Australian Tumbleweeds
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
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.