Australian Tumbleweeds
Hey, There’s a trailer for Border Protection Squad
We liked Ed Kavalee’s Scumbus – mildly controversial move on our part there, but what can we say? Being stupid isn’t always a bad thing – so we’re actually looking forward to this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPEL82KplX4
Your mileage may vary.
Old-fashioned charm
Considering how often we used to bang on about how shit The Chaser’s War on Everything was, it’s hard not to feel a little nostalgic for the team’s comedy days (as opposed to their consumer rights TV days) when you read Charles Firth’s recent article for The Citizen, which recounts the early history of the group. Having met at university, The Chaser team really got started almost a decade and a half ago when they brought out a satirical newspaper. This quickly achieved legendary status, but principally online – finding a print copy was difficult, especially if you didn’t live on the east coast.
But halfway through his article Firth brings us back to the present day with some musings about The Roast…
In my latest venture – The Roast (on ABC2 – 7:30pm weeknights) – our correspondents travel the world without ever leaving the comfort of the green screen. There is a charm to this that has surprised me…
The green screen is an invitation for the audience to imagine what this show could be if its correspondents were able to go anywhere. The gap between its actual resources and its ambition allows the audience a role in its success. The Roast requires the audience to fill in its (considerable) gaps with their imagination in order to enjoy it. It’s far more satisfying – and far more theatrical – than, say, Iron Man 3, where every twist and turn is replicated in such detail that no imagination is necessary. That’s not to say Iron Man 3 is bad (it is), but simply that it is not theatre – it’s spectacle…
…at least part of the enjoyment, and part of the reason why people became so evangelical about it [The Chaser newspaper], and why our readers would continue to turn up to our parties despite their increasing frequency and rising entry price, was because of the theatre surrounding it.
The audience was imagining the mythical drunken brainstorm that led to the front page where we published John Howard’s personal phone number, when in fact, the decision to do so was made at the last minute and was largely because we couldn’t think of anything else to put on the cover…
It was the theatre rather than the actual subscriber numbers that kept The Chaser growing. The Chaser was appealing to read because it invited the readers to use their imagination to fill in the gaps. You could just imagine how amazing it would be to be one of The Chaser editors. Constantly drunk, constantly witty, constantly partying, and rarely even turning up at the office. It was a wonderfully attractive conceit, even if it was completely untrue.
Thus, if I have any advice for the editors of The Citizen, it is this: allow your readers the space to imagine what you want to be. Don’t let reality get in the way of your ambition. Let the readers fill in that gap. That way, it’s much more satisfying for them, and it’s much cheaper for you.
…which is all very well, but doesn’t really justify the continued existence of The Roast:
- The Roast is not charming, because of its use of green screen or otherwise. It’s a poorly-written topical comedy that even YouTube turns its nose up at (check the stats, they’re not very impressive).
- “Old school” TV technology like green screen isn’t automatically more charming the CGI-heavy approach used in action films like Iron Man 3. It may remind us of charming old TV comedies like The Goodies, but a large part of the charm of old TV comedies like The Goodies was their scripts were full of original ideas and lots of good gags –or certainly more original ideas and good gags than you get in The Roast.
- The idea that the audience fills in the comedy details with their imaginations is true, but applies mainly to radio comedy. In TV comedy visuals are kinda important. One way in which The Roast could add some comedy details, and be funnier, is if they included some gags going on in the background. Or some gags with a bit more complexity than they’re currently managing.
- There are two main reasons why the thing everyone knows about The Chaser newspaper is that they published John Howard’s phone number: 1) it was deliciously dangerous, and 2) it presumably caused a man who was disliked by the paper’s readership a lot of bother. Can you imagine The Roast doing anything like that? They can barely work themselves up in to being satirical…which is a bit of a problem if you’re a topical comedy.
Obviously most of the team from The Roast are barely out of university and perhaps when they’ve got as much experience under the belt as The Chaser they’ll be producing shows of the quality of, say, The Hamster Wheel, but the only way they’ll get there is if they spend a bit more time off-off-Broadway. The Chaser team didn’t just turn up on the ABC one day, they struggled to survive as a newspaper and gradually did more and more radio and TV. They built up experience and learnt what did and didn’t work. The best we can hope for The Roast team and the comedy they produce is that the show’s axed and they’re forced to learn the hard way.
Spit roast hog
If you gave a video camera to a student revue and asked them to make a news parody The Roast is probably what you’d get. Indeed, if you look at the biographies of the show’s cast and writers it’s notable that many of them are barely out of university. Not that this automatically makes them or the show bad – inexperienced writers can’t be expected to produce a good program – what we question is why a show which was a proven dud in its earliest incarnation as WTF! (2010), and then as a web series (2011), made it to TV for a first series (2012) and is now back yet again. For 150 episodes.
The Roast sets itself up as a long-running news show which reports from around the country (and the world) on the issues of the day. Its team of reporters play it relatively straight (unlike in news parodies such as Mad As Hell and Brass Eye which got laughs by making their reporters “characters”) meaning that on The Roast the stories have to do the heavy comedic lifting. The Roast has also chosen to keep it very topical, focusing on real world headlines rather than current affairs. In the hands of a more experienced team these restrictions wouldn’t be such a problem, but it’s hard to avoid wondering whether a bit more freedom in the format might have given the team at The Roast a better chance of getting laughs.
The best episode of The Roast that we have seen was a “from the archives” special parodying period reports of the disappearance of Harold Holt and the introduction of Random Breath Testing. Here, the writers and cast could get a decent amount of laughs from old-style clothes and modes of TV production and presentation. Whereas in a story about a contemporary issue they have to find a way of making that issue funny.
Often, The Roast’s formula is to take an aspect of a topical issue to the extreme and hope for laughs. When Myer boss Bernie Brooks said a levy to fund disability care would mean less people spent money shopping, The Roast did a sketch about a new government levy to help big department stores. They also sent one of their reporters around stealing money from people on behalf of the retail giant. While the basic satirical ideas for this were fine – you could imagine Mad As Hell doing something similar – Mad As Hell would also have done it a lot better. The reason for this is tone – Mad As Hell’s angrier, rantier approach is a lot funnier than The Roast‘s reporter David Ferrier playing it alternately straight and cheeky.
Great topical comedies like The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Mad As Hell and Clarke & Dawe are fuelled by anger. One of the many problems with The Roast is that there just doesn’t seem to be any drive or passion behind it. And that’s the death knell for a topical comedy, because if there’s no passion or rage behind the material why make it topical? Why not just broadcast 10 minutes of dinner party sketches? Or Justin Bieber gags? Or dead air?
The Final Kountdown
Wow, good thing we didn’t bother reviewing The Kath & Kim Kountdown:
Clip special The Kath and Kim Kountdown has been dumped from Seven’s Sunday night line-up after just one outing.
Could Australia’s legendary goodwill towards the foxy morons finally have run out? Or perhaps someone should have told the programming team at Seven that Kath & Kimderella was, er, not that great and there hasn’t even been a new episode of the TV series in over five years.
Much as we enjoyed the first series, that was a decade ago and they’ve been treading water since then: stick a fork in them, they’re done.
Destroying The Gruen
And in comedy news, Helen Razer’s written a long article on how the twitter hashtag #destroythejoint has betrayed feminism. We’re mentioning this why now? It’s not like anyone really sees Razer as a comedian these days – probably not even herself, as her last (that we know of) stab at hilarity here was last updated August 2012. Remember The Sponsored Lady? Seems to only have been a thing for two months. Guess we wasted our time reviewing it. Here’s hoping her current article has more of an impact.
Like pretty much everything Razer writes, it’s over-long and self-obsessed (like you can talk – ed), but the short version is that Helen grew up (yes, it starts with her childhood) being aware that feminism could easily be co-opted by marketing (insert reference to “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby”), but had hoped that #destroythejoint could avoid this fate, what with being at least a little bit about being funny.
Here comes the sad music: It’s stopped being funny, it’s been co-opted by marketing, and it’s now a waste of time.
Destroy the Joint had turned from an organisation that fought sexism with a mocking wit to one that did nothing but reproduce miserable sexism. For both the advertising industry and the patriarchy.
It’s not just her that thinks this: she’s also got “34-year-old Sydney-based marketing strategist” and former administrator of a Destroy the Joint Facebook page Aaron Darc backing her up. So a self-styled internet funny lady and a marketing guru think #destroythejoint needs to be funnier and better handled marketing-wise? Quelle surprise.
Just to engage with the substance of the article for a moment: Marketing using a social movement to market a product? That’s what capitalism does (cue Kyle Reese voice: “That’s all it does!!“). We’re hardly experts, but we dimly recall William Gibson saying that grunge – remember that, 90s fans? – was the last bohemia that had a chance to develop before it was co-opted by marketing. That was pre-internet and 20 years ago: come up with a social movement today and it’ll be harnessed to some kind of marketing push by, um, later that day.
The reason we even bring this article up – considering Razer and professional comedy are pretty much strangers these days and yes, we do know that if the writer starts talking about themselves in the first sentence of an article about an issue that involves at least half the population we really shouldn’t act surprised if the whole thing is basically “WHY ISN’T THIS SOCIAL MOVEMENT FOLLOWING MY BRIGHT AND SHINING LEAD” – is that this is a prime example of the kind of thinking that leads to thinking that The Gruen Whatever is a worthwhile effort. Fight marketing with marketing! That way, marketing wins.
What if #destroythejoint had followed Razer’s wishes and remained a “mocking wit”-based takedown of misogyny in the media and Australian life? For one thing, it would still be exploited by marketers; yes, it’s easier for marketers to exploit you when your online movement is entirely built around stoking OUTRAGE (it’s pretty much the only marketing tool the ABC used for its comedy programs for a few years there), but if your movement involves drawing attention to things*, it can be used as a marketing tool to expand the reach of those things whether you’re laughing or crying at them.
Wait, doesn’t this mean that all comedy is actually supporting the things they’re making fun of? Duh, no. But comedy making fun of advertising is supporting advertising pretty much all the time. That’s because advertising is about getting people to pay attention to you. Of course, there’s such a thing as negative attention, which is what #destroyingthejoint wants to apply. But you can’t really apply that to an ad, because as the saying goes, “there’s no such thing as bad publicity”. Especially when misogyny (at least, in the mild “women are sex objects and household providers” form many ads use) actually still appeals to some consumers. That “What’s wrong with being sexy?” line from Spinal Tap was funny for more than one reason, after all.
Gruen doesn’t work because it tries – well, it pretends to try – to fight marketing with marketing. “These lies are bad lies,” says the panel, “they should have lied like this”. In contrast, The Checkout (no matter what you might think of it as a comedy) at least works on this level, by fighting marketing with facts. “Marketing says this burger looks good” says someone against a wacky backdrop, “reality says this burger looks bad.” Marketing can’t get around that, because that’s the kind of issue marketing is designed to avoid.
[Which may be the reason why googling “lawsuit against The Gruen Transfer” turns up no examples of anyone important getting annoyed while “lawsuit against The Checkout” gives you this.]
We are in no way saying that misogyny doesn’t exist in the Australian media. It’s all over the place and it’s a disgrace. But it’s something marketers can use, because for the most part it doesn’t relate to the product they’re marketing. No-one (Men’s Rights Activists and some politicians aside) is selling “misogyny” as their product: they use misogyny to get your attention because what they really want is your attention.
But surely comedy is powerful enough to defeat even the most evil forms of marketing? Well, considering the most evil forms of marketing usually involve comedy, maybe not. Good comedy should open our eyes to the truth; marketing wants to open our eyes to whatever it is they’re selling to us. Basically, comedy fails when the message becomes more important than getting a laugh. “These examples of sexism in the media are hilarious” works as an approach to comedy. “These examples of sexism in the media are horrible” does not**.
Then you’re just back to fighting marketing with marketing and unless there’s a deeper truth on your side – one that goes beyond “this ad or person is sexist”, because as we’ve pointed out, that’s probably what the marketers want you to think as sadly not everyone agrees that “being sexist” is a bad thing – marketing will win. As regular Gruen watchers know all too well.
And no, we’re not saying “ignore it and it’ll go away”. We actually kind of agree with Razer here: there’s no simple solution to the problem of entrenched misogyny and retweeting a joke on twitter isn’t going to change anything. But we’re not a social activism blog, we’re a blog about comedy. And selling this kind of social activism as comedy doesn’t work as either social activism OR as comedy.
It’s probably appropriate Razer was the one who brought it up, come to think of it.
*Basically, #destroythejoint was and is a method of marketing that attempts to over-write the original message with “this is sexist”. Razer thinks that comedy was a more effective way of doing that than outrage, because comedy is harder for marketing to co-opt. We disagree; ads are trying to get ‘in on the joke’ all the time.
**The difference being, when the joke stops being funny you have to move on, which is a bit tricky for a social movement supposedly naming and shaming society’s creeps over an important and on-going issue.
Hung Out To Dry
Considering our recent griping about Tractor Monkeys, it seems only right to start our review of Dirty Laundry Live with this: the ABC have taken exactly the right approach with this show. It’s on at 9.30pm on a Thursday night on ABC2, which is pretty much the textbook definition of “out of the way”, it’s shown live which means they can make changes week to week depending on what works and what doesn’t, and they’ve given it a reasonably long run (16 episodes), so it’ll have plenty of time to bed down.
On the other hand, this kind of thing rarely bodes well:
The public broadcaster confirmed it had engaged classifiers, editorial policy advisers and lawyers to make sure the hosts don’t get too litigious in their accusations.
Dirty Laundry has been granted an MA classification and it has to meet that rating. That means there needs to be a certain level of coarse language and naughtiness or they will get into trouble for being too prudish.
Or, you know, they could just try to be funny. And anyway, considering that outside of news programs the ABC doesn’t exactly “do” live television any more, presumably those extra lawyers have just been hired to bring the staffing levels up to, say, what Nine has for The Footy Show. And we all know how edgy that is these days.
The obvious snarkiness about having Sophie Monk on as a “celebrity guest” aside, things got off to a solid start – oh right, the show itself: Host Lawrence Mooney and a cast of semi-famous faces and comedians sit around a big desk to talk about the celebrity gossip of the week. It’s a solid comedy topic, and more importantly, it’s not one that’s currently being mined to death on the ABC *cough Daily Show knock-offs cough*. On the other hand yes, it’s another panel show. One that initially gave off strong Glasshouse vibes, which… yeah, we’ve got nothing good to say about that.
With two introductions to the panel and two introductions to the show either side of Mooney’s opening monologue (yeah, those Kristen Stewart vampire facial gags worked a treat) we’re four minutes into the show before the show actually starts. Chalk it up to first week nerves, alongside the “can I say FUCK?” “You can say fuck as much as you like, but you can’t talk about suicide.” bits. Oh, and then there’s a quiz. Joy. Fortunately they seem to just be using the quiz to kickstart discussions, which is exactly the right way to use a quiz on a comedy panel show.
Further on the plus side, these aren’t the usual TV panelists. It’s amazing just how refreshing it is to see some different comedians on television (especially when they turn out to be funny), and even though there were a few garbled moments here – there wasn’t a whole lot of chemistry between the panelists, who occasionally seemed to be shouting into the void rather than interacting with each other – the fact that we don’t already know every word that’s going to come out of their mouths is a big big plus for a television show in 2013. Even Sophie Monk, about whom we’ve previously had zero interest, came off here as someone moderately interesting. Or at least human, which isn’t something you can say about a lot of our more popular comedy panel show regulars.
It’s hard to underestimate just how far you can get on television by being entertainingly shambolic. Lord knows Australian television has underestimated it over the last decade or so – though after Live From Planet Earth, some of that reluctance is understandable. Sure, watching panelists passing around a porn movie called ‘Back Door Teen Mom’ may not be the kind of thing you’d plan to tune in to watch, but watching it happen on a live show is at least as interesting as anything else you may have seen on ABC after 8.30pm this year.
There were plenty of rough edges on this opening episode, but Mooney is a rock-solid comedy performer who’ll settle in as host and Brooke Satchwell (who’ll be a regular panelist over the sixteen episodes) came off as pretty sharp as well. Luke McGregor’s comedy interview was a highlight, and not just because it made Josh Thomas seem kind of likable; is it too soon to say “breakout star”? Probably. We’ll stick with “love your work” for now.
We’re grading on a curve here because it’s the first episode of a show that’s doing its growing up in public. So while there’s plenty of room for improvement, we’re going to assume they’re at least going to try and address the show’s problems (which are mostly to do with structure anyway; they just need to find more elegant ways to move between topics). Otherwise we’re going to give Dirty Laundry Live our highest possible rating for an Australian comedy panel show: it’s worth a look.
Over the Hill
The strangest clip doing the rounds over the last few days hasn’t been this:
http://youtu.be/D29C6S9eSo4
Though that accent does have us scratching our heads so hard it looks like we’re wearing red nail polish. No, it’s been the oddly unavailable online promo for the third series of Adam Hills’ talk show, now just known as Adam Hills Tonight. The strange part is that it features a hefty clip from this:
http://youtu.be/hUsDWRgLKEM
We’ve discussed this elsewhere – short version, it’s hardly edgy, brave or funny for Hills to have a go at the appearance of a woman twice his age under the guise of defending an internationally successful and famous musician – but for the ABC to use it as promotion for Hills’ new show is a handy reminder that Hills isn’t really the lovely guy he plays on television. He is, in fact, someone who promotes himself as a “nice guy” but feels it’s part of his job to insult an old lady. And Joan Rivers, she’s totally a serious threat to someone who, well, take it away Wikipedia:
Adele is the first female in the history of the Billboard Hot 100 to have three singles in the top 10 at the same time as a lead artist, and the first female artist to have two albums in the top five of the Billboard 200 and two singles in the top five of the Billboard Hot 100 simultaneously.21 is the longest running number one album by a female solo artist on the UK and US Albums Chart. In 2011 and 2012, Billboard named Adele Artist of the Year. In 2012, Adele was listed at number five on VH1′s 100 Greatest Women In Music, and the American magazine Time named Adele one of the most influential people in the world. In 2013, she received an Academy Award as well as the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song for her song “Skyfall“, written for Skyfall, the twenty-third James Bond film.
Phew, lucky Hills stood up for her. Inexperienced newcomers really need a protector in today’s media landscape.
Anyway, it’s hardly like Hills goes around stabbing kittens in the opening episode of his remarkably resilient talk show. Rather, once you get past the new opening and new set he does the same old talk show business he’s been doing to no real success for the last two years. Same nothing jokes, same chat with the punters, same sense that life’s passing you by.
Yes you, up the back. “No real success? But it’s back for a third year! Nothing gets a third year at the ABC these days!” And yet last year we were reading this:
After years of much success on the middle night of the week, Aunty has flopped hard this year as viewers have deserted its relatively fresh Wednesday lineup. Their tentpole programme, Adam Hills in Gordon Street Tonight, has completely underwhelmed, even in comparison to its first season last year.
On the comparable night in 2011, Gordon Street pulled 760,000 viewers – a massive difference to the 508,000 viewers it attracted last night. Comparisons to long-running programme Spicks and Specks significantly out-shadow current figures for the timeslot and underline how far ABC1 has fallen post-8:00pm.
Clearly the ABC wants to stay in the Adam Hills business, even when the general public just aren’t all that fussed. Actually, that’s not true: people clearly like Hills a whole lot, they just don’t like him as a talk show host.
That said, when your very first segment is your (actually pretty funny) sidekick struggling with learning how to get into the world of baton-twirling, either you’re not a fan of starting big or you figure you can do pretty much whatever takes your fancy. Which would get two thumbs up from us if it ever really seemed like Hills is interested in anything beyond a fairly forgettable chat show. An opening show featuring as guests Denise Scott and Father Bob (both solid talent, make no mistake), does feel somewhat as if decent ratings are not the highest priority. Even if there are plenty of attractive women in the audience for the numerous audience segments. Just don’t cut to any hefty dudes!
We were hardly fans of Enough Rope (drain your guests salty tears, Denton!), but it did provide a solid example of how to make a decent talk show when A-grade guests aren’t walking in the door – “A-grade guests”, by our definition, are those interesting or famous types that people are interested in no matter who they’re talking to. Ditching the usual surface talk show waffle, Denton (and researchers) pushed it a little further, and though the seedy, tabloid-esque results weren’t our cup of tea it certainly did pull in the crowds. We’re saying, if famous people aren’t beating down your door, just go with regular people who have interesting stories… or jerk some tears out of B-list celebs, we’re cool with that. What we don’t want is just the same old chit from the same old chatters.
And the rest of the evening’s events were… well, having Tripod rock out reminded us all that hey, where’s that Tripod sitcom they’ve been deserving for the last decade or so? Not to mention that the ABC know their audience of inner-city types and this show is pointed straight at their heart. The question remains: where’s the laughs? US talk show are packed with boffo yuks, or at least the occasional scripted bit. UK talk shows mean well but largely get by on the quality of their guests. But this?
To be fair, it’s clear the ABC needs a talk show: Australian television currently doesn’t have one and the commercial networks clearly can’t be arsed. Two years on though, and it’s kind of obvious that Adam Hills Tonight isn’t getting the job done. The guests are the same old same old before, during and after the interview, the comedy is featherweight at best – Hills just doesn’t do sketches, though he does seem to like hanging out with the audience as much as possible, which is great for the audience but not so much for the home viewer – and overall the end product is solidly, firmly, determinedly safe. It’s a show with all the signs of being a good time, but the closer you look the less there is to see.
Maybe we were too harsh on Hills’ rant against Joan Rivers. Whatever its dubious underpinnings, at least it showed some life and energy. But don’t worry, it seems the ABC will be running Hills’ full unedited chat with Sir Michael Parkinson as a half hour special! And next week, they’ll be going through Hills’ trash hoping to find a sheet of notepaper with “Hills <3 ABC” written on it over and over and over again. They could get a ten-part series out of that.
Vale Tractor Monkeys
Sorry we’re a bit late with this one, but we’ll be honest: it took us a few days to realise Tractor Monkeys was over. From its nonsensical title to its tried and rejected host to its no-star cast of unexciting personalities to its blatant use of old footage to pad out banter that would have been rejected by AD/BC as “too stilted”, it was not a show that will live on in our hearts or minds or the part of our memory where we keep lists of shows to use as negative comparisons. Randling, your crown is safe.
Of course, not all that is the fault of the show itself. Since Spicks and Specks a): became the ABC’s biggest and most reliable comedy hit and then was b): dumped, the pressure has been on to find a replacement. Having learned with Randling that getting a million viewers a week isn’t simply a matter of sticking a random bunch of comedians behind a couple of desks, a strange combination of panic and disinterest seems to have settled in over at the ABC. They want to find the next S&S and fast, so forget about putting a low-key panel show together and letting it develop, and yet they don’t seem to want to spend any real money or put any serious effort into creating something that, you know, people might want to watch.
Part of the problem is that the ABC doesn’t seem to realise that even when television is free people want value for money. Tractor Monkeys might have worked at, say, 6.30pm on a Sunday night, where looking cheap and involving little more than people mucking around inbetween old clips seems like a good deal. But prime time on a Wednesday night? No. Noooo. People want to watch real entertainment then – you know, like high-stakes cooking contests or talent quests.
Another part of the problem is that the ABC doesn’t seem to realise that panel shows only work when the guests are, as the French say, not la massif shithouse. UK panel shows might seem equally thrown together, but their guests are usually people who are also off making television shows or having smash hit stand-up careers. The equivalent here, much as it pains us to say it, would be doing a panel show featuring Dave Hughes and Wil Anderson, not Dave O’Neil and Someone You’ve Never Heard Of. Get Chris Lilley to turn up and you’ve got your ratings hit; a musician most people know nothing about and they’re not even playing music on the show… not so much.
Panel shows can create stars, but it usually takes at least a few episodes and the freedom to mess around and see what works. If the ABC was serious about finding a real replacement for Spicks and Specks, they would have done the exact opposite of Tractor Monkeys: either get serious with the talent and bring on board people viewers want to watch (lets not forget, even The Panel featured the Working Dog guys, who at the time had a lot of goodwill from their radio work and The Late Show), or put together something featuring talented nobodies, place it out of the spotlight and give it the time to develop into something special. Which was how they got Spicks and Specks in the first place.
It’s easy to say that the big names don’t want to do panel shows. It’s just as easy to say that today’s ABC doesn’t have the resources to put together a panel show outside of prime time. And that’s fine. But if that’s the case, don’t waste our time with half-arsed crap like Tractor Monkeys. If even we can tell it’s not going to work, what are they paying the programmers at the ABC for?
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.