Australian Tumbleweeds
Upper middle grade
When you compare Upper Middle Bogan and It’s A Date to the other Australian sitcoms of this year, Housos, Please Like Me, Leongatha, TwentySomething and the horrors to come, it’s clear that they’ve been the stand-outs. Admittedly the competition has not been strong, and both Upper Middle Bogan and It’s A Date were always going to have a wider appeal in terms of subject matter and style of humour, but winners they are none the less.
As we’ve pointed out before, It’s A Date could run for years and years assuming it continues to attract good writers…which it didn’t always do. Reasonably high profile guest stars are important too but not essential. The idea of Ross Noble and Ian “Harold from Neighbours” Smith as a gay couple dancing the flamenco and making a Trojan Horse in the shed is funny as a concept if you know who they are – and how they different they are – but as a slow burn story spread over half an hour…not so much. While there was a lot of charm in this series it would have been better if it had been charming AND funny, but at least the self-indulgence the killed off any charm present in Please Like Me was nowhere to be seen.
Upper Middle Bogan was interesting more because of the huge difference in style and quality when different writers wrote the scripts. The scripts from Tony Martin and Gary McCaffrie broadcast in the middle of the season were lighter on the plot and more focused on getting laughs from the interplay of the characters, whereas the Gristmill-penned episodes which bookended the series needed to set things up and bring them to some sort of conclusion. In the mid series episodes the ensemble cast each got their time to shine and play off each other, and the unlikely friendships between Margaret and Brianna and Kayne and Oscar were particularly good at generating laughs. It’d be nice to think someone in Australia could make a sitcom which raised a few laughs as it got through all the functional/plot stuff but maybe we have to wait for series 2 for that? The Librarians certainly improved once the characters were better established.
Overall it would be good to see either It’s A Date or Upper Middle Bogan back on air, which seems likely given the ratings. It’s not often that we side with mainstream opinion (thanks for the new government, guys!), but this time they got it right.
Diamonds in the Mud or Turds In The Bowl: A Nation Decides
What to make of this?
Australians love sport, and one of our favourite sports is the grand old game of ”Slagging Off Australian Television”. The beauty of this sport is that it’s cheap, easy and can be played by anyone – all you need is a television set and a certain smug sense of superiority. And in this day and age, you don’t really need the first one.
So saying Australian television is bad requires “a certain smug sense of superiority”? And not just, say, one functioning eyeball?
Pobjie goes on to qualify his opening to such an extent that we seriously wondered why he bothered with the opening at all. Just kidding! Newspaper pages don’t just fill themselves, especially when you have nothing to say, and so over the years Pobjie has become fairly good at almost saying one thing then qualifying it out of existence before anyone got the impression he might have an actual opinion on something.
But today he does! And unsurprisingly, it’s that local television, by and large, is ace.
But every now and then, in the midst of the enjoyable schadenfreude of ripping into Australian TV, we should take a moment to recognise that we actually have some damn talented folk in this country, doing damn fine work. As great as stunning locations and spectacular effects are, great television can always be made on a shoestring when you have great writers and great actors on the case. And Australia doesn’t lack those.
It just doesn’t give them television shows. But don’t worry, another series of House Husbands is just around the corner!
The real question here is what inspired this sudden rush to defend the helpless, pitiful Australian television industry – which last time we looked only had a half-dozen or so awards devoted to telling us how great it is, including one “night of nights” – from what the kids call “da haterz”. After all, he says this-
So, as much as I enjoy joining the dogpile on the woeful state of our TV industry, let’s not let the brilliance under our noses go unnoticed.
-prompting us to go boil the jug, make a nice strong cup of tea, take a hefty swig from the cup once it’s cooled down, then spit-take it all over the place because Pobjie’s idea of dogpiling on the local industry is suggesting that maybe Masterchef has lost its way a little.
But where exactly is this dogpile? It’s certainly not amongst Pobjie’s peers in the print media, where praising every single Aussie production to the high heavens is a basic job requirement. Maybe he overheard someone calling Laid “not very good” on the bus and thought “this insult WILL NOT STAND!!” *furiously types out insipid column*
Seriously, we have zero problem with Pobjie hilariously claiming that Wentworth and Redfern Now are our world-beating dramas, nor that It’s A Date and Legally Brown are our first-rate comedies. He’s wrong of course, but he’s expressing an opinion that his readers can agree or disagree with. Which is his job.
What isn’t his job is talking up the Australian television industry, as we already have an entire business to do that. It’s called PR, and the many people who work in it are very well paid. Their job is to lie to the public… uh, we mean get out the good word about how great every single show made in Australia is. They take out ads, they wine and dine TV writers, they trade media access for positive coverage, and so on. And they’re just doing their job too.
So when one of the few television columnists in the print media – one of the very few who doesn’t have to fill his space with positive puff pieces about upcoming dreck or near-moronic actors taking the opportunity to say bugger-all – decides to do the PR industry’s job and waste his time and ours writing a column with nothing to say but “lay off Australian television, it’s rooly good”… well, we’re really looking forward to next weeks effort from Pobjie. Will he decide to do the crime columnist’s job instead of his own? The motoring reporter’s job? The Leader of the Opposition’s job? Spin the wheel and find out!
Australian television should be attacked again and again and again until they get it right. Yes, plenty of lovely and extremely hard-working people put their entire lives into it – which makes it just like every single other job on the planet. If you hired a plumber who came round and fucked up your plumbing so it sprayed shit all over your kitchen when you turned on a tap, you wouldn’t say “we should take a moment to recognise that we actually have some damn talented folk in this country, doing damn fine work”. And plumbing isn’t nearly as important as television; you can always call another plumber to fix your taps, but Please Like Me is broken forever.
Going soft on the local television industry doesn’t do anyone any favours. When one of these hugs and snuggles-style critics continually calls shit gold, those who take their advice soon learn the unpleasant truth for themselves. Then they either stop listening to critics, or they think “wow, local standards must be pretty fucking low if that crap is the best we can do”. Either way, you end up with an audience that automatically assumes anything local is rubbish. Just ask our film-makers how much three decades of Margaret & David “supporting the local industry” has helped the public perception of Australian film.
“Once you start looking for diamonds in the mud, you’ll suddenly find them everywhere,” Pobjie says. Hey, you’re the paid TV critic with a high-profile position: how about you TELL us where these diamonds are. And once we know what your definition of what a “diamond” is and whether it involves content-free terms like “tastily tasteless”*, we can decide whether your voice is one worth listening to in the field of diamond exploration. Australian television doesn’t need another critic who’s idea of “criticism” is a school sports day where everyone gets a medal just for turning up; when the Chris Lilley hype machine gets into gear later this month that mud Pobjie is so fond of is going to be rising up around our throats.
And if columns like his latest are any guide, it’s not going to stop there.
*”Laid is clever, dark and tastily tasteless but it makes me laugh, which is the first, last and only necessary qualification for a comedy.” – Ben Pobjie, March 5th, 2011
Sa’me ol’ La’me
So, you’ve all seen this by now, right?
Ah, so many questions. For one, who thought giving us a one minute clip where the first 20 seconds consist of teenage girls going “love you” was going to make a good impression. Oh wait, that’s Chris Lilley’s patented “insight”, isn’t it. Wow, who knew teenage girls could be mildly self-obsessed?
Of course, where Chris Lilley leads a large segment of the Australian media follow, especially when he’s disappearing up his own backside. Setting a new benchmark in creeping us the fuck out is this particular story: hands up everyone who never wants to see the word “raunchy” used to describe Chris Lilley dressing up as a teenage girl ever again? Nobody’s putting their hands up? Oh, that’s right, you’re all too busy gouging out your own eyes to make sure you never have to see it again:
The first episode shows that Lilley is doing much more than using Ja’mie to revisit past glories.
Instead, Ja’mie is the key to unlocking the world of young women two years after Lilley shone a light on young men with Angry Boys.
“Shone a light on young men”? Yeah, that’s one way of putting it. “Put on blackface” would be another.
The tone is much lighter and less confronting than Angry Boys, which divided audiences, but is still full of razor sharp wit.
Well, not so much “divided audiences” as “lost a million viewers”. But who’s counting.
Ja’mie is trailed by a group of six prefects – Immy, Madison, Olivia, Morgan, Alex and Bell – that hang off her every word. She considers herself the boss of the whole school.
The students at Kelton Boys Grammar, down the road, are a magnet for Ja’mie’s attentions.
Call us when she starts making out with one of them.
The laughs start early on when Ja’mie performs a raunchy routine to Timomatic at a school assembly – and for the most part they don’t let up.
We do all realise by now that “for the most part” is television reviewer-code for “long, loooong stretches where nothing remotely funny happens”, right?
Ja’mie still rolls out non-stop bitchy comments about the other students, particularly the borders, and treats her family – mum Jhyll, dad Marcus and younger sister Courtney – like dirt.
So basically same shit, different day. And unless she’s taken to insulting the demarcation line between two sovereign nations, we’re going to assume Vickery means “boarders”.
We’re very low down on the television review totem pole, but even we’ve heard tell of the extremely impressive press kit the ABC have sent out to promote Ja’mie: Private School Girl. None of those cardboard booklets Upper Middle Bogan and It’s A Date got here: we’re talking a replica hardcover high school yearbook packed with glossy photos of a forty-something man dressed as a seventeen year-old schoolgirl.
It’s also packed with cool facts: did you know that Angry Boys has had over 1.4 million plays on iView? And the various DVD / blu-ray editions have sold over 100,000 copies? Oddly, no mention of the actual free-to-air ratings, but who cares about them? Oh wait, the ABC does, as they go on to mention that Angry Boys tripled Summer Heights High‘s ratings on BBC3.
We’ve also been told this press kit contains a preview of the first episode of Private School Girl. Unfortunately details are sketchy, but we have heard audiences can expect a lot of other girls being called lesbians and being told to “grow some tits”. Hilariously, Ja’mie and her girl gang use the word “Quiche” when something is cooler than cool, occasionally someone who’s not Chris Lilley gets some dialogue, and the general impression we were given was that this was a show just as much about Lilley getting to act out a fantasy of being a teenage girl as it was a comedy about a teenage girl. We can’t wait!
Seriously, at this stage we all know exactly the kind of show Lilley is going to deliver and the only question is whether it’s going to be creepy boring or just pointless boring. Having him focus on just one character (though rumours persist that others from his roster may appear later in the series) for six episodes means that with his firm insistence on covering the same tiny patch of comedy turf over and over – why yes, we hear there is an “inappropriately” sexy high school dance routine in the very first episode – things are going to develop some kind of depth through sheer repetition alone.
We don’t expect to laugh much at Private School Girl. But we’ll take horrified disgust over massive boredom any day of the week.
Barely Legal
Okay, so Legally Brown: remember when SBS used to show Chappelle’s Show pretty much non-stop Monday nights? Yes, that’s the laziest possible comparison, but we are talking about Australian television here. And yeah we know that, in the US at least, the sketch show format where the host / performer(s) comes out and do a bit of stand-up in front of an audience to introduce at least some of the pre-taped sketches is pretty common (Key & Peele still do it, for one). It’s a surprise more Australian shows haven’t used this format; with our fairly strong stand-up scene and supposed love of sketch comedy, it seems like a format that could work out here.
Ah, but does it work here? Well, kind of: while the sketches and pranks here probably don’t require a two minute intro each time, they are actual sketches and pranks. Which puts them ahead of a lot of what gets served up under the heading of comedy in Australia. The stand-up itself is a bit ropey – in last week’s episode when talking about the expectations for the show, host and star Nazeem Hussain said “Smash the white establishment? I’ll try my best”, which isn’t exactly a joke – but as the point is more about getting the audience on side than getting big laughs, that’s no big surprise.
As for the actual meat of the show… well, there’s a lot of comedy gold to be found in the multicultural experience in Australia that Housos sure as shit isn’t uncovering. While the first week was a little wobbly sketch-wise (the crap psychic was the kind of idea that always seems funny in theory but almost never works) and overall felt a lot like a show that wasn’t sure what it was up to, week two managed to deliver the kind of sketches you’d expect from a show named “Legally Brown”. And some of them were even kind of funny.
Interestingly, while there’s a heavy early Chaser influence in the pranks, Hussain (to date) doesn’t seem to be hammering the general public the way the Chaser used to when they’d reveal everyone in Eastern Sydney was racist. Last week’s people smuggler prank didn’t really work because it didn’t pull out any outrageous reactions from the white folk confronted with the “people smuggling”; without hilarious “hell yeah I want me some free slaves”-style responses, the bit kind of fizzled.
But week two’s sketch where Hussain pretended to be various celebrities he looks nothing like (on the theory that all non-whites look alike) worked because his scam wasn’t horrifyingly successful at exposing racism. Seeing a parade of white folks going “hey look, it’s Jackie Chan” would have become depressing pretty quickly – the fact that no-one believed him to be Chan (while sadly everyone believed him to be Will.I.Am) meant that at least some of the time the joke was on him.
Otherwise, there’s not a lot of real insight into, well, much of anything here, unless you think having an Indian prince go on speed dating is shining some much needed light onto… Indian princes? And the sketch with the six year old would-be terrorist was a laundry list of gags that could have happily lost a couple of items. But the focus seems to be on comedy over controversy – at least until “Uncle Sam” starts talking to politicians about gay marriage, and even that was more like time-wasting than shit-stirring. And we’re never going to complain about a show going for laughs over shock value.
Legally Brown isn’t classic comedy by any stretch, but as entry-level television stuff (that is, the kind of show SBS should be making instead of giving Pauly Fenech another chance to do the same old same old) it’s off to a reasonable start. It’s hardly perfect: this kind of long form sketches really need to contain more ideas than what we’ve seen here so far, and the pranks need to either be sillier or more pointed if they’re going to have any real impact. Hussain himself doesn’t really have much of a comedic persona and his stand-up intros are pretty weak, but if Dave Chappelle couldn’t make intro’ing sketches work it’s hard to fault anyone else for doing a sub-par job.
With a ten episode order and a fairly below-the-radar profile – unless we’re missing a whole bunch of stories about how it’s reshaping the face of Australian comedy and / or it’s offending a bunch of News Ltd readers – Legally Brown has the perfect opportunity to get the job done comedy-wise. It probably won’t (we’ve had our hearts broken too many times to get our hopes up), but there was a clear improvement between weeks one and two. If it continues, who knows? We might actually have an Australian sketch comedy show that works on our hands.
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.
*
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.