Australian Tumbleweeds
You Can’t Handle The Truth
Whadda know? Turns out The Unbelievable Truth isn’t half bad. The jokes are funny and there’s a lot of them, the dodgy panel format is constantly being broken up by cutaways and in studio antics, and… oh wait, maybe we should actually describe the show first: Craig Reucassel from The Chaser is your host, there’s a four-person panel, and each round one member gets up and spouts off a whole bunch of rubbish about a topic – for example, Toby Truslove tackles beards in episode one – in the hope that the occasional nugget of real-world fact will sneak by the panel. The more truth you get by the panel, the more you “win”. Yes, it’s another comedy game show, right down to the wacky celebrity cameos (ep 1 it’s Khamal) and a set that looks it was found in an abandoned business park. So wait, why are we saying it’s good?
Well, at least on first viewing, it’s doing its best to be funny. Put together by The Chaser in conjunction with Graeme “Yes, from The Goodies and he’s going to be on episode two” Garden and based on a UK radio quiz, it’s twenty odd-minutes of at least moderately funny people getting up and talking complete rubbish. That’s a pretty solid basis for getting at least a handful of laughs, and in a world where Randling continues to exist even a handful of laughs doesn’t look that bad. Even better, the cast seem to be having fun with the idea of spinning shit – again, Randling for contrast – and in at least the case of Kitty Flanagan (who’s tackling pregnancy while being actually pregnant) we get the feeling she might be bringing some material she’d prepared earlier. Again, not a bad thing. When you put Sam Simmons on your show you want him to do his Sam Simmons thing.
Of course, it’s doomed to fail. Wait, you thought being moderately entertaining was all a show needed to do to survive? Well sure, and if you’re The Block or The X Factor even being entertaining is optional. But if you’re a comedy panel show on Channel Seven, home of the failed comedy panel show since The Late Report in 1999, you simply have no chance of survival. Maybe you’ll make it to the end of your run if you’re lucky. Maybe you’ll even get a consistent timeslot. But the weight of failure after failure means that even if your show is the best darn panel comedy show ever made, Seven viewers just don’t want to know. Neither, judging by their idea of promotion, does Seven management.
So why does Seven even bother with this half-arsed commitment to the blandest form of comedy possible? Could it be that they have neither the guts to fully commit to an actual proper full-on comedy show nor the willpower to admit they’ve failed Seven’s once proud legacy of comedy and it’s time to just give up and bury the dog once and for all? From anyone else this rock-solid commitment to at least the idea of comedy would be admirable: from this collection of stiffs who seem incapable of actually putting out a comedy product without also giving off the impression they have no faith in it whatsoever – whatever you might think of Nine, at least with Live From Planet Earth they were fully committed to promoting the damn thing – it’s just getting pathetic.
Sitting on a halfway decent product for months (Truth was announced and filmed six month ago) then releasing it in a dud timeslot – 9.41pm on a Thursday – to try and cash in on the hosts’ more high-profile show on an other network is not the work of a station putting their full weight behind a show. It’s not even the work of a station allowing their shadow to fall behind a show. And audiences can pick up on this lack of commitment, which is, as you might have gathered here, something of a shame. Because despite everything Seven has done to promote it – or more accurately, “promote” it – The Unbelievable Truth is still worth a look.
Blah Blah Blah
If there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that Australian comedy is currently not operating at peak efficiency. In fact, it’s coughing its guts up all over the place. Duds to the left, ratings flops to the right, tired old formats hacking out their final breath everywhere else. What does it say about a field when the most exciting thing to happen all year is a rehash* of a show that finished five years** ago made by a fifty year-old*** who’s been in the business since the mid-1990s? Meanwhile, down at the cutting edge, we can look forward to this:
SHOCK of the NOW!
Hosted by Tom Ballard – you can totally join us, because it’s free!DATE
Wednesday 10th October 2012
TIME
Please arrive by 6:00PM SHARP!
LOCATION
Channel 10 Studios – 1 Saunders Street PYRMONT NSW 2009
We are looking for an audience to come and join us and host TOM BALLARD for a taping of a new TV show on all things digital:Wednesday 10 October 2012, 6:00PM at Channel 10 Studios – 1 Saunders Street, Pyrmont.
SHOCK of the NOW is a smart, challenging, fun, irreverent and unpredictable show that takes on the digital realm.
Expect robust discussions, live stupidity, funny clips, ‘fuck me’ moments, and the best and worst of the digital world.
SHOCK of the NOW wants to do to the digital world what Top Gear did with cars, Gruen did with advertising and Masterchef did with cravats.
To book tickets, please contact:
Ursula Mellor at Cordell Jigsaw Zapruder: umellor@zapruder.com.au or fill out this form and we’ll contact you to confirm your attendance
Be quick as tickets are limited and organised on a first-come-first-in basis!
(thanks to EvilCommieDictator for bringing this to our attention)
Seriously, it’s not physically possible for us to say “what the fuck” in a tone weary enough to express our utter contempt for every single aspect of this God-forsaken project. Is there any aspect of modern life Andrew Denton isn’t going to try and slap “the Gruen take” on? And this isn’t even covering a thing that’s actually a new thing, considering regular vanilla brand Gruen is already all up in the world of youtube clips and viral what-the-fucks. Is this a half hour “check out this cool tumblr” show? WHO FUCKING CARES.
Enter Tom Ballard. Is it possible to be bone-tired of someone who’s yet to actually do anything? Let’s find out! Apart from his semi-regular “let me say offensive and vaguely reactionary stuff because FREEDOM OF SPEECH BRO” outbursts, we’re yet to have our attention drawn to anything this breakfast radio jock has done that seems intended to cause actual laughter. Combine that with the fact he’s stepping into a role traditionally Wil Anderson-shaped, and… whatever. Who cares. Fuck.
Seriously, despite the uptick in the number of comedy shows currently being made – and don’t get us for a second wrong here, we’re really happy that at least we have more than three Australian comedy shows a year to watch – we seem to be getting a heavy dose of bugger all when it comes to actual variety, let alone fresh faces. Again, don’t get us wrong, Australian comedy is always going to have more good people than good shows to put them on. But considering the current cloud of lethargy hanging over the field of televised comedy, here and now is not the time to give a bunch of tired talentless chumps another swing on the merry-go-round.
Let’s look at what’s currently screening, shall we? Randling is the funeral home stink that will not fade and Gruen is scratching desperately for crumbs it hasn’t already re-chewed while giving off the impression it’s doing well purely because everything else this year has sunk without trace. Lowdown is a decent six-part idea that’s been given sixteen episodes over two years because why not, The Hamster Wheel is good solid comedy – that is to say, anything worse than The Hamster Wheel should not get a second series – the promos for the upcoming Unbelievable Truth look so much like the previous half-dozen commercial television panel yawn-fests it’ll be born dead whatever the class of the on-camera talent and every single thing that’s meant to be coming up between now and the end of the year is just more of the same. More Hamish & Andy road trips? More quirky ABC dramedies? More dramatic ABC quirkedies?Gaaaah.
What Australian comedy needs more than anything right now – well, not more than it needs to be funny, but that’s a whole ‘nother problem – is some sense of excitement. Even in 2012 people still get slightly excited about television, whether it’s The Voice or Puberty Blues or those Jack Irish telemovies or The Block. Drama shows have buzz. Reality shows have buzz. Comedy has zzz and it’s not the same thing.
The best shows of this year have come from seasoned professionals doing the kind of thing they always do. That’s exactly the kind of thing Australian comedy needs. But on top of that, we need shows that get people talking. What was the last comedy that did that? Live From Planet Earth? Forget we said anything.
But seriously: there hasn’t been a comedy this year (with the possible exception of Mad as Hell) that’s had any kind of buzz or excitement around it at all. No-one’s excited that Lowdown is back. No-one cares who wins the Randling trophy. No-one’s even talking about Can of Worms. And so long as Australian television’s idea of new comedy is sticking some easily molded self-promoter in front of a bog-standard clapped-out boring-as-shit format, comedy is going to continue to remain something no-one gives a flying fuck about.
*Mad as Hell
**Newstopia
***Shaun Micallef
You’d Have To Be Mental
“I tried to make MENTAL as politically incorrect as I could because I think I’m not a fan of political correctness, especially in comedy and especially not when it comes to this subject matter, mental illness, because political correctness, for me, is another way of saying, “We don’t want to talk about it.” Use the right words or we don’t want to talk about it, which means don’t talk about it.”
– P.J. Hogan, director of Mental, At The Movies, ABC1, 3rd October 2012.
All these things have gradually been eroded by political correctness, which seems to me to be about an institutionalised politeness at its worst. And if there is some fallout from this, which means that someone in an office might get in trouble one day for saying something that someone was a bit unsure about because they couldn’t decide whether it was sexist or homophobic or racist, it’s a small price to pay for the massive benefits and improvements in the quality of life for millions of people that political correctness has made. It’s a complete lie that allows the right, which basically controls media now, and international politics, to make people on the left who are concerned about the way people are represented look like killjoys.
– Stewart Lee, someone who’s actually funny, “Heresy”, BBC Radio 4, 16th May 2007
Of course, upon actually watching Mental, it soon becomes extremely clear that Hogan has no real desire whatsoever to make un-PC fun of mental illness. Oh right, the story: a local politician in a picture perfect coastal Australian town gets into trouble when his long suffering wife suffers a mental breakdown and he’s forced to take care of his five young daughters, all of which seem to think they’re suffering from one kind of mental illness or another. His solution is to hire a babysitter, and he finds a babysitter by picking up a hippie hitch-hiker named Shaz (played by Toni Collette) who is probably not the most mentally stable person around either. Crazy!
Uh, no. The kids’ various mental illnesses are quickly dismissed as either attention-seeking or self-pity – apart from the one who actually is mentally ill, where her illness is solved halfway through with a simple “I’m on medication now!” – the mum’s illness is fairly obviously stress-related and so cured by a bit of hospital rest (well, Shaz does also go around assaulting everyone who was tormenting the mum, so the pressure’s off there), and the issues behind Shaz herself are treated sensitively and as something worthy of our sympathies, even if she does act like a stereotypical wacky nutbag for much of the film.
So basically, Hogan’s quote at the top of this post is just him getting the word out that his film is going to be packed with crazy hijinks that the stuffed shirts down at PC HQ are going to take offense at while regular folk – that means you, everybody – are just going to laugh and laugh and laugh. Meanwhile, back in the real world, his film goes out of its way to make sure its depiction of mental illness is the kind of thing no-one anywhere could possibly take offense at because in the world of the movie actual mental illness is treated seriously and with respect. While also being either a problem easily solved by tough love and wonder drugs, or the kind of thing that leads you to organise a synchronised menstrual cycle on your racist neighbour’s white couch or setting fire to a house by lighting your farts.
[Oh wait, doesn’t the racist neighbour have a mental breakdown after the couch incident? Because her cleanliness fetish and refusal to accept her daughter is a lesbian finally shatter her grip on sanity? Sounds about right, but because she’s nasty and mean and racist, her breakdown is… well, not exactly used for comedy, but shown to be the end result of her ugly yet extremely clean way of life. Presumably having her daughter then marry an aboriginal woman falls more under “natural justice” than “non-stop hilarity”.]
In much of the publicity for this film Hogan’s been talking up the fact this story is, to a large extent, autobiographical:
I should stop saying that it’s a story at all. It’s a documentary really.
Which may explain a lot of the problems here: he’s just too close to his story. For Mental to work as a comedy – it doesn’t, thanks to much of the comedy being the kind of broad, cartoony ocker material most of us had a gutful of back when Hogan and Collette made the far more successful Muriel’s Wedding – it needed… well, a lot of things. A central topic the writer / director actually wanted to wring laugh-out-loud comedy out of may have been a good place to start.
More specifically, while Shaz herself is an interesting character with a lot of potential for comedy, Hogan clearly felt that unless he set up a variety of cartoon villains (who come off as pale retreads of his Muriel’s Wedding suburban bitches) for her to slap around, her erratic knife-wielding antics might come across as less ha-ha and more call-the-police. And when he does get around to letting us know that there is a darker side to her antics, it feels like a): he’s talking down to the audience (she’s a complete stranger who wanders around carrying a knife and beating up shop staff: of course something isn’t quite right here) and b): the lightweight comedy we’ve been watching just got thrown out the window for something much darker. Not better, mind you, unless you find formerly comedic characters suddenly howling in emotional pain over issues the film has no intention of making fun of to be a great third act for a comedy.
Australian movie comedy is going through something of a golden age – quantity wise only, we stress – at the moment: look forward to upcoming reviews of The Wedding Party and the Housos movie when they hit screens over the next month or so. Chances are those films – like Kath & Kinderella and A Few Best Men and Mental before them – will also portray a sunlit suburban nightmare packed with shouty nutcases dressed in garish outfits. Mental at least had the potential to go somewhere a little different and be a little funnier than the usual: it’s hard to know whether to be saddened or resigned that it didn’t.
The Unbelievable Delays
It’s always a bit puzzling when a network goes to the effort of making a brand new comedy show and promotes the fact that they are doing so (i.e. in The Age and the Herald-Sun), and then sticks that show on the shelf for months – because unlike cheese or wine it’s probably not going to improve with age. In situations like these you always find yourself wondering if the network is unhappy with the end product or nervous about how it will do, leading them to delay airing it for as long as possible. We may be able to take a more informed guess on why this happened to The Unbelievable Truth (shot in February) when its first episode (of ten) finally airs on Thursday 11 October.
The Unbelievable Truth is co-production between The Chaser’s company Giant Dwarf and Random Entertainment, which is co-owned by British comedian Graeme Garden and British comedy producer Jon Naismith. On paper it looks like a good pairing and a good idea. The Unbelievable Truth is a popular British radio comedy panel game show hosted by David Mitchell (That Mitchell & Webb Look, Peep Show) which airs on BBC Radio 4 and is now into its 10th series. The Chaser’s Andrew Hansen, a fan of the radio show, approached Garden about bringing it to Australian TV when Garden was in Sydney performing in a Goodies show in 2009; two years later the show went into production for Seven.
Seven isn’t exactly where you’d expect a show like The Unbelievable Truth to end up given that network’s history with panel shows (i.e. The White Room) and locally made comedy in general (i.e. Let Loose Live), but they’ve certainly made an effort to get some well-known people involved. The Chaser’s Andrew Hansen and Julian Morrow will be on the panel, with Craig Reucassel hosting, and other guests include Merrick Watts, Sarah Kendall, Shane Jacobson, Kitty Flanagan, Sam Simmons, Toby Truslove, Tom Gleeson and Graeme Garden himself.
A couple of potential problems for The Unbelievable Truth are whether it will work on TV and whether this style of comedy will work on Seven. In the radio series each of the four panellists give a short lecture which may contain only five true statements, while the rest of the panellists challenge if they spot a truth (with a point being awarded if they are correct). Judging by the promo videos the format of the TV show is exactly the same and a lot of effort has been put into making the lectures as visual as possible, with each of the panellists using props, images and footage. People who attended the recordings in February reported that the show was funny, and the promos indicate that too.
As to whether the show will work on Seven, for those unused to British panel shows of this ilk (Call My Bluff, Would I Lie To You) or who have sat through Australian comedy’s attempts to ape the likes of QI, Have I Got News For You and Never Mind The Buzzcocks (Good News Week, ADbc, Randling, Spicks & Specks), this is possibly going to look a bit like The White Room. But Seven’s decision to program The Unbelievable Truth with the British panel show Celebrity Juice and the US sitcoms Whitney and Cougar Town is probably a good approach, as is timing the show’s premiere a few weeks after the return of The Hamster Wheel. But with The Hamster Wheel looking very strong so far and this show being a co-production between its makers and a successful British comedy production house, our cynicism about the timing of this program is probably totally unfounded.
So Let’s Get Back Together and Do It Again
A few months back we ran a post about how, for all its critical praise and fannish worship, The Late Show wasn’t all that influential when it came to actual Australian comedy television. Someone wrote in to take us to task for not mentioning The Chaser’s War On Everything, and rightly so: while it may have lacked the two elements that really made The Late Show – the live energy and the focus on the cast as comedy characters – it was certainly a show keen to follow in the footsteps of Mick, Tony, Rob, Tommy G, Jane, Jason, Judith and Santo.
Phew, lucky we got that out of the way before discussing the second series of The Chaser’s latest effort, The Hamster Wheel! Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to point out their opening “Ratings Flop” musical number was following so firmly in the footsteps of The Late Show‘s classic second series opener “Still Number Four” you’d have to staple the words “homage” and “salute to” together to come close to covering it. Not that we’re grumbling: making fun of the collapse of the ABC’s once proud Wednesday night comedy line-up is a-ok with us. We even laughed when Mad as Hell did it a few months back. Blamed Adam Hills and everything.
That’s the big problem facing much of the ABC’s current comedy line-up: they’re all fighting over a very small slice of pie. There’s no denying that there’s much comedy to be mined from the media and news coverage, but with Mad as Hell, The Gruen Prolapse and Media Watch all covering pretty much the same turf, having The Hamster Wheel pile on pretty much guarantees there’s going to be some serious overlap in there somewhere. Who knew you could have too many jokes about failing newspapers?
To be fair to The Chaser, they pretty much got there first. They’ve been covering the news / politics round at the ABC for a decade, and now that the pranks are largely a thing of the past (trying to marry Malcolm Turnbull aside) they’ve got their product down to a thin, nutritious paste with the occasional chunk of meat mixed in. Pointing out to opponents of gay marriage that following the Bible means following all of it – even the bits where a wife is supposed to “submit” to her husband – and watching them squirm is the kind of thing no-one else is currently doing, and seeing Fred Nile refer to our current PM as “him” just about justifies the show on its own. It’s what they do, they know how to do it, and so long as they’re not doing it 20 weeks a year they generally do a good job of it.
Still, it’s not entirely business as usual this time around. The Chris, Craig and Julian’s opening monologue / gag-fest seems a fair bit looser than last time – they actually acknowledge the audience when a joke tanks (Fifty Shades of Greyhounds? That’s gold, Jerry!), and while they’ll never be up there with The Late Show when it comes to off-the-cuff pissfarting around, any hint of them actually enjoying their work has to be a good thing.
They’ve amped up the pace a little as well, which we’re never going to complain about. Get those jokes out there! Often The Chaser run out of puff a little by episode two or three, but going by last night’s premiere they’re taking a stab at putting out something with a pretty high joke-per-minute rate. If you can’t stake a claim to an area you can call your own at least you can try to cover it with more depth than anyone else, and The Hamster Wheel certainly makes a solid fist of making its’ lead-in The Gruen Degaussing look like very thin gruel indeed.
Meanwhile, back at the real Australian Tumbleweeds, The Hamster Wheel did also feature a few duds. “Cedric the Salamander” was a good reminder of just how great the sketches on Mad as Hell were, and the swipes at Gina Rinehart were, eh, a way to take up time. This kind of show is always going to be a bit hit-and-miss, but pointing that out isn’t the kind of fair and even handed coverage you come here to read. So, uh… stop shouting so much! More jokes about dying newspapers!
“Competent” isn’t exactly high praise, but it’s the word that best suits The Hamster Wheel. They’ve got enough of a team behind them (was that seven researchers we counted?) to punch out plenty of examples of the depths to which the Australian media will stoop, and they’ve been at this long enough now – you’d be hard-pressed to argue that they’ve ever done anything that wasn’t “let’s make fun of the media and current events” – to know just where to hit for maximum impact (Rinehart jokes aside).
If we had any reservations about our severely qualified praise, it’d be that The Chaser’s shows don’t usually improve all that much over their run – lure the punters in with the good stuff early on, then by week four it’s on with the comedy tuxes for the fake awards show sketch. But so long as they can maintain the quality of last night’s episode, that’ll be fine with us: for once, let’s live in hope.
Mean Green Guide fighting machine
You can always spot a comedian who’s been actively looking for material when they pull a newspaper clipping out of their pocket and start talking about. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Some great routines have been inspired by weird news stories or nutbag letters to the editor, and if the podcast I Love Green Guide Letters is any indication the latter is in abundant supply.
I Love Green Guide Letters started late last year with the simple format of host Steele Saunders and two other comedians talking about the letters in that week’s edition of The Green Guide (the media supplement published in The Age every Thursday). In each episode Saunders reads out the letters (often in a sarcastic voice) and the trio tries to get as much comic mileage from them as possible.
The letters which inspire the most gags tend to be those making pedantic points about the pronunciation of words or the misuse of language on television. In some instances one letter about a minor issue of this nature initiates a chain of furious correspondence from Green Guide readers which plays out over a number of weeks. For the casual reader of The Age this is amusing enough, but in the hands of the I Love Green Guide Letters team it can be a full-scale riot. And as the podcast has developed, notable Age Green Guide letters, letter writers and columnists have become the stuff of minor legend and major laughs.
I Love Green Guide Letters doesn’t always hit the mark, sometimes the trio don’t seem to know what to say about a letter and just end up calling the correspondent a dick. And while that can be funny (and is often fairly accurate), when the show’s really on fire there’s a funnier, more creative comedic point being made.
Other times the comedians abandon talking about Green Guide letters entirely and just riff on other topics – that’s pretty fun too – particularly if the riffers in questions are people like Justin Hamilton, John Safran or Tony Martin. But ultimately with I Love Green Guide Letters it’s not about guests, it’s about anyone with a funny bone putting a spin on some sometimes pretty bizarre letters.
Blurst Wednesday Book Club: The Bedroom Philosopher Diaries
A lot of comedians have been turning their hand to books of late – why look, here’s a Fairfax story on that very same subject. Good luck getting past this line…
what is evident is the women on the comedy circuit seem to write more memoirs than the blokes, and those books are made up of more than just jokey anecdotes.
… if you’ve read Tony Martin’s Lolly Scramble or Nest of Occasionals, Akmal Saleh’s The Life of Akmal, Anh Do’s award-winning The Happiest Refugee, Charlie Pickering’s Impractical Jokes, Tom Gleeson’s Playing Poker With The SAS, Grahame Bond’s Jack of All Trades Mistress Of One, the endless stream of Barry Humphries memoirs, and so on. Yeah yeah, it’s not a competition, but if you’re going to hang your article on a hook, it’d help if it was a hook that actually existed.
Added to that list of male comedians looking back at their past with a critical eye is Justin Heazlewood, AKA The Bedroom Philosopher, with The Bedroom Philosopher Diaries. Published by The Small Press in Melbourne, supposedly only 500 copies were printed, which makes stumbling across it in an actual physical bookstore doubly exciting! To us. Well, it was until we discovered you can order it from his website here. Or read an extract (that’s a bit more hipster pick-up than most of the book) from it here. Guess we’re not so special after all.
The book itself is a collection of various tour tales largely focusing on the vagaries of performing to a bunch of people who often aren’t quite sure what kind of act they’re seeing. Early on Heazlewood talks about how he pitches himself as a musician more than a comedian because musicians get more respect on tour (supposedly Tom Gleeson pulled out of one tour that billed him as “Love him or hate him you would have laughed at least once”; Sam Simmons couldn’t even get a tent at another), and a lot of this book is more in line with a muso’s tour diary than, say, Pickering talking about his dad’s wacky hijinks or Doh’s experiences as a refugee.
Heazlewood is a sharp writer (as you might have gathered from his song lyrics) who largely eschews overblown lyricism and tortured metaphors, and his tour adventures are the kind of thing that make for great stories later while no doubt being something of an ordeal at the time. As far as comedy goes you’ll be checking this out more for actual laughs than for backstage gossip about the Australian comedy scene – even if Greg Fleet does make an appearance – but Heazlewood does deliver a few gems about his own approach to his work and comedy in general, and overall the whole thing is an insightful and compellingly readable window into the roller-coaster ride of live performance.
Fairfax may have been right in talking about the current boom in comedians memoirs and comedy books in general, but The Bedroom Philosopher Diaries is one of the few books out there that’s not only by a comedian but about comedy as a day job. Heazlewood deals with disinterested audiences, audiences who are really into it, his own occasional lack of energy, how to throw people out of a gig when the sound tech guy is your security guy, how to defuse a bunch of angry guys by turning the night into a breakdance contest, and a lot more besides. If you like his music, you’ll like this. If you don’t like his music, we’re slightly surprised you’ve read this far. If you don’t know his music, it’s probably easier to find it than this. If you don’t like musical comedy but do like reading about comedians, this is a book worth searching out. Is that everyone covered?
A Solution to a Problem We Didn’t Know We Had
Why doesn’t Australia have any ensemble comedies? As in, why don’t we make sitcoms where we get together a bunch of actors people have actually heard of? Okay, sure, we don’t make sitcoms full stop these days, but on the rare occasions when we do make them – Lowdown, Laid *shudder*, Outland, The Jesters, Twentysomething, and so on – they’re either built around a main character played by someone no-one’s interested in or they feature an ensemble made up of people no-one’s ever heard of. Is this the way to go about luring people into watching a show?
Some context: if you’ve been watching Australian drama – or worse, dramedy – over the last few thousand years, you’re well aware that when producers are putting together those shows they cram them as full as they possibly can with name-brand cast members. Why wouldn’t they? In Australia actors are cheap and plentiful, and the more names you have in your show the more likely it is people might tune in to check them out. Even Rake, a show built entirely around the supposed lure of getting to see Richard Roxburgh act like a tool yet still lure in the ladies, kicked off this year with an appearance from Toni Collette.
Yet no-one seems to have had the idea of putting together a sitcom featuring a bunch of A-list actors. Even though our last great sitcom success Kath & Kim featured three equally well-known comedy personalities and then piled on the guest stars like nobody’s business. Sure, you could argue that well known actors might not be able to handle the subtleties of comedy. Sadly for you, it’s not like the gun comedy performers we’ve been using are working out as far as getting anyone along to check out their often excellent work.
Our point is this: much of what makes a television show a success is getting people to watch it in the first place. Television shows need to do everything they can to get people to watch them, and that includes sometimes staring name actors that audiences want to see. Yet in this country time and again comedies go to air with casts that no-one has ever heard of, let alone expressed any interest in wanting to see. It’s great that comedy is the place where unknowns can get their big break and it’s good news that comedies often (actually, in these days of tight budgets, make that “almost always”) feature writer-performers. But would it kill the networks to occasionally try a laugh-out-loud sitcom (no, House Husbands doesn’t count) where performers who can bring in a crowd are the ones piss-farting about on-camera?
The K&K Took My Baby Away
In his review of Kath & Kimderella (available here), TripleJ film reviewer Marc Fennell says the film “has no jokes”. He is wrong. Not wrong in a “oh, it’s just a matter of opinion you guyse” way. Wrong in an easily proven, factual, obvious way. Fennell is wrong to claim Kath & Kimderella contains no jokes, and he’s wrong in a way that suggests we should perhaps start to be concerned about the state of his eyesight*.
Now to be fair, if he’d said “Kath & Kimderella has no jokes that work“, that’d be an opinion he could back up. Well, actually he wouldn’t have to, because it’d just be his opinion. But to claim this film flat-out has no jokes – look, here’s one: the rear-projection during a crap car chase is so amazingly dodgy no-one watching the screen could take it seriously (hey, we didn’t say it was a good joke, though it did get a laugh from us) – is yet another reason why, when it comes to comedy, Australian film reviewers generally have about as much of a clue as Australian television reviewers.
[cue forty-five minute rant about The Green Guide’s Paul Kalina calling Lowdown “gentle” twice in this week’s edition. Tho to be fair, while “gentle” and “comedy” belong nowhere together, it does get across the idea that Lowdown isn’t all that funny]
Fennell does get one thing right in his review: he talks about the way people bring different (meaning “bigger”) expectations to the cinema than they do turning on the television. Which, when it comes to action and drama and pretty much everything else, is true (kinda: if someone makes a movie as good as a good episode of, say, Mad Men, a lot of people would be pretty happy with that). But when it comes to comedy, whatever the audience expectation of a “movie” might be, a comedy movie simply has to do the exact same thing a television show does: make you laugh. In fact, the big big problem Australian film comedy has – and hoo boy, are we looking forward to Mental – is this idea that because it’s on the big screen it has to go BIG.
Think of the film comedies that have worked – as in connected with audiences, not necessarily been critically acclaimed – in Australia: The Castle. Crackerjack. Muriel’s Wedding. These are small-scale, naturalistic, character-based stories. Because small-scale character-based comedies are more often what people laugh at** – not the massively over-the-top, scream at the viewer for 90 minutes, manic laff riot capital-M movies that professional film-makers make when they try to be funny in this country.
While we’re laying down the law here, we’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: polish is almost always the enemy of comedy. The urge to make something look polished runs counter to the urge to make something seem funny. Comedy is either spontaneous or seems that way; something slick and polished almost always seems laboured over. In that respect, Kath & Kimderella is the anti-Any Questions For Ben. Ben was a film so polished and trying to look cool it didn’t have room for jokes: Kath & Kimderella is slipshod and daggy as hell but really packs the jokes in.
The upshot? Reviewers that claim Kath & Kimderella is crap because it’s sloppy, or it’s all over the place, or it feels thrown together, or it looks cheap, or it’s erratic or uneven, or it features broad performances, or it isn’t a “real movie” or is just “the worst movie of the year” or whatever: they’re wrong. For a serious drama, sure, those things are big negatives. For a comedy, they can often be a big plus. If you’re reviewing a comedy, review it as a comedy. It’s trying to make you laugh: that’s a good place to start.
All that said, Kath & Kimderella is far, far from perfect. Gina Reilly and Jane Turner’s suburban stereotypes first appeared on sketch show Big Girl’s Blouse in 1994 in a parody of a wedding reality show, and even the first series of Kath & Kim had a mockumentary approach and overall story arc that went some way towards structuring what was otherwise little more than a bunch of funny fights and sharp suburban observations. But since then the characters have pretty much been adrift – still funny in their own right, but with no growth or development either in their situations or their relationships.
On the plus side Kath & Kimderella does addresses this problem: Turner’s Kath and Reilly’s Kim (plus Madga Szubanski’s Sharon) head off to the tiny fictional Spanish outpost of Papilloma on the heel of Italy***, thus providing a new setting. There Kath is preyed upon by local king Javier (Rob Sitch) as Kim and Sharon clump about being spied upon by the masked prince (Erin Mulally), thus providing new characters for them to interact with.
On the minus side, these developments are not improvements. Papilloma is a generic “foreign” country where starving peasants and 80’s disco are the main attributes so there’s no comedy to be had there, and while Rob Sitch is clearly the finest comedy actor of his generation – within an extremely narrow performing range, mind you – he plays a generic sleazy type who’s not all that interesting. The magic of Kath & Kim is the interactions between Kath & Kim: in this film they’re barely seen together.
Taking them away from Fountain Lakes is also a misstep. It may be traditional for sitcoms to take their cast somewhere foreign and new for a big screen outing, but Kath & Kim wasn’t just about a bunch of characters like most sitcoms – it was about a bunch of characters defined by their setting. Kath & Kim anywhere but the outer suburbs is just the story of a mum and her bitchy daughter: more than anything else, it’s the layers of social observation about life in the outer suburbs that made it special.
The story is both a mess and strangely well-plotted, with some elements clearly foreshadowed while others are glossed over or forgotten (the entire subplot of King Javier being a repressive ruler sort of makes sense – Kath and Kim are going to liberate the oppressed! – but Sitch’s comedy King is just too likably sleazy to be a real bad guy). Again, for a comedy this isn’t automatically a bad thing: once something’s been milked of laughs, why keep it around? But this isn’t sure of what it needs to keep around and what it can discard.
For example, the film opens by introducing the characters and their relationships in what is basically a clumsy extended prologue. Why? The real story here begins with Kath winning the trip overseas, and everything we need to know – Kath being married to Kel (Glenn Robbins), Kim having split from Brett (Peter Rowsthorn), Kath being a doting mum getting on with her life, Kim being her spoilt brat daughter – could have easily been gotten across in a line or two rather than a five minute prologue. It’s like Turner and Reilly (who wrote the script) lack confidence in their ability to reveal character by action rather than explanation – they tell us everything when it’d be funnier to show us.
So considering we did laugh at least some of the time, what does work? At least some of the jokes, for starters. Pretty much the entire cast is rolled gold – Richard E Grant has a great line in eye-rolling, Marg Downey has fun reprising her dodgy therapist and Mick Molloy appears in footage that probably comes from the TV series – while Robbins’ naked arse once again makes an appearance for those keeping score. The very idea of Sitch and Robbins having a swordfight is hilarious for those of a certain comedy vintage (even if the actual swordfight is hardly shown), and the cutaway moments following Reilly and Turner’s other creations Pru and Trude are always fun. Even the running joke about Sharon’s sexuality doesn’t feel overplayed.
More importantly, the daggy feel of the film suits the characters. A truly shithouse Kath & Kim movie would look and feel something like notorious Aussie arthouse snore-fest Somersault: sombre, serious, weighted down by pretensions and playing the mother-daughter conflict for drama over laughs. So while this is far, far from a perfect film – short review: if you’re a fan, wait for DVD – it remains faithful to the characters and their world. Even if this part of that world is a lot less funny.
As characters, Kath and Kim are well past their use-by date. As a send-off, they deserved better than this film. But it’s been diminishing returns for the “foxy morons” for a long time now, and ironically the way this film focuses on them as characters – seemingly we’re supposed to like them enough to want to see them even if they’re not really a double act and they’re no longer making fun of Australian suburbia, and going by the box office they’re right – signals the end of them as comedy characters. They’re celebrities now, and we all know how funny those guys are.
*Fennell’s full quote: “There are no jokes… or at least, ones that weren’t written in 2008”. Buh? Presumably he’s referencing the audioclip he plays that features a joke about the high price of bananas. Yes, that’s an old joke. No, that is not the only joke the film contains. Even given the time constraints of a short radio review, this is sloppy reviewing – seriously, the “worst thing” about this film according to Fennell is that it’s made all the characters so unlikable? Kath & Kim? When were they ever likable? Why have we had to put up with a decade of “should we be laughing at the suburban satire of Kath & Kim” questions if not for the fact that they don’t exactly come across as likable?
**Unless you have a gun comedy actor like Ben Stiller or Will Ferrell who can make a zany cartoon character-type character likable and fun. Number of these performers Australia currently has: 0
***more than one reviewer – no, it’s not just Fennell this time – has complained about this supposedly confusing and / or “stupid” set-up. News flash; it’s a joke. Specifically, wordplay – confusing the Spanish city Pamplona with Papilloma, which can mean a wart or wart-like growth, hence its position on the “heel” of Italy. It might not be funny, but it’s obviously a joke.