Australian Tumbleweeds
Fart from the Past: Get Nicked
Flops on Australian television work one of two ways: they get to air and stink so badly they’re axed, or you read about someone desperately trying to talk up a project that’s clearly never going to happen. What we almost never see is the show that progresses a long way down the track before getting the chop – after all, even The White Room eventually made it to air after years of faffing around. But it does happen: come with us now on an epic journey into the strange and mildly depressing world of… Get Nicked.
Seven gets Nicked – Nick Giannopoulos returns to Television
25-Oct-2005
Channel Seven today announced it has commissioned a new Australian comedy series starring Nick Giannopoulos entitled Get Nicked. Produced by Granada Productions and In Good Nick Productions, the eight part, half-hour series is created and written by multi-award winning Giannopoulos (The Wannabes, The Wog Boy, Wogs Out Of Work and Acropolis Now) and will be directed by Ted Emery (Fast Forward, Full Frontal Jimeoin and Kath Kim). Get Nicked follows the ups and downs of Giannopoulos chaotic family and celebrity lifestyle. The series will go into pre-production at the end of the month and will air on the Seven Network in 2006.Nick Giannopoulos said today: I am very excited that the Seven Network has commissioned my new TV series Get Nicked. After 12 years of stage and film I feel like Im coming back home to where it all began with Acropolis Now. I am sure that with such a successful and experienced partner as Granada, we will be able to produce a very funny and unique Australian comedy series. Sevens Head of Program Development, Mr Brad Lyons, said: Get Nicked is a fresh and unique concept, audiences are going to love and laugh at Nicks escapades. Its fantastic to have Nick back at Seven. Head of Development, Granada Productions, Ms Hilary Innes said: The timing for Nick G to pop back up on our small screens is perfect. We can certainly do with some more self deprecating contemporary Australian comedy. Get Nicked is full of well drawn characters that we can all identify with, some sparkling new talent and a cast list of cameos to die for great home grown laughs for all!
From a gossip column a few months later:
Rave reviews for Get Nicked
Get Nicked, Nick Giannopoulos’ clever new take on reality television
is up for grabs.With the Granada Television pilot already receiving rave reviews from
Granada’s international head, it can only be a matter of time before
it pops up on one of the networks.Described by Giannopoulos as “art imitating life”, Get Nicked
features actors playing the star’s family and friends while
celebrities play themselves.Vince Colosimo and Holly Brisley were both in the pilot, which
included an hysterical scene at Icebergs Dining Room.
And yet, the next we heard about it was this from an interview with Giannopoulos in 2007:
In 2005 [Nick Giannopoulos] began work on a sitcom concept, Get Nicked. Production house Granada shopped it to the networks and it was snapped up by an enthusiastic Channel 7.
Giannopoulos toiled in script development and the casting process, only to find Seven had pulled the plug on the concept. A year’s passion and commitment went down the loo.
“We shot the pilot, everyone seemed to love it and it was the most enjoyable thing I’d done in TV,” Giannopoulos says.
“We were ready to shoot the 10 episodes when I got a call saying Seven wasn’t going ahead. I was shattered. I literally spent two months on the floor. I’d put more than 18 months of my life into that show.
“It’s so confusing and frustrating for this to happen after the show had previously been so enthusiastically embraced. We all got paid out and you move on, but I still don’t know the real reason the show didn’t get made.”
Obviously Nick never read the business pages:
— Quote —23/05/06
Sector:Plc
TV plc (”ITV”) today announces the sale of a 11.6% stake in Seven Network Limited, the Australian Media Company, for £87 million.The disposal represents a further step in the disposal programme of non-core assets which has raised close to £400m in cash since the creation of ITV in 2004.
ITV retains its strong interest in the Australian television production sector through its wholly-owned subsidiary Granada Productions Pty Limited.
Notes to editors
About ITV
ITV is Britain’s biggest and most popular commercial broadcaster, with 82% of people in the UK watching ITV in any week. ITV’s flagship channel – ITV1 – is the home of the most popular drama and entertainment programmes on British television and ITV2, 3 and 4 are among the most popular channels on multi-channel television.Granada Australia is one of Australia’s leading independent television producers. Its recent and current programme slate includes Merrick and Rosso Unplanned (Nine Network); World Comedy Tour (Nine Network, Foxtel, Comedy Central USA); Dancing with the Stars Series 4 (Seven Network and TVNZ); Guinness World Records (Seven Network); Australia’s Next Top Model Series 2 (Fox 8); and Australian Princess (Ten Network). It is also currently working on Get Nicked, a situation comedy starring Australian celebrity Nick Giannopoulos for the Seven Network. Dancing with the Stars was the sixth most watched series of 2005 and the Final of Dancing with the Stars was one of the most watched shows in 2005.
— End quote —
So to clarify: Nick Giannopoulos sold a show produced by Granada to a network partially owned by Granada’s parent company, then when that parent company sold off their share in Seven, Seven suddenly lost interest in Nick’s show. Hmm. That doesn’t really seem to say a lot for the intrinsic quality of Get Nicked.
All was not lost though: while Nick G went on to host the now-completely forgotten The Singing Office and then make the utterly worthless Wogboy 2: Kings of Mykonos, Ted Emery directed basically the same concept – which, let’s be honest, is just “let’s rip off Curb Your Enthusiasm” – starring Peter Moon for Foxtel as Whatever Happened to That Guy? Which we actually liked. Hurrah!
Running ‘Round In Circles
How many elections is it now that The Chaser have covered? Eleventy-Billion? And considering the punishing repetitiveness of the Australian electoral cycle its only fair to expect a little wear and tear on the boys when they’re hauled in front of the camera to crack wise about an election between The Guy No-One Likes and The Really Unpopular One. Put a slightly different way, it’s no surprise that with their latest election series The Hamster Decides occasionally things slip into the realm of “check out this hilarious clip”.
Clips aside, most of the segments here are your standard-issue Chaser: seeing Chas Licciardello and Andrew Hansen punch their way through a couple of issues via rapid-fire clips and Craig Reucassel providing a funny summary of an issue that leads into a prank is familiar both from The Hamster Wheel and The Checkout. The difference is that this time it’s all about politics. All. About. The. Politics. So much politics, so close to home.
When doing election-based comedy (or just covering the election on the regular ABC news) it’s way, waaaay too tempting to gather all the clips of a politician stating their message then put them all together to reveal that politicians say the same thing over and over and over again. Big deal: that’s just what politicians have to do if they’re going to have the slightest chance of getting their message onto the news. Putting those clips together tells us nothing past “here’s the message they’re trying to sell… which we’re now helping them get out there”. When this leads to Andrew and Chas talking about the secret vault where Abbott’s “secret plan” is kept, it’s worth it; when there’s no punchline, all that’s left is a lot of not much.
But to follow our politicians lead and stay positive, the compare and contrast stuff here manages to be both informative and funny, thus rendering Gruen completely superfluous. Though the big problem with the ABC’s election coverage persists as the curse of “balance” strikes again: no-one outside Liberal Party Headquarters thinks their NBN scheme is on par with Labour’s as far as quality goes, yet the Hamster sketch – which basically pointed out that the Liberal’s scheme was only slightly cheaper but much slower, in accord with the generally accepted facts – ended with a “oh ho ho, it’s all too confusing”. No it’s not: you just told us one side was better than the other.
Having Abbott cough “bullshit” into his fist is comedy gold: a montage of Abbott going “aah”, not so much. Having senator Doug Cameron on was great for Cameron – he certainly seemed to be kak’ing himself – and seeing him struggle to say something positive about Rudd practicing gangnam style was chuckle-worthy. But as always and we’ll never stop saying this, getting politicians in on the joke makes us choke back bile. It’s an easy segment to put together and the questions themselves can be funny and the politicians acquit themselves well but what’s the point? The politician is going to laugh along and seem like a decent person and then be involved in cutting benefits to the sick or the poor or the elderly and it’s THE DAY THE LAUGHTER DIED.
There are two ways of looking at The Hamster Decides. One is that the nation deserves – nay, demands – quality election based comedy and if that’s the case you might as well get in the experts. The other is that the nation deserves – nay, demands – quality election based comedy and if that’s the case why not get in some new guys to mix things up a little? Either side has its merits: while The Chaser are the ones this year who seem to feel like they’ve had enough of this kind of thing – Gruen, being pure evil, maintains the glee and energy of pure evil – it’d still be a shame to lose them entirely from the election media landscape.
The big problem is that the ABC currently has close to 90 minutes of election-based comedy coverage per week and the election is lucky to be generating 20 minutes of worthwhile material. While politicians and the quote-unquote “media elite” no doubt think quantity and plenty of it is what’s required when it comes to gasbagging about elections, what’s really needed is intelligent and insightful examination of the issues. Again, that rules the smug admen and showboating political hacks of Gruen right out. But when it’s only week two of your comedy series and already you’re revisiting Julia Gillard having a sandwich thrown at her, perhaps it’s a sign that our politicians just aren’t as interesting as they think they are?
Good luck taking that message to Parliament next time the ABC funding arrangements come up.
Vale Wednesday Night Fever
Usually when a television show – especially a comedy – goes off the rails, it’s because those rails were faulty from the start. Remember how Randling filmed every single episode of it’s 27 episode run before a single one went to air? Oh how we laughed – not at the show, but at the foolishness of filming every single episode before the public had seen a single one. And yet, in hindsight wasn’t that a little harsh?
Okay, obviously not, but go with us here: the way television (and especially comedy) works is that it’s pretty much impossible to turn the ship around in a week if something goes wrong. Australian shows rarely have the budget for vast teams of writers so even “topical” shows have long lead times to write a lot of generic gags they can slot in during quiet weeks when they’re on-air. Non-topical scripted comedy is almost always completely finished before the first episode goes to air; shows like The Hamster Decides and Gruen Nation have tried and tested formats that aren’t going to change.
Basically, what you see in week one is almost always, minor changes aside, what you’re going to get for the whole run: Randling might have been able to tweak its’ format if it had been filmed weekly, but it still would have been basically the same – basically rubbish – show. So pretty much the only interesting thing about the car crash into a train wreck that was Wednesday Night Fever is this: it was a show that actually changed substantially between weeks one and two.
It’s easy to point out Wednesday Night Fever‘s superficial failings so lets do so fast before we get to the interesting stuff. Sammy J aside, the cast was a collection of performers that no-one wants to see. We’ve seen them before, we didn’t like them the first time. Having the creative team behind previously proven flops as Double Take, Comedy Inc: The Late Shift and Big Bite, not to mention the one-joke wonder of At Home With Julia, was hardly a sign that anyone here was going to be reaching for creative excellence.
But if that’s the case, why even make Wednesday Night Fever? Initial reports suggested the show was going to be a showcase for new talent, so when the line-up turned out to be these guys (this list is taken from the inital press release – just check out their high-profile credits!):
Amanda Bishop (At Home with Julia); Paul McCarthy (Comedy Inc. – The Late Shift, At Home with Julia); Genevieve Morris (Comedy Inc. – The Late Shift); Dave Eastgate (A Moody Christmas, Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting); Heath Franklin (‘Chopper’ of The Ronnie Johns Half Hour); Melbourne Comedy Festival sensation Anne Edmonds; music theatre star Lisa Adam and Robin Goldsworthy (At Home with Julia, Paper Giants).
… well, if by “new talent” they meant “shows no-one watched the first time…”
Okay, so the show lacked star power. And being a “satirical political sketch comedy” isn’t really enough to make you stand out on a network that already has The Chaser and Shaun Micallef doing basically the same thing already. Let’s go back to that first ever press release:
ABC TV today announced that Wednesday Night Fever – its new, late night, weekly comedy series from the makers of controversial hit At Home with Julia – will premiere on Wednesday, July 3 at 9:30pm on ABC1.
Did you spot the magic word? Correctamundo: “controversial”. Not “hilarious”, not “critically acclaimed”, not even “much-loved”. The secret ingredient is controversy.
As cast member Genevieve Morris told TV Tonight just before it went to air:
“There’s no point in making comedy if you’re going to play it safe. I certainly don’t believe in comedy having a go at people and taking a cheap shot just for the sake of it. That’s lazy writing. But there will be points made, probably in a provocative way,”
Clearly Morris hadn’t yet seen the script for “Celebrity Whores”
Now, we’ve had discussions with people in a much better position to know such things than us over the years who’ve told us flat out that the ABC is scared of controversy. They do not like the media spotlight being shone on them one bit, and any speculation on our part that they create or promote shows with the intention of stirring up trouble in the hope of boosting ratings is flat-out wrong. But in this case, well, we think it may have worked both ways.
If the question prior to Wednesday Night Fever going to air was “what could they possibly do to get people to watch a show put together by the writers and performers who made the worst Australian sketch comedy of the last decade?”, the first episode answered it loud and clear: swearing! Lots and lots of swearing!
When we reviewed the first episode, we largely steered clear of passing judgment on the swearing, because what was there to say? There was a lot of it and a lot of the time it seemed forced; the show had bigger problems than that. For example, it was harsh and mean-spirited, which the swearing only underlined. When your parody of Kyle Sandilands has nothing to say past “he so fat!”, you’re not exactly expecting applause for your thoughtful deconstruction of his public persona.
Still, it wasn’t surprising that most commentators focused on the swearing and insults – this was a show that made jokes about the “fact” that Ruby Rose supposedly looked like a boy, Jesus Christ – and when word leaked out via a (since taken down) Crikey report that future sketches would feature a range of dubious-sounding efforts including Prince Phillip in blackface, it looked like the kerfuffle might even make it out to the wider press.
Cut to week two, and huh? Where’d all the swearing go? From more fucks than a half-price brothel on Friday night one week to a single solitary “shit” in week two. Remember how the ABC doesn’t like controversy? Rumour had it that the producers had admitted the show had gone a bit far (or had been told so by their superiors) and decided to dial it back. At least they managed to still air most of the “offensive” sketches they’d pre-recorded… though surprisingly, blackface Prince Phillip seemed to have been left on the cutting room floor.
For a show like this, this was a massive change. Basically, its only point of difference – apart from a slightly creepy strand of social conservatism – had been taken away from it. This was going to be the “controversial” comedy where “nothing was sacred”; as no-one involved seemed capable of living up to those terms without swearing or fat jokes, all that was left was a fairly tame comedy largely built around impersonations where the performance was far stronger than the writing.
And that was pretty much that. In hindsight it’s obvious that the swearing and “edgy comedy” (read: insults) were meant to cover up the fact that this had nothing to offer that the public hadn’t already rejected, and with them gone all that was left was a series of flop-sweat desperate attempts to create cult characters (Clive Palmer, Margaret & David, Justice Whatshername) while bending over backwards to keep Amanda Bishop’s Julia Gillard character in front of the cameras despite the real Gillard having vanished from public view days before the first episode aired.
Obviously at least some of the show’s misfortunes were out of the hands of the cast and crew. But if you set out to make a nasty, spiteful show designed to get laughs from ending every sentence with “fuck” and making fun of people because they don’t conform to your ideas of what people should look like, you deserve a much worse kicking than anything we could hand out. This was a lazy show trading on cheap jokes – “politicians swearing” largely summed it up – and every hurdle it faced only forced it to move closer to what it should have been from the start: a show that tried to be funny.
Shame it failed at that too.
Taking their rightful place
What with there being an election campaign on, politicians are everywhere trying to get us to vote for them. And what with there being a glut of topical comedies on at the moment, any politicians after the “youth vote” are beating down the doors trying to get on those shows.
Gone are the days when Paul Keating refused to go bowling with Andrew Denton and John Howard wouldn’t appear on The Panel. To take one example, it’s hard to keep Bob Katter away from comedy interview segments at the moment – in recent weeks he’s sat opposite Tom Gleeson for This Week Live’s I Hate You Change My Mind, and joined Julian Morrow for Question Time on The Hamster Decides. And why wouldn’t he? More people watch those shows than Insiders or 7.30, and he’ll get a far easier ride.
You could argue it was the Chaser team who made it okay for our politicians to appear in comedy shows. Because despite their reputation for hard-hitting satire the Chaser rarely go in hard on anyone, meaning any politician with a bit of savvy could take advantage of the situation. The famous Julie Bishop stare-off on Yes We Canberra! made her seem more like a good sport than a tough nut, as did Hugging the PM from The Chaser’s War on Everything for John Howard.
But while all this isn’t exactly great for politics or comedy, politicians throughout the ages have always manipulated the media…if the media’s let them. Clive Palmer’s appearance on the final episode of Wednesday Night Fever was a new low, in that several minutes of a (supposed) satire program was given over to an election candidate to deliver material he’d written himself. In the promotional articles published before the show aired Palmer claimed to really like Heath Franklin’s impression of him, suggesting he was trying to cash-in on the impression’s popularity.
This is something the makers of Wednesday Night Fever should have resisted as there’s clearly a conflict of interest here (and not just that Tony Abbott and Kevin Rudd weren’t also given a few minutes to show us their original comedy stylings): if you’re making a topical comedy, aren’t you supposed to go hard on all sides on behalf of the nation, rather than hand the show over to the people you’re supposed to be satirising? Wednesday Night Fever didn’t exactly rate its pants off, but this was no way to end the series.
Jonathan Lynn, legendary comedy writer (of the British sitcoms Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister), wrote a book called Comedy Rules a couple of years ago, which should serve as the bible for any comedy writer or producer in this situation. Amongst Lynn’s comedy rules is “Try to resist if the Prime Minister asks to join your writing team”, a rule which may as well apply to politicians writing comedy in general.
The book describes how in the mid-1980s a right-wing, “keep filth off TV”-type organisation called the Viewers and Listeners Association announced it was giving an award to Yes Minister. Yes Minister was (and still is) one of the best political satire programs ever made. Its masterstroke was that it never revealed which party the protagonist Jim Hacker MP was a member of, allowing it to artfully and hilariously lift the lid on the inner workings of government.
So resonant was it with the politicians of the time that many declared that they loved it, including then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who agreed to present the award to Yes Minister at the Viewers and Listeners Association’s awards ceremony. Lynn describes what happened as follows:
Finally, two days before the event, a scarcely believable message arrived from Number 10: Mrs T had written a Yes Minister sketch, which she intended to perform with herself playing the PM, and Nigel [Hawthorne] as Sir Humphrey and Paul [Eddington] as the Minister for Administrative Affairs…. To say that it wasn’t funny would be something of an understatement…
The awful day dawned. We all went to the little church in Portland Place, beside [BBC] Broadcasting House. The ceremony was to take place in a big basement room, which was packed with journalists and cameramen. There was a battery of mics and video cameras, the sort of thing you would expect at the end of a summit conference. The whole thing had been expertly timed by Bernard Ingham [Thatcher’s Press Secretary] to be covered not only live on the radio but in the Evening Standard [newspaper], on the evening TV news and in the following morning’s papers. The sketch began, with everybody reading their lines rather badly: Mrs Thatcher couldn’t act, and Nigel and Paul were reading badly in what looked like a half-hearted attempt to dissociate themselves from the whole embarrassing event. Then a strange alchemy occurred: it started to be funny just because, like Mount Everest, it was there. It was so ludicrous that we started laughing.
The sketch over, Lynn was presented with the award, and famously quipped “I should like to thank Mrs Thatcher for finally taking her rightful place in the field of situation comedy”, a line which caused a “volcanic eruption of laughter” in the audience although none from Mrs Thatcher herself. The sketch in question is now on YouTube – judge for yourself if you think it’s funny – or indeed if Palmer’s effort were funny.
What’s most sad about the Palmer sketch is that it wasn’t followed by a line as spot-on as Jonathan Lynn’s. It did include an “OMG, what a car crash!” look from Sammy J in the middle of it, but that’s hardly the same thing. And anyway, car crashes are (in most instances) un-planned.
******
A few commenters on our recent blog on Gruen Nation took issue with Craig Emerson’s appearances on The Hamster Decides. On the surface these are quite similar to Palmer’s Wednesday Night Fever cameo, and while we agree that the Emerson appearances were crap there are several key differences: 1) He isn’t standing for election, 2) He technically didn’t write his own material – he just agreed to perform it, 3) Even if he is on the show every week we can live with it. To dredge up an ancient reference, it’s like Ian Turpie’s appearances on Club Buggery, a bit of harmless fluff.
Thursday Night Fever
Did you hear? It only took the ABC eight months to air their first broad-based sitcom for 2013! You might think we’re being sarcastic; feel free to go back and look over all those years when the ABC didn’t manage to air even one sitcom that could be charitably described as having “broad-based appeal”. The ABC’s always had a remit when it comes to airing the comedy that the commercial networks won’t: it’s just taken them twenty years to realise that pretty much means ALL comedy – including stuff that might actually rate well.
It’s also a sign of the diminished status of Australian comedy that when the ABC was screening dramas like The Slap on Thursday nights at 8.30pm there was a low but steady grumble along the lines of “why is the national broadcaster throwing away quality drama on a Thursday night”. Yet not a word has been spoken up now that they’re “throwing away” quality comedy on that very same night. Though considering the pig’s breakfast the ABC have made of their once-proud Wednesday night comedy line-up, perhaps silence is golden in this case.
General bitchiness aside for the moment, Upper Middle Bogan gets points merely for being an increasingly rare attempt to create a sitcom aimed at a wide audience – so wide, in fact, that the very concept advertises the fact that it’s meant to contain pretty much something for everyone: Bess (Annie Maynard) is a well-off doctor with twin 13 year-olds at private school and an architect (Patrick Brammall) for a husband. Then she discovers her snooty mum (Robyn Nevin) is not, in fact her mother: she was adopted, and her real parents are Wayne (Glenn Robbins) and Julie (Robyn Malcolm), the rough-around-the-edges heads of a western suburbs drag racing dynasty. Hilarity ensues? Well, not quite.
First, some background: this is the latest effort from Wayne Hope and Robyn Butler’s company Gristmill. If you remember their earlier series The Librarians you’ve probably got a bit of an idea of what to expect here. On the whole we liked The Librarians: you might want to keep that in mind as you read on.
While the sense of humour on display here is similar, the approach here is much gentler than the cringe comedy and broad strokes of The Librarians: yes, there are at least two exceedingly stupid young male characters, and Bess’s jittery nature is more than slightly reminiscent of Butler’s character in The Librarians (as is Maynard’s performance). But there’s a lot less laughing at the characters here and the second half of episode one was basically a lightweight drama right up to the point where both families finally met up.
Drama in this country has been moving in on comedy’s turf for a while now and this feels like a continuation of that trend from the comedy side – or just good old-fashioned character-based comedy, where the first few episodes struggle a little until everyone beds in. Based on the first episode it could go either way; there’s enough overall quality on display – seriously, at least all the characters didn’t sound exactly the same, which isn’t something you can say about a lot of ABC sitcoms over the last few years – to keep us coming back.
Slightly shakier was the more obviously trying-to-be comedic Peter Helliar-scripted It’s a Date, which each week follows two couples on, you guessed it, a date. It’s a solid concept and the cast across the eight weeks is great, but going by tonight’s episode Helliar (who co-writes every episode) has learnt a grand total of bugger-all from the fizzle of his last stab at rom-com, the forgettable feature film I Love You Too.
Whether it’s confusing set-ups, strippers, people being urinated on, or the clunky “theme” (tonight’s was “When Should You Give Up On A Date”, which turned out to be totally irrelevant to both stories), the whole thing felt a definite step down in quality after Upper Middle Bogan. Sadly, it’s also the one show out of the two that’s clearly trying to be broadly funny right out the gate: meanwhile, how many billion people did the final episode of Offspring rate? Yeah, crying is the future of comedy. So now we can probably look forward to at least one moronic “think piece” on how the two Thursday night shows’ relative merits are a sign that Australians just aren’t interested in “ha-ha funny” any more.
Which is crap: people aren’t interested in proven dud Peter Helliar’s ham-fisted attempts to cover-up his inability to write characters by piling on increasingly forced “surprise twists” and stupid situations. It’s not quite a total loss: at least the Helliar / Lisa McCune story had an explanation for their painfully crap antics built in – it was an explanation that didn’t really make all that much sense, but at least it was there.
The only upside so far with It’s a Date is that at least the generally classy cast and lack of ongoing storylines means each episode could, in theory at least, be better than the last; here’s hoping they didn’t lead with the strongest, because this is a date we’re already willing to break. And who knows? Maybe by week four Upper Middle Bogan will be busting out the hilarity and it’ll actually work because we’re invested in the characters and the laughs are coming from what we now know about them. It won’t make It’s a Date any funnier, but at least it’ll be a sign that comedy itself isn’t dead.
Hilarious Election / Erection Mix-Up!
It’s election time again and what better way to add some life to the seemingly endless parade of clapped-out hacks that the electorate clearly despises than by dusting off the usual comedians and commentators to make the usual comedy and comments? Seriously, what better way? There’s got to be a better way, people. Here’s a suggestion: maybe get Shaun Micallef to handle things next time?
Of the two shows returning to the ABC tonight, Gruen Nation continues to be the one of no use to anyone. The tone was set with the opening with the audience laughing at an old Country Party promotional film, which was funny because… people in the past are funny? Because they weren’t as media savvy as we are today? And then we zoned out for a while imagining a show where old people heaped shit on Wil Anderson for not being able to do sums using a slide rule. So much shit. And when we zoned back in Anderson said “same as last time…” and we zoned back out again.
You know the drill by now: wacky opening monologue, here’s the panel, let’s look at a few ads, the TV screen suddenly shatters under the force of our boot because Jesus Fuck, these smug bastards talk about everything but the one thing that actually matters: how what we’re seeing will affect people in the real world. It’s sooo cool to look at political commercials with a disinterested eye and pretend that there’s nothing beneath them, isn’t it? Caring about actual policy is for losers, right guys? Let’s get some ad agencies to write some funny songs, that’ll be hilarious.
Our griping about that stuff might seem beside the point: it’s still a comedy, right? Well, it’s a shit comedy for starters: you want to gut the running time, maybe five full minutes of Anderson’s opening monologue / clip fest is four minutes too long. The panelists laugh at each others jokes, then we cut to Anderson laughing, then we cut to the audience applauding; why again does this needs to go for 45 minutes? Ha ha, they edited Kevin Rudd to make it look like he’s wanking! Then Russel Howcroft says “in marketing, we know that-” and another television bites the dust.
This veers wildly between lame clip comedy – seriously guys, leave this to the Chaser – and borderline dull analysis of political marketing. They show clips, then they restate what we just saw in their own terms: “it’s the most positive negative ad I’ve seen” “we have two opposition leaders here – they’re both running against the Labour Party” and so on. Which tells us what exactly? Who cares, time for more kak-tastic attempts to out-do each other describing Kevin Rudd’s hand gestures. All this is painful enough when it’s regular Gruen, because at least then the marketing they’re promoting is peddling trivial crap; here it’s-
Look, forgive us for noticing that everyone on Gruen Nation‘s panel is either a straight-up millionaire, someone just a regular shitload richer than you and I, someone connected to one of the political parties or someone who makes a living in the media commentating on politicians: in short, people from the well-off end of the spectrum. Who gives a fuck what they think? These are people with enough money to cushion themselves from the excesses of government policy: they have no skin in this game. Having them talk about politics in Australia is like having a bunch of high-paid architects sitting around discussing the designs of housing commission flats. Sure, you can do it and you can even call it good television, but it’s kind of offensive to the people who have to live under those conditions.
This has an effect on the comedy side of things because there’s a big difference between people making fun of a system that treats them poorly and people who are part of the system having a laugh amongst themselves. For a show that’s meant to be informative, there’s zero attempt – via either comedy or analysis – to get at the real heart of the political system, because this show purposely isn’t about that. It’s just forty five minutes each week of wealthy people who have minimal interaction with the pointy end of government policy – it’s doubtful they use many services with “public” on the front – chortling amongst themselves about what a good or bad job their professional peers are doing selling life-changing policies to the little people.
Gruen Nation is a cynical embarrassment, a show that pretends political messaging can and should be divorced from the political message. It’s a show made by an elite condescending to the masses, patting them on the head and saying “here, let us explain this to you” about a subject that for them means little more than who’s going to be signing their next massive pay check. Fuck this show.
As for The Hamster Decides… eh, it was okay.
Wrap It Up To Go
To answer all your pressing questions:
1): Yes, we noticed Twentysomething finished up last week. We enjoyed the series as a whole, but the ending was a little meh – presumably to leave the door open for a third series, especially considering how much effort they had to put into hitting the reset button after they wrapped things up a little too tightly at the end of s1. And if they are going to do a third series they might want to get cracking: Jess’ monstrous self-absorption works just fine for a twentysomething, but we’re starting to get to the stage where she just can’t keep flitting from scenario to scenario. Then again, if they did lock her down into one setting then we’d have a regular sitcom and we know how much Australian television hates those.
2): Yes, we noticed Hamish & Andy’s Gap Year Asia has moved timeslots, but as this is clearly more to do with cramming in yet more utterly pointless reality shows in prime time than it is to do with their ratings (which remain strong), we’re not exactly panicking just yet. On the other hand, the fact that Housos on SBS is rating better than The Americans on Ten is clearly some kind of sign that the end of the world is a-borning.
3: Yes, we did get the following press release:
VOTE GRUEN!
VOTE HAMSTER!
Now that Australia has a Federal Election date, ABC TV can today finally confirm the new broadcast details for the return of its smash-hit TV franchises, GRUEN and HAMSTER.
Gruen Nation– four extra-length, extra-strength, election-oriented specials – will premiere Wednesday, August 14, at 8:30pm on ABC1. Host Wil Anderson will be joined by regulars Todd Sampson and Russel Howcroft, Nation legends Dr John Hewson and Annabel Crabb, and surprise guests too important to mention in this press release. A spokesperson for the Gruen team conceded their disappointment that Kevin Rudd has now scheduled the election on International Vulture Awareness Day, but looked forward to a campaign fought on three word slogans, such as “It’s my round!”, “Spit that out!” and “Darling, I’m pregnant!”
Gruen Nation will then be followed by season three of Gruen Planet – eight episodes of the show that loves spin and marketing like Tony Abbott loves a red tie.
Then prepare yourselves as The Chaser return to our screens to give their version of the 2013 Federal Election campaign trail with their five part series The Hamster Decides – premiering Wednesday, August 14 at 9:15pm on ABC1. The series is described by Chaser member Chris Taylor as “an exciting new iview program, which can also be watched on older content platforms, such as ABC1 television or on LaserDisc”. It promises to concentrate its analysis on the 2013 contest, an election which The Chaser’s previous election shows virtually all but ignored. The Hamster Decides will also be written, performed, directed and produced entirely by Kevin Rudd, as part of his plan to micro-manage every aspect of this election.
Gruen Nation (4×45’) premieres Wednesday, August 14 at 8:30pm on ABC1
followed by Gruen Planet (8×35’)
The Hamster Decides (5×30’) premieres Wednesday, August 14 at 9:15pm on ABC1
** Please note – the last episode of Wednesday Night Fever will move to 9:45pm on Wednesday August 14.
Which has us wondering: what kind of political stance will these guys take with election 2013? Not so much the Gruen team – they’ll obviously be swooning over commercials based entirely on hate and greed because they speak directly to the very core of their being – but The Chaser team seems to have been slowly and ever-so-slightly moving away from the early Howard-era “ehh, they’re all as bad as each other so who cares?” approach to politics that was a trademark of their earlier work.
While it’s understandable that you don’t want to tip over too far too often towards one side on the ABC, it’s slightly less understandable when the result is a program that, for example, makes Julie Bishop seem like a lovable knockabout funster instead of a frontline member of one of the more dubious political teams around. And as for Kevin Rudd, has anyone gone back to rewatch those (yeah, non-Chaser, but we’re making a point here) Rudd sketches shown on Rove? We’re guessing all those “what a wacky prankster” jokes just don’t hold up like they used to back when he wasn’t a remorseless vengeance machine.
Our strongly held view is that the second you let a politician in on the joke on any level you’re letting them off the hook. And The Chaser, in previous years at least, was just a little too keen to bring politicians on board for sketches and pranks. In a year where the political campaign is basically one insanely power-hungry monster versus his identical twin in a batter to pander to our basest instincts, anything less than kicking both sides around the floor non-stop for the duration of each and every episode would be nothing less than a complete betrayal of the viewing public.
And we’ve already got Gruen for that.
Ashes to Ashes
The Australian cricket team’s performance may have been variable this Ashes, but Warwick Todd’s output in his weekly Ashes column for the Herald-Sun has raised plenty of laughs. Warwick (AKA Tom Gleisner) is a veteran of many an Ashes series and is the author of four volumes of tour diaries (available in all good second-hand bookshops). As sports-themed comedy goes, it’s hard to find anyone funnier – or better able to make non-sports fans laugh.
Take this extract from a recent column, who’s going to argue with a set-up like this?:
Several days of hot weather made it very hard to pick up the red ball against a sea of sunburned English spectators. And talk about a hostile crowd!
Lunchtime on the very first day I actually had someone say to my face that I was a “boorish Colonial who couldn’t bat for sh–“.
Not exactly what you’d expect from Her Majesty the Queen but she was obviously struggling in the heat.
This kind of gag is a Gleisner staple, and he’s got a million of them. You’ll find them in Audrey’s Kitchen, Santo, Sam & Ed, and those news desk segments he did on The Late Show. It’s kind of a shame Gleisner hasn’t got a regular column where he can talk about anything in the news – these are lot funnier than most of the humour columns you get in what’s left of the press.
And it’s not like Australia has a long and proud tradition of comedy columnists either. News Ltd, despite having Adam Zwar as their relationship columnist many years ago, almost never goes for straight comedy, preferring instead a clump of people waffling on with wry observations about fuck all. Realistically, Todd is appearing in their pages because he’s a “celebrity” who’s had a number of books published, not because he’s actually funny; if one of the Masterchef hosts said they wanted to write funny columns about The Ashes, Todd’d be boned faster than, um, something cooking related on Masterchef.
Over at Fairfax we have Danny Katz. Gaaah. Fun fact: in the mid ‘90s The Age had a new editor fresh from the UK who spotted that Katz – already well past his prime even back then so God knows what he’s like now – had written a classic “I’ve got nothing to write about” column and promptly sacked his lazy arse. Cue massive outrage and a good old fashioned letter writing campaign, while Katz himself swanned over to The Bulletin for a year or so until The Age waved enough money around to lure him back. You know those newspaper readers who’d (supposedly – no-one’s ever game to test the theory out) riot if Fred Basset was removed from the paper, despite it literally being the unfunniest and most pointless thing ever created? Danny Katz fans, every last one of them.
No, usually what we get stuck with under the guise of “comedy” is people failing to do the job they’ve been hired to do – hello every single television columnist for The Age in the 21st century (Catherine Deveny, Marieke Hardy Ben Pobjie) -in favour of wandering off topic when it suits them. It’s not that we want these stiflingly unfunny but self-obsessed types to write flat-out comedy, as we’d rather they wrote nothing at all, but at least if they were forced to write columns branded as “humour” it’d quickly become obvious exactly how unfunny they are.
Otherwise, well, the sports pages often have someone trying to be funny, but as we know nothing about sport it’s difficult to judge their success (The Age’s Leaping Larry is an exception; he’s often pretty good). Peter Ruhel was consistently funny right up until his (sadly premature) death. The trashier men’s magazines usually at least try to run more humour-based columns if you dare open them up, and we all remember Mick Molloy’s brief run as a columnist for The Truth in the early part of 1993 (who’s we, sucker?- ed). Someone actually made an archive of Hamish Blake’s columns for Cosmo, if that’s what you’re into.
It’s tempting – and probably accurate – to see this as a reflection of Australia’s largely stand-up based comedy culture, where good material (or more realistically, “good” material) is seen as something to be carefully treasured and guarded, rather than seeing the ability to write comedy as something that should be exercised as often as possible. Instead of writing a funny column, having it see print, then starting again next week to develop the ability to actually be funny, our comedy writers and performers seem to see writing actual comedy (in contrast to talking crap on panel shows and radio) more as something you do in brief spurts then try to stretch out the results for as long as possible.
But thinking about it, the lack of comedy columnists makes sense: why throw away good stuff in a newspaper when you could tour it for months, then try and sell it to a sketch show? It also explains why most of our comedy writing in this country is rubbish. Here’s a tip: the more you do something, the better you get at it. That awesome joke you came up with? It’s not that awesome. Trying to train yourself to become able to create jokes that awesome every week would be a lot more awesome, really.
As evidence we cite Clarke & Dawe, which started as a newspaper column featuring a different “interview” with a public figure each week. As legend has it, British comedy superstar Peter Cook, during his late-80s visit to Melbourne for the Comedy Festival, suggested John Clarke start to perform the columns. So, Clarke contacted radio comedy producer Bryan Dawe, they tried it out, it worked, and they started performing them each week on ABC radio. Then a A Current Affair came calling…and the rest is history!
Highway to Hell
The community TV sitcom Leongatha finished up on Melbourne’s Channel 31 a few months back and is now airing on Sydney’s TVS. Set largely on a mini bus, it’s a six-part show about a family’s stilted journey to a wedding. In the first episode we meet Denny (Chris Gibson) who’s reluctantly agreed to film cousin Darryl’s (Bryce Hardy) wedding (“This is the last time I do this!”). And at the last minute has to step in as Best Man when Darryl’s mate has to pull out due to a football semi-final. Darryl still wants Denny to get good shots of the bride and bridesmaids going in to the church, though.
Joining the increasingly put-upon Denny and anxious Darryl on the bus are Darryl’s parents and sister (Roy Barker, Jane Menze and Kate Mulqueen), Denny’s Dad (Trevor Major), Grandma Lorna (Maureen Andrew), who has a poorly-guarded secret she doesn’t want the rest of the family to know about, and Mazzy (Sarah Ranken), a mysterious stranger Denny first met when he was buying a wedding present from unhinged shopkeeper Terry (Bob Franklin).
There’s a lot of set-up in episode 1 and a lot going on between the characters, but oddly the pace is quite slow. Stretching a two hour journey to a wedding over three hours of sitcom means there’s a fair bit of padding, and the show would benefit from some editing. (Leongatha might have worked better if it’d followed the lead of the British sitcom The Worst Week of My Life and set the action over a week, with the final episode being the ill-fated wedding ceremony.)
What doesn’t necessarily help is that there’s a clash of styles between the realistic production values and the more traditional broad dialogue and comedy performances in some of the scenes. A Moody Christmas took a similar approach by mixing dramatic and comedic styles, but Leongatha probably does it better. Having a strong comic performer like Bob Franklin, doing what he does best, at the start of the show is a statement of intent – they want this to be funny – and as the show hits its stride it probably will be.