Australian Tumbleweeds
Vale Mad As Hell
It’s rare for an Australian comedy show to be “must watch” but that’s what Mad As Hell has been for the past 12 weeks, and part of what has made it compelling is that it’s a topical comedy show with real attitude. That’s “attitude” rather than “bias”, something it’s probably been accused of by idiots (judging from some of Micallef’s snarky gags) and something that’s increasingly rare in a television climate where everyone seems afraid to be seen to have an opinion because that might alienate someone.
Part of what made Charles Ramsey, hero of the Amanda Berry escape in Ohio, a worldwide internet legend this week is that he has attitude too. He talked about his experience and expressed his opinions in a frank, honest and amusing way – and he wasn’t afraid to address the racial politics of the situation. People loved him for this.
Last year Julia Gillard’s misogyny speech captured the internet’s imagination too. One of the reasons was that she said what half the population have felt for a long time but have never been able to express so well.
Mad As Hell has had a similar effect, although with a much smaller audience than these global internet phenomena. The sketch deconstructing the Liberal party’s headless chooks video beautifully ripped to shreds the video’s strained metaphorical conceit and its idiot creators, before ending with “Go tell it to Wil Anderson”. That last line was particularly cutting given the way in which the Gruen franchise has been more an ad for the ad makers than a fascinating deconstruction of advertising (or whatever they claim it is).
This and various other Micallef-led, ranty sketches throughout the series have said more about the Carbon Tax, Gonski and just about any other political issue than you could name than a month of mainstream news programmes. Sometimes you need a bit of attitude and opinion to tell it like it is. And as light relief there’s a giant green Octopus and characters with names like Vomitoria Catchment – now that’s entertainment!
As with the final episode of Get This, it’s a massive shame Mad As Hell won’t be around to de-construct the election. Their countdown clock suggested that was the plan, and in the absence of a more boring explanation we can perhaps legitimately suggest that someone at the ABC might not have wanted a comedy show with a satirical bent on air during the campaign.
The recent commissioning of Wednesday Night Fever was a bit of a surprise (perhaps to the Mad As Hell team too), but we’ll wait to see it before passing judgement. It’ll be hard for it to follow Mad As Hell though, which has been the best Australian sketch show since, well, probably The Micallef Program. Still, Mad As Hell will probably be back next year – and if Tony Abbott’s Prime Minister imagine the fun they’ll have!
The Lights Are Going Out All Over Television. We May Not See Them Lit Again In Our Lifetimes.
First, the bad news: Channel Seven, home of commercial sketch comedy in Australia for close to two decades, now thinks this is a good idea:
From Kylie and Dannii to Warney and Thorpey, the celebs come out to play for a new series of Kath & Kim specials coming to Seven.
A galaxy of Australia’s biggest stars (and best known fans) will share their funniest foxymoron moments in a new series of Kath & Kim specials which will air soon on Channel Seven.
Featuring never-before-seen footage of Australia’s favourite hornbags, The Kath & Kim Kountdown celebrates the magic of Fountain Lakes, counting down to the Top Ten Kath & Kim moments of all time.
Kylie and Dannii? Warney and Thorpey? What, Sleepy and Dopey weren’t available?
So a bunch of “Australia’s biggest stars” are going to talk about their “favourite” (from the ones selected by the producers for them to choose from) moments from Kath & Kim? So it’s a clip show? For a show that hasn’t been on the air in five years? Wow, good thing it’ll be desperately promoting both a range of Channel Seven “personalities” and the commercial television / DVD release of the critically and popularly ignored Kath & Kimderella movie, otherwise there’d just be no reason to show it at all.
At least we’re supposedly going to get at least some new linking material. Yay? Presumably it’s hard for creative types to accurately pinpoint the moment when they stop caring about their characters – especially when there’s still money to be made – but it’s still safe to assume that the idea of quitting while they’re ahead and preserving some of their dignity as comedians is something they’ve considered… and then said “naaah”. But who knows? Perhaps the goodwill towards Kath & Kim is so bottomless that they can be attached to literally any cheap, nasty, time-wasting product or programme and the public will lap it up. Lord knows they’re still miles ahead of anything Chris Lilley’s come up with.
Meanwhile, over at Jungleboys the champagne corks are popping once again:
It draws a meagre 300,000 viewers on ABC1 – yet this Australian comedy has become a global internet sensation, racking up millions of YouTube views and attracting the interest of Fox Television in the US.
The debut episode of provocative sketch comedy The Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting, made by Sydney production company Jungleboys, was watched by 432,000 people. The audience dropped to 290,000 by the second episode – perhaps not surprising given the dark, edgy nature of some of the material.
But yesterday, executive producer Jason Burrows awoke to an email, alerting him to the fact that someone had posted a clip from the program on YouTube.
“It was sent at 10.30 at night and it said the clip had 600,000 views,” Burrows says. “By the time I read it at 7am, it had 1.4 million views.”
Now, it is close to 1.6 million.
Great! Oh wait a second, 1.6 million views (more like 1.9 million now) for a professionally made product on YouTube is, how you say, “average”? Put a slightly less snarky way, at the time of writing the original “Beached Az” clip on YouTube has 7,839,920 views. And where’s Beached Az now? Where was Beached Az in the first place, apart from on a bunch of merchandise?
When Jungleboys honcho Jason Burrows says “the game has changed”, what he means is “we now have an angle we can use to try and paint The Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting (which finished up this week) as something more than a flop.” To which we draw your attention to the final line of this article:
Ironically, The Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting began as a web series in 2011 before it was picked up by the ABC.
That is correct, sir or madam: the show has succeed at doing what it was a success at doing before it became a television show. The story here is not “ABC series makes good”, but “ABC blunders in taking web series to television”. When a show is a hit on the web, then fails to make any kind of impact on television, then becomes a hit again on the internet, the takeaway is obvious: it’s a really good web series. So leave it on the web.
The internet rewards short clips – like comedy sketches – that have “edgy” premises. Television, not so much. In fact, you could probably argue that the internet has killed off sketch comedy as we once knew it, where sketches were discrete scenes like individual short films. The sketch shows that work on television today look more like The Daily Show or even Mad as Hell, where the comedy bits weave in and out without clear cut-offs. Because if you want short, stand-alone, done-in-one comedy, YouTube is where you’re looking. Probably at bits from Family Guy. That “The Bird is the Word” clip they did has seventy million views.
If we wanted to be extremely cynical, we could suggest that Jungleboys have taken the ABC’s resources to make a product they can exploit outside of the ABC. Obviously that’s not the case here, though the person who posted the 1,900,000 version has only ever posted one other clip, also from The Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting; guess they’re a committed fan.
Meanwhile, the official version on the Jungleboys YouTube channel has around 12,000 views, and their other clips don’t seem to have been as successful: the Amish IT guy clip is around 190,000 views, and the rest range between 50,000 and 5,000 views. The 300,000 viewers ratings figure for the TV show meant it was a flop, right?
What this story really tells us is that while The Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting was a fizzle on television, one of their clips is doing really well on YouTube, as someone not related to the production company has scored almost two million views for their channel using one of Jungleboys clips. So the ABC lost out by trying to take an online show to television, and then the production company lost out when someone ripped off one of their clips and everyone linked to it.
Australian comedy in 2013, everybody. Take a bow.
Vale Santo, Sam & Ed
Dirty Laundry Live, a new panel show about celebrity gossip hosted by Lawrence Mooney and Brooke Satchwell, starts in a couple of weeks. “Get ready to embrace the shame of our obsession with celebrity and fame” says the official webpage, perhaps hinting that this show will not so much skewer celebrity gossip as celebrate it. So, kinda like pretty much every other look at celebrity gossip ever. Probably. We really should wait to see the show before passing judgement.
Yet Dirty Laundry Live does sound a little more “breakfast radio” than we’d hoped. Which is a shame, because there’s a way of taking a light-hearted look at the less serious stories in the media whilst keeping your tongue firmly in your cheek. And that way isn’t always to follow the media’s line and go after the subjects of silly celebrity stories – highlighting the stupid things journalists and commenters say is far funnier.
The Santo, Sam & Ed podcast, now taking a break after 24 episodes, usually gets it right. It may look like they’re just finding bizarre clips and playing them to death for cacks (“This is my sausage moment”, “Qatari cash”), but what they’re really taking the piss out of is the level of insight and commentary we get from people in the spotlight these days, or about people in the spotlight. That and they’re taking endless delight in crowbarring Clive Palmer/fat jokes in wherever possible. And very good Clive Palmer/fat jokes they are too.
It’s a shame Santo, Sam & Ed are taking a break, but Ed’s been in LA for several months and only been calling in via Skype for part of the show, and now Sam’s off to Eurovision, and as fun as it might be to have the Santo, Rob & Tom podcast maybe the Working Dog team have something in the pipeline? We’re to “stay tuned”, apparently.
Connect the Dots and Win a Prize
Okay, so we know there’s going to be a new head of ABC comedy – one Mr Rick Kalowski – and for once there’s a solid track record of work we can examine to give us an idea of where things might be heading. Time to draw some wild and almost certainly inaccurate conclusions from the little we do know as a way to pass the time until something actually interesting happens with Australian comedy. Deal? Deal.
First up, getting Kalowski, AKA the brains behind Comedy Inc: The Late Shift and Double Take amongst others, to run ABC comedy is a fairly large admission that the last few years of ABC comedy haven’t worked as well as anyone would have liked. Who would have thought in 2011 that the guy behind At Home With Julia would take over ABC comedy? And that the Chosen One, AKA Andrew “hit factory” Denton, would all but retire from public life after having been responsible for the ABC’s biggest ratings failure in years?
That said, Kalowski’s rise is also an admission of just how low the standards have dropped in Australian comedy: let’s not forget, Big Bite and Double Take were… hmm, let’s put this tactfully for once. They were rarely watchable? Barely watchable? Fairly flushable?
If Andrew Denton had been given the gig, at least then there’d be a few career-slash-ratings highpoints to gesture at to suggest he might be able to deliver the occasional moment of brilliance, or at least surprise; giving it to Kalowski suggests that the most important thing in Australian comedy today is the ability to show up on time and provide a reliable if generic product that does what it says on the label without scaring the horses by trying anything surprising or new.
Still, just because someone single-handedly kept Paul McCarthy in work for over a decade doesn’t mean they don’t have what it takes to run ABC comedy. Well, apart from the “spotting new talent” side of things, but as he worked with Jungleboys’ sidekick Phil Lloyd on At Home With Julia it’s fairly safe to assume that Jungleboys will continue to provide 80% of the ABC’s “new comedy” needs. And maybe 20% of the laughs.
But back to that whole “clean slate” idea. What we can deduce from Kalowski’s prior efforts is that when he sets out to make a comedy, he at least tries to make a comedy. Which is not something you could say about recent ABC efforts like Please Like Me and Laid and… well, you know the list. It’s not like we ever shut up about them.
The one massive shining light coming out of Kalowski taking on the ABC comedy chief role – and remember, this is the guy who was head writer for two years on Comedy Inc: The Late Shift, a show that survived almost entirely due to it being counted as a drama as far as Channel Nine’s Australian content quotas* were concerned – is that he may put paid to the practice of ABC comedy being used as a dumping ground for shit “quirky” dramas that manage to appeal to neither comedy fans or drama buffs. Which, in our opinion, would be enough of a plus to let him off the hook even if he decided to go around firebombing war memorials in his spare time.
The downside is that while his past work has largely made a solid effort to engage with mainstream Australian society – which, in news to at least a couple of people at the ABC, is A GOOD THING – the level at which that engagement has taken place can most charitably be described as “fairly low”. Help us out, wikipedia:
A skit which was a parody of “Thomas the Tank Engine” was called, “Ernest the Engine“. This would mainly consists of 3 characters, Ernest the Engine Car, Stevie the Steam Train, and Gale the Guards Compartment who originally made their speaking and lead roles. The main component of this skit is Stevie’s stuttering at inappropriate moments, resulting in words that sound like swearing.
Hilarious.
But while ABC comedy in generally has generally been pretty poor over the last few years, one area where it can hold its head up is political satire. When The Chaser or Mad as Hell or Clarke & Dawe go after politicians, it has been on the basis of their ideas, not their vocal tone or choice of swimwear. Kalowski’s previous efforts can not, on the whole, make that same claim.
From what we’ve heard, Kalowski’s appointment doesn’t take place until September, which just happens to be when the next Federal election (and presumably if the polls are correct, a change in government) is due. Kalowski’s already gone on record (and that link’s worth clicking if you’re after some insight into Kalowski’s approach to the media) as being no fan of Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd TV reporters, and no-one’s suggesting for a second that he’s going to drag the ABC comedy department over to the right to pander to our new leaders. We’ve already got an ad agency (Jungleboys) making sketch comedies and sitcoms over and above the various advertising-worshiping Gruen series: the only way things could get more pro-business is if they gave Q&A over to The Sydney Institute.
What we are suggesting is that it might be a good idea to pay close attention and see if the current crop of intelligent political comedies – which generally tend to lean to the left, largely because the right currently have no policies past “stop the boats!” and the usual screwing over of the poor – are downplayed in favour of the kind of shows Kalowski’s been involved with in the past, which have tended more towards mocking politicans’ personal quirks and surface issues rather than the core things our leaders actually stand for.
Put another way, we don’t give a fuck about Gillard’s accent or Abbott’s speedos, and if the ABC starts serving up jokes about that kind of crap rather than jokes about their attitudes and policies we’d be feeling more than a little short-changed.
*Commercial networks have to show a certain amount of Australian-made drama each year as part of their license. Seven and Ten managed this easily due to their nightly half hour soaps; Nine, which had neither local soaps nor successful prime-time dramas, relied on NZ imports and the cheaply made late night Comedy Inc (which, as scripted comedy, counted as “drama”) for much of the early 00’s to make it over the line. It’s no coincidence that Comedy Inc walked out the door at almost exactly the same time as Underbelly walked in.
The reality of the situation
Take a look at the cast of Celebrity Splash, alongside the usual reality TV role-call of presenters, actors, sportspeople and Brynne Edelsten are four figures from the world of comedy:
- Paul Fenech – creator, writer, director, producer and star of Pizza, Housos and Swift and Shift Couriers
- Adam Richard – stand-up, radio personality, and co-creator and star of Outland
- Josh Thomas – stand-up, star of Talkin’ ‘Bout Your Generation, and co-writer and star of Please Like Me
- Denise Drysdale – veteran comic performer whose best known comedy work was on The Ernie Sigley Show and Hey Hey it’s Saturday
Okay, you could dispute whether some of this quartet are strictly speaking “comedians”, but we’ll move on to the main point of this post anyway: should comedians do reality TV?
Isn’t one of the things about comedy that it’s supposed to be above this kind of crap? Shouldn’t comedy be taking the piss out of a show whose intelligence-insulting premise is “amateur attempts an armstand back double-somersault with one and a half twists in the free position, amateur actually does a belly whacker”.
To be fair to Paul Fenech and Denise Drysdale they’re actually quite good physical comedians, so they’ll be quite good at giving the audience a bit of a laugh, which is presumably what they’re on the show to do. Adam Richard, being someone we assume isn’t a “natural sportsman”, should also look suitably amusing as he plunges into the pool. It’s Josh Thomas that’s the worry. That awkwardness schtick of his should be hilarious in this context, but as Thomas seems to disappoint in everything else he does we doubt he could even pull off a half-decent bomb. He’d probably be too embarrassed to even attempt a bomb, or think it would be hilarious to pretend to be too embarrassed to attempt a bomb, or whatever the hell his comedy thought process is…apart from one that doesn’t result in something funny.
Hang on, have we just spent a paragraph analysing the level and style of hilarity these people will bring to Celebrity Splash? Aren’t we supposed to be pointing out that comedians shouldn’t lower themselves to appear in shows like Celebrity Splash? And that the natural place of the comedian with regard to Celebrity Splash is to, say, sit behind the Mad As Hell desk and point out why everything about it is RUINING THE WORLD WE LIVE IN in a very funny way?
As potentially amusing as Fenech, Richard, Thomas and Drysdale might be amongst the sportsperson/actor/model-turned-whatevers who’ll be taking the whole thing a little too seriously (because this could totally be their breakout show), we’d much rather see comedians writing and performing comedy. You know, being amusing in a way that has something to say beyond “look at my incompetence at a sport”.
The State of Play In the World Today
Press release time!
RICK KALOWSKI APPOINTED ABC TV’S NEW HEAD OF COMEDY
Rick Kalowski, former lawyer turned award-winning TV creator/writer/producer, has today been appointed ABC TV’s Head of Comedy.
He will take up his position at ABC TV in Sydney in the second half of 2013. In the meantime, ABC Fiction will continue to manage the comedy slate.
Rick, who is currently Creative Director for Sydney/Los Angeles based Quail Television, has extensive television experience creating, writing and producing numerous television projects in Australia and abroad. These shows have garnered considerable industry recognition, including 14 AACTA/AFI Award nominations – four for Best Television Comedy Series; several Australian Writers’ Guild Awards and nominations; a Logie Award nomination for Outstanding TV Comedy Series; and a Golden Rose of Montreux nomination for Best International Comedy.
Rick was most recently co‐creator/co-writer/executive producer of At Home with Julia (ABC1), 2011’s top rating Australian narrative comedy series, which sold to HULU in the United States. Popular with critics, the series won the 2012 Equity Award for Outstanding Comedy Ensemble Cast, and earned Rick an AACTA Award nomination for Best TV Comedy Series and two Australian Writers’ Guild Award nominations for Outstanding Comedy Writing.
Rick’s other credits include head writer of the long‐running, internationally broadcast sketch comedy hit Comedy Inc. – The Late Shift (Channel Nine); co‐creator/head writer of Channel Seven’s sketch comedy series Big Bite (starring Chris Lilley); and co-writer of the comedy feature film The Honourable Wally Norman produced by Emile Sherman (The King’s Speech), directed by Ted Emery (Kath & Kim) and starring Shaun Micallef. Rick has also developed comedy pilots for 20th Century Fox Television in the United States, and for the BBC.
Carole Sklan, ABC TV’s Head of Drama said “We’re delighted Rick is joining ABC TV as Head of Comedy. He is passionate about Australian comedy and brings considerable creative skills and experience to the role. Rick has written and produced hours of sketch and narrative comedy. He also has a background in the law which seems to have only enhanced his sense of humour.”
Rick Kalowski said “I’m hugely honoured and excited to be joining ABC TV as Head of Comedy. The ABC’s greatest comedy shows have been foundation experiences in my life, both as a viewer and a writer, and the opportunity to help continue that tradition is truly a privilege. Hopefully I don’t wreck the joint”.
And then this:
LOWDOWN NOMINATED FOR MONTE CARLO:
The ABC comedy Lowdown has been nominated for three awards at the prestigious Monte Carlo Television Festival.
The AACTA-award winning comedy has been nominated for Best Comedy, and Adam Zwar and Beth Buchanan have also been nominated in the Most Outstanding Actor and Actress categories.
Other nominees in the Best Actress and Actor category include Julie Bowen and Ty Burrell (Modern Family) and Tina Fey (30 Rock).
Lowdown is a High Wire Films production, produced by Nicole Minchin, created and written by Amanda Brotchie and Adam Zwar and directed by Amanda Brotchie. It joins Modern Family and Canadian show Les Parents, which also have three nominations, and 30 Rock which has two nominations, for Best Comedy and Outstanding Actress (Tina Fey). Other Best Comedy nominees include UK shows Fresh Meat and Red Dwarf X.
Along with winning the AACTA award for Best Comedy, Lowdown has won two AWGIE Awards for Best Comedy, and Season 1 won the Gold Medal for Best Comedy at the New York Film and Television Festival.
We’d love to say more, but we’re currently having a lie-down on the couch with a wet flannel draped over our foreheads.
Details are sketchy
Hmmm…this sure sounds worrying for the ABC…
An output deal between the BBC and ABC will end after nearly 50 years following the announcement of a new BBC Drama and Comedy channel on Foxtel.
Almost all the BBC Dramas and Comedies will shift to the new channel as Australian premieres, many which will be fast-tracked, and will only become available for Free to Air after 12 months.
But the ABC is unhappy it was not consulted on the new deal.
“In the past, the ABC has been able to point to our audience share, distinctive reach and the unique relationship between the two organisations, which has lasted 50 years,” an ABC spokesman said.
“The ABC is disappointed that this decision was taken without any consultation.
“The decision has no impact on the ABC’s ability to acquire content from other British production houses and television networks like ITV and Channel 4.”
On the other hand, when only 30% of the country can be bothered to get Foxtel this may be less of a problem than we think: the 70% without Foxtel will patiently wait a year to watch it on the ABC, right? The ones who haven’t learnt to torrent, that is.
Even so, you’ve got to wonder how the ABC are going retain their reputation for quality programming when less and less first-run quality broadcasting will be available on their channels. Want first run HBO? Sign up to Quickflix, or get it from iTunes or Foxtel. Want first run BBC, get Foxtel and watch it on their channel.
You have to feel sorry for the ABC, unlike the BBC or HBO, or the other big UK and US networks, they’ve never made almost all of the programmes they air. In a multi-channel environment it’s easy for an organisation like the BBC set up on their own; according to Wikipedia their flagship channel BBC One presented 100% original programming in peak time in 2010/11, and they’ve been on air since 1932 so they’ve also got quite a large archive.
Any broadcaster who either can’t get access to first run overseas shows or who isn’t making compelling, distinctive and good quality new programming for itself is going to become less and less relevant, and less and less watched. The ABC needs to make more Australian shows – including comedy. They’ll also need to be braver about the subject matter and formats if they want to stand out.
The most recent episode of Boxcutters concludes with a discussion of Greg Fleet’s Die On Your Feet, a dramedy featuring an all-star cast and directed by industry veteran Ted Robinson, which was filmed a couple of years ago but is most famous for not having made it to air. It was screened at MICF recently and Boxcutters presenter Josh Kinal went along to see it. “It wasn’t great”, he concluded, but the theories for it not airing are far more interesting. Cast member Adam Hills apparently reckons the ABC doesn’t want him, their flagship nice guy, playing a character who’s a “largely swearing arsehole”. There also seemed to be some hints that the show’s failure to make it to air was as much to do with politics as quality. For us, there are questions about whether a show with Alan Brough, Greg Fleet, Adam Hills, Steven Gates and Corinne Grant, and made by Ted Robinson, is likely to be worse than Please Like Me or Laid. If you’ve seen Die On Your Feet and have some thoughts on it please post a comment.
Also on the most recent Boxcutters was a discussion of The Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting and Australia’s recent lack of success in the area of sketch comedy. Josh Kinal said of …Knife Fighting “It’s really good, really good…the sketches are funny”, and praised the show for being about things that happen in the real world as opposed to being parodies of television.
There was also much praise the British system of developing comedy talent by giving newcomers opportunities in radio, to get experience and grow, as opposed to the Australian system of throwing a bunch of people into a room and hoping for the best. “It misses out on all the great chemistry that’s developed from performers and the writing that can come from that” said comedian and Boxcutters presenter Courtney Hocking.
We probably don’t need to point this out, but it’s notable that The Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting is more an example of the “throwing a bunch of people into a room” system while the consistently excellent Mad As Hell comes from a team who’ve (mostly) been working together for a couple of decades. We know which we think is the better show.
The recent announcement that Quail Television will soon start production on a weekly topical sketch show called Wednesday Night Fever will also test this theory. The Creator/Executive Producer is Rick Kalowski (The Honourable Wally Norman, Big Bite, Comedy Inc – The Late Shift, Double Take, At Home with Julia) and the show will feature a mix of old and new talent:
There’s a new wave of young comedic talent in Australia and this series is the perfect vehicle to showcase them, while playing alongside some of Australia’s more established comedians.
Given that the show will be topical in nature it seems likely that Kalowski’s old cohorts Amanda Bishop and Paul McCarthy will be reprising their Gillard, Rudd and Abbott impressions. Hopefully amusingly.
This could go one of two ways. It could be a “bunch of people in a room” show as Kalowski gets in a load of new faces in the hope that they’ll come up with the goods. Or Kalowski could bring in a bunch of tried and tested names from his days on a string of somewhat similar sketch comedy shows and hope that reliability will win out over inspiration.
Ideally a show like this would start out on radio or ABC2 out of the spotlight, take the time to develop new talent and give them the skills required to write successful topical sketches, and then when a group develops that works lift them up into the big time. Instead we’re getting a show that may come together and work – or it may stumble early on, lose the faith of viewers, get bumped back to a later timeslot and then vanish, remembered only when someone wants to make the dubious point that Australian audiences seemingly aren’t interested in comedy any more.
Still, look on the bright side: with Mad as Hell and The Roast and The Chaser’s upcoming election work, it’s not like the ABC is going to run short of topical news satire any time soon.
Typing LOL Is Not The Same Thing As Actual Laughter
One of our contacts forwarded us this press release for tonight’s episode of The Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting:
It is random, it’s weird it’s awkward and uncomfortable.
It’s not easy to boil down all the current cliches about what makes a comedy “good” in 2013 into a single line, but they’ve managed it. As usual with this kind of thing, the words to pay attention to are the words they don’t mention. Words like “funny”. Also “entertaining”, “exciting”, “hilarious”, and pretty much every other even vaguely positive term you could possible think of.
Who chooses to promote their show as being weird, awkward and uncomfortable? Don’t answer that, we already know and so do you: people who want you to think that it’s not a show for everyone. That somehow “getting it” will make you cooler than those morons around you who are still judging comedy on whether it makes them laugh. The fools! Everyone knows only the best comedy makes you feel like you’ve wasted your time and been insulted for your troubles.
The next line was just as thrilling:
It is dividing the audience.
Knife isn’t dividing audiences. According to last week’s ratings, it doesn’t have an audience:
new sketch comedy The Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting slipped to just 292,000.
And that was before it was bumped back half an hour. With both The Voice and My Kitchen Rules pounding away at everything else on a Wednesday night, it’s time to call it: the ABC’s Wednesday night comedy line-up is dead. Even if the ABC could come up with a show people might want to watch, putting it on at 8.30pm on a Wednesday night is going to kill it.
Maybe the various Gruen efforts might bring a few viewers back out of sheer habit if the commercial networks aren’t trying, but television is a bullies game and once the ABC showed some weakness the commercial networks – well, Nine and Seven at least, as Ten tried their best to make Wednesdays into their light drama stronghold but couldn’t manage it – decided Wednesday nights were a corner of the playground they wanted all to themselves.
Realistically, we’re back to where we were a decade or more ago when every comedy had to survive on its merits and the sooner the ABC realises it the better. Back then half hour comedies usually aired at 8pm, often on a Monday: it’s no surprise that the closest thing to a success the ABC has had with a new show has been the 8pm only Mad as Hell. And having to make shows for an 8pm timeslot would rule out a lot of the “weird”, “awkward” and “uncomfortable” crutches they’ve been leaning on and force them to go for “light”, “likable” and above all else, “funny”.
Maybe they could move comedy over to Thursday nights, where at least it might do better against the various footy shows. The idea of actually having a night when people know the ABC will be showing comedy-themed local programming is still a good one, even if they’ve managed to shit all over the Wednesday night version by green-lighting year after year’s worth of rubbish*. Back in the bad old days, a lot of ABC comedy series vanished without trace simply because no-one knew where to look for them.
The big difference is, back then the shows themselves often weren’t half bad; giving The Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting a prime-time timeslot and then wondering why it doesn’t rate is like wondering why your live stage show about that time you fell asleep on the couch during a commercial for GayMatchMaker.com isn’t packing out the MCG.
*then again, who can blame them? When Spicks and Specks was on, they could put anything on after it at 9pm and it would automatically pull in over 800,000 viewers. Now they’re lucky to get a third of that. The only possible upside to all this is that without the support of a strong ratings lead-in, the ABC will realise they have to make sure every single comedy they green-light can stand on its own as broad-based or quality entertainment. You know, like they already do with drama.
Rubbish Shows in Failure to Rate Non-Shocker
If you ever wanted to whiff deep the odor of desperation, simply hold your nose close to your television set during the ABC’s Wednesday night line-up. How bad has it become? This bad:
It was a bad week for ABC’s Wednesday line-up this week and it is wasting no time in adjusting its schedule.
From next week Qi is back in at 8:30pm (with a repeat no less) while the local Aussie offerings have been pushed out by thirty minutes.
When the answer is “who needs one when you have old Qi‘s”, presumably the question is “why doesn’t the ABC have a current head of comedy?”
The system of entertainment we know as “television” involves three separate and rarely overlapping groups: the people who make television, the people who watch television and – most critically here – the people who run television. Usually when we have a failure as big as the on-going one with the ABC’s Wednesday night comedy line-up, the temptation is to blame one or both of the first two groups, as well-worn terms like “Show X sadly failed to find an audience” and “Show Y was a pile of shit” suggest.
But when you have an on-going failure like the one here, it’s the third group that deserves our attention. Put another way, even in 2013 it remains a fact that if you somehow make a local comedy program that either sounds interesting or features popular performers, audiences will tune in. It’s also a fact that Australia has a number of proven comedy performers who can generally be relied upon to create watchable television. So to have a Wednesday night comedy line up that consists of yet another “comedy” panel show hosted by multiple ratings zero Merrick Watts and a sketch show starring no-one anyone gives a shit about that was seemingly written by anyone who happened to be on set at the time of filming suggests either massive incompetence or a criminal disinterest in the idea of success.
Let’s point out just how easy this whole “spotting losers” deal is: here’s our post on the announcement of Tractor Monkeys:
Yes, it really has come to this: an ABC re-make of The White Room. And the latest in a long line of attempts to ape the success of Spicks & Specks with as little budget as possible. Makes you wonder if we’re almost at the point where a program will get made which consists entirely of random tweets put up on the screen while Andrew Denton laughs.
And here’s what we said at the announcement of The Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting:
Perhaps we should look to the next generation, perhaps they’ll return Australian comedy to its glory days? They’ll be keen to cast aside the conservatism of the Howard era, and be “native” to the multimedia environment, right? The announcement last week of the senior creative team behind Jungleboy’s upcoming sketch show, which will showcase up-and-coming talent, was…interesting. Almost 100 sketches from new writers will be directed by the likes of Wayne Blair (The Sapphires), Christiaan and Connor Van Vuuren (The Bondi Hipsters), and Abe Forsythe (Laid). It could work, but as with many new talent projects this is more likely to be the start of something than a great comedy in and of itself, a D-Generation rather than a Late Show, if you like. But good luck to them anyway.
Every now and again someone tells us that our relentless negativity is not an accurate reflection of the current state of Australian comedy, but rather a reflection of the ugly nature of our souls. Ya boo sucks to them: we’re negative about so much of Australian comedy because not only is so much of it shit, but so much of it is obviously shit from the moment it is announced.
And because we live in the real world, and not some magic fantasy land where Merrick Watts or random sketches featuring nobodies are ratings drawcards, the fact that so many of these shows sound crap from the start isn’t just typical internet hating, but a serious problem for the ABC. Put bluntly, PEOPLE WILL NOT WATCH SHOWS THAT ARE SHIT. And thus you have your ratings failure. At least people are still tuning in to check out these new shows before dismissing them: another year’s worth of these turds and the ABC won’t even be able to rely on that.
As for the unreplacable holy grail of Australian comedy, Spicks & Specks wasn’t a hit because of a whole range of bizarre and unexplainable reasons that can never be replicated. Spicks & Specks was, let’s not forget, a rip-off of Never Mind the Buzzcocks that was greenlit after the ABC knocked back Rockwiz. So while even we said the ABC were screwing over their Wednesday night line-up by letting S&S go, that doesn’t mean it was a magical once-off thing that can never be replaced and all blame for the failure of Wednesday nights since then can be laid at its feet, it’s clearly not management’s fault all the replacements they picked have failed, time to hit the pub.
Spicks & Specks worked because A): people like music – they like current music because it’s fun, and the like old music because it brings back memories of fun; B): musicians are entertaining – they’re often good with banter, and when they’re not they can always play some music; C): comedians, being people, like music, so when they’re not trying to be funny about it they can display their passion for it and seeing people being passionate always makes them likable, and D): by staffing it with talented nobodies the audience grew to feel they had ownership of the program – the host and team leaders weren’t the same old faces they saw everywhere else, they were part of the show (and something they could only get by watching the show). Do we really have to point out that none of these things apply to Tractor Monkeys?
If the ABC wants to have a Wednesday night comedy night line-up that rates well, they need to start commissioning comedy shows that at least sound like things people might want to watch. Here’s a quick list of what not to do if you want to get an audience excited*:
Dramadies? Dead.
Panel shows? Dead.
Sketch shows that don’t have a really really good hook to them? Dead.
So we assume we can look forward to seeing at least one more of each from the ABC on Wednesday nights before the year is out.
*unless you can get some seriously high grade talent involved, and as Shaun Micallef seems occupied elsewhere that seems unlikely.
Things You Learn At The Logies
Well, you learn that no-one gives a fuck about Australian comedy, for starters. Mad as Hell was beaten by The X Factor? All the comedy categories replaced by “Best Presenter” and “Best Light Entertainment”? It’s enough to make you think The TV Week Logie Awards are nothing more than a promotional tool for the comedy-free commercial networks. Ahem.
But there’s more to be gleaned from television’s night of shite than just a wall of contempt for making people laugh*. For one, TV Tonight’s David Knox hit the red carpet to chat with the “stars”, and despite The Logies best efforts some of those stars actually make shows that could be defined (by us) as comedy.
For example, this-
Adam Hills on the new title for the show formerly known as Gordon Street Tonight:
“I can’t say Adam Hills Tonight. It’s Me Tonight!
“We start in the middle of May and go right up until the end of July. We film our last episode on July 29 and then I go live on Channel 4 in the UK on the second of August.”
-is handy to know. Will it replace The Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting? Hours of fun speculation. Then there’s this:
Adam Zwar on developing new shows for his production company High Wire Productions:
“We’re developing a number of shows for the company. There may be a sketch show for ABC2. But it’s early days and no contract has been signed. It’s with 20-somethings.
“I’d be the EP with Amanda (Brotchie) and Nicole (Minchin) and maybe write a sketch or two.
“We’ve got a few dramas and comedies that are percolating.”
Are we getting more Lowdown and Agony?
“I’m waiting to hear back on Lowdown.
“Until they (ABC) get a Head of Comedy they can’t really commission anything.
“We’re looking good for more Agony. We had really good ratings up until the last week.”
We honestly can’t draw enough oxygen into our lungs to let out a sigh deep enough to express our feelings over “we’re looking good for more Agony“. This piss-useless format is just going to go on and on, isn’t it? Not being funny, not being informative, not being insightful, not being anything but cheap as shit to make as it clogs up timeslots that could have gone to shows that at least tried to be more than a parade of c-list celebrities talking about that one time something happened to them that was pretty much universal to human existence in the affluent west. Fuck.
Also, the ABC doesn’t have a current Head of Comedy? Presumably they’re waiting for the stink to die down over Randling before they slide Andrew Denton in there all nice and cosy. That would explain why Denton recently distanced himself from his production company too, come to think of it…
*See the constant appearances by Julia Morris