Australian Tumbleweeds

Australia's most opinionated blog about comedy.

Again With The Dodgy Comedy Festival Reviews

The Sunday Age‘s entertainment section – “M: Melbourne Inside Out” – has a section titled “8 Days: Your One-Stop Guide To The Week Ahead”. The second listing in today’s edition is this:

“Comedy Writer, comedian and poet Ben Pobjie is talking rage at this year’s Comedy Festival. His show, Trigger Warning, takes to task the sheer amount of anger and offence that exists in our modern world, and tries to figure out why people enjoy outrage so much. Trigger Warning is running six nights a week [we’ve left out the booking details because this isn’t an ad for his show]”

Hmm. Why is there so much anger in the world? Here’s a suggestion: maybe people become angry when they read a prominent listing like this in The Age that somehow fails to mention anywhere that Ben Pobjie is an Age employee? Maybe they’re outraged at a supposed “guide to the week ahead” that – in the middle of a flood of comedians performing in the Melbourne International Comedy Festival – puts a three-star, “lukewarm” outing by someone who works for the paper as the second item on their long list of things they’re promoting?

This isn’t a swipe at Pobjie or his show. Fairfax’s business model, relying as it does more on freelancers and part-timers than News Corp, all but guarantees that many of its writers will have other gigs, some of which will be the kind of thing that the Fairfax papers usually promote. The problem is that no-one seems to be telling the people who work at Fairfax that promoting your mates, while a nice thing in theory, is crap journalism in practice.

If you think The Age shouldn’t have to reveal that Pobjie works for them in a listing like this, you’re wrong. If you think it’s fair enough for them to promote his act even though it’s during a period when a comedy festival brings literally dozens of more interesting comedy performers to town, you’re wrong. It makes the paper look bad if you’re a reader who knows the connection, and it’s treating the readers who don’t like suckers.

And to think, The Age hasn’t run a puff piece on Marieke Hardy in months…

Dribs & Drabs

* Have You Been Paying Attention? is coming back after Easter as an hour-long late-night show:

CHANNEL 10 has shifted Have You Been Paying Attention? from its prime Sunday evening timeslot.

Ten says the comedy panel show hasn’t been axed. Instead it is set to be relaunched in an expanded one-hour version after Easter.

The new Have You Been Paying Attention will screen at 9.30pm but Ten won’t confirm what night it will air.

Have You Been Paying Attention? has been a ratings disappointment ever since it launched at 6pm Sundays on November 3 last year.

Recent episodes have hovered around 300,000 viewers across Australia’s five capital cities.

*Myf Warhurst is going to be a host on Triple J’s new digital network, where presumably her overwhelming niceness will finally be put to good use:

Finding music to shock listeners is going to be much more difficult and Loader says that all-important first song – which will be played by new presenter (and ex-Triple Jer) Myf Warhurst at midday on April 30 – is being hotly debated at Triple J as you read this. She says all suggestions are welcomed.

“We are not resurrecting [the old] Double J on air we are re-appropriating the name and that spirit… we think it will still be surprising for listeners.”

One way the new Double J will be at least progressive is that, as Loader says, it will have a strong female influence – handy timing after Triple J was attacked for perceptions of male bias in its playlist when only nine female artists made the station’s top 100 of the past 20 years last July.

The new Double J’s music director will be Dorothy Markek, Warhurst is the weekday day-time presenter, Dan Buhagiar is a senior music producer, Loader is the content director and “over half of the presenters will be women”.

*There’s a Kickstarter aiming to revive good old-fashioned radio (well, audio) comedy:

Night Terrace is a new, full-cast, eight-part science fiction audio-comedy series following the adventures of Anastasia Black, played by Neighbours’ Jackie Woodburne, and created by some of the people behind Splendid Chaps, ABC1’s Outland and ABC2’s The Bazura Project.

*The Roast is slowly crushing our will to live… sorry, there’s no link as we haven’t written our reviews yet. But for a team that the ABC is clearly positioning as “the next Chaser“, wouldn’t it be good if they were occasionally half as funny as The Chaser? The bar’s not that high, folks.

Also, anybody who says anything like “what can you expect with the pressure they’re under doing a nightly show” gets slapped.

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:

… 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…

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