Australian Tumbleweeds
Unshockable
Here’s our take home from Shock Horror Aunty: most things that people say are shocking aren’t. Especially when you see out-of-context clips of them 30 or so years on. This is particularly true of satire. What did we think of all those clips from The Gillies Report and The Dingo Principle? They’re fascinating, obviously, but also quite baffling. Unless you know lots about the politics of that era you’re just left wondering why a mock funeral for Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen would be done in the style of Ragtime. And why there were lots of Meter Maids in the procession. Assuming they were Meter Maids.
Thing is, for a TV show to be shocking to someone it has to mean something to them. Nudity might offend a person because of their morality or religious beliefs, while a satirical song about Kerry “Goanna” Packer presumably insulted Kerry Packer because it hit some kind of nerve and he was rich enough to try and sue the left-wing satirists at the ABC. Or something. It wasn’t quite explained enough for those of us who’d never heard of the incident in our lives. (Maybe it needed to be dramatised in a Paper Giants first?)
Anyway, you end up wondering if Shock Horror Aunty might be a better show if it looked at less clips in more depth. There were several series worth of fascinating insights in to what got people’s goats across the three episodes but a lot of the time it just seemed like an endless parade of tits, bums, swearing and blackface. For example, we’ve never seen Wollongong The Brave before so we’ll have to take Rory O’Donoghue’s word for it that there was a solid satirical point underpinning that immigrants sketch with Italian grandmothers on dog leashes. It’s hard to imagine what it might have been or whether it was successful, but we’ll assume it was there and that the sketch wasn’t the Jackson Jive of its era.
At least with the more recent comedy, such as The Micallef P(r)ogram(me)’s “Weary Dunlop: Transexual” and the various Chaser sketches, most of us saw them at the time. And what marks these controversies out, particularly the Chaser sketches, is that the media in the internet era has become a lot more cynical about controversies in that they actively seek them out and beat them up to get eyeballs on their websites. In another era you wonder how many Chaser sketches would have got the media upset, and by extension the wider public, who particularly with the “Make A Wish” sketch only got upset after the media OUTRAGE kicked in. Not that anyone made that point on the show or that “Make A Wish” got shown, so clearly there are still limits when it comes to the ABC gazing at its controversial naval.
I Heard The News Today, Oh Boy…
First up tonight, Australian media in “what, the rest of the world doesn’t love our shithouse television?” shocker:
How much of a “foul-mouthed mean girl” can a TV audience take?
It’s taken several weeks for the ABC’s broadcast of Chris Lilley’s Ja’mie: Private School Girl in Australia to shed half its audience.
US television critics only took several minutes.
The series, which is co-produced by the US premium cable channel HBO and makes its debut here this week, has divided critics, earning either a resounding thumbs down or, in some cases, cautious praise.
To illustrate just how divided opinion on the series is in the US, it has been labelled both Lilley’s “crowning triumph” and “sloppy, transphobic drag”.
The AV Club is one of America’s “most respected” sources of TV coverage? Not after they praised Please Like Me it ain’t.
Obviously the “Australian show meets the overseas critics” story is a time-tested space-filler in local papers, so we’re not exactly freaking out over this one. And with Ja’mie faltering in the ratings any publicity is good publicity, so… sorry about mentioning it here.
But the existence of this story does point out one fairly obvious fact about television critics: they go soft on the local product and sink the boot into imports. Or more accurately, they only say what they really think about shows when the production team are at least one ocean away. Local media has ties to local television on any number of levels, and why risk that over a few harsh words about a show people are going to watch (or not watch) anyway? Basically, in this case the overseas media are the ones you can trust… except when the local media recommends the overseas media to you, obviously. Wait, what?
And after the break, the ABC totally forgets they even have a comedy department:
The ABC is developing a long-term strategy to attract audiences to “big, national conversations” with bigger Dramas and more risks.
Richard Finlayson, Director of Television, told TV Tonight the public broadcaster is looking at ways its Content can resonate in a changing television landscape.
“Linear TV can be around for a long time but it has to change. So the changes we’re seeing are that people want it to feel very current. They want it to reflect what’s happening now. If you want people to sit down as a group and aggregate big audiences, families, lots of people together, then you’ve got to give them a reason to come and watch,” he explains.
Why Richard, please continue outlining a future in which comedy doesn’t even rate a mention:
“The last thing I want to do is knock off our slate because there’s a lot of fantastic productions but it’s a big shift and we have to start moving now. Those changes will be about trying to give our channels a greater sense of currency. More reasons to watch in the moment. More events, more noisy Factual pieces. Possibly fewer, but bigger Dramas. Taking bigger risks and bigger punts,” he says.
“’Fewer, bigger, better’ is an idea across the whole slate, really. We need to push our resources behind some bigger bets.
“It doesn’t mean there won’t be a role for all sorts of one-offs, or big telemovies, Arts, Indigenous, specialist Factual –all those things will continue to exist. But to really stand out we have to take some bigger punts.”
Considering the ABC is basically the only place doing local comedy with any kind of regularity, this kind of big interview – and yes, we do know that it could just be that he wasn’t asked about comedy, but still – is pretty depressing. It gives the impression that the future of the ABC is going to increasingly revolve around trying to make a big splash with big local productions, which clearly should involve comedy – both Kath & Kim and Summer Heights High made bigger splashes than any ABC drama series of the last decade, and Spicks and Specks delivered ratings ABC dramas could only dream of – and yet comedy doesn’t rate a mention.
So what we have here is someone who’s saying one thing (we need to make a big splash) but seems to means another (we need to make a big splash – but only by doing “serious” television). The cart is before the horse: instead of deciding on a result then figuring out the best way to achieve that result, he seems to have decided on both the result and the method. Which to be fair, makes some sense: if the ABC decided to go into mass market reality programming there’d be a justifiable outcry even if it is the best way to make a splash.
But comedy is one of the things the ABC does. So where’s the public support? Where’s the admission that the last really big ABC drama was Seachange, which was a comedy in all but name? Oh well, guess another decade of the ABC pouring money into crappy “prestige” dramas while comedy dwindles down to a handful of thrown-together panel shows and whatever Chris Lilley ideas HBO will fund can’t be all that bad…
Going Home In A Body Bag
We’ve been a bit distracted by the ongoing Ja’mie circus to keep up with the rest of the world of Australian comedy these last few weeks, but don’t think we haven’t noticed that things have been happening. Clip show-shaped things even. Okay, that proves nothing, you can say “clip show” at any time of the year and you’re bound to be describing at least most of the ABC’s comedy output. But still, Shock Horror Aunty? Good clip show. Tractor Monkeys? Bad clip show. Hey, at least for one brief week you could choose between them.
But what’s the difference between a good clip show and a bad one? Well, in a good one the clips are, you know, not shit. And by that we mean they’re actually about something more than “oh ho ho, those people in the past sure weren’t like us, right guys?” Shock Horror Aunty generally presents clips that are either stand-alone funny or of some historical interest: Tractor Monkeys presents clips so Dave O’Neill can talk about his camping trip. Some people might think the latter is the better entertainment option… but going by the ratings, not too many people.
Meanwhile, Gruen Planet has also wrapped up, thus dooming the rest of the ABC’s Wednesday night line-up to ratings obscurity. What should we complain about this time? Oh, here’s something: the Gruen series is so hateful yet so impressive because it manages to pull off a trick usually only accomplished by high-end US cable TV dramas – it flatters the viewer for being too smart for television.
Gruen viewers are clearly too sharp to fall for that “advertising” malarkey that the rest of the sheeple soak up. They see right through the scams and lies that make up today’s media, cutting away the set dressing of Western Civilisation to the very heart of What’s Going On In Society thanks to the guidance of… a bunch of people who work in advertising? Oh yeah, Gruen viewers are geniuses.
And as for Legally Brown (which wraps up this coming Monday) it did what we hoped it would do: be occasionally funny without becoming the heart of a “controversy”. Because we’re really really tired of people missing the point when it comes to comedy. Short version: if you don’t think you should laugh at certain things, then don’t laugh. You, personally: don’t laugh. Everyone else can decide for themselves if the subject matter is funny or not.
Anyway, the show itself wasn’t exactly a laugh a minute but there were enough actual laughs in there (ie: the guy doing “Spirit Yoga” last week being told his spirit didn’t want to go back into his body and that if he wanted to get his spirit back he’d have to “make an application to the courts”. Or the bit in Muslim Shore where a girl was described as “DTF – Down To Fast” during Ramadan) to keep us coming back. There’s a big difference between a comedy made by people who think they know what’s funny but really don’t and people who do know what’s funny but just can’t generate enough material yet, and LB is usually found behind door number two.
Our big problem with a lot of the comedy output in Australia is that it’s just not that interested in making jokes. Legally Brown follows (mostly) the lead of Australia’s “golden age” of sketch comedy – you know, Fast Forward, The D-Generation, The Comedy Company, The Big Gig, those shows – in that it’s a): trying to make jokes about real-life Australian culture, and b): the culture it’s making jokes about isn’t the mainstream media culture. So they can’t afford that bullshit laid-back ABC approach that thinks “subtle” is better than “funny” – they have to be broad to get their point across because they’re not making the usual points.
The moral of the story is, if you’re a comedy genius, then you can make subtle work: if you’re working in Australian comedy, broad is almost always your best bet if you want to get laughs*.
*not valid for Paul Fenech.
Five Alive!
For years we’ve been moaning about Chris Lilley’s sitcoms on this blog, and chief amongst our complaints are the rambling, incoherent plotting and characterisations, and the lack of laughs to be had from Lilley ensuring that his characters always end up on top. But in Ja’mie: Private School Girl episode five Lilley changed tack. A little…
Earlier episodes of Ja’mie: Private School Girl seemed to consist of little more than a bunch of noisy scenes that were only connected by the fact that they were dominated by the same character. But in episode five events from previous shows all came to a head when it transpired that Ja’mie had ruined her chances of winning the Hillford medal, getting to perform her dance at assembly and having a statue modelled on her…because a sexy Skype call she’d made leaked on to the internet. Oh no! Even better, all the honours were going to Erin, the girl from the boarding house Ja’mie had bullied. Poetic justice! And Erin and her friend got a couple of lines of dialogue. Wow!
For Lilley this is a break from the usual formula, and one that made us laugh a lot more than we have so far during this series…because it’s funny when horrible characters in comedy get their comeuppance. That’s how comedy works. Obviously we give full marks to Lilley for trying something different over the years – trying to get laughs from horrible characters triumphing – but as an experiment it was kind of a waste of time.
Which is why we were screaming at our tellies when we saw the promos for episode six, in which Ja’mie takes over assembly and swans off in a helicopter. She’ll probably fly direct to Hollywood with a hot billionaire too. And win the Nobel Peace Prize. Hilarious! We shouldn’t really have been surprised that the series looks set to end like this, but it would be a massive shame if Lilley abandoned a style that could work better for him and stuck to his usual, kinda crappy formula.
#2ManySillyIdeasLater
We’ve held off reviewing ABC2’s #7DaysLater for a few weeks, partly because we wanted to give the team a chance to get to grips with what was always going to be a difficult format, in that they have just seven days to make each show, and partly because the first episode had so much going on in it that we didn’t quite know what to say about it.
The key thing you need to know about #7DaysLater is this – “the story, dialogue and characters were developed by our audience” – something they state at the start of each episode like it’s a warning. And to a certain extent it is a warning because with the general public making all sorts of suggestions via the show’s Facebook page, Google+ hangouts and Triple J phone-ins, there’s a lot of ideas being generated. And to make a fairly obvious point, the kind of ideas the public are going to suggest in a radio phone-in or a Facebook page post might be amusing in a phone-in or Facebook context, where you have to get attention and laughs in two lines, but aren’t quite so funny when you try to turn them in to seven minutes of narrative television.
Hence you get plots like “Improv troupe try to save people held at gunpoint through improv” (Week 1) or “Zombies take over the country and debate the Prime Minister on Q&A” (Week 3), which sound like they should be funny but aren’t (unless you count the parody tweets on the zombie Q&A). More successful was Week 4, which took the idea of “Crack team keeps fucking up a heist” and presented it in a way which worked well on television, and was funny. We won’t spoil it for you. That’s not to say that Week 4 was brilliant, but it did at least feel like something which had been conceived for television.
Week 2 wasn’t bad either in that its “alien love triangle” plot, in which an alien Lord returns to earth to reunite with his now grown-up and married human best friend, seemed to have been conceived with 80’s teen heartthrob and #7DaysLater guest star Corey Feldman in mind. Again, it might not have been a non-stop cack but it worked as TV. And when you have to seven days to pull together crazy ideas from the public and make something watchable, that’s about the best you can hope for.
Ja’mie’s (ratings) Box Gap
So someone kindly forwarded us this from the ABC PR department:
JA’MIE KING SERVES UP IVIEW’S QUICHEST RATINGS YET
Australian viewers have proven that their love for Ja’mie King – the bitchiest private school girl to ever grace our screens – extends beyond just TV, with the show smashing online viewing records too.
Ja’mie: Private School Girl has registered more than 810,000 plays for Episodes 1, 2 and 3 of the show on ABC TV’s catch-up viewing platform iview.
The six-part series, which first premiered on Wednesday October 23, has broken all existing viewing records for iview – making it the biggest show on the platform since its launch in 2008.
The previous most-watched program in one day was the premiere of Doctor Who Series 7 with 76,000 views – this record was smashed by Ja’mie with 216,000 plays in one day.
Ja’mie: Private School Girl continues every Wednesday at 9pm on ABC1 or you can catch-up on iview shortly after.
Notice anything missing? Oh right, the actual ratings figures, which are as follows:
Week one we had this:
Ja’mie: Private School Girl, the highly-anticipated follow-up to Lilley’s comedy hit Summer Heights High, drew a capital city TV audience of 925,000 viewers last night.
At first glance the number seems soft – it falls below the all-important one million viewer waterline that is used to measure commercial success.
We’ll cut it off there, but follow the link and read the whole thing – it’s a handy collection of all the excuses Lilley’s supporters make for the increasingly soft ratings he’s been pulling in since Angry Boys turned out to be, well, not so good. Or popular.
Week two saw a minor dip:
JA’MIE: PRIVATE SCHOOL GIRL-EV Network ABC1 880,000 277,000 299,000 131,000 79,000 94,000
Which was to be expected, but losing 45,000 viewers was nothing for the ABC to worry about. Then came week three:
Ja’mie: Private School Girl (17th – 592,000)
And now they’re starting to sweat. Losing over 300,000 viewers in three weeks? That’s a repeat of his Angry Boys performance. So you’d be guessing the ABC would be crossing their fingers extremely tightly hoping that result was a one week blip. Cue week four:
JA’MIE: PRIVATE SCHOOL GIRL-EV Network ABC1 575,000 199,000 191,000 87,000 55,000 43,000
Oops. Guess breaking that million viewer mark is out of the question, hey? And suddenly the reason why the ABC is shouting loud and proud about Ja’mie‘s “quichest” ratings on iView becomes clear. Just like it did back when they pulled the exact same stunt during Angry Boys.
What we seem to be seeing here is a structural problem. Chris Lilley still has an awful lot of goodwill out there in the community from his Summer Heights High days, but it only takes a couple episodes of his newer work before people realise it’s not to their taste. We’ll leave why this might be to other posts: for now it’s starting to look like the ABC might be steering future Chris Lilley projects to a “one-off special event” format…
*update* It’s been pointed out to us that the big drop in Ja’mie‘s ratings may have something to do with having Gruen as a lead-in during those first two weeks. Which does seem to suggest that the market for Ja’mie is even weaker than we first suspected…
What About Ja’mie – It Isn’t Fair
Week four of Ja’mie: Private School Girl, and what have we learnt? Seriously, what have we learnt? Private schools create monsters? Well no, as Ja’mie’s sister seems kind of un-monstrous – as do a bunch of Ja’mie’s fellow students – and they all go to a private school. Teen girls fabricate relationships where little more than friendship exists? So… like everyone else then? Chris Lilley thinks that treating a bitchy cartoon character’s superficial heartbreak as a serious matter is something people would like to watch? Now you’re talking.
When people write things like this:
Ja’mie: Private School Girl is terrifyingly akin to watching a documentary.
Or this:
The portrait he paints of what it’s like to be a girl growing up in this impossible, contradictory world is disarmingly honest
It’s important to realise that they’re full of shit. How is this like a documentary? Ja’mie is not like a real teenage girl. Oh sure, she has elements that real teenage girls have, but even if she was a “real teenage girl” and not a forty year old man in a dress, the show he’s created around her only shows an extremely limited range of her behaviours.
C’mon: would a real teenage girl be a bitch to everyone all the time? Would she be so consistently vapid that she would say half the things Ja’mie said about suicide this week? Would she be so totally unaware that teen boys are, you know, somewhat interested in having sex with their girlfriends when she spent half of an earlier episode talking about how boys are really into tits?
There’s always been a strong element of “it’s funny because it’s true, even if it’s not actually funny” in Lilley’s fanbase. Back during Summer Heights High people were claiming that Mr G was spot on as far as high school drama teachers go. Were they still saying that after he tried to make it look like a special needs student had taken a shit on the floor of a classroom? Ask your friends.
But with Ja’mie, that seems to be the only basis on which anyone is defending it: “teenage girls are just like that!”. Only if you watch the show for more than a minute it’s clear the show itself is completely unrealistic on every level. For example, last week’s party: did anyone else think for something with a three episode build up what we saw was extremely watered down and fake, especially for 17-18 year olds? Didn’t we just get three minutes of Ja’mie talking about dick pics? Would they really jump into the pool in their party gear? Wouldn’t they have to have been drinking to make looking like shit for the rest of the night seem like a good idea?
Meanwhile, why did the boarders even show up dressed to party at a party held by their arch-enemy at her own home? Why has Ja’mie been allowed to take a black teenager away from his family to live at her place? Why hasn’t someone taken Ja’mie aside and said “you know, you’re coming off as a bit of a bitch”? Why haven’t the teachers noticed that Ja’mie a): is the biggest bully in the schoolyard, b): abuses her detention powers like mad c): never seems to go to any class that doesn’t involve her singing terribly or dancing horribly and d): seems to have some kind of deep-seated sexual issues considering the number of times she’s started taking her gear off in public?
If you think the show is actually funny, fine. But if you’re claiming it’s basically a documentary, then you should examine it as such and not just base your verdict on “yeah, teenage girls are such bitches” or “teenagers are so random, nothing they do makes any sense!” And if your reply to that is “you’re not meant to take it seriously”? So you’re going to defend it on the basis that it’s packed with jokes? This should be good.
Picking Up the Pieces
It was announced last year, then languished in the ABC’s “too hard” basket for most of this year but now it appears Spicks and Specks is finally back.
The hit music quiz show is set to return early next year hosted by comic Josh Earl with Melbourne radio host Adam Richard and former Killing Heidi singer Ella Hooper.
The series return was to have been announced at the ABC’s 2014 upfronts event later this month but with the pilot due to be recorded this week, news of the much-loved series return has leaked.
You say leaked, we say “isn’t this news like, six months late at least”, lets call it even and move on. Presumably the ABC have been conducting a lot of top-secret rehearsals in a barn somewhere out bush, because this is the kind of line-up that doesn’t get put together by chance. None of them are nobodies, but it’s the kind of mildly risky set-up – well, “risky” in an ABC panel show context where the host could have just as easily been Peter Helliar – that suggests they’ve actually spent the extra time since the relaunch was first announced trying to make sure they got it right.
That’s not to say this will work of course, but we’re going to be slightly more optimistic about this than we were 24 hours ago. Only slightly mind you; if they really are recording the “pilot” later this week (and haven’t, as we suspect, been recording numerous pilot-like efforts with various possible cast members) then there must be an awful lot of people at the ABC hoping it doesn’t turn out to be a big steaming turd.
But hey! We never really liked the original Spicks and Specks much either. Just so long as it rates well enough to make the actually funny shows that follow it look good – and also rates well enough to kill off the ABCs numerous other crap stabs at panel comedy programming – all’s right in our world. Until the Adam Hills guest appearances start.
Our biannual post about Clarke & Dawe
Given the locally-made comedy that’s served up to us – dull attention-seekers playing dull attention-seekers, B-list celebrities falling off sets, Tractor Monkeys – it would be easy to assume that large numbers of Australians wouldn’t be interested in watching two men in their 60s, sitting on stools, delivering three minutes of hardcore political satire. It’s doubtful a focus group representing the key demographics would react favourably to that concept, anyway.
We ourselves were a bit concerned that Clarke & Dawe – despite its successful 20+ year run – wouldn’t survive for too long after it was put in the “doomed to fail timeslot” of 6.55pm on a Thursday following its axing from 7.30. But guess what? We were wrong! We Australians watch them in droves.
If you head over to TV Tonight’s section on Timeshifted Ratings and trawl through the ratings for Thursdays you’ll see that Clarke & Dawe has been in the Top 20 most weeks for at least the last six months, averaging around 550,000 viewers per episode. Which is pretty good for a show that requires effort to watch – in more ways than one. Add to that the thousands of views each sketch quickly accrues on YouTube and, well, it’s probably safe to assume we’ll see them again in 2014.
The Lights Comin’ Over The Hill Are A-Blinding Me
Well, at least now we know where all this Ja’mie malarky is heading. It’s not exactly a positive sign for a character when pretty much the only question – well, the only question in the non-teen-girl circles we move in – about Ja’mie: Private School Girl is “will Lilley man up and give his much-loved creation the savage kicking she so clearly deserves?”
Of course not. And with that said, let’s continue.
Tonight’s episode pretty much laid down the tracks for the back end of the series: Ja’mie’s sister was again sidelined, Ja’mie’s dad was again sidelined, we got loads more talk about Ja’mie’s tits and some crappy singing and bad dancing. Groundhog Day!
But of slight interest was the way the confrontation with The Boarders played out. In case you may have missed it / fell asleep / stopped giving a shit back at episode one, all the girls Ja’mie hates turn up at the gates of her house wanting to get into her party… presumably because they’re all idiots who actually thought Ja’mie was going to let them in? Yeah, next time your local TV writer talks about how this show is “practically a documentary”, keep in mind the way that none of the plot makes any sense whatsoever. But we digress.
The Boarders, enraged at being shut out, tell Ja’mie she’s ugly and fat and shit at dancing – all of which is, objectively, true – so she promptly chucks a hissy fit then breaks down in tears, only to have totally recovered three minutes later after making out (oh so briefly) with a boy. So she’s flighty, superficial and capricious; what else is new?
With three episodes to go and Ja’mie little more than a nightmarish bitch on wheels AND YET she also has a massive and devoted fanbase Lilley wouldn’t dare let down by allowing anything seriously yet deservedly bad to happen to her, the end of this series seems clear: Ja’mie will not achieve all her goals (thus satisfying those wanting her bitchy behaviour to be punished), yet her setback will be brief as she promptly shifts her focus to something she has achieved (thus satisfying those who for some insane reason think she’s awesome).
As for satisfying those who’d like to get a decent laugh out of this series… yeah, good luck with that.