Australian Tumbleweeds
Short Order
Julia Zemiro’s Home Delivery finished up last week after just five episodes. Five is an odd number of shows to make in this sort of series but its shorter than usual run is probably more to do with it needing to make way for the almighty force of comedy that will be Ja’mie: Private School Girl than anything else.
While we weren’t too keen on the first couple of episodes, the latter ones with Noeline Brown and John Safran were worth a look. This is the kind of show that needs a good autobiographer as a guest, and both Brown and Safran had some well-honed stories to tell.
What also worked particularly well in the Safran episode, and in the third episode of the series with Shane Jacobson, was that the show diverted slightly from the “visit the childhood home, then the primary school, then the high school formula” of the other episodes, and took Safran and Jacobson to other locations they’d frequented as a child. In the case of the Safran episode, the religious bookshop and Safran’s vivid description of the bizarre titles he’d purchased there showed the, er, genesis of his comedy career.
For the second series, and we’re assuming this program will be back, it will be important to get good talent who’ve got something interesting to say about their early lives and their hometowns, ideally people who can really articulate the ways in which their childhoods shaped their careers. Shaun Micallef, Judith Lucy, Andrew Denton, Hannah Gadsby, Fiona O’Loughlin, and even Josh Thomas would all be ideal subjects. (As would Tony Martin, but we kinda promised not to talk about him.)
A Very Wide Turning Circle
Oh Mr Pobjie, two weeks of us reacting to your TV review column with words like “ire” and “irk” and then you go and do this:
I hesitate to say this, and it is said with a heavy heart, but … I think I might be a bit over Ja’mie King. In fact, to be honest, I think I was a bit over her halfway through Summer Heights High.
Lucky he hesitated to say it or we might have thought he’d been possessed by the evil spirit of someone who actually had an opinion. But seriously, all bitchiness aside – well, aside from the show being discussed, which runs entirely on bitchiness – Pobjie has manfully stepped up to the plate with this one:
In all of these shows Lilley has demonstrated an uncanny Sellers-esque ability to inhabit his characters that brings them to life with a humanity seemingly at odds with their ridiculous premises.
Okay, not that bit, because comparing Lilley with Sellers is like saying Mahatma Cote is on par with Dame Edna because they’re both a man in a dress. Yes, we know Cote isn’t actually wearing a dress: that’s just how wrong the comparison is. But this, this we can get behind:
It looks like Private School Girl is the same old mannerisms, the same old situations, the same old teen-grotesque routine. Eventually Ja’mie will need to find a way to make us care, a way to make herself the character in a story, rather than just a snapshot of satirical horror
Still, to paraphrase a famous Chris Rock comedy routine, you don’t deserve praise for just doing your damn job and Ja’mie: Private School Girl is a project that deserves to have an extremely sceptical eye cast over it from day one. After all, stuff like this –
Of all the loveable, though self-deluded, ogres Chris Lilley has foisted upon us – miscreant schoolboy Jonah Takalua, nerd-turned-theatre impresario Ricky Wong, country-hick twins Daniel and Nathan Sims – none pierces the nerves quite the way Ja’mie Louise King does.
So it’s unsurprising the self-obsessed, privileged and potty-mouthed teenager would get a ”one-woman” show of her own in the multi-talented writer-director’s latest enterprise.
– isn’t helping anyone. Why exactly is it “unsurprising” Lilley’s doing a series focused entirely on Ja’mie? Sure, you say it’s because none of his other characters “pierces the nerves” like she does, but isn’t it slightly more likely that after the critical and ratings flop that was Angry Boys Lilley has retreated to creatively safer ground? Isn’t that the kind of thing you should mention in passing at least once in a story about Chris Lilley in 2013? And don’t get us started on “multi-talented”: what’s the bet Private School Girl has the exact same sweeping choral opening music every other one of Chris Lilley’s shows has because he writes the opening music for them all and he can only write one tune?
Sure, ratings aren’t everything and plenty of good comedy shows either rate poorly or have a fall in audience numbers across a series. But from highest point to lowest, Angry Boys lost a million viewers: the only way most comedy in this country could lose a million viewers would be by murdering strangers door-to-door.
Blah blah iView figures blah blah international sales blah blah globally recognised. Yes, all those things are nice and with them in his back pocket there’s no reason why the ABC shouldn’t have leapt at the chance to give Lilley yet another series of the same old tat. The fact remains: the ratings dropped alarmingly across the course of Angry Boys, critical reaction was – for an Australian show – increasingly negative, and no-one walked away from Angry Boys thinking it was an unqualified success the way Summer Heights High was. This is Lilley attempting a comeback; that’s your story about Ja’mie: Private School Girl.
Instead, we get this:
The next obvious step after year 12 is university. Will you be going or do you have another career in mind?
I’m taking my gap year next year to focus on modelling and I’m gonna do aid work in Africa. And like stop child slavery and stuff. And because it’s Africa there’s hardly any food so I’m gonna look SO thin. I can’t wait!
Eh, we can’t really blame the Murdoch press for going down the “wacky in-character interview” path here, as otherwise their (often slightly-more level headed when it comes to local product) coverage actually would have to point out that Angry Boys tanked. Don’t go there, girlfriend!
What that faux-interview does reveal is that Lilley is running on empty. It’s the same old same old wall-to-wall in that article and while you wouldn’t really expect anything less from a promotional puff piece you can’t keep selling the same three jokes forever. She’s a bitch who thinks she’s hot who is played by a man: we get it. Even Ben Pobjie gets it.
That said, we’d be remiss in our duties here if we didn’t point out that for a scathing take-down of Chris Lilley’s upcoming series, Pobjie sure does have a lot of nice things to say about the guy. Things like:
This is not to put down Chris Lilley, who I believe is one of the most brilliant comedic minds and greatest actors Australia has produced
and:
Summer Heights High brought Lilley the big hit he deserved and was followed by the ambitious Angry Boys, not such a hit but in my view, a greatly underrated series.
and:
it would be a shame to see a pull-back from the whip-smart inventiveness that has characterised his career to date
and:
If Lilley can find a way to make that happen, Private School Girl could be another triumph for this bona fide genius.
Stretching the Boundaries
Is Super Fun Night an Australian comedy? Well, since you ask… no. It’s made in the USA by an USA network for USA audiences. And yet here we are, about to have a whinge about it anyway. Our excuse? It stars “Australia’s own” Rebel Wilson as both lead and series creator. Plus we talked about the US version of Wilfred that one time so it’s totally fair enough, okay?
We’re filing this one under “overseas sales” even though it’s not a remake of a local series because if you squint your eyes a little it’s kind of obvious that this is just Wilson’s latest attempt to peddle a comedy persona she’s been working pretty much non-stop since she left Pizza: the fat chick with a heart of gold who’s also kind of a tramp but not knowingly so but she’s still a tramp so yeah. Hey, remember when she said this:
“Kimmie is prissy in a way.” Wilson paused. “It would be nice if there were hearts on her clothes. She believes in true love, and that’s part of what gets her out of the house.”
And then dressed like this:
So yeah, there’s that. Sometimes you just have to go for the big laugh.
Meanwhile, what did Fairfax TV reviewer Tony Squires have to say about it?
Super Fun Night copped a hammering from US critics, but its first few episodes gathered a strong following from audiences. People want Wilson to succeed because she appears to be an everywoman, dealing in knockabout, self-deprecating humour.
Give it a crack. You only stand to lose half an hour of your life.
Gee, so the people with an educated opinion thought it was crap but morons loved it so you’re going to side with the morons? Clearly we place a value on our time slightly higher than “whatever, you’ll be dead soon anyway”.
That said, we did actually watch the first episode and… yeah, it was crap. Two minutes into the episode and we’d already seen a toilet joke, a “whoops, check out my embarrassing underwear” joke (different underwear than the photo above, mind you, which suggests we’re going to be seeing a lot of Ms Wilson’s scanties) and a cutaway joke which… okay, they’re an accepted part of comedy now, but if you can’t do them better than Scrubs (or The Simpsons, or even Family Guy), then don’t bother.
What follows is a bog-standard US sitcom of the “utterly generic” variety featuring the occasional scene designed to play to Wilson’s strengths, which are fat jokes and singing. She has two friends – an Asian Nerd and a Butch Gal – there’s a Cute Guy at her workplace who already seems into her and she likes him back so presumably the only reason they’re not together is because he doesn’t root fat chicks, and a Blonde Bitch type who by week six will turn into either everyone’s friend or Ms Babcock from The Nanny. Wasn’t The Nanny a good show? Yes, yes it was.
Reportedly Super Fun Night is doing well in the ratings in the US, but some seem to think that’s more due to it getting a massive lead-in from Modern Family than any inherent quality in the show itself. It’s hard to see Super Fun Night being any kind of long-term hit: Wilson’s act works best in small doses, while the supporting cast are totally forgettable and the set-up is clearly going to be ditched the second they can think of something better.
Ironically, the one thing that seems to be dragging in all the praise – having Wilson playing a strong, independent woman despite her size – is the thing that seems certain to kill the comedy. Elaine on Seinfeld was a bundle of neuroses, and 30 Rock‘s Liz Lemon was a slobby sexless nerd. In contrast, Wilson’s character is outgoing, good at her job, is briefly worried about singing karaoke but overcomes that, and likes a workmate who seems to like her back. Being a self-confident winner despite her XXL size works fine for comedy in tiny doses, but week in week out? Comedy and role models don’t mix.
Time for a change of Tone?
Occasionally we’re accused of having a slave-like devotion to one particular Australian comedian or group. Usually Tony Martin. For example…
So, your apparent mission in life is to attack every comedy and comedian on Australian television as being unfunny, untalented, hacky, unworthy of your time and superior tastes, etc? The only conspicuous talent to escape your ranting is the Melbourne comedian Tony Martin, who is certainly uniquely funny but I know takes your fanboy love for him as incredibly “Mark David Chapman-esque”. Is being a “snark” now a job? You clearly have talent but why are you wasting it on this bizarre little hate blog? Anger makes dull men witty but it keeps them poor, as Helen Razer wrote once. Write something worthwhile! You clearly have the ability but you are frittering time away on this nonsense.
Fair enough, we are permanently camped in Tony Martin’s garden. And when we aren’t we’re following him down the street carrying a copy of Kylie Mole’s Diary with DIE MCFADYEN DIE scrawled on the cover. Just the one of us, mind. A big, burly male one. And that man’s been unemployed since the second season of Totally Full Frontal, so he’s got lots of time to do this. Seriously Tony, look out! He’s going to start reading out his Col’n Carpenter fan fiction!
Anyway, we accept that lots of people disagree with our point of view, and guess what…we don’t mind! What we’re primarily doing on this blog is critiquing Australian comedy – new and old. We come at the subject from a particular point of view, now well-established, that we think comedy should be laugh out loud funny first and foremost. And we make arguments as to why comedies or comedians succeed or fail in doing this by drawing on our knowledge of Australian and world comedy (principally TV comedy) produced in the last 40-50 years.
Tony Martin and the shows he’s been involved in are inevitably going to be critiqued and used as points of comparison in this process. As is the work of Shaun Micallef, John Clarke, Working Dog, Chris Lilley, and lots of others. There’s no real point going on about how we think some shows are bad if we don’t occasionally mention what it is that we happen to think is good. If you don’t agree with our views on certain comedians or shows, or don’t think we’re comparing these shows to appropriate comedians or shows, fine. You’re allowed to disagree with us.
One of the things we always try to do here is to give reasons for our views – ranting or otherwise. If you don’t like our point of view or our approach you may prefer other critics and we suggest you seek them out. If you want to read about how great Chris Lilley or Rebel Wilson or Laid are you really shouldn’t hang around here.
What we take issue with is baseless claims, conspiracy theories, false accusations or anything else that can’t be backed up. As mentioned previously, we try to back up our claims and we prefer to deal with people who do the same. So while you’re here, here’s a list of all the times we’ve mentioned Tony Martin in a blog in the past six months:
9 July 2013 – We compare Hamish & Andy to Martin/Molloy in this review of Hamish & Andy’s Asian Gap Year
13 September 2013 – We review Upper Middle Bogan and say nice things about Episode 4, written by Tony Martin
6 October 2013 – We farewell Upper Middle Bogan and mention that Tony Martin wrote two of the best episodes in the series
10 October 2013 – We argue that Tony Martin isn’t very good on panel shows
In the same six month period we’ve written about a number of Australian comedians and comedies with greater frequency, including Chris Lilley, Tractor Monkeys, Wednesday Night Fever, The Chaser, Rebel Wilson, Josh Thomas, Twentysomething and the Gruen franchise.
So where does the idea come from – and Mr Hughs isn’t alone in expressing it – that we have a laser-like focus on Tony Martin? Is it just that when we do mention him we’re generally complimentary (in much the same way as we’re complimentary about Shaun Micallef, John Clarke, Gristmill and a variety of lower-profile comedians like Jess Harris and Ryan Shelton) and some people don’t like us being nice? Then again, Mr Hughs is disapproving of us a): hating on everything and b): liking Tony Martin, which seems like he wants to have it both ways.
The short version of all this is that we like the comedians we think are good, we don’t like the ones we think are bad, and the whole point of this blog is to point out the difference – which means that yes, we’re going to name names on both sides of the equation. And if we’re packing heat for any Australian comedy figure right now it’s probably Chris Lilley. That is, until that Ross Noble series that Tony Martin’s directed hits the air. In fact, we’re already calling it “an extraordinary achievement” as we field-strip our guns over and over Travis Bickle-style.
No, that’s not a Late Show reference.
Martin Plaza
People occasionally ask us why we’re not big fans of the panel format. “It’s got comedians on it and they’re being funny’n shit” says this almost certainly fictional idiot, “what’s not to like?” Well, a lot of things really, but let’s stick to one: some very good comedians are no damn good on panel shows.
We’re big Shaun Micallef fans here, but let’s face it: unless you let him do something like this-
-he’s pretty much wasted on a panel show. He’s just not that kind of comedian: he works by creating his own world, and while he can be great interacting with a host, once you have comments coming from more than one direction any attempt to build anything more complicated than a one-liner is doomed to fail.
Then there’s Tony Martin, a comedian we usually have a lot of time for around these parts and a man you’d expect to do well on panel shows, what with his years of commercial radio experience and, you know, being funny. But as a guest on a panel show? It’s probably fair to say he sometimes struggles.
There’s a bunch of reasons why this might be. He could be more of a monologist, who does his best work when he’s given a bit of time to tell a story. It could be that his best material requires a bit of set-up, which often gets drowned out or taken in another direction by the rest of the panel. He might just not be that good at talking over the top of other people. For whatever reason, while he usually gets a few good lines out in a panel setting, it’s rarely a setting that shows off his skills to best advantage.
Let’s come at it from another direction for a moment. We were never the world’s biggest fans of The Panel, but that show did have one major strength at least some of the time: it featured a panel full of people who’d worked together for years. These guys knew each other’s sense of humour, they knew each other’s timing, they knew when someone was building to a joke and they knew enough to let them get to it. And then you had Kate Langbroek, who was seemingly hired because she had none of those abilities. Yes, they needed at least one woman and yes, they needed someone who would speak up and not let the boy’s club run roughshod all over them – but comedy was still the big loser.
Panel shows encourage a certain kind of comedian, and generally speaking that’s a kind of comedian we don’t have a lot of time for. Sure, there are people out there who are fast, loud and funny, but generally speaking you only need to be two of those things to get semi-regular panel show work. Guess what usually falls short? Here’s a clue: it’s not “loud”.
Part of the reason why we’re currently enjoying This Week Live slightly more than we expected to is because it adds a few twists to the panel show formula. The first ten minutes or so are just various members of the regular panel doing various bits, and the rest of the show has non-panel sketches and segments scattered around the place. Plus the four regulars have a bit of chemistry between them – we’re not talking Panel levels just yet, but increasingly they seem to know enough about how each other works to let them get on with the job.
So it’s not all that surprising that Tony Martin’s appearance on last night’s show was probably his best panel show work in a while – Meshel Laurie feeling the bizarre need to explain his Chopper / Heath Franklin joke aside. They let him talk on the panel, he got to dress up like a pimp, and if he spent a lot of time promoting the upcoming Ross Noble show he directed, at least it led to a couple of Howard Jones jokes.
Of course, once the panel chitchat began in earnest Martin rarely got a word in edgeways and then vanished from the show altogether, but that’s business as usual. Let’s leave the last word to fellow guest Denise Scott, who at one stage summed up pretty much all the problems with panel shows when she apologised to Tommy Little for continuing with a story. “I thought you had a gag coming,” she said, “and I felt I cut you off.”
Cooking in the Kitchen
Audrey’s Kitchen is back on ABC2, and we believe this news should be filed under “good”. Last year’s run of two minutes (fake) cooking episodes in which Working Dog creation Audrey Gordon (Heidi Arena) put together actual edible meals while dispensing casual racism and thinly veiled insults was one of the more impressive comedies of the year and has been pretty much in constant repeats ever since. So more of the same? Please pass the plate.
Yes, we know it’s nothing original. Yes, it’s the kind of comedy Working Dog can do standing on their head. Yes, it’s only two minutes long. But this is the kind of non-flashy, solid bedrock material Australian comedy needs if we’re ever going to restore Australian comedy to its rightful place as “something people watch willingly”.
Australian comedy can’t survive solely as destination viewing. We need to have fun stuff that travels under the radar, that people can stumble on and enjoy and think “I’d like more of that”. By being short, funny and to the point, Audrey’s Kitchen is perfect for that, and it’s a spot-on parody of cooking segments as well. Here’s hoping it leads to bigger and better things – in all manner of directions.
Upper middle grade
When you compare Upper Middle Bogan and It’s A Date to the other Australian sitcoms of this year, Housos, Please Like Me, Leongatha, TwentySomething and the horrors to come, it’s clear that they’ve been the stand-outs. Admittedly the competition has not been strong, and both Upper Middle Bogan and It’s A Date were always going to have a wider appeal in terms of subject matter and style of humour, but winners they are none the less.
As we’ve pointed out before, It’s A Date could run for years and years assuming it continues to attract good writers…which it didn’t always do. Reasonably high profile guest stars are important too but not essential. The idea of Ross Noble and Ian “Harold from Neighbours” Smith as a gay couple dancing the flamenco and making a Trojan Horse in the shed is funny as a concept if you know who they are – and how they different they are – but as a slow burn story spread over half an hour…not so much. While there was a lot of charm in this series it would have been better if it had been charming AND funny, but at least the self-indulgence the killed off any charm present in Please Like Me was nowhere to be seen.
Upper Middle Bogan was interesting more because of the huge difference in style and quality when different writers wrote the scripts. The scripts from Tony Martin and Gary McCaffrie broadcast in the middle of the season were lighter on the plot and more focused on getting laughs from the interplay of the characters, whereas the Gristmill-penned episodes which bookended the series needed to set things up and bring them to some sort of conclusion. In the mid series episodes the ensemble cast each got their time to shine and play off each other, and the unlikely friendships between Margaret and Brianna and Kayne and Oscar were particularly good at generating laughs. It’d be nice to think someone in Australia could make a sitcom which raised a few laughs as it got through all the functional/plot stuff but maybe we have to wait for series 2 for that? The Librarians certainly improved once the characters were better established.
Overall it would be good to see either It’s A Date or Upper Middle Bogan back on air, which seems likely given the ratings. It’s not often that we side with mainstream opinion (thanks for the new government, guys!), but this time they got it right.
Diamonds in the Mud or Turds In The Bowl: A Nation Decides
What to make of this?
Australians love sport, and one of our favourite sports is the grand old game of ”Slagging Off Australian Television”. The beauty of this sport is that it’s cheap, easy and can be played by anyone – all you need is a television set and a certain smug sense of superiority. And in this day and age, you don’t really need the first one.
So saying Australian television is bad requires “a certain smug sense of superiority”? And not just, say, one functioning eyeball?
Pobjie goes on to qualify his opening to such an extent that we seriously wondered why he bothered with the opening at all. Just kidding! Newspaper pages don’t just fill themselves, especially when you have nothing to say, and so over the years Pobjie has become fairly good at almost saying one thing then qualifying it out of existence before anyone got the impression he might have an actual opinion on something.
But today he does! And unsurprisingly, it’s that local television, by and large, is ace.
But every now and then, in the midst of the enjoyable schadenfreude of ripping into Australian TV, we should take a moment to recognise that we actually have some damn talented folk in this country, doing damn fine work. As great as stunning locations and spectacular effects are, great television can always be made on a shoestring when you have great writers and great actors on the case. And Australia doesn’t lack those.
It just doesn’t give them television shows. But don’t worry, another series of House Husbands is just around the corner!
The real question here is what inspired this sudden rush to defend the helpless, pitiful Australian television industry – which last time we looked only had a half-dozen or so awards devoted to telling us how great it is, including one “night of nights” – from what the kids call “da haterz”. After all, he says this-
So, as much as I enjoy joining the dogpile on the woeful state of our TV industry, let’s not let the brilliance under our noses go unnoticed.
-prompting us to go boil the jug, make a nice strong cup of tea, take a hefty swig from the cup once it’s cooled down, then spit-take it all over the place because Pobjie’s idea of dogpiling on the local industry is suggesting that maybe Masterchef has lost its way a little.
But where exactly is this dogpile? It’s certainly not amongst Pobjie’s peers in the print media, where praising every single Aussie production to the high heavens is a basic job requirement. Maybe he overheard someone calling Laid “not very good” on the bus and thought “this insult WILL NOT STAND!!” *furiously types out insipid column*
Seriously, we have zero problem with Pobjie hilariously claiming that Wentworth and Redfern Now are our world-beating dramas, nor that It’s A Date and Legally Brown are our first-rate comedies. He’s wrong of course, but he’s expressing an opinion that his readers can agree or disagree with. Which is his job.
What isn’t his job is talking up the Australian television industry, as we already have an entire business to do that. It’s called PR, and the many people who work in it are very well paid. Their job is to lie to the public… uh, we mean get out the good word about how great every single show made in Australia is. They take out ads, they wine and dine TV writers, they trade media access for positive coverage, and so on. And they’re just doing their job too.
So when one of the few television columnists in the print media – one of the very few who doesn’t have to fill his space with positive puff pieces about upcoming dreck or near-moronic actors taking the opportunity to say bugger-all – decides to do the PR industry’s job and waste his time and ours writing a column with nothing to say but “lay off Australian television, it’s rooly good”… well, we’re really looking forward to next weeks effort from Pobjie. Will he decide to do the crime columnist’s job instead of his own? The motoring reporter’s job? The Leader of the Opposition’s job? Spin the wheel and find out!
Australian television should be attacked again and again and again until they get it right. Yes, plenty of lovely and extremely hard-working people put their entire lives into it – which makes it just like every single other job on the planet. If you hired a plumber who came round and fucked up your plumbing so it sprayed shit all over your kitchen when you turned on a tap, you wouldn’t say “we should take a moment to recognise that we actually have some damn talented folk in this country, doing damn fine work”. And plumbing isn’t nearly as important as television; you can always call another plumber to fix your taps, but Please Like Me is broken forever.
Going soft on the local television industry doesn’t do anyone any favours. When one of these hugs and snuggles-style critics continually calls shit gold, those who take their advice soon learn the unpleasant truth for themselves. Then they either stop listening to critics, or they think “wow, local standards must be pretty fucking low if that crap is the best we can do”. Either way, you end up with an audience that automatically assumes anything local is rubbish. Just ask our film-makers how much three decades of Margaret & David “supporting the local industry” has helped the public perception of Australian film.
“Once you start looking for diamonds in the mud, you’ll suddenly find them everywhere,” Pobjie says. Hey, you’re the paid TV critic with a high-profile position: how about you TELL us where these diamonds are. And once we know what your definition of what a “diamond” is and whether it involves content-free terms like “tastily tasteless”*, we can decide whether your voice is one worth listening to in the field of diamond exploration. Australian television doesn’t need another critic who’s idea of “criticism” is a school sports day where everyone gets a medal just for turning up; when the Chris Lilley hype machine gets into gear later this month that mud Pobjie is so fond of is going to be rising up around our throats.
And if columns like his latest are any guide, it’s not going to stop there.
*”Laid is clever, dark and tastily tasteless but it makes me laugh, which is the first, last and only necessary qualification for a comedy.” – Ben Pobjie, March 5th, 2011
Sa’me ol’ La’me
So, you’ve all seen this by now, right?
Ah, so many questions. For one, who thought giving us a one minute clip where the first 20 seconds consist of teenage girls going “love you” was going to make a good impression. Oh wait, that’s Chris Lilley’s patented “insight”, isn’t it. Wow, who knew teenage girls could be mildly self-obsessed?
Of course, where Chris Lilley leads a large segment of the Australian media follow, especially when he’s disappearing up his own backside. Setting a new benchmark in creeping us the fuck out is this particular story: hands up everyone who never wants to see the word “raunchy” used to describe Chris Lilley dressing up as a teenage girl ever again? Nobody’s putting their hands up? Oh, that’s right, you’re all too busy gouging out your own eyes to make sure you never have to see it again:
The first episode shows that Lilley is doing much more than using Ja’mie to revisit past glories.
Instead, Ja’mie is the key to unlocking the world of young women two years after Lilley shone a light on young men with Angry Boys.
“Shone a light on young men”? Yeah, that’s one way of putting it. “Put on blackface” would be another.
The tone is much lighter and less confronting than Angry Boys, which divided audiences, but is still full of razor sharp wit.
Well, not so much “divided audiences” as “lost a million viewers”. But who’s counting.
Ja’mie is trailed by a group of six prefects – Immy, Madison, Olivia, Morgan, Alex and Bell – that hang off her every word. She considers herself the boss of the whole school.
The students at Kelton Boys Grammar, down the road, are a magnet for Ja’mie’s attentions.
Call us when she starts making out with one of them.
The laughs start early on when Ja’mie performs a raunchy routine to Timomatic at a school assembly – and for the most part they don’t let up.
We do all realise by now that “for the most part” is television reviewer-code for “long, loooong stretches where nothing remotely funny happens”, right?
Ja’mie still rolls out non-stop bitchy comments about the other students, particularly the borders, and treats her family – mum Jhyll, dad Marcus and younger sister Courtney – like dirt.
So basically same shit, different day. And unless she’s taken to insulting the demarcation line between two sovereign nations, we’re going to assume Vickery means “boarders”.
We’re very low down on the television review totem pole, but even we’ve heard tell of the extremely impressive press kit the ABC have sent out to promote Ja’mie: Private School Girl. None of those cardboard booklets Upper Middle Bogan and It’s A Date got here: we’re talking a replica hardcover high school yearbook packed with glossy photos of a forty-something man dressed as a seventeen year-old schoolgirl.
It’s also packed with cool facts: did you know that Angry Boys has had over 1.4 million plays on iView? And the various DVD / blu-ray editions have sold over 100,000 copies? Oddly, no mention of the actual free-to-air ratings, but who cares about them? Oh wait, the ABC does, as they go on to mention that Angry Boys tripled Summer Heights High‘s ratings on BBC3.
We’ve also been told this press kit contains a preview of the first episode of Private School Girl. Unfortunately details are sketchy, but we have heard audiences can expect a lot of other girls being called lesbians and being told to “grow some tits”. Hilariously, Ja’mie and her girl gang use the word “Quiche” when something is cooler than cool, occasionally someone who’s not Chris Lilley gets some dialogue, and the general impression we were given was that this was a show just as much about Lilley getting to act out a fantasy of being a teenage girl as it was a comedy about a teenage girl. We can’t wait!
Seriously, at this stage we all know exactly the kind of show Lilley is going to deliver and the only question is whether it’s going to be creepy boring or just pointless boring. Having him focus on just one character (though rumours persist that others from his roster may appear later in the series) for six episodes means that with his firm insistence on covering the same tiny patch of comedy turf over and over – why yes, we hear there is an “inappropriately” sexy high school dance routine in the very first episode – things are going to develop some kind of depth through sheer repetition alone.
We don’t expect to laugh much at Private School Girl. But we’ll take horrified disgust over massive boredom any day of the week.
Barely Legal
Okay, so Legally Brown: remember when SBS used to show Chappelle’s Show pretty much non-stop Monday nights? Yes, that’s the laziest possible comparison, but we are talking about Australian television here. And yeah we know that, in the US at least, the sketch show format where the host / performer(s) comes out and do a bit of stand-up in front of an audience to introduce at least some of the pre-taped sketches is pretty common (Key & Peele still do it, for one). It’s a surprise more Australian shows haven’t used this format; with our fairly strong stand-up scene and supposed love of sketch comedy, it seems like a format that could work out here.
Ah, but does it work here? Well, kind of: while the sketches and pranks here probably don’t require a two minute intro each time, they are actual sketches and pranks. Which puts them ahead of a lot of what gets served up under the heading of comedy in Australia. The stand-up itself is a bit ropey – in last week’s episode when talking about the expectations for the show, host and star Nazeem Hussain said “Smash the white establishment? I’ll try my best”, which isn’t exactly a joke – but as the point is more about getting the audience on side than getting big laughs, that’s no big surprise.
As for the actual meat of the show… well, there’s a lot of comedy gold to be found in the multicultural experience in Australia that Housos sure as shit isn’t uncovering. While the first week was a little wobbly sketch-wise (the crap psychic was the kind of idea that always seems funny in theory but almost never works) and overall felt a lot like a show that wasn’t sure what it was up to, week two managed to deliver the kind of sketches you’d expect from a show named “Legally Brown”. And some of them were even kind of funny.
Interestingly, while there’s a heavy early Chaser influence in the pranks, Hussain (to date) doesn’t seem to be hammering the general public the way the Chaser used to when they’d reveal everyone in Eastern Sydney was racist. Last week’s people smuggler prank didn’t really work because it didn’t pull out any outrageous reactions from the white folk confronted with the “people smuggling”; without hilarious “hell yeah I want me some free slaves”-style responses, the bit kind of fizzled.
But week two’s sketch where Hussain pretended to be various celebrities he looks nothing like (on the theory that all non-whites look alike) worked because his scam wasn’t horrifyingly successful at exposing racism. Seeing a parade of white folks going “hey look, it’s Jackie Chan” would have become depressing pretty quickly – the fact that no-one believed him to be Chan (while sadly everyone believed him to be Will.I.Am) meant that at least some of the time the joke was on him.
Otherwise, there’s not a lot of real insight into, well, much of anything here, unless you think having an Indian prince go on speed dating is shining some much needed light onto… Indian princes? And the sketch with the six year old would-be terrorist was a laundry list of gags that could have happily lost a couple of items. But the focus seems to be on comedy over controversy – at least until “Uncle Sam” starts talking to politicians about gay marriage, and even that was more like time-wasting than shit-stirring. And we’re never going to complain about a show going for laughs over shock value.
Legally Brown isn’t classic comedy by any stretch, but as entry-level television stuff (that is, the kind of show SBS should be making instead of giving Pauly Fenech another chance to do the same old same old) it’s off to a reasonable start. It’s hardly perfect: this kind of long form sketches really need to contain more ideas than what we’ve seen here so far, and the pranks need to either be sillier or more pointed if they’re going to have any real impact. Hussain himself doesn’t really have much of a comedic persona and his stand-up intros are pretty weak, but if Dave Chappelle couldn’t make intro’ing sketches work it’s hard to fault anyone else for doing a sub-par job.
With a ten episode order and a fairly below-the-radar profile – unless we’re missing a whole bunch of stories about how it’s reshaping the face of Australian comedy and / or it’s offending a bunch of News Ltd readers – Legally Brown has the perfect opportunity to get the job done comedy-wise. It probably won’t (we’ve had our hearts broken too many times to get our hopes up), but there was a clear improvement between weeks one and two. If it continues, who knows? We might actually have an Australian sketch comedy show that works on our hands.