Australian Tumbleweeds
Interview with an Anonymous Troll
Just in case you didn’t catch it, Jo Case from Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre published an interview with one of us yesterday. Sadly it hasn’t got any comments yet, so why not make a change from venting your spleen here and give the Wheeler Centre website’s moderator something to do? Or just be lazy and post something here.
Either way, we’d be interested to know what you think. Do you care that we don’t give our names? Is our approach to reviewing totally wrong?
And while we’re here, thanks to Jo Case and all at the Wheeler Centre for giving us the best publicity we’ve had since that time Julia Morris mentioned us on The Project. We had five likes on Facebook for this, it’s like we’re a proper blog!
Vale Charlie Pickering
It seems Charlie Pickering has wrapped up his five years on The Project:
“My biggest thanks of all goes to you for watching. I consider it an absolute privilege to be on air. That you would invite me into your home night after night means the world to me. It’s been an honour being in your television and I look forward to doing it again, before too long.”
That makes one of us*.
*ok, that’s a bit harsh. It seems clear he clearly wants to do higher-brow, edgier, political stuff in the future, and we’re certainly interested in seeing him tackle that. But after five years of slightly smug televised drive-radio banter, we’re not sorry to see him leave The Project. And with Hughsie out the door and Ten going down the crapper ratings-wise, he may have bailed just in time…
**Edit: someone just pointed out this story:
On-set blow-ups are a part of life when it comes to putting a live news and entertainment show to air five nights a week, according to The Project’s executive producer Craig Campbell.
But he denies that one such blow up was the catalyst for one of the Channel Ten show’s stars, Charlie Pickering, to quit.
”We have blow-ups all the time. I have them with everyone,” Campbell told PS this week, hosing down rumours of a showdown he and Pickering had last month while the show was being shot in Sydney.
”It’s part of being a member of a creative team that produces live television five nights of the week … We are under immense pressure. It comes with the territory. We are all very passionate people.”
Rumours have circulated throughout Channel Ten that Pickering himself had a rather ”combative” approach to dealing with the producers and staff on The Project.
We can confirm at least one aspect of this story: those rumours have circulated beyond the walls of Channel Ten. And if you’re going to counter a rumour, you really need to try harder than Campbell is, because this…
”There are always creative differences. It’s just a part of this business. I’m sure there will be plenty more creative differences in the future.
”But there was absolutely no problem with Charlie. He has done an amazing job over the past five years … He graciously agreed to stick around a bit longer than he had originally planned.”
… is basically confirming that the blow-up (which may or may not have led to Pickering’s departure) did happen. Though our best guess is that Campbell is right: these “blow-ups” happened all the time between Pickering and… whoever… and this one was only noted because it happened outside of the confines of Ten’s studios at The Como Centre. Where presumably these “blow-ups” were just part of the job.
Surprise Development Surprises No-One
Sure, we said we weren’t going to cover the Melbourne International Comedy Festival – but we never said we weren’t going to cover the coverage of the… well, you get the idea. Anyway, seems like the Herald Sun – official sponsors of MICF despite not giving a flying fuck about live comedy the rest of the year – have done it again. And by “done it again” we mean, as you have no doubt already figured out, given someone a horrendously crap review based on non-performance elements of their show. Also, astoundingly sexist, but you knew that.
Hilariously, this review was so kak-handed and offensive that even though the Herald-Sun has already removed it from its website, the very first line – which is all that we could find on google* – is bad enough in and of itself:
YOU wouldn’t look twice at Alice Fraser if she walked past you on Collins St in her black business dress that unfortunately only half covers a…
That’s a review of a comedy show? Slightly more details come from Fraser herself:
@justinhamilton_ @mrtonymartin the herald sun said I looked like a "Plain Jane" and wore a "hideous green" (actually blue) shirt. Top critic
— Alice R Fraser (@aliterative) April 5, 2014
… and while no doubt if we had access to the original review we’d be able to quote even more rubbish (though we believe the overall review was positive), we think you get the picture.
So many questions, none of them new. Who are they getting to review comedy at the Herald-Sun? Where are the editors in all this? Why would anyone think that talking about a comic’s appearance was in any possible way relevant to a comedy show (unless they were wearing a wacky outfit that was part of the act, which, it’s amazingly safe to say, is not the case here)? Haven’t we been here before?
As we’ve said in the past, the Herald-Sun and live comedy are an odd fit. Worse, the Herald-Sun‘s general lack of live arts coverage means that when MICF rolls around, they don’t have the experienced reviewers to handle it. MICF is a very tough reviewing gig at the best of times – comedians are very touchy about reviews, and there’s not the history of consistent live reviews to give readers any of the context (is four stars a good review or just average? Does a certain reviewer consistently give out bad ratings to good shows?) that’s needed if reviews are really going to be of much use.
But having this happen yet again points to a systemic problem with the MICF / Herald Sun dynamic. As in, the Herald Sun doesn’t really give much of a shit about comedy and their promotion of the festival is basically about promoting themselves. So long as that’s the case they’re going to be handing out reviewing gigs to anyone they can find who’ll take them, and that includes people who don’t have a clue.
The MICF management seems fine with this: whether the comedians themselves get much of a say seems doubtful.
*edit: the full review can now be found here.
Oh, The Pain.
The Agony series is back with The Agony Guide to Modern Manners, and… yeah. Unlike some of the ABC’s long-running series where the end product is an insult on enough levels to make it worth our while to re-examine it every time it airs, the Agony shows are the same thing over and over and over. What more is there to say?
Of course, from a programming standpoint the shows are genius. Creator / host / cameraman Adam Zwar goes around to the homes of a bunch of b-list media personalities – many of whom are his peers or his wife, though over the course of the twenty odd episodes that have already aired he’s been casting his net increasingly wider, to the show’s benefit – and asks them a bunch of questions about living life. They answer, their answers are edited into bite-sized chunks, some “quirky” archival footage and Zwar voice-over is added to hold it all together and hey presto! Prime time viewing.
We all know that money is tight at the ABC and a series like this – Zwar and his wife are basically the entire production team and the guests are presumably paid a pittance – must be a godsend for the bean counters. It provides Australian content for cheap, gives local comedians and personalities valuable exposure (it basically kick-started Lawrence Mooney’s current ABC career), and rates well enough that bringing it back year after year doesn’t just seem like penny-pinching.
On the other side of the ledger, it’s somewhat pointless, rarely funny and borderline condescending. At least with Grumpy Old Men – you know, the show basically identical to this one only it came out a few years earlier – you had the angle that the old men were representing a world gone by; they’d seen society change around them and they weren’t happy about it. The majority of the cast of the Agony series are just your average prime-of-life media types who are telling the rest of us about the ways of the world because… they’re friends of the host?
But what about the tough questions being asked? Questions like: “How should you behave on your first day on the job?” Hey, aren’t most of these people self-employed or freelancers? Then there’s “How should you behave in the office lift?” “What should you wear to work?” “What are the dos and don’ts of the office phone?” … And this is on television because why now? Wait, John Elliot just asked how to find Miranda Kerr topless on the internet. And no-one told him how. Come on, that would have been useful information.
The one moderately interesting thing about the Agony series as it’s developed is that it’s moved away a little from its original format, where – in Agony Uncles at least – it was a bunch of somewhat smug, generally good-looking, reasonably well-off blokes handing out relationship advice. As we pointed out way back then, these guys generally came off as dickheads to be pitied and laughed at, and their advice seemed largely torn from the pages of some 60s guide to being a knob. Which perhaps wasn’t all that big a surprise: Zwar spent a while as a successful weekend “man’s issues” columnist, and that’s an area where re-enforcing stereotypes (women like men with cash; men like to be the ones chasing women) rather than dramatically challenging them is the way to go.
But over the course of the series the advice being handed out has somehow become even more vague and general, to the point now that what we’re being served up in some segments is the shock revelation that some slightly famous people are gossips and snoops. The advice angle has been downplayed and rightly so, as generally speaking the cast are largely unqualified to advise anyone on anything past “how to get on television” (which is one more thing than we could advise people on, but we’re not the ones on television). Meanwhile the celebrity culture “tell us what you’re wearing” side of things has been dialled up until what’s left is a thin stew of mild anecdotes and celebrity polling (which celebrities like a bit of cleavage at work? which celebrities like to gossip?).
Oh, we’ve also had our attention drawn to this:
“There are certain websites that have had a lot to say about me over the years,” Zwar admits.
“My friend Shane Jacobson doesn’t read anything whereas I read whatever I come across, I don’t search for it, but I am slowly becoming tougher. I just don’t care anymore. It has to be pretty nasty for me to care, and that is not (me) encouraging Australians to write nasty things about me!
“It’s terrible when it comes from someone in the industry. That’s when it hurts. It doesn’t matter if it comes from a critic, that’s their job, and if it was from someone anonymous –then whatever. If they can’t be bothered putting their name to their comment then how much investment can they possibly have?
Hmm. Let’s get this straight. If you’re a nothing-to-hide member of the public – well, Zwar doesn’t even mention what he thinks of your opinion. If you’re a critic, he doesn’t care. Nameless and therefore un-invested chumps like us? Forget it. It’s only those in the industry – those who know all the hard work and effort that goes into making a program firsthand – that he’s listening to.
Oh wait – no he’s not:
“But if it comes from a colleague then that is always seen in the industry as over-stepping the mark.
“That’s a no-no.”
So if you’re not in the industry he doesn’t care what you say, and if you are in the industry you shouldn’t be saying negative things*.
We’re guessing emptying the suggestion box isn’t a full time job at ZwarCorp.
*This would come as a large surprise to 95% of the industry people we’ve met.
What A Difference a Year Makes
So today we woke up to this:
[Chris] Lilley has been nominated for a Silver Logie as Most Outstanding Actor for his performance as the snobby cashed-up bogan schoolgirl in Ja’mie King.
It is sweet redemption for Lilley who was devastated when the ABC made a huge gaffe by failing to put in a submission for his Angry Boys two years ago.
“Sweet redemption”? Let’s just wait and see if he wins before we start flashing our boobs around. And considering the “gaffe” around Angry Boys was – if, as they say, the rumours are true – more about the ABC hurriedly washing their hands of a proven ratings flop than an innocent mistake, it shall be interesting to see if the in-house promotional effort required to get Lilley over the line is forthcoming. Especially considering the Silver Logie is a peer-voted category, thus ruling out his teenage tumblr fanbase.
Wait, you do all know the Logies are – to some extent or another – at the mercy of network publicists, right? TV Week needs television more than television needs TV Week: the awards aren’t outright fixed… we think… but publicists have their ways of making sure they get the result they want at least some of the time. Sure, Andy Lee could have been nominated for a Gold Logie over 2012 winner Hamish Blake because he’s awesome and 2013 was his year. Or it could have been because the Nine publicists decided he was the horse they were going to back this year. Which seems more likely to you?
And don’t think we haven’t noticed that the Logies continue to have nothing but contempt for comedy, what with all the actual comedy programs dumped in the “Popular Light Entertainment Program” and peer-voted “Most Outstanding Light Entertainment Program” categories. As previously and repeatedly stated by us, this seems like a fairly obvious attempt to disguise the fact that the commercial networks don’t actually make any comedy (Hamish & Andy’s travel shows aside): can’t have a category where the commercial networks can’t win now, can we?
The upshot of all this is that somehow comedy has managed to become, like any drama more complex than Home & Away, “elitist viewing” on Australian television. Despite occasional attempts to claim otherwise, the Logies are a populist award aimed at “popular” shows on the commercial networks: that means bland mainstream dramas and rubbish reality television. Seriously, even in the peer-voted “Most Outstanding Light Entertainment Program” category somehow talent show The Voice gets a look in. Much as it must be nice to win a Logie, against this kind of competition it’s hardly something to be proud of.
Repeat as necessary
Remember Life Support, SBS’s spoof lifestyle program from about a decade ago? It was never a ratings blockbuster, more a cult hit, but it’s currently getting a repeat run on Monday nights on SBS2 so we’ve been reacquainting ourselves with it.
Inspired by the plethora of early evening magazine shows on commercial TV in the ‘90s, Life Support was fronted by a small team of experts – “modern woman” Sigourney (Rachel Coopes), general practitioner and financial guru Dr Rudi (Simon Van Der Stap), tradie Todd (Brendan Cowell) and anarchist/rebel-type Penne (Abbie Cornish) – who between them gave advice on cooking, DIY, craft, pet care, finances, health and a variety of other topics.
Each segment was a detailed parody of the sort of story you’d see on the likes of Better Homes and Gardens, right down to the camera angles and the adult contemporary music stings, which was played perfectly straight by the cast. Rachel Coopes as Sigourney had a grim determination to cheerfully tackle whichever pointless craft project the producers threw at her, while Brendan Cowell’s Todd was an amalgam of every actor who’d ever picked up a hammer and tried to look appropriately blokey in front of a camera.
These perverted re-imaginings of Noni Hazelhurst and John Jarrett often presented the darker and more satirical segments, such as suggesting ways to exploit refugees or showing how you can cover up the black eye your partner has given you with make-up. Meanwhile Dr Rudi was giving advice to drug dealers on how to cut coke and keep your customers happy, and Penne was showing you how to knock off your neighbours’ telly and get away with it. Full Frontal this was not.
A few years later this sort of comedy would have caused OUTRAGE in the Murdoch tabloids, but in those mid-Howard era days of 2001-2003 no one really cared. Comedies like this were so obviously for an audience of annoyed youngsters who hated the government that it was largely left alone. Even John Safran’s 3AW ecstasy tablets prank, made around the same time and also aired on SBS, didn’t cause much concern (outside the confines of the 3AW studios).
Sure, it was the sort of comedy you could describe as “undergraduate”, but with a writer’s room populated by the likes of John Eastway (The Norman Gunston Show, Denton, Australian You’re Standing In It), Kevin Brumpton (CNNNN, The Jesters) and Angus Fitzsimmons (CNNNN, The Joy of Sets) there was a level of quality about this show. As we recall, Life Support did get a bit repetitive towards the end of its run – try as hard as you like, but there’s only so many ways you can parody a lifestyle show segment – but we were kinda surprised by how well this has stood the test of time.
Vale The Moodys
For whatever reason, one of the big, big fears Australian comedy has had over the last decade or so is that of going big. Not for the wide brown land any broad stereotypes or exaggerated characteristics, oh no: we like our comedy restrained to the point where it’s almost impossible to tell that it actually is a comedy. And nowhere is this more plain to see than The Moodys, a series that takes a collection of characters that would struggle to make it to the final cut in a below-par Australian movie and says “hey, lets hang out with these guys for three hours and see what happens”.
To be fair, taken in isolation The Moodys has… well, not “much to recommend it”, but it’s hardly a dead loss either. Some of the cast are strong and the Jungleboys team know how to give a show that “commercial-fresh” polish. For example, the slo-mo shots that set the tone at the start of the final wedding episode are effective mood-setters – they’re not funny, mind you, but they’re a good set up for the funny stuff to follow… wait, there’s no funny stuff to follow? Bugger.
Cheap shots aside – of course there’s funny stuff to follow, but “the wedding’s on a Tuesday” is the punchline to a joke, not a statement that needs another two or three sentences to pound into the ground – there’s… wait, we haven’t finished with the cheap shots.
“Roger, I’m not sure why you’re here” is the kind of line that writers think is both smart and funny (“hey, there’s no plot reason why his character should still be in this show, but by pointing it out we turn this problem into a joke!”), but by episode eight of a series where Roger has had no reason to be involved aside from being played by one of the production team, it’s just a sign of incompetence. Either find a real in-story reason for him to still be in the show, or get rid of him. This show isn’t that fantastic that it can afford to be carrying dead wood.
The funniest thing about The Moodys has been the various attempts by both ABC publicity and the press to convince us that the Moody family are a zany bunch of knockabout larrikins – well, more that they’re “crazy” and “riotous”, but you get the drift. Perhaps if you subsist on a meagre diet of historical murder mysteries and programs where politicians dodge the most basic of questions then sure, the extended Moody family might seem a little “out there”. But as a comedy? It’s barely funnier than your average episode of House Husbands.
Everything over the last eight episodes has been pitched at such a low volume that the overall impression is of a show actually scared to try for a big laugh in case it fails. These aren’t wacky comedy characters: they’re barely exaggerated versions of the chumps you find around any family barbecue. Then if a critic realises this is pretty thin gruel, they try to sell that blandness as a strong point: it’s a show “driven by characters who make us squirm in recognition”, you say? Here’s an idea: when The Simpsons had Homer laughing at a lame comedy while saying “it’s funny because it’s true”, it wasn’t a ringing endorsement of that style of laff-getting.
Yes, there are moments where The Moodys tries to go broad. Disposing of business documents in a woodchipper: not unfunny. Oh look, the wedding celebrant won’t go off to the hospital to conduct the wedding unless she gets a ride in a hot air balloon; oddly unfunny but it turns out to be a major plot point, so the trouble is that the follow-up twist feels weirdly contrived. Patrick Brammall and Darren Gilshenan can actually give comedic performances that add something to a scene; everyone else, back to drama school for you.
But the real problem with The Moodys is that while observational comedy can work when someone really, really really good is doing the observation, otherwise all you’re left with is a vague feeling you’ve left the kettle on. Worse, it’s a show deliberately pulling its punches: it would not be at all difficult to play the characters broader to make them funnier, or to make the situations more outlandish so they could provide some actual laughs too. It’s obviously way too much to expect this kind of “start off normal then let the insanity mount” comedy be handled with the skill and comedy of Fawlty Towers or Seinfeld, but those are shows that exist now and there’s nothing wrong with learning from them.
There’s clearly a lot of effort from a lot of talented people on display here, but unfortunately much of their talent lies in creating a kind of soft rom-com with a couple of mildly oddball supporting characters. You want to make that lightweight “classy” stuff, go make an Australian film and see how well you do at the box office. If you’re on television and you’re making something labelled comedy, here’s a suggestion: put making people laugh at the top of your list.
Bella! Bella!
Stand-up on TV doesn’t always work out. This is not to say that stand-up must never be broadcast – ordinary folks in the suburbs who can’t get to an inner city comedy club should get a chance to see stand-up on TV, right? It’s more that seeing stand-up in its natural home, an inner city comedy club, is the way to see it.
Stand-up comedy is written to be played live to a small group of people who’ve all had a couple, and stand-up routines are designed to play out over 5 minutes, or 10 minutes, or 20 minutes, or an hour. Many stand-ups pride themselves on developing narrative arcs in their routines, back-referencing to a gag they told 10 minutes earlier, exploring a theme in different ways, and then bringing it home with a great punchline. But when the TV people come along they don’t want to broadcast a 20 minute set, they want 2 minutes of funny before they cut to an ad break, or to something else; apparently those people in the suburbs get bored watching the same person talk for more than 3 minutes.
Louis CK, Stewart Lee, Ben Elton and others have got around the difficulties of presenting their stand-up on TV by introducing sitcom and sketch elements in to their series Louis, Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle and The Man From Auntie.* At the opposite end of the spectrum was the late 90’s ABC series Smallest Room In The House, which filmed stand-up shows written for festivals “as live” in a studio decked-out to look like a comedy club. We remember it being good.
Less successful have been the shows where a crew turned up to a comedy club, filmed all the acts, then cut their routines to ribbons and edited the funniest ribbons together. The result was often a disjointed, context-free, unfunny mess, made worse by pointless cutaways to the comedians backstage drinking beers and mucking around together, and boring interviews with the stand-ups.
So it’s with some surprise that we’ve warmed to Stand Up @ Bella Union, a stand-up show which follows this approach. In the first episode there was a lot of fast editing and a lot of time given to showing snippets of Chas Licciardello interviewing Matt Okine, but in the second and third episodes the editor took a more relaxed approach, with each of the four or five comedians on the bill getting several 3-5 minute routines in the show and with less time spent on Licciardello’s interviews. The show is all the better for it.
It’s not that the interviews have been bad, it’s more that the stand-up’s good enough to hold its own. Indeed it would be interesting to see longer extracts from each routine as there are some promising, relatively-unknown comedians in the show who are as funny as the higher profile acts like Okine and Nazeem Hussein. And let’s face it, seeing new comedians on TV who are actually funny is pretty rare. So we want to see as much of them being funny as we possibly can.
* If you only know Ben Elton from Live From Planet Earth you’ll have to trust us when we say The Man From Auntie was good. In fact following the Live From Planet Earth debacle we got out our videos of The Man From Auntie (well, it was made in 1994) and we can confirm it holds up. Oh Ben Elton, where did it all go wrong? You were so funny once…
The Melbourne International Comedy Festival Starts This Week!
… yeah, we’re not going to be covering it.
It’s fairly obvious from the content of this blog that live comedy is not our thing. Then again, we shouldn’t assume that anything here is “fairly obvious”: it’s also fairly obvious that this blog is written by a team of people (we’ve even had guest posters), and yet we occasionally hear about one comedian or another convinced they’ve tracked down the singular “person” behind this blog. So, in the spirit of spelling everything out, here goes: we’re not all that interested in live comedy.
Sure, maybe we should be. Lord knows we get enough people telling us about this or that great stand-up (or YouTube comedian) we really need to take a look at if we’re going to take the real pulse of Australian comedy. But we have to draw the line somewhere when it comes to comedy coverage – no, we’re not going to drive three hours to check out your open-mic night – and our line is this: once you get on television, that’s when we’ll take a look.
To be honest, we’re not even all that excited about filmed stand-up sets broadcast on television. Stand-up is a live act designed to be performed in front of a crowd that is reacting to it: filming it for broadcast is a great way to record material that might otherwise be lost, but it certainly loses something in the translation. Some comedians figure out ways to make up for that loss: when we start getting the Australian equivalent of Louie or Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, give us a ring.
This is in no way a dismissal of all the good work going on out there in stand-up land. It’s just acknowledging the fact that stand-up comedy is largely a niche act for a niche audience. As one of the things we self-important wanker types at Team Tumbleweeds are interested in is comedy’s place in Australian culture – that’s why we crap on about reviewers so much, as in some ways those guys are trying to nail down where a comedian fits in our culture (Chris Lilley is hilarious and exposes fault-lines in Australian culture; Shaun Micallef is a little too “smart” for mainstream acceptance; Andrew Denton is a genius; Dave Hughes is a knockabout everyman; you get the idea) – and stand-up’s place is way out on the fringe.
Of course, the fringe is a good place to be if you want to try out new and different stuff. Again, because this entire post is about making ourselves clear so we don’t spend the next few weeks fending off questions about our lack of MICF coverage as if we’re the only blog in Australia dealing with comedy, we’re not having a go at stand-up. Covering it is just not what we do.
Now, slagging off dodgy comedy gala reviews (“slightly un-PC” – Jesus wept) – that’s another story.
The Future Of Comedy Will Cost You Plenty
Now that their target has been reached, we can now safely direct your attention to the crowdfunding campaign to support A Rational Fear in their efforts to “commission a 10-week season of digital comedy to fill the void of political satire in this country.” Does anyone really think there’s a “void of political satire in this country”? We’re getting 20 episodes of Mad as Hell this year, plus the weekly antics of Clarke & Dawe and the usual Chaser hijinks on top of that; if anything else, we’d say “political satire” was suffering a bit of a glut at the moment. But hey, at least they’re trying: you can donate for the next day or so here.
Also basking in the glow of managing to get people to pay up front for something that doesn’t exist yet is Catherine Deveny, who somehow has managed to get people to cough up A$10,000 to pay for “a short YouTube film called The Atheist Alphabet. It’s an A to Z of atheism that answers all the Frequently Asked Questions about atheism.” Does anyone have any frequently asked questions about atheism past “how can you be an atheist and still say ‘Oh My God’?”.
But wait! As is typical of Deveny’s work in general, it’s not really about anything more than Deveny herself: “The film will be 20 minutes or so, uploaded to YouTube. It follows me from waking in the morning to going to sleep as I travel through my beautiful Melbourne on my trusty bicycle with my dog Archie in the basket.” So… no graphics, no diagrams, no primary sources, no interviews with experts? Well, presumably her dog doesn’t believe in God so maybe Archie can bark into the mic a few times.
(at least it sounds better than this, which sounds not very good at all. Considering the online behaviour of both the participants, we’re fairly sure that just by mentioning the fact we don’t think it sounds like much fun qualifies us as “trolls” – if anyone reading this does end up going, let us know if we get a mention)
The usual line people roll out when it comes to crowd-funding is “hey, if people want to give money, go for it”. The problem with that stance is that once you have direct sources of funding everything that isn’t directly funded is suddenly under the pump. “If people really wanted to see your show, they’d pay money for it themselves” becomes the cry from some of the more manic corners of the room. And because this also seems to make sense, if you’re not careful you end up in the situation we currently find ourselves in with regard to transport, schools, hospitals and the like: those who can afford the good stuff get the good stuff, those who can’t have to make do with crap.
Putting aside for a moment that these “level playing fields” are never level – public transport has to account for every cent spent while private transport (cars) gets roads built everywhere at a massive subsidy, private schools can inflate their educational results by keeping disadvantaged kids out, etc etc – the other big problem with this approach is that you only end up getting the kind of comedy people are willing to pay for. If it turns out that angry political types have loads of cash to spend on “political satire”, that’s what we’ll get. Comedy that points out that rich people are often self-obsessed wankers and the internet is full of smug dickheads? Good luck getting funding for that.
“But you don’t have to watch it.” What, you think if people can turn up to a television network and say “we’ve got a show for you and you don’t have to spend a cent on it”, the networks aren’t going to pay attention? You do realise The Roast gets a run on ABC2 because The Comedy Channel decided to fund 150 episodes of it? It’s hardly the first time this has happened either: both Stupid Stupid Man and :30 Seconds appeared on the ABC after airing on pay TV. Sure, if you’re nobody – or crap – undercutting your rivals price-wise won’t make much difference. But if you don’t completely suck, crowdfunding could make just enough of a difference to put you on the air.
So colour us massively unsurprised that these two efforts – one aimed at the beating heart of inner-city self-righteousness, the other promising to make fun of all those politicians the internet gets so riled up about – met their targets with time to spare. They’re exactly the type of thing that gets crowd-funded – not because they promise to be all that funny, but because they appeal to people who have money.
Whether they’re the type of thing the rest of us want to actually watch remains to be seen.