Australian Tumbleweeds
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.
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!