has advised that he is leaving the ABC to pursue new opportunities in digital media.
Baskaran was instrumental in launching iview, Australia’s first on-line TV catch-up service which remains the country’s leading video-on-demand platform to this day.
Under his stewardship, iview has seen dramatic growth both in content and audience uptake. The number of monthly visitors has grown from 122,000 in 2008 to more than 1.3 million today, and the service has expanded from a single website to 13 platforms including tablets and mobile, gaming consoles and connected TV devices. In the last three years monthly program plays have grown from 3.5 million to more than 19.5 million, and according to Nielson Online, this makes iview Australia’s most widely used internet TV service.
Recently Baskaran played a key role in commissioning ABC’s first ‘straight to on-demand’ programs for iview, including the Fresh Blood comedy initiative in partnership with Screen Australia, the post-apocalyptic web series Wastelander Panda, and Noirhouse, a web festival-winning comedy.
He was also responsible for ABC TV’s kids’ digital properties, overseeing the development of the ABC3 and ABC4Kids portals and commissioning a range of games, interactive content and apps for program brands including Play School, Bananas in Pyjamas, Giggle and Hoot,Dance Academy and Nowhere Boys, several of which have been recognized with international awards.
“It’s been a privilege to work at the ABC and to lead our digital expansion, especially with iview which is now a household name in Australia,” said Baskaran. “I’ve had the chance to head an exceptional team working on innovative products and I look forward to the next challenge,” he says.
ABC’s Director of Television, Richard Finlayson, said: “After nearly a decade with the ABC, Arul’s contribution to the growth of iview has been simply outstanding. He has grown a market-leading platform from virtually nothing to one that supports more than 200 million views a year and he leaves the ABC ideally positioned for the next phase of digital transformation. We wish him every success in his future ventures.”
What do you make of all that then?
On the one hand, people leave jobs all the time, especially in the digital realm. Mr Baskaran had been with the ABC for close to a decade: no-one would raise an eyebrow if he simply decided it was time to move on.
On the other hand, here’s the guy in charge of the ABC’s iView platform leaving just a few weeks after the ABC made their first big push into online-first content by putting all of Jonah from Tonga on iView before airing it on ABC1. Considering you’d have to say Jonah‘s current ratings are, um, “not record-breaking“*, and that it doesn’t seem too far out there to think that giving the whole thing away for free before it aired may in part be responsible for those bad ratings, one thing and the other may be somehow connected.
As always, we have absolutely no idea what’s going on. For us to say anything even remotely like “The failure of Jonah‘s online distribution to do anything but lower the show’s free-to-air ratings may have led to the departure of the ABC’s iView chief” would be nothing but wild, baseless speculation on our behalf.
Does seem odd timing though.
*”No doubt ABC will look to the iview offering as indication that the core Chris Lilley audience had already seen the series, however while those numbers were good they were not record-breaking and they should have generated word of mouth rather than having the opposite effect.”
Jonah Week 2: Slip Sliding Away
Wow, Jonah really is stirring up some serious shit:
A new Australian television comedy about a rebellious Tongan teenager has been condemned as “self indulgent” and “deeply offensive” to Pacific Islanders.
Chris Lilley’s six-part ABC TV comedy series Jonah From Tonga follows the life of a 14-year-old schoolboy and his run-ins with family, friends and teachers.
Professor Helen Lee, head of La Trobe University’s department of sociology and anthropology, has told Radio Australia’s Pacific Beat she was horrified by the show’s portrayal of Pacific youth.
“I just think it’s dreadful. It’s just awful. It’s creating a terrible stereotype that’s just deeply offensive to Tongans,” she said.
It’s a wonder there haven’t been riots by now – especially as those outraged have been forced to resort to quoting New Zealand hip-hop to make their point:
Australia has a comedy problem if a guy who dresses in blackface, brownface and yellowface is considered a ‘genius’. In what other country could a comedian earn a pass, let alone praise, for resurrecting minstrelsy? Not many, if any.
That’s what Chris Lilley does: racial cross-dressing. In Jonah from Tonga, Lilley’s latest mockumentary, he wears brown makeup, fake curls, a phoney tatatau, and uses a fob accent and Polynesian mannerisms. Lilley appropriates the Polynesian appearance and experience to make an obvious point about racism in Australia: Polynesians are marginalised.
Oh wait, we forgot: no-one in the real world gives a shit about any of this stuff, because no-one in the real world is watching Jonah from Tonga:
Chris Lilley, once a homegrown critical and audience success story for the ABC, is now a ratings failure.
Week two of the 39-year-old comedian’s latest ABC1 television series, Jonah from Tonga, fell from a modest start of 441,000 viewers to just 287,000.
This put Jonah in 37th spot in Wednesday’s ratings, below standard afternoon fare such as The Bold and The Beautiful on Ten.
That’s a long way from the success of the 2007 series Summer Heights High, which catapulted him to fame and regularly attracted more than 1.2 million viewers. It was the ABC’s bestselling comedy DVD.
The disappointing figures come on the back of an equally poor reception for Jonah’s predecessor Ja’mie: Private School Girl, also on ABC1.
The figures suggest Australian audiences have grown tired of Lilley, who once attracted a three-country deal with HBO and the BBC on the strength of Summer Heights High.
Okay, all snark aside for the moment, that really is an astonishingly poor result only two weeks in. Perhaps someone should have told Lilley that the first episode of Jonah shouldn’t have been all about hitting the reset button on a character who’s story had already been wrapped up back in 2007. At the time – was it really only last week? – it seemed like a reasonable decision to return Jonah to a place where Lilley could move forward from. Now it seems like a massive mistake: whatever people might actually want from Lilley in 2014, “more of the same” is certainly not it.
But wait – surely we can expect a press release from the ABC any minute now touting the series’ “massive” iView figures because no real Chris Lilley fan would be caught dead watching it on a television which they don’t even own anyway because it’s the future? Oh right: the ABC already shot their iView load with that “whole series over one weekend” deal. Plus – and this is something we can never say enough because it’s what happens every time with Lilley’s shows – the show’s television ratings dropped; did 150,000 people lose their television sets between weeks one and two? No? Guess they tried the show and didn’t like it.
The sad thing about all this is that, on the whole, Jonah from Tonga is a step up from Ja’mie: Private School Girl. That’s not hard to do: three hours staring at a photo of Rove McManus would be a step up from Ja’mie. But still, Jonah features a lead character who, while as one-note and unchanging as everything else Lilley does, at least has a gimmick funnier than just “treat everyone else like shit”.
We’re not going to go as far as Fairfax has yet again –
We’re half way through this six-parter following the life and times of Jonah Takalua and the show is shaping up as possibly Chris Lilley’s best work yet. And yet Jonah could only loosely be termed a comedy – and then only in the same way as is Ricky Gervais’ The Office. Much of the time the show makes for uncomfortable viewing as we watch the awkward, lost, man-boy Jonah grope his way toward some sort of self-awareness and maturity. It’s important for this journey that Jonah is not really a bad kid. At least, not in a vicious, violent way. Sure, he is enormously irritating, disrespectful and far from the sharpest tool in the shed, but Lilley tempers Jonah’s many unsavoury aspects with brief flashes of vulnerable pathos, never allowing us to fully give up on him.
– because seriously, comparing Lilley to The Office in 2014 is a fool’s move: he’s made almost twice as many hours of television as all of the UK The Office put together, so we can safely consider that particular strip mined out. If Lilley can’t transcend his influences by now, he’s nothing but a hack.
But we do appreciate the way that in this series Chris Lilley is actually letting people who aren’t Chris Lilley have more than a handful of lines. It’s still a show where Jonah welds a “ranga’s” locker shut then rounds up all the school’s “rangas”, cages them in back-to-back soccer nets then tries to make one of them eat dog shit, but… what was our point again?
Oh right: everything in this article is wrong:
It’s hard to think of anyone on TV who excites as much interest or divides audiences as dramatically as Chris Lilley
Maybe Ms Enker should think a little harder: last time we checked Chris Lilley wasn’t exciting as much interest from Australian television audiences as The Bold and the Beautiful.
Centrifugal Spin: The Second Cycle
We don’t always talk up upcoming shows unless they fill us with a sense of dread but this one snuck up on us: Dirty Laundry Live is back! Yes, the only survivor (to date) from the 2013 round of panel shows returns tomorrow night on ABC2 to deliver the same mix of celebrity gossip and smutty jokes. Or at least, we assume so. The show’s broadcast live, it’s not like we could sneak a look early or anything.
With the ABC basically giving everything an automatic second series these days – except for the really good shows like Very Small Business and The Bazura Project – it’d be easy to undersell this particular return. So let’s say it again: the only survivor (to date) from the 2013 round of panel shows is back! Not quite as high profile as Tractor Monkeys! Not quite as strong a lead-in as the one This Week Live had!
Still, much as we’d like to think the show’s success is down to the ABC (for once) taking the right approach when it comes to panel shows – start them off small in a no-pressure timeslot and build them around people who are funny together, not big names who talk over each other to boost their profile – the ABC also gave Tractor Monkeys a second series. So it’s probably safe to say this season’s a gimme: if they want a third, they’re going to have to earn it.
Which may be a struggle. Extending the show to 45 minutes probably seemed a good idea at the time – hey, it’s live and the guys are having fun, why not let them ramble – but brevity, as they say, is the soul of laffs. Shorter is pretty much always better with this kind of thing, which is why we’re also a little concerned about the new series of Have You Been Paying Attention dragging out what was a perfectly decent half hour show into an hour.
Last year’s version of Dirty Laundry Live never quite nailed down the format either. It’s one thing to have a bunch of guys messing about on a panel, but even live (especially live?) the energy level is going to flag on occasion. The quiz doesn’t add much more than a loose format to make sure people keep talking, and the inventiveness and spontaneity that should make a live show something special rarely got a look in. As we said last year, if you can’t make a live show feel at least a little bit dangerous, why bother doing it live?
But overall, the pluses with this one outweigh the minuses. It’s an Australian panel show that’s funny more often than not, with a cast that work well together and a bunch of guests that actually add to proceedings. As we say all too often around these parts, it’s the bare minimum we should expect from this kind of show… which somehow means it ends up well above average. Which really means just better than Tractor Monkeys. We’ll stop talking now.