Australian Tumbleweeds
Well, It’s A Good Thing We’ve Never Liked Prank Calls Then
Earlier this week we were discussing whether to bother with a post on the prank call 2DayFM radio presenters Mel Greig and Michael Christian made to the hospital where the Duchess of Cambridge, AKA Kate Middleton, was being treated for morning sickness. We decided against it because prank calls are crap, 2Day FM is the sluice tray at the bottom of the commercial radio slops bucket and what little Australian media interest the call attracted had basically fizzled out by the end of the day anyway.
With the death – a reported suicide – of the nurse who was the initial victim of their prank, the situation has changed a little. For one thing, this article on Fairfax’s website now seems a little dubious:
AS PRANKS go, it has caused offence right to the very top. The Queen, Prince Charles, Prince William, sections of the British public, the British press, royalists across the world and even a bewildered corgi or two.
But, in Australia, those who are well practised in this art of japery said on Thursday that the British outrage over the phone call made by the 2DayFM radio presenters Mel Greig and Michael Christian to the private hospital where the Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton, was being treated for morning sickness, is what makes it so good
Actually, let’s quote a bit more in case it gets taken down:
Asked about the royal stunt, Julian Morrow, from The Chaser, said on Thursday: ”It’s funny and I think Austereo was fairly silly to apologise.
”Prank calls are really legitimate and there’s plenty of really good ones. There’s a particular skill you apply in each case … they got through, it worked, that’s fine.”
Even radio presenters from rival stations were praising the duo’s stunt during the week. Michael ”Wippa” Wipfli, from the Fitzy and Wippa show on NovaFM (owned by DMG Australia), said Greig and Christian deserved credit for the fuss their prank has caused.
”Three cheers to them, I think they’ve done an amazing job … the joke went really well, they should have aired it,” he said on Thursday. ”Anyone that doesn’t laugh at this story, and works in the media, is just angry they didn’t do it themselves. They’ve done well, I take my hat off to them.”
Wippa, who performs regular radio pranks with his co-star Fitzy (including impersonating Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe in calls to the Chateau Marmont) said the 2DayFM call would have initially been about amusing listeners with funny voices and corgi sounds but the comedic approach would have changed dramatically when the nurse went along with it.
”It’s one of those things where the joke paid off,” Wippa said. ”The prank was there, they conned the person. They managed to convince a person that it was actually the Queen. The gag is they would be in disbelief that they actually managed to convince someone.”
Despite the official public apology from Austereo, Greig and Christian were said to be privately delighted by the global reaction. Their names (and the 2DayFM brand) have made headlines across the world, particularly in Britain, where the world’s most notorious tabloids have declared their outrage.
Yeah, in hindsight that probably doesn’t look good.
The question that will no doubt be asked in the coming days and weeks is, are pranks legitimate comedy if this is the result? Not that that’ll be the right question to ask: at this early stage we have no idea how cause and effect has worked in this case. Was she being hounded by the British Tabloids? Was she under pressure at her job? What was her prior mental state? What was going on in her personal life? At the moment we – and by “we” we mean “the kind of media commentators who rush to pass judgment on this kind of story” – have no real idea past various unsubstantiated news reports. We may never know: for one thing, it’s hardly likely her employers – or her co-workers, or the royal family, or anyone else – will now openly admit they put pressure on her in the wake of her falling for this prank.
Usually at this stage we’d pause to consider what effect this tragedy will have on the world of comedy. There are always forces – shadowy, sinister, no-fun forces – looking for a way to whip up outrage against comedians as a way to exert their own moral authority. But despite the cement-mixer loud volume of the initial hand-wringing, in this case it’s already perfectly clear what effect it will have on comedy (or more realistically, “comedy”, what with of-course-it’s-not-bullying pranks being pretty dubious laugh-getters in our book): bugger all.
2Day FM has been playing shit pranks on their listeners – insert joke about Kyle Sandilands’ entire career here – for years now, and nothing thrown at them so far seems to have dented their desire to give the bottom of the barrel a right seeing to. Remember all the outrage when they interviewed and named a 14 year old rape victim live to air? Remember how that changed everyt… oh right, nothing at all changed. They’ll make the appropriate noises, throw the presenters under a bus (while presumably the producers only get a rap on the knuckles and management not even that), dial it down a little over the non-ratings period and come back next year like nothing ever happened. Like nobody even died.
We don’t cover “comedy” on commercial radio here much any more, mostly because commercial radio comedy has – is there a stronger word than “devolved”? – into a slurry of giveaways, shouting and naked abuse. Which, if the ratings are any guide, some people seem to enjoy. Whether the end result is particularly healthy for those involved – this is hardly the first suicide linked to the Austereo network, after all – clearly those cranking the handle at this particular sausage factory aren’t all that concerned.
Vale All And Sundry Chaser Projects
In some circles it’s become increasingly fashionable to suggest that The Chaser’s best years are behind them. Yes, we have boring friends. Also: say what now? When exactly was this golden age of The Chaser meant to have taken place exactly? Those two years when The Chaser’s War on Everything threw increasingly desperate and pointless pranks on screen week after week as it staggered towards a finish line that must have seemed a thousand years away? The controversy-marred third season, which succeeded only in whipping the tabloid press into a frenzy over a sketch that felt half-baked at best? The first season of The Hamster Wheel, which in hindsight was a show unsure of itself and best described as “mildly uneven”? Or those election specials where they snuggled up to various politicians and gave the vile turds who seek to run every aspect of our lives the opportunity to pretend they’re in on the joke? Run for the shadows, run for the shadows, run for the shadows in these golden years.
So let’s just say we reckon The Chaser of 2012 is at least as good as it’s ever been. While The Unbelievable Truth was yet another comedy panel show, it was at least a comedy panel show that didn’t stink up the joint. Seven showing back-to-back episodes was too much of a moderately good thing and we’re not going to pretend it didn’t have its fair share of dud segments (hey look it’s Scott Dooley) but unlike just about every other Australian comedy panel show in recent memory, laughs were had.
It was great to see The Umbilical Brothers on non-children’s television, Kitty Flanagan is always good value, the Chaser members who appeared as guests held their own, Sam Simmons’ style of comedy actually worked for us for once, and overall – due perhaps to coming out of Sydney, and thus being unable to fall back on the increasingly worn-out Melbourne comedy regulars – the show felt a little fresher than we expected going in to what was, after all, yet another comedy panel show.
Part of the credit has to go to host Craig Reucassel, surprisingly enough*. It’s taken The Chaser team a very long time indeed to actually get comfortable in front of the camera – and by comfortable we mean “comfortable enough to relax and have fun rather than just say the words and move on” – but here he actually seemed like a host willing to chip in and try and few jokes of his own to move things along. Sure, the whole thing could have been tightly scripted, but it looked a lot more relaxed than the usual Chaser deal, and that’s what we picked up on.
Over at The Hamster Wheel, our long held dream of a series that was nothing but the “What Have We Learnt From Current Affairs” segments from The Chaser’s War on Everything has finally come true. Frankly, the fewer traditional sketches they do the happier we are – for whatever reason, their sketches and fake news bits rarely fire, though they had a few winners – and this year they largely integrated that side of things into longer segments tackling one or another area of Australia’s rubbish media. And it worked! Largely because Australia’s media really is rubbish and making fun of them is both completely justified and a well that never runs dry, but generally they had good points to make and they made them well. Oh yeah, and it was funny sometimes too.
[something else that worked was their increasing use of bit players – we’re guessing they were their research team, as we recognised Lee Zachariah from The Bazura Project on camera every episode and he was listed in the credits as a researcher. Having non-core Chaser people turning up in the short one-joke cutaways that they increasingly peppered their segments with opened up the show and provided some much needed front-of-camera variety. And one of them was a woman!]
The other biggish change was they picked up the pace. A lot. How do we put this tactfully? For a variety of reasons (they’re not professional actors, for one) The Chaser are a team that works best when they’re putting a lot of material out there, not when they try to draw comedy out of a few jokes. Appearing in a year when Shaun Micallef – who can (together with his team) get 90 seconds of solid comedy out of one idea – this was more important than ever, and The Chaser really stepped up and fired those jokes out there at a rapid rate.
In previous years we’ve had our usual whinge about The Chaser doing the same thing over and over and over without ever stretching themselves or surprising us. After this year, if they wanted to do a ten week series of The Hamster Wheel (2012 version) for the next decade or so we’d be happy with that. They finally seem to have figured out what it is that they do best, and they’ve decided to do the best job of it that they can. We’re still waiting on that sitcom from them, mind you…
*As The Chaser’s frontmen, Chris Taylor and Craig Reucassel haven’t always brought the energy with them. Where Andrew Hansen has displayed flashes of dry wit, Chaz has felt like a tightly wound comedy machine and Julian Morrow has been “the brains” of the organisation, Chris and Craig have seemed a little too much like the guys who are there simply because it’s a solid gig. Maybe that decade of hosting has finally rubbed off, but Reucassel on The Unbelievable Truth and the duo (together with Morrow) on The Hamster Wheel finally came across as guys actually having fun in their jobs. Considering The Chaser has never really traded on its members personalities – they’ve always just been “themselves” in front of the character rather than playing larger-than-life comedy characters, so they’ve had nothing to hide behind – this newfound ease is a big leap forward.
[Agree that The Chaser had a good year? Think we’ve lost the plot and the “Chaser Lads” should be put out to pasture? The nominations for the 2012 Australian Tumbleweeds Awards are now open – our online nominations form can be found here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/tumblies2012noms]
Australian Tumbleweeds Awards 2012 – Nominations now open
Nominations are now open in the Australian Tumbleweeds Awards 2012. Now in its 7th year, the Australian Tumbleweeds hails the failures (and occasional successes) of this nation’s comic talent.
Your online nominations form can be found here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/tumblies2012noms
This year we have decided to reduce the number of public-voted awards, and to introduce a new Special Awards category for exceptional under-achievement in the field of Australian comedy. You may suggest Special Awards or Special Award recipients as part of the nominations process. The Special Awards are in the gift of the judges and their decisions are final.
You have until midnight on Friday 14th December to nominate. Please make no more than 4 nominations in each category. Full rules and instructions can be found with the nominations form.
Voting will start on Sunday 16th December and close on Sunday 6th January 2013, with the winners announced on Australia Day.
As always, the official Twitter hashtag is #tumblies.
Two Times The Love!
While we’d like to thank everyone who sent in cards and letters over the last few hours congratulating us on taking over the role of Head of Comedy at the ABC, bad news: we didn’t get the gig. It’s an easy mistake to make though, considering this was one of the main planks of today’s announcement of the ABC’s line-up for 2013:
we welcome the return of Australia’s favourite music quiz show SPICKS AND SPECKS – but it will be no cover version
Remember when we said this back in March?
1): Bring back Spicks & Specks. Okay, the horse has pretty much bolted here. So why the hell didn’t they keep the show going and just change the host? It was extremely obvious from the second In Gordon Street wasn’t a massive car crash that Hills was going to bail on S&S. Fair enough too, he’d clearly had enough. But let’s be honest: unless you are a relative or close personal friend of Hills, he’s not exactly irreplaceable. He’s a moderately handsome host who can come out with ABC-level quips. Two words: Will Fucking Anderson. Or pretty much anyone else, including your local postie. Yes, he was good at his job. His job was hosting a musical quiz show. IT’S NOT THAT HARD. Just look at the UK, where they have loads of this kind of long-running show and think nothing of swapping out hosts when need be.
We’re not saying an idiot could do a better job of running comedy at the ABC at the moment. We’re saying that we’re idiots and even we could see the ABC had fucked up big time by kicking Spicks and Specks to the curb when they did. So we guess we might possibly be saying that idiots could maybe do a better job than the current crew. Ouch.
Then there’s this, which is a direct quote from the fancy big book proper TV journalists were sent today outlining the future of the national broadcaster:
“…drum roll… Chris Lilley is back… but if we told you any more, we’d have to kill you”
You don’t have to be a moron to recognise that line as the stock-standard “we don’t know either” cover-up. You also don’t have to be a moron to know that Chris Lilley has not made a show and brought it to air in under a year since 2005. So we’re going to call it: whatever Chris Lilley is working on will not be seen on Australian televisions in 2013. But thanks for keeping us posted.
Otherwise the comedy line-up is pretty much what you’d expect: all the high profile stuff looks crap, all the decent stuff has a blanket thrown over it. In the former pile we have The Agony Guide to Life – yes, Agony Uncles / Aunts is getting another go, which shows you just how disastrous this year was for the ABC – Joe Hildebrand is back with… something, they don’t even have a name for it because presumably RACE-BAITING was taken… the pointless “comedy” gameshow Tractor Monkeys looks set to follow firmly in the footsteps of every single other ABC comedy gameshow not called Spicks and Specks, It’s a Date is Peter Helliar’s chance to do for romantic comedy on television what he did for it on the big screen with I Love You Too (did we ever mention how that films co-star Peter “Game of Thrones” Dinklage had Helliar take out all the dwarf-tossing jokes before he agreed to do it?) and everything else is reality programming we’ll probably end up covering because there’s fuck-all else on for months at a time.
Oh, in Chaser news, there’s this:
The Chaser’s Julian Morrow and Craig Reucassel will give consumer affairs an extreme makeover in THE CHECK OUT
But we also think there’s a pretty good chance The Hamster Wheel or something like it will return in the second half of the year – after all, they didn’t announce its return at the 2012 launch either.
On the positive side, Gristmill’s Upper Middle Bogan looks promising and we’re pretty happy there’s going to be a second season of Twentysomething. We’re also happy but also somewhat puzzled that there is no mention anywhere here of Josh Thomas’ long-promised sitcom Please Like Me, first announced at the ABC’s 2012 launch. Guess they’re keeping it under wraps for a surprise attack later in the year.
Shows that are coming back include Adam Hills’ talk show, at least two separate flavours of Gruen (Nation and Planet), Audrey’s Kitchen – which is a pleasant surprise, as it was one of the stronger efforts from Working Dog in recent years – and Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell. Which is as good a segue as any into the other big announcement in Australian television today…
*
A lot of people have asked us over the last year or two why we bother reporting on anything that appears in The Age‘s television supplement, The Green Guide. We do so because while in theory they’re part of a large and credible news outlet worthy of our attention and respect, in actuality they have no idea what the hell they’re doing. For example, this week they released their annual “Best and Worst of the Year in Television” issue and hooly dooly is it a five star shocker.
They didn’t have separate categories for drama and comedy* – their best show of the year is Homeland, which seems to suggest they have extremely short attention spans and / or realised they couldn’t not give the number one slot to a show airing on commercial television even though Australian commercial television in 2012 basically took out ads saying “we just don’t give a fuck about quality” – so oh ho ho ho what classic show do you think they reckon was the best Australian comedy in 2012? Coming in at number eight:
Agony Aunts / Uncles (ABC1). Superbly cast, terrifically edited local series that provided frank, funny answers from a diverse group of men and woman. Has made stars – and landed a heap of work – for it’s breakout participants.
Putting aside the fact that the Green Guide staff thought that in 2012 there were only seven shows better than Agony Uncles / Aunts on Australian television – which is not exactly a decision designed to engender trust in their mental facilities- every single point they make is provably wrong just by watching five minutes of the actual show. Here, we’ve made a list:
* “Superbly cast”… with a whole bunch of creator / host Adam’s Zwar’s comedy mates up to and including his own wife. If you weren’t passably attractive and under 40 you’d better be a big name or talk a lot of crazy sex stuff or you were nowhere to be seen.
*”Terrifically edited”… actually, the rapid-fire editing and constant cutting between talking heads did a really good job of making the whole show feel like a shallow bowl of plain mush. It was a collection of soundbites, not a narrative.
*”Diverse group of men and woman”… see “superbly cast”, only while you could argue about the quality of the cast (such things being subjective), calling the B-list comedians and Sunday paper talking heads here “diverse” is a bigger joke than any of the ones the guests cracked.
*”Has made stars – and landed a heap of work”… for Lawrence Mooney.
(not that their love of the show was really all that surprising – it was basically the same soft opinion / relationship material The Age runs all weekend every weekend)
After that, we pretty much gave up on the rest of the list (even if The Hamster Wheel came in at number nine because “Nobody comes close to doing what the Chaser lads do on Australian TV”… apart from Media Watch, the Gruen shows and Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell, of course), but we did keep on skimming just to see whether our current front runner for fave comedy of the year Mad as Hell placed, just so we knew where we stood with this list. Surprise! Turns out our position regarding this list wasn’t so much standing as sitting on the toilet looking for something to wipe our backsides with:
20. Why we’re torn about Shaun Micallef Is Mad As Hell (ABC1)
For: Federal politics has been certifiably bonkers this year – bleak, joyless farce. But for 10 weeks, at the apex of the carbon tax battle, Shaun Micallef’s wilfully perverse news satire provided a weekly dose of pleasurably silly mockery. There were always incidental pleasures in the characters’ names (especially Veronica Milsom as reporter Xanthe Kalamazoo), but highlights played on headlines: Francis Greenslade’s softly menacing union official; Tony Abbott’s ”national hairnet tour”; the dance choreographed to Craig Emerson’s ”Whyalla Wipeout”. I loved best the jokes at the expense of Fairfax and the future of print – especially the skit where the fish-and-chip shop wraps the flake in an iPad.
Against: The people spoke and the ABC listened, which is how Shaun Micallef was given a chance to flex his muscles as a writer, performer and avowed news junkie in this eponymous current-affairs satire. But anyone who saw his earlier go-around on SBS, the inventive, cheap and cheerful Newstopia, quickly realised that a polished production and overplayed gesturing didn’t value-add. There were some bright spots – enough, evidently, for a return season next year.
That was 20 in their Worst Shows of 2012 list. Seriously. And the worst thing they seem to be able to say about it is that it’s kind of like Newstopia, which they seem to have enjoyed. No-one tell them The Footy Show is the same old shit year in year out, their heads might explode.
Now, we know full well these lists are largely about shit-stirring – or “trolling”, as the people on Today Tonight like to call it. We know the point is to say controversial things to get people paying attention to you. And we have no problem with that when it’s done online, or when it’s a columnist speaking their mind. But when a supposedly reputable source of television coverage – a place people are meant to be able to go to for reviews of television shows that will give them a serious idea of what the writer thinks is worthwhile viewing – tries to pull off the kind of wacked-out shit that this list does (AGONY UNCLES / AUNTS WAS THE BEST AUSTRALIAN COMEDY SHOW OF 2012 EVERYONE!!), all we hear is the sounds of them flushing the shredded remains of their credibility down the toilet.
If the Green Guide wants to start basing its approach around saying controversial / bizarre / hilarious shit to get attention, it’s going to have to become a lot more entertaining. Because as it stands, it’s not smart or funny enough to stand as a decent read on its merits and it sure as shit can’t be taken seriously as a source of quality reviewing. Who would have guessed the days when Marieke “I made a completely superfluous second series of Laid and it didn’t make the worst shows of the year even though it rated worse than Randling” Hardy would give glowing reviews of shows on the ABC while actually working for the ABC would seem like a golden age?
*they did have a sidebar complaining about the overall lack of Australian comedy on television this year, seemingly unaware that it was actually one of the better years for Australian television comedy – in quantity if not quality. Guess what they meant to say was “Any year without a series by Chris Lilley doesn’t count”.
Podcast into the wilderness
We’ll say this upfront, our punny little title for this blog post is unfair. The fact that Santo, Sam and Ed (that’s Cilauro, Pang and Kavalee) are now podcasting (subscribe with iTunes or with RSS), as opposed to being on Channel 7 or SBS or radio, isn’t because they’ve been banished for being crap, it’s because broadcasters and audiences are crap. Santo, Sam and Ed are merely following in the footsteps of The Sweetest Plum and countless others who’ve made good comedy shows that didn’t rate with whatever demographics are important. It’s a massive shame they got the chop, but at least we the audience still get to hear them on our iPods.
The Santo, Sam and Ed podcast, the first episode of which was recorded on Friday and uploaded yesterday, is, as you’d expect, 50 minutes of amusing chat. Surprisingly the show is less sports-focused than you might expect, with about half the episode looking at topical matters in the worlds of politics, current affairs and show business. Tom Gleisner, who joined Santo and Sam in their London 2012 Olympics show for Triple M Melbourne, The Rush Hour – Going For Gold, was also involved for part of the podcast and he’ll no doubt make appearances in future episodes.
After just one episode the format for this show is far from settled upon, apart from that it’ll be weekly, but given the make-up of the team it’s likely there’ll be appearances from people like Rob Sitch, as well as the odd sketch. A return of Tom’s quiz from The Rush Hour – Going For Gold would be a good idea too. And with comedy pretty much winding down (nominations in the Australian Tumbleweeds Awards 2012 will start soon!), it’s nice to have something to look forward to over summer – bring it on!
Hilarious Joke About How Sam Simmons Has Problems.
A little over two years ago now Sam Simmons briefly followed our page on Facebook. He made two comments on posts having a go at his work – “Wow you are so boring! Learn a new tune.” and “Bullllllshiiiiittttt” – and then asked us to stop harassing him, unaware that the problem was that he had chosen to follow us and so was receiving updates every time we made a new post. Soon after we explained this he unfollowed us, and we decided that he actually had a reasonable point: we didn’t like his work, so why keep on going on about it? His television career was seemingly over after jTV ended and his spin-off The Urban Monkey failed to make any kind of impact, so constantly bringing him up merely to hang shit on him seemed kind of petty. Our last post that examined his work in any depth was back at the start of 2010; since then we’ve limited our coverage to noting his (often funny) presence on various panel shows. Mostly because as far as television was concerned there wasn’t anything else to cover.
But now, all that’s changed! As this article reveals, Simmons has a new comedy series – Problems – starting on the ABC and man, has he thrown the gauntlet down or what:
”The first episode is really f—ing out there,” he says. ”It’s anarchic, subversive and dark. Lazy journalists are going to say, ‘It’s like The Mighty Boosh,’ but it’s nothing like the f—ing Mighty Boosh. That’s what they’ll write, though, because we can’t get our head around absurdism in this country.”
Because, you know, The Goodies was realistic comedy in the vein of When Harry Met Sally. And Shaun Micallef’s career has really struggled these last few years thanks to Australia’s complete inability to “get our head around absurdism”. What the fuck is Simmons talking about?
Tempting as it is to point out that simply calling some random shit “absurdist comedy” doesn’t make it so and an audiences’ failure to laugh at your work doesn’t mean they don’t get it, that can wait. Let’s instead look at the very first sketch in the very first episode of a show that, in Simmons own words, “is really f—ing out there”:
Lawrence Mooney: “Watched the sheepdog trials last night. Smart dogs.”
Anthony Morgan: “Yeah, I had one of them a few years back.”
LM: “Good dog?”
AM: “Best dog I ever had.”
LM: “Where is it now?”
AM: “Shot it.”
LM: “Aww”
AM: “Had to.”
LM: “Parvo?”
AM: “Nah, I was going out”.
Apart from the quality of the performers, we’re going to go out on a limb here and suggest there is nothing here you couldn’t have seen on a random episode of Comedy Inc: The Late Shift. Now, maybe Simmons – who is the star and wrote most of his own material, though the series is directed by “Mr Everywhere” Trent O’Donnell and has a team of writers led by Declan Fay – wanted to ease audiences into his “really f—ing out there” show with a fairly traditional gag. Make that a really traditional gag. Make that a gag you could see on Red Faces.
Surprisingly, only not really – our point of attack is that Simmons has claimed one thing for his show and delivered another, not that he’s delivered a bad comedy scene – we didn’t mind that bit. And as the episode goes on it becomes clear that Morgan and Mooney are easily the best things going on here. Largely because they’re making fun of actual stuff rather than just repeating phrases over and over again in different voices in the hope that comedy will magically spring forth. Simmons is keeping that gold all to himself.
When Morgan says later on in the episode that Mick Jagger is “not a fictional Australian’s arsehole”, it’s not a random comment: it’s the punchline to a comedy conversation that started with a decent idea (how many Australians do you have to hate to become un-Australian) then built on it (do fictional Australians count) with funny examples (I don’t hate Ned Kelly, I hate the legend of Ned Kelly) and comedy confusion (Mick Jagger only played Ned Kelly in a notoriously bad 70s film) before reaching the aforementioned punchline. Meanwhile, Simmons is playing a quiz show host offering as a prize a “sexual trout”, which largely involves him acting out sticking a fake fish up his arse. Though the bit where he sticks the fish head over his groin and calls it a cod piece was almost funny.
Onto the next sketch, which turns out to be the backbone of the episode: Sam Simmons plays “Sam”, a guy who likes tacos too much. He makes tacos, eats one, then spits it up because they changed the recipe.Yeah, this is more like it. Like pretty much everything Sam Simmons has ever written, this contains the potential for comedy then completely throws it out the window because why write a joke when you can have fake footage of a bear trying to catch hot dogs in a river on a TV set in the background. Why write jokes, people? Jokes aren’t “subversive”. Making people laugh isn’t “dark”. Being funny isn’t “really f–king out there”.
Not that Simmons doesn’t know his stuff: “Sam” stands up, a coin falls out of his pocket and rolls down the back of the couch and hey presto, new sketch about the moths who live in his couch. It’s a smooth transition. Obviously, they’re people in moth costumes: slightly less obviously, this joke (or “joke”) was done in the previous sketch, where Sam’s cat was played by an actor in a cat suit.
Having people dressed up as animals is hardly original even in Australia in the last few years -*cough Wilfred cough* – but nor is it common enough for it to pass as just an unremarkable part of the background. To work as comedy, either this is going to be part of the landscape of the show – it’s a show about animals where the animals are played by people a la Wilfred – or it’s a once-off joke. Doing it twice in two back-to-back sketches looks like the work of someone who thinks a): people dressed up as animals is automatically funny and b): doesn’t have a whole lot of other ideas.
There’s a strand of comedy variously known as “monkey whimsy” or “animal whimsy” in which a comedian bereft of jokes or insight tries to get the laughs started by peppering things with wacky references to silly animals. You know why Simmons said that Australian reviewers would compare Problems to The Mighty Boosh? Neither do we. But it could be because Boosh star Noel Fielding is one of the prime exponents of “animal whimsy” and Simmons does seem to find animals hilarious.
[Simmons, a former zookeeper who started out on Fox FM as “the animal guy”, previously had a television series titled The Urban Monkey. Stage shows include Tales From The Erotic Cat and Where Can I Win A Bear Around Here. To be fair, he’s dialed back the animal titles in recent years, though he does seem to have animal ears and paws in the poster for his latest live show, About the Weather.]
The joke with the moths turns out to be a moderately “realistic” depiction of a crumbling marriage, only they’re, you know, moths. Sketch-wise they get a couple of turns, Simmons as the crap quiz show host comes back a few times – making the “it’s obvious what the real answer is after all these clues but sorry, the card says something completely different” joke (made famous by the “Moops” Trivial Pursuit answer in Seinfeld) twice in the same episode – there’s a repeated sketch about “Ultra Phil” in which an intentionally shit song about “Ultra Phil” is sung while a regular guy tries to get work done in his office, a fake ad where a woman who doesn’t remember being trampled by a police horse sets up a video portrait business (this sketch was kind of okay, but suffered from having the same tone as everything else in the show) and a supermarket loudspeaker says hilariously wrong things about a dead old lady in aisle three and a wild animal attacking people on the second level. Did we say hilariously? Predictably. We meant predictably.
Problems has a lot of problems, but the show’s biggest one is that everything bar the old guys is pitched at the exact same level of random LOL wacky. Running throughout the episode are cutaway gags that are basically a shot of a person in a situation while the voiceover says stuff like “Meanwhile in Freemantle, Glenn is learning to clap. He’s trying his best” (an old guy trying to clap and failing), “Meanwhile in [somewhere], Juliet has discovered that some babies are wankers” (over a woman holding a baby),”Meanwhile in Bunbry, Aflie has lost $400 on the skill-tester. He really wanted the bear” (man using skill-tester), “Meanwhile in Preston, Alex can’t find his backpack anywhere” (Alex is a schoolkid running in circles because his backpack is on his back). On a completely different show, these short snapshots could be a welcome change of pace. On this show, they’re just even more of more of the same.
Problems is not a sketch show on a theme because there is no theme past “random shit is wacky shit”. Sam’s obsession with tacos doesn’t say anything about anything past Simmons’ belief that repeating “especious secreto” over and over and over – sometimes whispered, sometimes shouted – is funny. Apart from a suburban setting that is largely set decoration, there’s no sense here that the show is trying to say anything about anything. At its most basic – and this kind of random wacky shit is pretty basic – comedy works because it’s unexpected. Random shit works because you don’t see it coming. A 27 minute sketch show that’s all random shit pitched at the exact same note – apart from the aforementioned old buggers – is pretty much the definition of “expected”.
Rather than insult Sam Simmons by comparing his show to The Mighty Boosh, let’s make a comparison that seems to be slightly more relevant: UK comedian Chris Morris’ 2000 sketch show Jam. Jam was “dark” and “subversive” and “really f—king out there” because, well, this: Jam‘s first sketch was about parents who were a): having sex with a local gay man to stop him having sex with their son, b): having sex with their son to stop him going gay, c): wanted a friend to take over having sex with the local gay because the dad couldn’t keep up the pace, d): were clearly insane and e): the friend just went along with it because the whole thing felt like a creepy dream. Simmons first sketch was about how he really loves tacos.
More relevantly, Morris’ show felt like there was an over-arching criticism of society taking place behind all the random LOL stuff. A sketch on Jam about a couple who decide to have sex with a creep to get a lower price on the house he’s selling – and then get an even lower price by basically selling a relative to him – was “really f—king out there”, but also had a point to make about the lengths middle class people will go to secure the right house. Of course, comedy doesn’t have to make a point. But if you’re trying to be funny by doing the unexpected, you really need to have some level of normal to work against. Jam worked because Morris and company put in just enough recognisable elements – overly protective parents, bargain house-hunters – to make the strange stuff work*. Simmons just wacks in the weird crap and it’s off to the races.
Perhaps the market for this show is people who are half watching the television, see Simmons’ antics out of the corner of their eye and go “ha, what a dickhead! He looks like an ironic sex pest”. The line “I am sorry about causing a racial sensation in an eating environment” is the kind of thing that could be funny coming from a well-established and engaging comedy character – George Costanza, for example, or Homer Simpson. Coming from “Sam Simmons”, a character adrift against a barely defined backdrop and defined by annoying behaviour, comedy racism, a desire for tacos and an ability to shout AND whisper, it’s nothing. It’s just nothing.
*Jam did have skits that were just strange for strangeness’ sake. But even then, seeing a fat woman up a tree getting wacked on the backside by a space hopper wielded by a crying man wearing a nappy while she lip-synchs to “Loving You” is an order of strangeness beyond anything in Problems.
Time for John Clarke & Bryan Dawe?
John Clarke doesn’t do many interviews, so it’s interesting that he was the subject of a long article on TV Tonight the other day.
EXCLUSIVE: Comedian John Clarke has paid tribute to former Current Affair host Jana Wendt for supporting his mock interviews with Bryan Dawe, more than two decades ago.
Wendt’s belief in the bold concept as part of a current affairs programme on a commercial network saved the pair from getting the axe. This year the duo mark 25 years together on radio and television.
Although the TV Tonight interview makes no mention of it, it’s worth remembering that a recent article in Crikey suggested that the Clarke & Dawe segment on 7.30 could be facing the axe. According to Crikey 7.30’s contract with John Clarke and Bryan Dawe ends at the end of this year, meaning the pair could only be on air for a few more weeks. In this context, the liberal quotes from Clarke talking about how the Clarke & Dawe segment was at odds with the commercial culture at Channel 9 in the 1990s, and how crucial Wendt’s support had been in keeping them on A Current Affair, seems almost like a plea to 7.30 host Leigh Sales for support. The Crikey piece gave no indication as to Sales’ likely influence over the decision, stating that:
…[the Clarke & Dawe segment’s] future is being keenly debated by heavy-hitters in Aunty’s news and current affairs department — including 7.30 EP Sally Neighbour and current affairs boss Bruce Belsham.
After a difficult post-Kerry O’Brien year in 2011, 7.30 has been turned around by Neighbour this year. According to Craig Mathieson’s recent article for Fairfax the show’s ratings have risen from lows of 500,000 at the start of 2012 to more than 800,000. Mathieson wrote:
Sally Neighbour’s 7.30 is producing strong current affairs for a younger audience. But instead of trying to pander to them with gimmicks, the show is offering timeless basics done well with strong interviews and newsworthy stories. But that doesn’t mean 7.30 should dispense with John Clarke and Bryan Dawe’s interview slot on Thursdays. The satirists were the best thing about the show in 2011, and should be allowed to share in 7.30’s revitalisation.
A recent interview with Neighbour for The Power Index also highlighted the drive to improve ratings for 7.30, particularly amongst younger audiences:
Increasing the show’s appeal to younger viewers has also been a priority: out are the interviews with ageing rockers, in are stories about a trampolinist with AIDS or a one-armed pole dancer.
In this context perhaps two men in their 60s doing in-depth satire is at odds with the rest of the show? Not that it should be…head over to the Clarke & Dawe channel on YouTube, which has more than 13,000 subscribers and is heading for 3 million video views – each of their videos gets thousands of views within hours of upload. And with the majority of Australian YouTube users being under 40 the pair’s work can’t be a turn-off for younger viewers. John Clarke may be worried about the future of the Clarke & Dawe segment on 7.30 (well, we assume he is, why else would he give TV Tonight the interview?) but the producers shouldn’t be – Clarke & Dawe are pulling the kind of audience they want. And if they’re foolish enough to dump them any number of media will be bidding for them – rival current affairs shows, radio stations, news websites – this time next year Clarke & Dawe could be regulars on anything from 3AW to theage.com.au. Breathe deeply. Everything is fine.
Gapping On
Has there ever in the history of Australian comedy been a show more aptly named than Hamish & Andy’s Gap Year? A Gap Year being, for those not in the know, a year taken off between serious, future-shaping pursuits so you can pissfart around and enjoy yourself without having to worry about the future arc of your career. And so it has proved to be with the Gap Year programs: Hamish and Andy, seemingly free of concerns about making a “proper” television program, instead pick a spot on the map and wander around looking for fun stuff to do that they can slap together in a… wait, what?
Yeah, okay: the current two-part Hamish and Andy series is not actually called Hamish & Andy’s Gap Year. It is, in fact, Hamish & Andy’s Caravan of Courage, dusting off the title they gave to their in-Australia wanderings back when a): they had a daily radio show and b): made television specials for Channel Ten. Okay, well, whatever: they’re still wandering around the countryside looking for the strange and unusual so they can crack a few jokes about it and be on their way.
On the one hand, what’s wrong with that? They’re only on television a few times a year – ten hour long episodes in 2011 and (we think) seven hour episodes leading up to the London Olympics followed by the two 90 minute Caravan of Courage episodes. Hey, it’s almost as if they signed a contract to provide ten hours of television per year instead of just filming their wacky adventures until they ran out of wacky adventures to film. Acting like a slightly more comedic version of The Leyland Brothers plays to their strengths as comedians too: they’re likable guys, they have good chemistry together, and seeing Hamish taunting Andy after Andy’s just eaten a giant bug is about as funny as a scene where someone eats a giant bug is ever going to get.
On the other hand, enough already! After their half-hearted attempt at a talk show during the first series of Gap Year failed to set the ratings ablaze, they’ve retreated to a “travel all over the countryside” formula that was already looking a little threadbare back in 2009. There may not be a limit to the crazy guys and oddball situations they can uncover across the globe, but it’s certainly starting to feel like there’s a limit as to how many times they can expect us to watch it.
They’re still doing a good job of what they do. They’re still funny, likable guys. Still, there comes a point – very, very soon now there will come a point – where more of the same stops working. Oh, with the kind of ratings they’re pulling in now they can keep doing Caravan of Courage / Gap Year television for the next ten years. But unless they start trying to mix things up now, that’s all they’re ever going to do: every time they suggest something different (if they even want to try something different now), the network execs are going to frown and shake their heads and remind the guys that the last time they tried something different it didn’t really work out so maybe it’s time to drive around Tasmania looking for giant robot sheep, okay?
Whatever your opinion of Hamish Blake and Andy Lee, it’d be a shame if all they ever did from here on in was more of the same. They’re the only current comedians popular enough to actually make a stand-alone comedy series work on a commercial network: fingers crossed one day they’ll make a series that involves slightly more than just them standing in some guys homemade lightning-proof “coffin” while he fires bolts of electricity at them.
The Scumbus Has Something For Everyone
There’s a theory that says the perfect length for a comedy film is somewhere just south of 80 minutes. Any longer than that and you need to start adding non-comedic story and character elements to keep people watching, as there seems to be an inbuilt intolerance for silly antics once they drag on much longer than an hour. Good news: once you cut out the ads, Ed Kavalee’s long gestating self-financed movie Scumbus goes for just on 70 minutes. So that means it’s completely free of all that annoying “character development” and pointless tacked on serious drama rubbish, right? Right?
Ha, tricked you – it totally is free of all that stuff! In fact, even for a year that’s been surprisingly full of big-screen comedies – yeah, sorry we never reviewed Housos versus Authority, turns out it was the kind of unmitigated turd that didn’t deserve the slightest wiff of publicity oxygen, even if our review would have been so astoundingly negative it probably would have qualified as some kind of hate crime – Scumbus is without a doubt the funniest Australian feature film of 2012. So obviously it was screened only as a telemovie at 9.30 on a Saturday night on Channel Ten.
Actually though, this also works in its favour. Being “merely” a telemovie means Scumbus doesn’t have to try to be a “proper” movie, with the associated serious crap and character development and blah blah blah. It can just sit back, relax, and play pretty much everything for laughs. Which, as we’ve mentioned before, is what you want in a comedy, right? Not to mention the fairly limited range of low budget locations – at least half the movie takes place inside a caravan – plays a lot better on television that it would trying to compete on the big screen with Skyfall.
The story is simple: Tommy (Ed Kavalee) and Jesse (Toby Truslove) are flatmates who are also cops. How Jesse became a cop is a mystery, as he’s a borderline sex predator-slash-shit musician-slash-party guy-slash-sleazebag-slash-party drug vacuum. So yeah, this is Truslove’s funniest and most likable performance by far this year. Tommy is much more of a goody goody, but because he’s partnered with his incompetent best mate – who gave Tommy’s badge to a guy at a nude carwash because he “needed it” – his career is going nowhere. This is bad because he has a massive crush on detective Amy (Samantha Tolj) – though it seems it’s more his desire to be a detective than her supposed interest in only dating detectives that’s getting in his way there.
Having failed once again to secure any kind of promotion, Tommy is now going backwards: their boss (Glenn Robbins) has just demoted him and Jesse to working out of “The Scumbus”, a police caravan in a carpark in a suburb that seems to consist entirely of back lanes. This is not a good gig. The previous Scumbus cops (a genuinely scary Henry Nixon and an astoundingly thick Tony Martin) seem more than a little dodgy and local pimp-slash-drug-dealer-slash-cop-slasher Adam (Lachy Hulme) isn’t exactly happy to see them on his turf. How we get from here to a drug-fuelled party in the Scumbus with a bunch of girls Jesse met on an on-line dating site and some guy who seems to be a porn cameraman is a little hard to explain.
Much of what’s fun about Scumbus is the way it actually wants to just be a comedy. That is to say, there are no morals to be learnt here: in one scene where Jesse discovers an online hook-up is actually an excuse for Dave Hughes to watch someone get on with his wife, the usual result would be for Jesse to storm out in disgust. But why? She’s hot and he’s a sleaze. So here he just shrugs and gets back to work. Result: comedy.
[something to pay attention to: for a 21st century comedy there are a lot of “cute girl” roles, and all the “cute girls” look roughly the same. This isn’t exactly a return to the days of Alvin Purple – sorry guys, no nudity here – but this does feel like a film made by guys in their late twenties: if not all the jokes work, at least you can look at the girls! Who occasionally seem to suggest they may have been cast by a casting director who met them in a nightclub. But considering they’re all playing the kind of girls you’d meet in a nightclub, it’s win win! And before you put on your outrage hat, the character of Amy actually gets to make some good points about the kind of “nice” guys who don’t just ask out girls they obviously like, so it’s plain just about everyone here is a bit of a loser.]
There’s a great comedy cast here – Ryan Shelton does fine work as a creepy cat-obsessed cop, no-one’s better than Robbins when it comes to avuncular authority figures, Martin has a solid line in comedy stupidity and both Hughes and Peter Helliar in one-scene cameos are funnier than anything either has done in years – but there’s real variety in the characters too. Hulme is both a serious threat and pretty funny when he isn’t waving a knife around, Christian Clark as Tommy’s douchebag rival for Amy is a first-rate comedy smarm-artist, and again, Nixon is more frightening than the entire cast of Underbelly:Razor. Kavalee gives his nice guy character the occasional sex pest vibe too: this isn’t a story where a nice guy somehow can’t get the girl, it’s a story where the nice guy gets in his own way when it comes to the ladies because he can be a little bit creepy. Which is a lot funnier than the first option, and a lot more realistic too.
Scumbus does have its flaws. The ending is a little muddled thanks to an addition of an out-of-nowhere comedy bit that drags on too long – though the comedy song involved is pretty funny – and if it isn’t already clear, if you’re after anything more spectacular than a couple of people trading barbs in a caravan this is not the movie for you. If, on the other hand, you like to laugh, consider this review a ringing endorsement of what is one of the comedy highlights of the year: if a DVD release (or at least, an encore showing) isn’t on the cards, we might have to consider going into the bootlegging field ourselves.
Unfunny ho hum
Making the audience laugh loudly and frequently should be the principle objective of any comedic work, right? Yet in the decade or so since The (UK) Office we have seen a fundamental change in the nature of sitcoms and how many people judge them. These days a sitcom is as likely to contain dramatic scenes and plots as it is comedic ones, with reviewers often viewing this as a positive.
Take The Strange Calls. Reviewing it in The Australian, Graham Blundell described it as “affecting in its low-key, oddly earnest way; not laugh out loud funny but endearingly funny.” In a similar vein, Dan Barrett writing on the Televised Revolution blog said: “The Strange Calls is a fun series. While not laugh out loud funny, the show is a charming smile inducing half hour that will do well in building a loyal audience.” While neither reviewer was raving about the series (and why would they) the lack of “laugh out loud funny” wasn’t viewed as a negative either.
Both reviewers went on to discuss the director’s use of Coolum Beach as a location and the quality of the acting in far more detail than the quality of the comedy, reflecting the fact that high production values and a focus on realism are more likely to be the hallmarks of the contemporary sitcom than the laughs, and that many commentators don’t question this. Yet can anyone seriously imagine a TV reviewer calling a drama “not edge of your seat dramatic” and it not being taken as a negative? And why is it assumed that a comedy is still a good comedy when it’s not very funny?
Part of the problem, perhaps, is that comedy is harder to review than drama because everyone laughs at different things. Most people can agree that a TV drama works better if it has good production values (i.e. the sets look realistic, the camera work is smooth, the lighting allows you to see the actors at key moments, the editing doesn’t jar, the director’s brought it all together in a way that allows you to follow the storyline, etc., etc.), but as to what’s funny and what isn’t…some people laugh at surreal gags, some people prefer crude gags, some people want all comedy to be satirical, and someone somewhere found Live From Planet Earth hilarious – there’s no objective way to critique it.
Which kinda leads us to a situation where many reviewers end up writing about comedy as if it were drama (i.e. commenting on the realism and slickness of the production) and consequently turn their noses up at any comedy that is actively trying to be funny. Add to this the relatively recent trend for making comedy like you’d make a drama – i.e. with non-comedic scenes and plot lines – and you get less laughs in comedy and people accepting that.
Over the years we’ve questioned both the trend for making realistic sitcoms and the lack of criticism of this style of sitcom for the simple reason that we believe that comedy should be about laughs and that the introduction of dramatic elements and other flourishes of realism hasn’t improved sitcoms, yet ours seems to be an unfashionable viewpoint. We’re not saying that all traditional comedies (i.e. shows with laugh out loud jokes peppered throughout the dialogue, and over-the-top/unrealistic characters and performances) are great – they aren’t, see Housos – but they’re more likely to make you laugh out loud. Even in The (UK) Office it’s notable that the most memorable, loved and funny moments were the ones that were silly or un-naturalistic, scenes such as the stapler in jelly or David Brent’s dance.
We find ourselves agreeing with the following point made by Ben Pobjie in his review of The Strange Calls for Fairfax:
It’s all very well to have realistic depictions of suburban life and explorations of the difficulties of raising a family but sometimes you need grossly unrealistic depictions, and Crocker with a hose and an iPhone.
And this is true whether you agree with the rest of Pobjie’s review of The Strange Calls (he likes it) or not. Comedy is there to make the audience laugh and, generally speaking, comedy comes from hyper-realism or surrealism rather than realism. People may laugh because something is true, but they’re laughing at an exaggerated truth. A show with realistic characters and serious plots, such as the romantic subtext between Dan and Cora in A Moody Christmas, would be better off being a drama. Not that Dan and Cora’s yuletide flirting makes for very good drama so far, but the short comings of dramatic subplots in sitcoms could fill a blog on their own… and may very well do so in the very near future.