Australian Tumbleweeds
Bringing a Knife to a Gun Fight
We’ve been a bit negative around these parts of late, so let’s start off our review of The Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting – or as we’ll call it from here on, Knife – with a positive: it’s giving fresh faces a shot at making comedy on ABC1. Traditionally the ABC’s major network has been something of a closed shop comedy-wise, so while the show itself is more than a little rough around the edges, obviously the benefits of giving new talent a run far outweigh the uneven quality of the end result.
Excuse us a second, we’ve just been handed this press release:
Produced by the award-winning Jungleboys and the creators of Review with Myles Barlow and A Moody Christmas, THE ELEGANT GENTLEMAN’S GUIDE TO KNIFE FIGHTING creates a brand new uncharted space for sketch comedy in Australia.
Based on the experimental online comedy site of the same name, the series has attracted a formidable lineup of the country’s finest comedic and dramatic actors.
Patrick Brammall (A Moody Christmas, East West 101), Phil Lloyd (Review with Myles Barlow, A Moody Christmas), Damon Herriman (Breaking Bad, Justified), Georgina Haig (Fringe, Underbelly), Darren Gilshenan (A Moody Christmas,Top of the Lake), Robin McLeavy (Hell on Wheels, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter), Craig Anderson (Next Stop Hollywood, Laid), Janis McGavin (The Urban Monkey, Laid) and Dave Eastgate (A Moody Christmas, Problems) lead an amazing lineup of onscreen talent.
Behind the camera is an equally distinguished lineup of creative talent. Among the directors: one of Variety Magazine’s Ten Director’s to Watch, Wayne Blair (The Sapphires, Redfern Now); Trent O’Donnell (Review with Myles Barlow, A Moody Christmas), Craig Melville (John Safran’s Race Relations and John Sarfan Vs God), the Van Vuuren Brothers (Bondi Hipsters, The Fully Sick Rapper), Abe Forsythe (Laid, Mr & Mrs Murder), award-winning documentary director Stephen Oliver (Chateau Chunder: A Wine Revolution, Skippy: Australia’s First Superstar) Alex Morrow (rage, Triple J TV), Alethea Jones (Tropfest and IF award winner) and first-time TV directors Scott Pickett and Leigh Richards.
Ah.
Taken in light of these just-to-hand facts, what we have here is not a hit-and-miss show where newcomers get a chance to develop their comedy skills, but an “amazing lineup of onscreen talent” revealing they’re not really all that good at comedy. And why? The secret lies in a close reading of this very press release, which goes out of its way to list the cast and directors while failing to mention anywhere the names of the people who actually wrote the jokes we’ve come here to laugh at. Who gives a shit about writers? They just write the show.
[Or do they? We’ve heard a third-hand rumour that at least one cast member, unimpressed with the quality of sketches they were appearing in, suggested new jokes and punchlines on the day of filming. Punchlines the producers then went with instead of the scripted ones.]
Having established the producers’ priorities, many of this show’s problems become a lot easier to grasp… in that pretty much all this show’s many, many problems stem from piss-poor writing. Yes, there are plenty of poor performances here as well, but as they largely stem from bad writing – many of the cast members, as that press release is so keen to remind us, have been tolerable in other things – we’re going to stick with blaming the bad writing.
Avoiding the obvious segue, here’s the opening of the Knife review at Molks Tv Talk:
The Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting is new sketch comedy from the pens of the Jungle Boys (Trent O’Donnell, Phil Lloyd & Jason Burrows) that doesn’t just push sketch comedy in a ‘different direction’, it picks it up kicking and screaming and carries it over there; then consoling it at their collective bosom whilst changing it’s nappy of shame which it soiled in the process.
Where to begin? For starters, this supposedly insanely edgy and out-there sketch show features a sketch where an Amish I.T. guy tries to fix a computer monitor with a hand drill. May we refer you to #16 (“Wooden Spoons”) in this list of offbeat Saturday Night Live sketches. Or this sketch from the UK’s It’s Kevin, which aired slighter earlier this week. Or the extended Amish jokes in the recent US teen sex comedy film Sex Drive. Or just comedy in general. Amish jokes – look, they’re people who don’t get modern technology! – have not been taking comedy in a “different direction” since roughly a fortnight after the Amish first came to America. They may still be funny, but making them is about as conservative and safe as sketch comedy gets.
“But duh, that’s not the joke – the REAL joke is that the guy who’s computer is being “fixed” is the only person who realises the Amish I.T. guy is useless! He’s a sane man trapped in a mad world!”. Thank you, imaginary idiot. What you’ve just described is not a joke; it’s lazy writing trying to drag out a one-joke idea for three or four minutes. We know sketch comedy is rare in this country, but anyone who’s watched any sketch comedy at all ever from any source knows that, unless you really put your back into it, the whole “we’re treating this insane idea as if it’s normal” idea is not strong enough to hang an entire sketch on. Especially when your sketches are overlong, as Knife‘s tend to be.
That brings us to the same basic flaw that runs through almost all of the sketches here: what is a moderately funny idea when expressed in one line (“he’s an average guy at a posh restaurant who’s trying to impress his date but he doesn’t know what any of the menu items are!”) is turned into a lengthy sketch, only no-one has any idea where to take it (“let’s have the food served on a naked fat guy!”).
For example, there’s a sketch about a guy who never takes his hat off and his wife pleads with him to let her see his head. It doesn’t matter if you’re bald, she says, I’ll still love you, she pleads and pleads and pleads. If you can’t see how this is going to end, you may want to check if English is a language you actually understand.
The low point comes in a dinner party sketch – yes, for a show that supposedly takes sketch comedy in a “different direction”, this features both a dinner party sketch AND a restaurant sketch, breaking the exact same ground that, say, Full Frontal broke for a full hour 26 times a year in the mid 1990s – in which a guy who looks like a sex criminal acts like an abusive dickhead for what feels like hours before it’s revealed that the reason why he’s acting like an abusive dickhead is – wait for it – because he owns a Prius, and thus is morally superior to everyone else there.
Then he continues to act like an abusive dickhead. Everyone else goes along with it. He drives a Prius.
Then later on there’s a callback to him acting like an abusive dickhead. He gets two women to make out for his amusement, because he drives a Prius.
Then after that there’s another callback to him acting like an abusive dickhead, followed by the only actual punchline in the show. It’s not a great one.
If you’re going to do a sketch show where all you have is good sketch concepts – and none of the basic concepts here are terrible – you need to do one of those rapid-fire sketch shows that just fires out the funny ideas willy-nilly. Oh wait: those shows don’t give the directors a chance to display their chops, or the performers a chance to ham it up for their showreels. Those shows do require writers, and plenty of them. Those shows don’t provide a chance for an up-and-coming production house to give their mates profile-raising work. Those shows do end up being funny for the people at home.
The one sketch here that does work is the one where Captain Cook is berated for his lazy naming of the islands he discovered, and that works because hey, a lot of those names really are lazy! Thursday Island, Easter Island, Christmas Island… the Cook Islands… maybe you had to be there. It is also the only sketch here that isn’t trying to be “edgy”. Could it be that the way to be funny is by being funny, not edgy? Could it be that the last decade of “awkward” comedy got it all wrong?
Let’s be blunt: even with the current slip-shod state of ABC comedy, this just isn’t prime time ABC1 material. This isn’t even C31 material. For a sketch show to work in sketch-adverse 2013, you either need a really solid concept to tie the sketches together (Problems wasn’t a great show by any stretch, but at least it advertised itself as having a definite point of view behind its sketches) or the sketches need to be really, really, really good.
The overall concept’s nearly there, what with most of the sketches (like most sketch shows) being about daily life being taken to awkward extremes (“let’s test out our potential new home by having a fight!” “look, it’s the dad who gets offended and goes into too much detail about sex when he hears his daughter’s pregnant!”); as for the quality…
Let’s give the last word to Molks:
Thank you, ABC1, for the return of hilarious, uncomfortable, giggle-inducing, awkward sketch comedy. The Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting is sure to put the cat among the pigeons of comedic taste and we’re long overdue the shit-covered statue that will be the debate surrounding it’s screening.
At least he got the “shit-covered statue” part right.
Vale Please Like Me
Well, that certainly wrapped up in a fashion that was bog-obvious from the start. So let’s let our attention wander a moment from the exciting world of Josh Thomas learning how to feel human emotions while remaining unable to speak in a human accent and discuss words. As in, do words actually mean anything in the context of Australian comedy reviews?
First off, The Age’s Paul Kalina gives us the history of Australian comedy in roughly 500 words. It has a happy ending, naturally:
On the home front, the record so far in scripted narrative comedy isn’t too shabby. Writers and actors Robyn Butler and Wayne Hope hit their stride with The Librarians and will hopefully do it again in Upper Middle Bogan. We’ve had the terrific A Moody Christmas, the pert and irreverent Laid, twentysomething and the under-appreciated Please Like Me, and rich veins of comedy course through Offspring, Mr & Mrs Murder and Rake.
There may not be enough of these shows and we should be alarmed that so many of them reside on the ABC, but the claim that Australian comedy is dead just doesn’t stack up.
pert (pûrt)adj. pert·er, pert·est1. Trim and stylish in appearance; jaunty: a pert hat.2. High-spirited; vivacious.3. Impudently bold; saucy
Which means Paul Kalina should be sacked.
Of slightly more relevance to us today is Kalina’s phrase “the under-appreciated Please Like Me“. On the surface this seems like a refreshingly bold statement to be coming from an Age Green Guide deputy editor, in that it seems to be an opinion about the actual quality of an Australian television program. Unsurprisingly, on closer inspection it proves to be the kind of generic yet arrogant term that can apply to almost any current program that isn’t My Kitchen Rules: a vague, hand-waving suggestion that a show should be more popular than it currently is combined with the sense that in not appreciating Please Like Me the general public is incorrect. Yeah, you heard him. Lift your game, general public. Stop paying attention to that sports-related program and watch a fey and presumably balding Australian mumble for half an hour.
Meanwhile in the sense of seeing print a few days earlier, everyone’s favourite Fairfax TV writer Melinda Huston had this to say about the end of Please Like Me:
PLEASE LIKE ME: FINAL
Thursday, 9.30pm, ABC2
★★★★Josh Thomas showed us from the start that he wasn’t afraid to go dark, and he was keenly aware of the absurdity of life’s tragedies, so it seems fitting that the final instalment of this excellent series should open with a funeral. Aunty Peg is dead and as the family prepares in its own peculiar ways for her send-off, Please Like Me is alternately funny, poignant, silly and occasionally terribly wrong. Debra Lawrance puts in another fabulous performance as an ordinary housewife on the edge but, once again, Thomas is just as impressive, both in his performance as an actor and in his insights as a writer. The final moments are satisfyingly elegiac. So just one question remains. Nothing about this series was really about Josh’s search for approval or acceptance. On the contrary, it was about him realising he didn’t need those things. So why was it called Please Like Me?
“Wasn’t afraid to go dark”. Jesus.
Look, “going dark” hasn’t been a risky move for a comedy since the end of the second series of the UK Office. That, by the way, was a decade ago. “Going dark” is, in fact, the easiest, safest, less to-be-afraid-of thing a comedian can do, because “going dark” is a comedian throwing his or her hands up in the air and saying “I can’t be funny any more”. “Going dark” is giving up on trying to make people laugh and turning your show into a cod-drama for a few moments so people – by which we mean reviewers – will take you seriously. So what Huston should have written is “Josh Thomas showed us from the start he wasn’t afraid to not be funny.” Which we think you’ll all agree is a shitload more accurate.
“Terribly wrong”. Last time we checked this is a slightly more twee version of “he went there”. This is a building block of comedy – that is, surprising the audience and pushing boundaries is a building block of comedy – but it isn’t actually comedy, in the same way that a pile of bricks isn’t a three bedroom house.
This is the big problem with pretty much every single television reviewer in this country when it comes to comedy: they can identify the basic elements of comedy, but they don’t have the gumption to actually say whether they found a show funny or not. To wit: “The final moments are satisfyingly elegiac”. Uh, you do realise this was meant to be a comedy, right? What makes you think this sounds even slightly like a decent ending for a comedy series?
At least Huston manages to use the word “funny” in her review – rapidly followed by “poignant”, just in case we got the impression we should be judging a four star show simply by whether it made us laugh. Was this a comedy series, or a photo of a sad-faced dog curled up atop his newly-dead master’s grave? Huston seems to suggest the latter – and worse, that this is a good thing.
The best we can say for her is that she managed to ask the right question: “Nothing about this series was really about Josh’s search for approval or acceptance. On the contrary, it was about him realising he didn’t need those things. So why was it called Please Like Me?”
Please allow us to explain: Josh’s journey, such as it was, was about him blossoming into the kind of arrogant, dismissive twat who would make a show as smugly self-mythologising as Please Like Me. So of course the conclusion was him realising he didn’t need acceptance or approval, because hey, he’s a cool dude who hires hot guys to make out with him on his own television show then complains on air about how hard it is when attractive men are into him. Suck it losers.
But while he – uh, we mean his character ‘Josh’ – can’t be bothered actually becoming someone funny and likable, he’s not stupid enough to think being patronising and self-obsessed is attractive to people who aren’t fame-whores. Thus the desperate pleading nature of the title, Please Like Me.
No.
Vale The Agony of Life
Did the final episode of The Agony of Life just go to air? Even if it didn’t – and let’s face it, this series will probably be back soon as The Agony of Topics We Haven’t Covered – then we’re going to pay tribute to it anyway, because getting eight more episodes out of this concept is an achievement…of sorts.
Let’s re-cap: the premise of the show is that various well(-ish) known people talk about how different stages of life can be difficult and embarrassing, which is obviously something we can all relate to. And these people appear to have been asked to be honest and/or funny when they tell their anecdotes, which seems like a more than reasonable method of presenting their stories. Cue eight weeks of hilarious heartache from some of the nation’s most slightly known personalities!
Actually, whether the people involved are well-known or not isn’t actually the point – what was always going to make this show successful was whether what they were saying was funny or interesting, and generally speaking it wasn’t. There were some alleged “break out” stars of the Agony series (John Elliot and Mirka Mora), but what made them break outs was that they were old enough and frank enough to say the kind of things that most of the rest of the people involved weren’t saying – which made them interesting by default.
Most of the people involved hadn’t been through any genuine agony. Almost none of the things they talked about involved the death of humans or animals, getting in to major financial difficulties, or resulted in them having to serve time in prison – you know, stuff that actually would be agonising to go through. What this series actually was, was a bunch of anecdotes from relatively well-off people who exaggerated some minor embarrassments which hadn’t really affected their lives.
Exaggerating the truth is, of course, the stuff of comedy – every human knows this – but what most humans don’t seem to know is that there’s a bit more to comedy than exaggeration. When you’re telling others about something that happened to you, you need to do more than exaggerate the facts if you want people to laugh: you need to position yourself as the hapless victim, or position someone else in the story as an idiot, or suddenly mention something weird and unexpected, or throw in a fart joke. Your story won’t be funny because it’s true, it’ll be funny because it’s funny!
It’s no real surprise that the people who were best on this series were either the shockingly frank older folk or the genuinely good comedians, people like Judith Lucy, people who can spin a good yarn. If more than 10% of the people involved had been like that, this may have been a watchable series. As it was, it was yet another series involving comedians that’s too hell bent on not alienating the mainstream audience with something as divisive as a gag, meaning people went around hailing its quasi-seriousness as one of its key strengths. You won’t be surprised to read that we disagree with this. In our view this only would have been a good series if it were either a serious, intelligent look at the issues involved, or a non-stop gag fest that just wanted to make us laugh. The middling compromise we ended up getting was, well, agonising.
We Don’t Mean to Brag / We Don’t Mean To Boast…
… but we for one have better things to do than watch The Roast.
We’ve griped enough already about how the ABC has certain kinds of shows they really, really want to have on the air all the time, and guess what? Looks like “News Satire” is one of them. Not content with having pretty much the best one Australian television in 2013 could possibly generate – that’d be Mad as Hell – they’ve decided* to give Charles Firth’s brainchild** The Roast not only another series, but they’ve expanded the episode length to ten minutes.
Hosted by Tom Glasson, The Roast also features Mark Humphries, Clarke Richards, Rachel Corbett and Nich Richardson. These names won’t mean anything to you, but give it time. As the show’s director and head writer, Richardson is responsible for assembling this collection of young writer/performers who have never worked in television before. He assures the ABC it’s all going to turn out fine.
With 150 episodes being produced over the next eight months – over 25 hours of original comedy – The Roast promises to kill more reporters on-screen than any other news show. Even Lateline. Don’t expect interviews out in the field or packaged up vox pops here. Everything is written on the day and recorded in-studio hours before airing. Again, the ABC has been promised this is going to work.
Aside from being an ambitious television venture, The Roast is also a creative development pool for a new generation of Australian comics who are sick of being unemployed in a country famous for its sense of humour.
We’ve discussed The Roast elsewhere, and our opinion hasn’t changed since then. If they can’t make two minutes of comedy work after well over 50 episodes – and we’re not even sure how many episodes of the extremely similar WTF! the team made for GO! beforehand – moving up to ten minutes may not exactly be a cause for celebration.
The real question here is, where do you draw the line and say a show simply isn’t going to get any better? At the moment even on ABC2 The Roast is hardly must-see comedy, and it’s been going long enough to suggest any limitations are those of the creative team rather than the format. But giving comedy more air-time is never a bad thing in our book and who knows? If they keep their obvious “satire” and student revue gags to the first two minutes and use the extra time to branch out, maybe this could work.
Yeah, right. Considering they’ve already been booked in for a 150 episode run (which suggests their employers are perfectly happy with the half-arsed job they’ve been doing), we’re guessing it’ll just be more of the same tortured not-quite-gags and smarmy host smirks, over and over and over and over again. Fingers crossed the pressure drives them insane: it’ll probably be the only way they’ll try something new.
*Actually, it seems The Comedy Channel decided and ABC2 just said “yeah, count us in”.
**as in Firth clutched his head and went “Fake News! Duh!”
Check This Shit Oww-t
We all want to think of each television show that makes it to our screens as an individual work of art, generated by the creative people responsible as a response to the unknowable urges of their hearts. But let’s be honest: in much the same way as your local News Ltd newspaper is going to have at least one grumpy columnist who hates the Labor government, “political correctness” and any form of welfare not directed at people earning $60,000 or more, so too do television stations have various programming niches they want filled by anyone who happens to be handy.
This extends far beyond just news, sports and weather. Channel Ten, for example, has a regular “quality Australian drama” slot, hence in 2013 we get Offspring, Mr & Mrs Murder and Puberty Blues. Seven has had a “middlebrow Aussie drama” slot for well over a decade: remember Always Greener before Packed to the Rafters? And the ABC? Well, it seems they just can’t get enough of their semi-informative quasi-comedy current / consumer affairs shows.
All of which is a long-winded way of letting you know that The Checkout is basically Hungry Beast, but with consumer goods. Wait, or is it The Hamster Wheel, only with consumer goods? Maybe it’s The Gruen Transfer, only without smug advertising arseholes being condescending. Ah, you know what we mean.
It’s all here: flashy graphics, loads of general information you kind of already knew (what, computer printer companies make all their money from selling the ink cartridges and car companies rake it in big time by demanding you only use their garages to have your car serviced, AKA the “razor-and-blade” business model? SAY WHAAAAoh we knew that), specific takedowns of individual products, hosts trying to be earnest while winking at the camera to let you know that you shouldn’t get too worked up about all this outrageous capitalist activity, fake infomercials making fun of infomercials while being perfectly happy to use the infomercial format to get their message across, and clips from big names (providing yet more consumer advice. So yeah, Hungry Beast has risen from its grave and tattooed BRAND POWER across its knuckles.
But is it comedy? Well… kind of? In much the same way as Hungry Beast tried to reinvent news and current affair for a new generation only to realise that particular generation was busy getting all their news and current affairs from the internet, so does The Checkout try to reinvent consumer affairs – something that ACA and Today Tonight actually do moderately well – for the 21st Century. And by “reinvent” we mean “more ‘eye-catching’ flashy graphics, lots of short info-grabs, and jokes”. Consumer affairs is the kind of thing you’d image an ABC audience would be interested in, and appealing to “da yoof” is certainly something the ABC is interested in, so it’s win-win. Right?
Here we get “sketches” where people read out a letter about cat food being all the same (but with flashy graphics!); Julian Morrow asking people to create angry videoes about corporate bungling for “F-U-Tube”; fake ads about baby wipes pointing out that baby wipes are bad for babies; the repeated mentioning of the fact that advertising makes crazy, unlikely claims that we all swallow unthinkingly; the just as repeated mentioning of the fact that companies will re-brand identical products over and over to capture as wide (and as gullible) an audience as possible. Worthy? You bet. Informative? Sure. Funny? Well… kind of?
Jokes about talking to camera and pranks about trying to get a company to adopt a slightly more dodgy product than the ones they’re already selling are Chaser 101. And if you were to think that this fairly straight consumer affairs show feels like a show with around 30% Chaser, 70% Hungry Beast in its blood, we wouldn’t argue with you. Is that value for your entertainment dollar? If you really care about consumer affairs, it’s worth a look. If you’re just looking for a laugh, the numerous references to the wording of various legal statutes and regulations aren’t exactly the dictionary definition of “kak-tastic”. But you do get to hear Julian Morrow get all shouty; you didn’t get that on The Unbelievable Truth.
And one more thing…
In an interview with Wired in 1995 Steve Jobs had this to say about creativity in the tech industry:
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.
In the past 18 years this quote has become quite famous and has been applied to creativity in lots of areas beyond tech. It sprung to mind when we watched the first two episodes of Tractor Monkeys, not because it applied to Tractor Monkeys but because it didn’t.
You could make a fairly strong argument that Tractor Monkeys is just Spicks & Specks, Talkin’ ‘bout Your Generation and maybe The White Room all combined in to one show. And that this is fine because as Steve Jobs pointed out creativity is just putting together lots of existing things to make new things. Except that that’s not true: in TV, combining lots of existing ideas to make a new one usually results in something crap. And it’s probably more a sign of creatives who aren’t out there having diverse experiences than ones who are.
Here’s what Steve Jobs said about television:
When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.
So yeah, we wanted Tractor Monkeys. We virtually asked for it, because lots of Australians watched Spicks & Specks and TBYG in large numbers and someone at the ABC took note of that. Thanks for making our dreams come true, guys!
It’s virtually pointless to actually review Tractor Monkeys, it being a show where some relatively well-known comedians and personalities answer questions based on archive footage whilst trying to put some zingers out there. We found our minds wandering a bit as we watched…this is presumably why the ABC have developed a second screen play-along app, so viewers will get involved in that and not tune out.
Actually, there are two things worth noting about Tractor Monkeys. Firstly, there’s a slightly higher proportion of women on the panel than usual: two out of the six panellists in the first show are women, and three out of six in the second show. Secondly, there’s a bit in the second episode where Sam Simmons starts doing some nostalgic whimsy about swans made from tyres and Dave O’Neil responds in a sarky-sounding way. O’Neil is no stranger to doing nostalgic whimsy himself, so perhaps there’s a turf war going on here? Okay, probably not, but when you’re sitting through a show like this you need to invent your own excitement. Or to Google some Steve Jobs quotes to help you rationalise it all.
You’ve Got To Cover Your Arse Before You Sit On The Fence
Confession: I was quite enthusiastic about Randling when it started last year. I thought it looked like a show with potential that just needed a couple of tweaks; to bed down a little. Of course, having been recorded in one monster block earlier in the year, tweaking and bedding down were never an option
No, this isn’t Melinda Houston’s resignation note. It should be, because the fact that Randling was recorded in one monster block was a matter of public record. But of course it isn’t, because when it comes to writing about Australian television actually doing your job comes a distant second to making sure you “support the local industry”. Which is why we don’t trust this “review” for a second:
Now we have the national broadcaster’s latest foray into the panel game show and, once again, I’m quite enthusiastic but, once again, all eight episodes have already been recorded. What that means for how the show evolves, if at all, remains to be seen.
Seriously? You’ve just told us that the last panel / game show you liked turned out to be shithouse because it didn’t have the time to “bed down a little” then you jump straight into telling us you like this new game / panel show even though you have the exact same reservations and it was recorded in the exact same fashion? You know what this means for how the show evolves because you just told us that shows recorded in “one monster block” don’t evolve, correct? So you’re saying… umm…
Okay, let’s get this straight: this is exactly the same situation as Randling – a show you initially supported but now admit turned out to be crap – only this time you’re… doing the exact same thing? You’re telling us this is a good show but it needs to evolve only you’re saying it won’t evolve so… it’s not a good show? But you’re not saying that so… what are you saying here? Ouch.
[we pick things up after a Bex and a good lie-down]
The review that follows seems to say plenty of positive things about the show, only when you read closer it’s all “this seems like a more straightforward concept…” and “What I’m really waiting to see is…” and “I’d love to see more of that on display as the series progresses…”, all of which push the verdict of whether this is a good show off into the future. Tractor Monkeys only runs for eight weeks: it’d be nice to get some kind of firm ruling before winter.
The overwhelming impression here is of a glowing review – as you’d expect from the Australian media – but dig a little deeper and it’s all arse-covering pure and simple. Houston talked up Randling even though it was shit because that’s what she does with Australian shows. Unfortunately for her, Randling was so obviously shit – and more importantly, was on the air long enough for people to notice it was shit (most shit Australian shows vanish before the audience has time to notice) – that her support of it became, let’s say “problematic”. At least as far as her critical opinion being taken seriously goes.
Hence this new approach, in which she desperately tries to juggle “being supportive” with “not sticking her neck out in the slightest”. If it turns out to be great? Hey, she said it has a “free-wheeling vibe” and “really fires”! And if it’s shit? Don’t blame her, she was “waiting to see how Watts develops as a host”. But is the show any good? Who knows? In a review of a half hour of television that already exists and she has seen in full, Houston’s only willing to commit to “remains to be seen”. Gee, thanks for that.
Someone Left the Cake Out In the Rain
What are we, four episodes into Please Like Me? And it’s not really a comedy at all, is it? It’s yet another one of those ABC “light dramas” where some self-obsessed “funny person” is given the go ahead to make a show pretty much entirely about themselves just so long as there’s some hook the ABC can point to when justifying it as a comedy. With Laid it was “everyone our hero has had sex with dies” – explain to us again how that’s funny, please – with Problems it was “Sam Simmons is strange” – again, not exactly a gut-buster – and with Please Like Me it’s “Josh Thomas is gay”. Wow, who knew the ABC was actively working to make comedies less funny than Laid?
Traditionally sitcoms have fallen into two loose groups: high concept and star vehicles. A Moody Christmas is high concept: anything Chris Lilley does is a star vehicle. Ideally a show would have both, a la Kath & Kim (suburban morons played by established comedy performers) or The Games (behind the scenes at The Olympics through the eyes of Clarke & Dawe), but that would require the ABC actually developing shows so good luck there. These days if no-one’s heard of you, you’d better come up with a good idea; if they have heard of you, it doesn’t matter what your idea is.
But of late, the ABC seem to have lost sight of who an actual “star” is in the world of Australian television. Here’s a clue: it’s not Marieke Hardy. And it sure as hell isn’t Josh Thomas, who was the least well known person on a moderately successful game show made moderately successful almost entirely by being hosted by one of the funniest men currently working in Australia. It’s like if the ABC had announced that, due to his excellent work on Before the Game, they were giving Lehmo his own sitcom. “What’s it going to be about?” people would ask. “Oh, just Lehmo being Lehmo,” would come the sing-song reply, right before a massive bipartisan governmental inquiry-slash-firing-squad into exactly what the fuck they were drinking over there at ABC HQ.
Thomas isn’t a terrible performer by any means, especially if you can stand his bullshit leprechaun accent. But this show is about nothing. It’s not even like he doesn’t already have an established comedy persona to work with: he’s a slightly fey man-child. Give him a job on an oil rig staffed by burly thugs and watch the laughs fly! Yeah, that sounds lame, but “Josh Thomas on an oil rig” is still roughly a ka-zillion times more interesting than “Josh Thomas in a variety of inner city locales looking mildly perplexed.”
Please Like Me is frustrating to watch because there’s a shitload of talent and effort going into this show but because no-one actually bothered to come up with a solid starting point for comedy all that talent and effort is just flailing about the place trying to create something out of nothing. Which is why the episodes are a weird mix of nothing characters standing around endlessly exchanging limp quips and then big dramatic moments happening. Josh’s aunt accepts that he’s gay! A relationship can’t happen because the guy’s bitchy ex is pregnant! Guess what: before the end of the series, someone dies! Aren’t we usually given reasons to care about the characters in a show before all this stuff happens?
Making matters worse, it feels like making a show this shit was the plan all along. As one of our commentators pointed out, originally this was meant to be a show about Thomas’ non-gay life, then he realised he was gay:
Thomas said the initial two-page treatment he submitted four years ago to obtain funding contained a heterosexual central character named Josh and his girlfriend Claire.
However, in between the funding pitch and making Please Like Me, which premieres on the ABC on February 28, his life changed and so did the storyline.
Thomas, 25, realised he was gay and inadvertently the premise of the series changed and Claire was bumped from a main character to a bit part.
“I started pitching this four years ago and it was a two-page document,” Thomas tells AAP.
“Four years ago I was straight as well… I had a girlfriend.
“Four years ago Claire was in the show a lot more.
“It kind of, quite by accident, tricked the ABC into funding this gay show.”
So what, four years ago he pitched a series to the ABC that was even more bland and boring than this one? And they gave it the go-ahead? Say whaaaaa?
Okay, more likely – considering he was an unknown 21 year-old at the time with zero television experience – he started pitching four years ago and they gave it the nod a year or two later after Talkin’ ’bout Your Generation had raised his profile. But still: the “whoops, I’m gay” angle is literally the only thing going on here that’s remotely new or interesting, and it happened by accident.
Josh Thomas made a series that is only interesting by mistake.
Somehow, we’re not that surprised.
Awards and renewals
The nominees for this year’s Logies have been announced and it’s not all bad for comedy. Okay, it’s not a complete disaster for comedy. Yes, the Most Popular categories are all Adam Hills, The Project, Hamish & Andy and shows made by Zapruder’s (don’t worry, there’s no nomination for Randling), but the Most Outstanding Light Entertainment Program category at least has the decency to include Shaun Micallef’s Mad As Hell and The Hamster Wheel.
Mad As Hell and The Hamster Wheel both fared well in the 2012 Australian Tumbleweed Awards, with Mad As Hell winning both Best New Comedy and Best Comedy. But whether the industry jury which decides the Most Outstanding Logies agrees with the Tumblies voters or plumps for The X Factor remains to be seen.
Incidentally, have you ever wondered who’s actually on the Logies jury? So have we. A quick Google reveals…well…not very much. Although we did find this on The Border Mail:
Eleven of the awards are “most outstanding” peer-voted awards; that is, they are voted by juries of television industry peers such as actors, writers and producers.
We also found the LinkedIn profiles of a producer and a director, who either were or had been on the Logies jury. Both of these individuals have enjoyed long careers in Australian television but neither seemed to have worked in comedy or entertainment, so exactly who will be judging the Most Outstanding Light Entertainment Program Logie remains a mystery. But fingers crossed they’re Micallef fans, obviously.
One show not receiving a Logies nomination, but apparently getting a second series and being pitched in the US is A Moody Christmas. It’s hard to imagine where this show can go if it follows the same format of six consecutive Christmases, but according to TV Tonight:
Jungleboys are planning to shoot another series later this year, following its success with audiences late last year.
That’s presumably success with audiences who don’t care too much about whether a show’s funny or interesting, because even if you judge A Moody Christmas as a “light family drama” you’re going to be disappointed.
Anyway, to get back to our original point, we hate to do our old gear on you but this bit from our original review of A Moody Christmas seems relevant as to why we don’t think a second series would be a good idea:
…the premise – we check back in with the Moody’s every Christmas – doesn’t give us a lot of hope there. It’s a good premise, but it really needs much stronger characters to work if it’s going to keep approaching things realistically. Christmas gatherings are a time when people fall into a rut, playing a role within their family, and from the first episode none of the one-note characters (the sister: I’m pregnant! Next week: we have to have sex so I can get pregnant!) or the roles they play are going to sustain six weeks of comedy unless they seriously go off the rails.
But hey, in a world where Laid might be coming back for a third outing it would probably be more surprising if A Moody Christmas didn’t than if it did!
Back in the Doghouse
We were recently asked on twitter (by one Ducks McOntos) what we thought of this:
The Oxford dictionary defines ”influence” as the capacity to have an affect on the character, development or behaviour of someone or something. In television, that translates into only one thing: having a hand in the most successful programs.
Yet influence is more complex than mere power. Chief executives have power by virtue of their office. Programmers have it by virtue of their control over the schedule.
The Guide canvassed a panel of experts – critics, executives and industry insiders – to compile the list of the 50 Most Influential People in Television.
This draws together the power partnerships, the deal-makers behind the deals and the new generation of rising stars.
Seriously Fairfax? You’re starting off articles with “The Oxford dictionary defines…” now? We look forward to future articles written by your crack team of high school debaters and regional sales assistants.
But in this case our attention wasn’t directed towards the usual self-serving Fairfax waffle – FYI, putting out a “power” list doesn’t make it look like you have the power to say who’s powerful; quite the opposite in fact – but the fact that, for what is probably the first time in a long time, Working Dog – you know, the production house run by those guys who once made Frontline and some other less-impressive but more popular shows – isn’t on the list.
On one level, this isn’t at all surprising. These lists don’t actually measure real power, after all, just the perception of power gathered by a bunch of outsiders and people on the make. Working Dog don’t have any shows on air at the moment; of course they’re less powerful than Andrew Denton, who had thirteen hours worth of programming on ABC1 last year. Hey, remember this bit at the very start of the article?
The Oxford dictionary defines ”influence” as the capacity to have an affect on the character, development or behaviour of someone or something. In television, that translates into only one thing: having a hand in the most successful programs
Explain to us again what the creator and host of Randling is doing on this list?
That’s the problem with these lists: you need zero actual insight into television to do one. List all the obvious decision makers at the networks, add in the production companies that are “hot” right now, a bunch of writer-actors – seriously, even we did a double-take at seeing Brendan “did anyone actually read my novel?” Cowell listed here (for one thing, that Save Your Legs film he wrote and starred in really, uh, failed to set the box office on fire) – plus a few other creatives to flatter your readers that television in Australia is a real art form and not a veracious money-suckhole, and away you go.
A real-world top fifty power list would just list the top fifty executives at the various networks plus their mates (hey, maybe Denton does deserve to be on this list); another more useful version of this list would take into account the popularity of the shows being made. You’re going to list Adam Zwar but not Hamish & Andy? Which lot are making the shows people actually watch again?
So all Working Dog’s absence from this list means is that they aren’t currently making television – apart from another series of Audrey’s Kitchen for the ABC – right this second. Could they wander into Ten with a new idea for a series and get it green-lit in five minutes? We’re going to go with yes, considering that two of their earlier shows – The Panel and Thank God You’re Here – basically reshaped Australian television in a way that Randling, or anything else Denton’s ever created, didn’t. Last time we checked, that’s real power.
(we’ll shut up about Randling now)
But… okay, let’s be honest: Working Dog haven’t been rocking the television world of late. Pictures of You happened. Santo Sam & Ed’s Sports Fever was a great show that no-one watched. Those 2 minute episodes of Audrey’s Kitchen seem to have been a bit of a hit for the ABC, but they go two minutes. Otherwise, as far as television goes, their cupboard’s looking pretty bare. Guess what? That’s a good thing.
When Working Dog are making hit Australian television shows, they’re making the kind of bland, FM-radio-esque shows that become hits on Australian television. We’re not going to say anyone can do that kind of thing – obviously it’s a serious challenge – but other people can and do manage it. But when Working Dog aren’t making hit shows, they don’t make The Rennovators or Being Lara Bingle; they make comedy. And they’re still pretty good at that.
For a two minute show, Audrey’s Kitchen was a lot funnier than most of the ABC’s half hour comedies. The Santo, Sam & Ed postcast started out strong and gets better each week. The Working Dog website here has been coughing up the occasional manifesto from Tom Gleisner’s cricketing character Warrick Todd, and while we probably don’t need to see another book-length Todd outing, as with Audrey’s Kitchen he can get a lot done in a small space.
This would usually be the point where we’d start with our moaning about how Working Dog’s style of comedy is no longer fashionable amongst the television executives who populate the Power Lists, and how if these guys can’t get a television showcase for their comedy up and running what hope do newcomers wanting to follow in their ramshackle yet clued-in footsteps have? But for once we’re going to be happy with what we’ve got: Working Dog, one of the legends of Australian comedy, are still making comedy that’s actually funny.
If Fairfax can’t see that, they deserve all the “comedy” from the influential Rick Kalowksi – remember, he’s “one of Australia’s most prolific comedy writers, with credits including Comedy Inc. and Double Take” – that comes their way.