Australian Tumbleweeds
Tractor Monkeys is Back!
Tractor Monkeys is back! Can’t you feel the excitement in the air? The electricity humming across this great land as in homes and pubs and vacant lots people look up with a thrill in their hearts at the news that Tractor Monkeys is back! Finally life has meaning again. Finally we have cause to go on. Finally. Finally.
Oh wait, Tractor Monkeys is shit. Sorry, our mistake. Why this total waste of everything put into it was brought back for a second series would be a mystery, but we all know why: the ABC screwed up their planned 2013 revival of Spicks & Specks – in itself an attempt to correct a previous mistake – and so had to fall back on bringing back a show no-one liked, watched, or even remembered from earlier this year. Your tax dollars at work!
To go even deeper into rumour, we heard that the ABC’s plan for reviving Spicks & Specks was to bring back the format but use the cast of Tractor Monkeys – Monty Dimond and Dave O’Neil – as team captains, Merrick Watts as host. This was such an amazingly stupid idea that even the ABC had second thoughts… but they’re still going to do it if this season of Tractor Monkeys takes off. And oh look, now it’s on at the all-but-automatically higher rating time of 8pm so they can claim it’s doing better in the ratings second time around! Yeah, this fight ain’t fixed at all.
(But seriously, judging by his work hosting Tractor Monkeys having Merrick Watts host anything more involved than a small child’s birthday party is an astoundingly bad idea, and if his name appears anywhere on the press release announcing the return of Spicks & Specks it will fail. FACT.)
Reportedly they’ve tweaked the Tractor Monkey format so it’s not so much comedy death this time around, but whatever they changed wasn’t detectable by the human eye. “Hilarious” old clips mocking the fact that people in the past weren’t exactly like we are today? Check. Watts shoe-horning in questions every time a conversation threatens to become interesting? Check. Editing so clumsy it makes Randling look like the work of Thelma Schoonmaker (look it up)? Check. Team captains who feel exactly like third rate versions of the already nothing special Spicks & Specks team captains OH HOLY CRAP THE RUMOURS WERE TRUE? Check-a-roonie.
It’s hard not to feel a little sorry for a show that breaks out the vagina and scrotum jokes five minutes into its very first episode. It’s less hard to feel sorry for the much-hyped Hannah Gadsby when her big joke for the night was answering “What did Mary Quant name the mini skirt after?” with “her Quant.” It’s funny because it sounds a little bit like “cunt” you see! And obviously “mini skirt” really means “cunt” so… hang on a second, I’m sure there was an actual joke here a minute ago.
We all know these panel shows live or die by the chemistry between the panellists – none was on display in this first episode, by the way – so it’s hardly fair to complain that for an episode supposedly based on fashion there was a fair bit about dancing, slang and music videos. It is fair to complain that the big final game was a): basically Celebrity Head from Hey Hey It’s Saturday but even slower paced and b): the kind of thing Talkin’ ’bout Your Generation would either have rejected outright or managed to turn into actual comedy. TAYG was a solid, quirky, funny show that made no lasting impression on the Australian audience: if you can’t do better than that, go home.
Tractor Monkeys was a failure in pretty much every way the first time around. Having it back on our screens is good news for nobody apart from the people involved in its production. For all the talk about how they’ve tweaked the format, they’ve changed nothing that counts and improved it in no way that matters. Tractor Monkeys might be worthwhile at 6pm on a Sunday night when its utter pointlessness and long laugh-free stretches could go unnoticed by all but the elderly and infirm: having this crap back on in prime time for the second time in a year is a fucking insult.
A Rebel in Time
In the hall of mirrors that is the internet these days it’s hard to tell what anybody really believes. So while you’d think this column in today’s Sydney Morning Herald would be music to our ears…
The following is not going to make me very popular, but given the hype surrounding the subject matter, I feel compelled to admit it: I don’t find Australia’s hit comedic export Rebel Wilson funny.
I just don’t see what all the fuss is about. Nor do I understand why Hollywood has apparently fallen head over heels for her, or why New York magazine put her on the cover and devoted more than 3000 words to her last week.
I have not laughed out loud during any of her performances. I barely smiled watching her play a Greek girl named Toula in Pizza. I watched her starring role in Bogan Pride, as an overweight teenager living in the outer suburbs, with a blank, expressionless face. And I couldn’t sit through her performance as Fat Amy in Pitch Perfect, while I found her portrayal of the weirdo flat mate in Bridesmaids totally redundant.
… two things set alarm bells a-ringing at Tumbleweeds HQ: “The following is not going to make me very popular”, which is internet-speak for “I’m going to stir up some serious shit here in the hopes that I get thousands of hate-reads”, and “New York magazine put her on the cover and devoted more than 3000 words to her last week”, which is internet-speak for “I’m going to try and ride the coat-tails of a more popular article in the hope of scooping up a few extra hits.”
That’s the big problem with criticism on the internet: once someone hits a certain level of popularity, it becomes increasingly difficult to say a bad word about them without being dismissed as “a hater”. It’s not a problem equally mindless praise seems to have, but why? Shoddy praise can be just as harmful to a career as mindless criticism.
Take that New York magazine article on Wilson. Sure, it’s 3000 words praising her to the rooftops, even if this bit:
“I watched Bogan Pride,” Conan O’Brien told me, “and I was impressed by her courage. She was like the Orson Welles of television in Australia—no one questioned her authority. Bogan Pride is not a show that would ever be on American television.”
Did make us laugh for (presumably) the wrong reason. But this portrait of a fearless funny lady whose honesty is taking her to the top falls apart once you get to this part:
Perhaps because she did not grow up in Australia with the dream of being a performer, Wilson, who is around 30 (her actual age is hard to determine), is appealingly untheatrical.
Hard to determine, you say? While most internet sources today (including wikipedia) say Wilson was born Feb 3rd 1986, that would mean she started appearing on Pizza at age 17. Which could be possible, but then why did this 2008 article on Bogan Pride start off with:
JUST AS Rebel Wilson was enjoying the creative freedom afforded by SBS on the set of her comedy series Bogan Pride, a school principal walked in and cramped her style.
Apparently bucket bongs and simulated oral sex are not kosher on school property, even if they are concealed from students in a blacked-out classroom and are all part of a deliberately daggy musical about a frumpy fat girl trying to save her even fatter mother (Sally Upton) from eating herself to death.
But them’s the breaks, says Wilson, 28, who wrote Bogan Pride, in which she plays the lead role of Jennie Cragg. (Her lawyers have already received a fierce letter from US weight loss company Jenny Craig, but Wilson is confident that, while she may have broken a few rules at Sunshine College West Campus where the show was filmed, she’s not in breach of copyright law.)
Hmm. Either she was actually born in 1980 and she’s shaved around six years off her age, or she made Bogan Pride aged 22 and Fairfax totally stuffed it up. Who profits from having Rebel Wilson lose six years in age between 2008 and 2013? We’re going to go with “Rebel Wilson”.
So hang on a second here: isn’t around two thirds of this article about how “authentic” she is? Heck, the article even has her saying this:
“I’m an actress. And if something gets a laugh, I have no problem embarrassing myself. The character is the point. Not my ego.”
This article spends most of its time hailing Wilson for being brave and authentic and in-your-face regarding her size – because there’s never been a funny fat person before, right everybody? – while blatantly tip-toeing around another area where that assessment of her character doesn’t really seem to apply.
It’s not even like it’s hard to figure out: the article says “As a girl, Wilson was studious and, at 17, she was voted an Australian Youth Ambassador and sent to South Africa to represent her country”… but if her publicised birthday is correct she would have been 17 in 2003, the year Wikipedia says “she moved to New York after winning the ATYP International scholarship”. Busy girl.
None of this matters as far as her actual career goes: she’s not exactly Chris Lilley still trying to play teenagers at 40-something. If the article had just stuck to saying Wilson was funny then… okay sure, we’d still have had a problem with it because we don’t think she is. But as we said at the start of this post, these days everyone has an agenda and the New York magazine article didn’t even bother to hide theirs: they’re giving Rebel Wilson 3000 words of praise because they want you to believe that in a sea of phonies there’s something real about her.
It just doesn’t seem to be her age.
Vale Election Coverage
Those of you who are Media Watch fans would have noticed that fearless prosecutor of all that’s dubious in the Australian media – no, it doesn’t run for three hours a day every day, why do you ask? – turned its sights this week onto the final episode of The Hamster Decides:
Hello, I’m Paul Barry, welcome to Media Watch.
And as you roar with laughter or reel with shock let me say it’s not normally my job to get stuck into comedy programs.
But after weeks of tackling the Tele for putting Kevin Rudd on the front page in a Nazi uniform, we could hardly ignore the Hamster Decides’ portrayal of the Australian newspaper’s Chris Kenny as a sexual pervert…
No doubt the Chaser team’s defence is that it’s satire.
But I can see nothing satirical or clever in the suggestion that Kenny—who is one of the ABC’s noisiest critics—has sex with animals.
We would have thought the big difference between The Hamster Decides and The Daily Telegraph is that one is a comedy show and the other is a joke. No, wait we can do better: one makes the nation laugh on a regular basis, and the other is an ABC television program! Nailed it.
Obviously the real defence is that The Hamster Decides is advertised and promoted as comedy, is made by professional comedians, and is compromised almost entirely of material that, whether you laugh or not, can clearly be defined by anyone with even the tiniest sense of humour as “comedy”. In contrast, The Daily Telegraph pretends to be an serious news organisation and expects to be treated as such. The Daily Telegraph‘s front page was a disgrace because it was coming from a supposedly unbiased news organisation as a serious contribution to political discussion, not simply because it claimed Kevin Rudd was a Nazi (if it had been an editorial cartoon – you know, Rudd in the fuhrerbunker during the final days – the outrage would have been a lot less).
So why go The Chaser over this? Especially when it was roughly the same joke as the infamous “Weary Dunlop: Transsexual” joke on The Micallef P(ro)gram(me) – the joke being “here’s the kind of thing that shows how dodgy the ABC is”, where the joke isn’t the idea (or in the Hamster‘s case, the doctored photo) itself, but the idea that the ABC would show such a thing. Did Media Watch really not get the joke? Did they not care because an obviously fake photo in 2013 is so shocking there could be no possible justification – comedic or otherwise – for showing it? Or is the week of an incoming Abbott government just a really good time to say “hey, we don’t like people picking on the Liberals”?
Either way, at least it left The Hamster Decides seeming like it was still somewhere close to what passes for a cutting edge in Australia. Which is roughly ten kilometres behind what was cutting edge on UK television a decade ago, but at least we’re up to date on Midsomer Murders. Seriously, when your opening joke is “the election is finally over” – because having to decide who will run the country for the next however many years is such a pointless chore, right guys? – it’s hard not to get the feeling we’d all rather be off doing something else.
Increasingly The Hamster Wheel / Decides feels like the kind of show The Chaser should handball off to someone else – or at the very least, start bringing up a new crop of people to carry some of the burden. It’s not like Australia couldn’t do with a “satirical review” that went for, say, 20 weeks a year, but The Chaser version 2013 don’t really feel like the guys to host it.
Oh, The Hamster Decides was solid enough – more than solid when Andrew Hansen and Chas Licciardello were doing “Inside the Wheel”, which by series end was spitting out gags at a furious pace (and featured the two members of The Chaser who don’t seem identical to the other three) – but as the grandfather of all these shows, Saturday Night Live, has proven over and over again, you need to freshen up the on-air talent every now and again.
Still, it’s a little churlish to be griping about pretty much the only group of seasoned comedy professionals on Australian television. Remember Wednesday Night Fever? Even with the politician-pandering “Question Time” segment The Hamster Decides was literally a billion times better than that crap. But it did on occasion lack the spark that separates the hard-working from the inspired. These guys have been at it for over a decade now and they know how to get the job done; bringing in some new blood – or even teaming up with someone established who can bring fresh eyes to this whole “politics and the media” deal – certainly couldn’t hurt.
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Meanwhile over at Gruen Nation, we have a question: how much election advertising did you see this year? Because outside Gruen Nation we didn’t really see all that much, what with commercial television being pretty much dead to anyone not interested in talent shows or sport. In fact, we’d suggest that since 2008 (when Gruen began) the reach of traditional advertising has been steadily shrinking. And yet Gruen keeps on airing for half the year. Even though it’s increasingly irrelevant. Huh.
At least regular Gruen is just sucking up to people who want to sell us crap. Gruen Nation is a whole ‘nother level of vile. Traditional political satire, whether you think it works or not, at least pretends to mock politicians. This is a good thing, because politicans need to be mocked. Mockery is how their egos are (hopefully, maybe… you know how it works) deflated, reminding them that they’re the servants of the people and not our lords and masters. It’s one of the few ways ordinary folks can strike back at the rich and powerful
Gruen Nation doesn’t do anything like that. The opposite in fact: it eagerly flatters the powerful. “Look,” it says, “your attempts to win us over are worthy of 45 minutes of analysis and discussion every week”. Sure, it makes fun of the clumsy ads they put out – but it also praises the smart ads, and more importantly it always comes down on the side of political advertising. It never says “let’s just ignore this crap” – it can’t, otherwise there’d be no show. And that would be a bad thing how?
The 2013 version of Gruen Nation was, unsurprisingly thanks to its’ solid ratings, more of the same. Adding Marieke Hardy 2.0, AKA Annabel Crabb to anything doesn’t improve it; that ex-Labour staffer guy got off a few sharp lines but who cares? All Gruen has ever done is congratulate its audience on being too smart to be sucked in by advertising – only this time it doesn’t matter how ad-resistant you are because when it comes to politics you can’t not buy the product.
Forget the shoddy banter and Wil Anderson’s shoe-horned in asides and the way they get ad agencies to make their sketches for them (with, it must be said, diminishing returns): Gruen Nation‘s big problem is that its very premise is fatally flawed. With regular Gruen the idea is meant to be that they’re empowering the consumer. “This is how advertising works,” they say, “and now you have seen behind the curtain, you’ll be able to make better, more informed choices – or even no choice at all.” This is, of course, bullcrap, but this post has gone on long enough already; just read any of our other rants on Gruen if you’d like to know more.
But with an election, none of that applies. Most people are already rusted onto one-party or another; many others live in electorates where their choice simply doesn’t matter. At best you get a choice between a tiny range of near-identical politicians and you have to choose one. If you decide not to by a brand of make-up because of their dodgy faux-feminist advertising, you don’t have that make-up in your house: if you decide not to vote, the government that gets voted in by everyone else still controls large chunks of your life.
So why the fuck did we need five 45-minute episodes looking at commercials hardly anyone saw that were advertising identical products where our individual choice meant next to nothing? Gruen Nation was a naked insult to our intelligence, bolstering politicians egos while pretending that politics was nothing more than a fashion choice we could take or leave. Caring about issues? You have to pay us to do that.
As for the rest of us, this was nothing but a peek into a walled garden of privilege where the elite mused on issues beyond the average citizen. Sure, if you’re as rich as every one of the smug fucks on the panel, maybe you can just use every single service with “private” on the front and pretend voting means nothing more than choosing a cool pair of sneakers: everyone else just exists to be sold to and may the best marketer win.
Do we need to point out that marketing is, by its very nature, an attempt to pervert democracy? Do we need to point out that Gruen Nation was a show celebrating the efforts of political parties to lie to and manipulate voters? Do we need to point out that this is a show that would work exactly the same way if Australia was a one-party dictatorship? Democracy: who needs it when Gruen Nation is rating over a million viewers a week.
Comedy: It Only Works If You’re Funny
So it seems Helen Razer has quit the high-stress world of online op-ed writing:
I have written capably to a large audience for some time for next-to-nothing. I made a contribution that was not without merit. And one to which you are no longer entitled. Because you give me shit and pay me shit.
Wait, why do we care about yet another internet flounce? Well, because of this:
In my head, it was nothing but a reasonably considered jocular urging to the left to hone its thinking and find its focus.
Thing is, what she actually wrote was more like this:
But can Mirabella be so bad and vexing as your stupid Facebook groups and your idiot opinion pieces suggest? And if she is, as seems to be the consensus on the lazy-left, a warmongering succubus who reproduces hate with her devil-vulva, then where is the evidence?
This is relevant to our concerns here because Razer got her start – well, not her start-start, that was hosting the heavy metal show on Triple J (hence the name “Helen Razer”) – as a wacky breakfast radio DJ alongside Mikey Robbins. Whatever she might be now, she started out as a comedian, and it seems she still thinks like a comedian when it comes to writing op-ed pieces – only, you know, instead of jokes she says “stupid” and “idiot” and “lazy-left”.
Razer is her own creature and what’s happening here has only limited relevance to the wider world of comedy, but it is worth mentioning as an example of what happens when you think you can do “comedy” without having to be “funny”. Comedians are allowed a certain leeway that more serious forms of discussion / entertainment aren’t because we all understand that making us laugh is a worthwhile end. If you don’t actually make us laugh – or even try to – you’re abusing this trust.
For example: Chris Lilley couldn’t make a drama series where he played all the main characters in drag / silly outfits / by pretending to be half his age. He might increasingly want to (just look at the growing level of dramatic moments in his “comedy” series), but even he knows that people won’t accept him playing, say, a teenage girl, unless it’s in a series clearly marked comedy. So he throws in enough snarky lines and bitchy hair-tossing to make sure it’s filed under comedy and then gives everyone terminal cancer or some other excuse to get all serious in the final two episodes.
Razer seems to have been under the impression that even though she wasn’t making any jokes (aside from insulting her readership) she was still covered by the rules of comedy. And maybe she should have been: her hyperbolic style is a difficult one to take seriously, even when she’s clearly trying to make a serious point. But if you’re going to try and (re-re-) build your career around insulting the only people paying any attention to you, then being a metric shitload funnier certainly couldn’t hurt. No doubt a lot of the backlash she experienced was due to people disliking her opinions, but we think there was at least a little of Homer Simpson hitting his TV set while shouting “Be more funny!” mixed in there.
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Slightly more predictably (at least from our end), is this:
The pilot for Australian actress Rebel Wilson’s new TV comedy, Super Fun Night, does not live up to its title, according to critics in the US.
The pilot for Rebel Wilson’s new TV comedy hasn’t given critics much to laugh about.
The Australian actress is preparing to debut Super Fun Night in the US on October 2.
But even before its premiere the pilot has been panned by a number of US critics.
“Super fright night is more like it. This show is so painful and cringe-inducing that it’s scary,” writes Chuck Barney for the Contra Costa Times.
How is this a surprise? In every single movie role she’s had she’s had the easiest job in Hollywood: the person who drops the occasional funny line to get laughs. She hasn’t carried a film and she hasn’t even been important to the plot of any of her films – she’s played the kind of roles where if her lines don’t work they can be cut and no-one will notice. So all that gets left in the film is the good stuff… and from that she’s got her own sitcom?
Last time this happened we got Bogan Pride, which was, um, not good. Ever since then we’ve been arguing that a little goes a very long way with Wilson and that over-exposure (or just plain regular exposure) would be the quickest way to kill her career stone dead. Not that we didn’t want her to get that exposure: having her career fizzle out wouldn’t shade our day in the slightest.
But if her US career dies then she’ll come back here and we all know the Australian networks would be falling over themselves for at least a decade to give work to someone who starred in even one half-successful US film. So while we hope Super Fun Night tanks because it sounds like the usual thing Wilson does and that thing doesn’t fall under “funny” in our book, we don’t want it to tank so badly she comes back to Australia looking to “reconnect with her roots” or whatever. Stay overseas, keep plugging away, make appearances in movies we never see and sitcoms we never watch: hey, if it’s good enough for Jason Gann…
On The Up
Is it just us or have the last few episodes of Upper Middle Bogan been a bit funnier the earlier ones? The fact that they were written by Tony Martin (episode 4 – “Picture Perfect”) and Gary McCaffrie (episode 5 – “No Angel”) may be a hint as to why.
Episode 4 was particularly good: loaded with fast paced, well executed gags, plus some great cameos from Tony Moclair and Justin Hamilton. What was particularly interesting was the sort of attention to detail in the plot that you rarely see in Australian comedy, where elaborate set-ups you didn’t notice being set up were knocked-down in ways you didn’t expect. If you liked the better episodes of One Foot In The Grave it was a bit like that, but in a very Tony Martin way (i.e. lots of gags for film nerds).
The other good news is that there’s more Martin and McCaffrie writing and directing, plus a Martin cameo coming up later in the series. If you’re a fan of consistency in sitcoms the variance in styles and tones across the series’ episodes might rankle, but if you bowed out after week three (as we almost did) now might be the time to get yourself over to iView and see how good Upper Middle Bogan can be.
Episodes of It’s A Date have also been pretty variable thus far, but that’s less surprising as each episode has a different set of writers and characters. Inevitably some will be better than others and in a way that’s good, because if there’s one thing Australian sitcoms lacks it’s variety.
We recently complained about Australian sitcoms being the almost exclusive preserve of the middle class, and while the plots in It’s A Date have largely involved middle class characters it’s notable that many have also involved non-Anglo Australians, and/or children, and/or older people, and/or gays – so pretty much the full spectrum of the Australian rainbow, and a nice change from the endless parade of WASPish 20/30 year olds.
Some of the scripts have also been pretty funny, and theoretically It’s A Date could go on forever – they just need a steady supply of stories about first time dates. And even if the quality of the shows remains variable, at least each one would be totally new.
We’ve already had a fair bit to say about the imminent return of Chris Lilley in Ja’mie: Private School Girl, but a major part of the problem is it’ll just be more of the same. Even if you like Chris Lilley surely you’re tired of Ja’mie by now? Ultimately, there’s only so much you can say about a character, and It’s A Date gets it spot on by devoting less than 15 minutes to each one.
She Goes She Goes She Goes… She Just Goes (and comes back)
Well, looks like a): all our speculation was wrong apart from b): the part where we guessed Chris Lilley was completely out of ideas:
Australia’s favourite mean girl is back
Ja’mie King returns to her private schoolgirl roots for ABC TV
After months of speculation and rumour, ABC TV is pleased to confirm that Australia’s favourite bitch is back… schoolgirl Ja’mie King will return to the small screen in a new series by Australian writer and performer Chris Lilley.
Revealed on ABC TV’s social media channels today, the six-part half-hour comedy series will air later this year on both ABC and HBO.
Today’s announcement capped off a week where fans flocked to guess who they thought would be back on screen after a series of cryptic videos featuring previous identities were released online.
The series, Ja’mie: Private School Girl, follows Ja’mie in her final year of school, seeing her far removed from the hallowed grounds of Summer Heights High and back on the lush manicured lawns of Hillford Girls Grammar School.
The series, co-produced by Chris Lilley and Princess Pictures in association with ABC TV in Australia and HBO in the US, will also screen on BBC Three in the UK and follows Ja’mie as she experiences her last few weeks of school and the series of events that will change her life forever.
Creator Chris Lilley, said: “I find teenage girls endlessly funny. So being able to write for and play the meanest bitch in school has been so fun. I can’t wait to show everyone what Ja’mie’s been up to.”
ABC1 Channel Controller, Brendan Dahill, said: “Ja’mie King is easily one of the most cunning characters in a school uniform we’ve ever seen. I know viewers will enjoy keeping up with the high drama, high-pace life of a teenage girl going through the motions of finishing school.”
Keep up-to-date with Ja’mie: Private School Girl updates on Twitter and Instagram via @jamieschoolgirl and at Facebook.com/jamieschoolgirl
Seriously? The one character he’s indisputably run into the ground is the one character he’s bringing back? Well, maybe it does make some sort of sense; after the near-total failure of Angry Boys even we can’t look all that surprised that he seems to have retreated back to the safe (and popular) turf of Summer Heights High. After having Ja’mie act like a bitchy teenage girl for fourteen episodes of television, clearly there was more to say. In a bitchy voice.
Look, if we’d ever considered Lilley to have any artistic ambitions we might have been surprised that he’d decide to make three of his (to date) four television series based around a knockoff of Kylie Mole. But around these parts it’s been clear for a long time now that whatever drives him isn’t exactly a desire to make a profound statement about the human condition. Or even a desire to make people laugh.
For context, here’s a brief reminder of what we had to say about where Lilley left Ja’mie at the end of Summer Heights High back in 2007:
Ja’ime’s 180 shift in the last five seconds to suddenly loving her “povvo bogan” filled State School made no sense at all… unless Lilley got worried that he was giving a negative view of State Schools, in which case maybe he should have figured that out before he spent eight episodes depicting them as a racist-packed hellhole where the teachers care only about themselves and preening groups of bitches treat other kids like shit. Which isn’t a bad thing, by the way, especially if it’s funny, but Lilley doesn’t seem to be able to see past his characters and individual scenes they’re starring in – he really, really needs a good script editor to turn his performances into a decent long-form show and explain to him that, well, just showing people being shits isn’t funny after the first three hours.
But who cares about any of that? It seems safe to say we can assume Ja’ime will go back to being exactly the same character she’s been for the last decade: a stereotypical bitchy teenage girl who was mildly amusing in We Can Be Heroes when her bitchiness was played off against her browbeaten mother but utterly pointless in Summer Heights High (remember how her big storyline was her trying to go out with an underage boy?). Ja’mie can work as a character when she’s given other characters to play off against, but as her last appearance just involved her sitting around being bitchy with a bunch of real teenage girls (which was creepy when Lilley was five years younger; Christ knows what vibe it’ll have now), it seems a little unlikely that we’ll be getting much more here than endless predictable “I can’t believe she said that!”-type lines.
Still, fingers crossed: maybe the “the series of events that will change her life forever” involves her finding out that she’s really a 40 year old man.
A Gran(d) Legacy
Well, isn’t this a surprising turn of events:
Guess which character is coming back in my new show? http://t.co/nTyz38JrRO pic.twitter.com/j6MNUsYt26
— Chris Lilley (@ChrisLilley) September 4, 2013
Hmm… could it be the one that involves Lilley putting on an unlikely costume for a 40-something man then saying “outrageous” things before the music gets all serious and his sad side is revealed? Oh wait, that’s every single character he’s done for the last fifteen years. Our mistake.
If we had to guess we wouldn’t guess because we just don’t give a fuck. Lilley pulled the exact same “oooh, who’s coming back this time?” stunt with his last series Angry Boys, where after months of only referring to “new characters” suddenly word slips out that hey, your faves are coming back guys! You’ve GOT to watch the new series now!
(And no bailing halfway through like last series either: Angry Boys dropping from 1.3 million viewers to 391,000 was the wrong kind of embarrassing.)
More cynical types might suggest these shock reveals are more revealing of Lilley’s lack of creative development. Is there any other figure in Australian comedy working at his level who’s churned out the exact same show four times now? This isn’t like The Chaser or Gruen or Spicks & Specks or Hamish & Andy where the cast and format remains largely unchanged but different topics and issues are tackled: Lilley just makes the exact same show over and over again. Oh sure, the locations are different and the racist stereotypes vary from show to show; the actual characters he plays, not so much.
If you do care about such things, the ABC have set up a page where you can keep track of the votes. Before you get too involved, here’s a reminder of what Lilley looks like now:
So those fresh-faced teen roles might be a little out of reach.
And let’s not forget that Lilley is yet to make a series that didn’t feature a number of “hilarious” musical numbers based on saying a bunch of offensive stuff. Needs a lot of make-up, likes singing offensive songs… that 05% ranking for S.Mouse suddenly seems kind of low…
Oh wait, it’s Gran.
Gran Sims has emerged as one of the likely stars of the new Chris Lilley comedy, which began filming this week in Melbourne.
The character of Gran, played by Lilley, is the grandmother of twins Daniel and Nathan Sims. The twins first appeared in the 2005 series We Can Be Heroes.
Their gran, who works as a prison officer at the fictional Garingal Juvenile Justice Centre for teenage boys in Sydney, was introduced in 2011’s Angry Boys.
Gran – full name Ruth Sims – is a tough mother figure to her wayward charges. She is also known for her love of guinea pigs, notably one (now deceased) which was named after the TV personality Kerri-Anne Kennerley.
At the end of Angry Boys, she left the prison service and moved back to the country town of Dunt to live with her family.
Few details have been released about the new series. Its creator and star, Chris Lilley, is notoriously shy when it comes to publicity.
However, it is understood the series has been filming at one of the locations where Gran’s scenes were filmed for Angry Boys.
The series has the working title Yellow Pants, according to a source. That title is most likely a red herring, with the real title yet to be unveiled.
Hey, didn’t Gran have Alzheimers at the end of Angry Boys? Sounds like Lilley’s vision of what comedy should be remains as tragic as ever…
Upwardly Mobile
Sure, Upper Middle Bogan is the front-runner for Australian comedy of the year – well, Mad as Hell might still beat it, but saying UMB is easily the best Australian sitcom of the year feels like damning it with faint praise – but there’s one thing about the show that no-one seems to be talking about: the bogans aren’t really bogans, are they? Oh sure, they’re rough around the edges and they’re cash-poor and they like Zumba and drag racing, but we’re still not talking about real bogans. They’re bogans who are really just rich people who like different stuff than real rich people; we mean the bus-riding, public-swearing, stroller-pushing, (relatively) small house, vaguely criminal, rough-as-guts, as seen in Centerlink actual bogans.
That’s not to say that the “bogan” family in UMB isn’t a reflection of something real in Australian society. It’s just that the divide being played up here is largely about taste, not class. The bogans on UMB are deep in debt whereas the upper-middle class types presumably are not, but otherwise they both seem to have new cars and big houses full of stuff. And for a comedy, this divide makes perfect sense. If the bogans were dirt poor we’d feel sorry for them, which isn’t funny. Or we’d be angry at the rich sods splashing their cash in front of our povvo friends- again, not all that funny. So we have no complaints about the approach taken here: Upper Middle Bogan, you’re all right with us.
Still, there’s a wider issue here. These days if you want to put a working class character into an Australian comedy, you’d better be Chris Lilley. Lilley can get away with it because there’s never any real risk of the audience ever forgetting they’re watching yet another brilliant performance from Australia’s own upper-middle class master of disguise. Lilley’s occasional working-class characters never – with the possible exception of Jonah, who was defined more as “troubled teen” than anything else – run the risk of winning over the audience’s sympathies. Whatever the arguments against Kath & Kim, the performers’ fondness for their characters came through. Lilley almost always just wants the audience to love him; the character he’s portraying is just a means to an end.
Otherwise, what have we got? Oh God, we have to talk about Housos, don’t we. There’s an argument a few people put out there around the time of Housos vs Authority claiming that Housos was actually a good thing because it was the only show out there that dared to present the working class (well, the non-working segment of it) on our televisions and cinema screens. Clearly, those people were, to quote the show they were defending, “fucked in the face”. A fart joke is a fart joke whether the person farting is in a pinstripe suit or a tracksuit; Housos is about swearing and shouting and laughing at dickheads you don’t think you’re anything like (it seems unlikely a lot of junkies watch Housos), and changing the costumes and location of the show (ie, Shearers? A bunch of hippies? Rich yob stockbrokers?) wouldn’t change the comedy content one bit.
That’s not to say Australian comedy doesn’t occasionally attempt to reach out to “a broader, more mainstream audience”. Remember Justice Waters from Wednesday Night Fever? The cranky left-wing tree-hugging “organic mother of the year” whose crazy antics were one of the numerous segments on that show that took place on that show while that show was going to air? With her getting offended by any question she didn’t like and her strident demands to be taken seriously “as a woman and a mother”, no-one actually found her funny because, hey, no jokes. But who was meant to find her funny but people who thought her values and beliefs were crazy?
When you make fun of entitled (read: well-off) lefties, you’re usually hoping to get less entitled right-wing (uh, “more mainstream”) types to laugh. It’s the reverse of the concerns some had about Kath & Kim and The Castle. There working class types were the focus of the comedy; there at least the characters were treated with the kind of sympathy and accuracy that went a long way towards making them funny. Meanwhile, Wednesday Night Fever’s swipes at Justice never made it past “look at this dickhead – what a dickhead”.
The shrinking of the comedy market in the last twenty or so years means all the fringe stuff – the quirky stuff, the non-anglo stuff, the non middle-class stuff – has largely been squeezed out. Sure, there’s more gay comedy out there now, but it’s either Josh Thomas being an inner city hipster (a market which has survived the cutbacks – see Twentysomething and Laid*) who just happens to pash boys or it’s Outland, which didn’t really have much to say to anyone who wasn’t gay or into science fiction fandom. An Australian comedy set in a small town? Or on a farm? Or within any kind of migrant community that isn’t (mis-)represented by Paul freaking Fenech? Yeah, nah.
The big problem with all this is that when you limit the kinds of people you show, you limit the kind of jokes you can tell. And Australian comedy needs all the jokes it can get. These days the poorer – uh, that is “more mainstream” – members of society don’t get to make comedy or be the subject of it. It’s a sign of how narrow our comedy horizons have become that the “bogans” in Upper Middle Bogan are taken at face value; compared to the parade of bland middle-class types on It’s A Date, or the no-dimensional cartoons on Housos, they probably are pushing the boundaries of Australian television.
Just not, you know, to a neighbourhood where middle-class types wouldn’t feel safe after dark.
*both shows that largely reflected their intended viewers back at them (as did Please Like Me) instead of making comedy out of their characters’ quirks (as Kath & Kim did)
Vale Dirty Laundry Live
It’s amusing to read back our review of episode 1 of Dirty Laundry Live and recall this…
[Celebrity gossip’s] a solid comedy topic, and more importantly, it’s not one that’s currently being mined to death.
…because 16 weeks on and Dirty Laundry Live has a competitor in the form of This Week Live. What is it with TV programmers? One minute all the want is Daily Show knock-offs, next minute they’re all making comedy panel shows about pop culture. Or to be slightly more accurate, putting breakfast radio on TV.
Having said that, and despite it being more “breakfast radio” than Dirty Laundry Live, This Week Live is probably the better show. Its 45 minutes of air time are a well-paced mix of stand-up, segments, sketches and guests, whereas Dirty Laundry Live is just topic after topic, a very light-touch quiz and Luke McGregor’s interview. Sure, the quiz is an inoffensive framework to hang the rest of the show on, and Luke McGregor’s schtick is great, but some of the topical discussions have really dragged – especially when the show was extended to 45 minutes. And they’ve dragged even when someone good was on the show, and there were lots of good people – old faces and new.
What Dirty Laundry Live didn’t nail over its 16 week run was the right format. It evolved a lot but it still felt like there was something missing. What it needed more of was pre-recorded sketches and segments, to break away momentarily from the main panel discussion and quiz. One of the nice things about good live shows is they have an “anything could happen” atmosphere to them. Dirty Laundry Live never quite had that. The panel could swear and talk about sex and stuff, but no one was suddenly going to burst on to the screen and do something really surprising. And if that was never going to happen, what was the point of doing it live? Or doing it at all?