Australian Tumbleweeds
Down, down, shallower and down
Lowdown series 2 has just ended on ABC1 and it’s probably worth asking: why did they bother? The series never promised to be anything other than a light-hearted take on the tabloid press – an entirely reasonable approach to take, because it’s not like there’s heaps and heaps of scope for satire and comedy there – but to spend at least half the episodes re-creating various media scandals from the past couple of years suggests that, well, the writers weren’t exactly brimming with ideas when the commission came through.
Last week we saw Lowdown’s take on that time Gordon Ramsey had an on-air blue with Tracey Grimshaw. Was it funny? Occasionally. Did we learn anything? Nup. At least this week we saw Alex and Bob taken down a peg or two by Ben (Craig McLaughlin), one of their victims in the first ever episode of the show, so there was some poetic justice if not much hilarity.
One of the key problems with this series is that the characters have been as surface level as the plots. Alex only thinks about himself and lives entirely in the moment, Dr James is a shonky general practitioner trying his luck with alternative therapies, Rita is a nutty artist who annoys people…they all get themselves into various mix-ups and mildly entertaining plots, but there’s not a lot at stake. Far be it for us to suggest that Stupid Stupid Man, a sitcom set in the kinda similar world of men’s magazines, had any kind of glory days, but at least it had distinct characters who’d play off each other in half interesting ways. What was happening in Lowdown? A group of people who basically like each other get into some mild conflict which will be resolved fairly quickly. Cue not much laughter.
On roughly the same level of interest was that The Sunday Sun’s editor Howard Evans (Kym Gyngell) had a heart attack and collapsed at the end of tonight’s show. Will he live to edit another paper? Is it all over? Does anyone care? The writers seemed to be hedging their bets here, so they clearly have no idea if this series will return. But it’s hard to imagine there’s anything more to say about Alex Burchill and chums, and it’s highly questionable that the ABC green lit this series at all given that all the ideas seemed to have played out in the first season. Mind you, Laid is coming back, so anything’s possible.
Is Australian Comedy Sexist?
Short answer: yes. Or no. Maybe? Dammit, we’re going to have to think about this one for a moment.
Let’s back up for a second. Last weeks episode of The Hamster Wheel had a segment on sexism in the Australian media. Yay Chaser! Or perhaps not, as a few people have expressed some doubts about the suitability of a team made up of five white guys when it comes to talking about sexism. Remember when The Chaser first arrived on our screens with CNNNN and they had a female member of the team? First person to make a Charles Firth joke gets slapped.
The Chaser have been doing a pretty good job with their swipes at the Australian media with this series of The Hamster Wheel, and their take on the media’s rampant sexism was, to our eyes at least, more good work from them. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a wider problem with sexism in Australian comedy, but because we’re the type of people who think anyone should be able to make jokes about anything so long as those jokes are funny, we’re not going to start going on about how only some kinds of people should be able to make some kinds of jokes. Well, unless you mean idiots shouldn’t make offensive jokes purely for shock value, but, you know, duh.
Instead, lets focus on an aspect of the problem we can actually measure: is Australian television comedy dominated by men? To be fair, comedy isn’t like calling the football, where even the idea of giving a woman airtime still causes furrowed brows and dark mutterings down the pub and Sam Newman frothing at the mouth. While there are certainly greater obstacles in their path, there are female comedians on our televisions and female comedians have their own shows. Judith Lucy has another solo ABC series coming up. Marieke Hardy’s Laid went to two series. Robyn Butler was the lead in The Librarians and runs Gristmill with her husband Wayne Hope. Cal Wilson, Julia Zemrio, Felicity Ward, Celia Pacquola, Kitty Flanagan – they’re all funny. There was a Kath & Kim movie. Kate Langbroek is someone you may have heard of. Rebel Wilson exists.
And yet there’s little denying that men get all the good gigs. After starting out with a rotating guest roster, Gruen is now based around three men. The “all blokes” Chaser have been ABC fixtures for a decade*. The “27 episodes locked in before even one went to air” Randling features seven women and thirteen men. The “okay, this one’s a bit less of a sure thing” Unspeakable Truth has four guests – three men and one woman – on every week. Adam “everywhere” Zwar has created and starred in 24 half-hour episodes of television on the ABC in 2012, including hosting a show entirely about women giving out relationship advice. Think about that for a second: they needed to have a man hosting a show about women talking about relationships. So obviously Zwar got a woman to host the male version? Ah ha ha ha get out of here. Seriously, go.
The more hit-and-miss slots seem to be more evenly divided. Laid, Outland, Mad as Hell, Twentysomething, The Bazura Project, The Strange Calls, Judith Lucy’s Spiritual Journey, In Gordon Street Tonight, Woodley, Myf Warhurst’s Nice; it’s not a 50/50 split across the board, but there’s enough variety there to at least suggest that the imbalance often comes down to individuals rather than automatic bias. Obviously more men are getting shows up (and getting panel show gigs), but it’s not a total lock-out like it currently seems to be with the more permanent, higher profile gigs. And any similarities between this situation and legends of a so-called “glass ceiling” are, no doubt, completely coincidental.
The problem with any sweeping generalisations is that Australian television comedy is such a small field at the top that a handful of people can make a big difference. If Wendy Harmer wanted to do a solo ABC television show, it at least seems likely that she could. If she and Judith Lucy and Myf Warhurst and Robyn Butler and Marieke Hardy all did shows on the ABC in one year and Kath & Kim came back to Seven, that’d look like a very good year. Especially if Chris Lilley came along and did another show where he showed the kind of insights into women we got with Ja’ime and Gran and Jen Okazaki and… oh right. Sorry.
So, with the problem somewhat clumsily identified, now for the fun part: laying blame. And the guilty party may surprise you: Andrew Denton. “Not ABC production stalwart and loveable host Denton,” you may or may not cry, “he’s so lefty and right-on and cuddly and everything we adore about the ABC – he can’t possibly be anti-woman! Look, he even married Jennifer Byrne! Nice of him to give her a job as a panelist on Randling, wasn’t it?”
And yet the facts speak for themselves: who gave the all-bloke Chaser their first shot on the ABC? Denton. Who allowed the Gruen franchise to basically become a male locker room dominated by Wil Anderson, Todd Sampson and Russel Howcroft (in contrast, the non-Denton Spicks and Specks had Warhurst as one of the three regulars; The Glasshouse had Corrine Grant as one of the three regulars; GNW had Claire Hooper and previously Julie McCrossin as one of the three regulars)? Denton. Who hosts and produces Randling, a game show that features two thirds male contestants? Denton.
[that last example might seem a little harsh, considering we cut the ABC some serious slack earlier for only getting near enough with their gender balance. But Randling features enough non-comedian guests to make it clear Denton and company weren’t just drawing from the already male-skewed comedian pool. If it was a show that only featured top-notch comedy talent then perhaps you could argue the gender imbalance comes down to who was available at the time. But it doesn’t, and once you start drafting in internet celebrities and the like, why not have fifty percent women?]
What else has he produced? :30 Seconds? Ground breaking salute to a white man’s mid-life crisis there. The Joy of Sets? No women (though to be fair, it was built around an established comedy double act). David Tench Tonight? That didn’t even have a human host! As for Hungry Beast, of the 19 original presenters, only six were women. And that was a show supposedly out there looking for new talent. You can’t see us but rest assured, the head shake we’re currently doing is a very sad one indeed**.
As always, what do we know? Maybe Denton has no say in how the shows he produces are actually run. Maybe various faceless ABC types are telling him who audiences want to see. Maybe he just thinks he’s putting the best possible talent on air. Maybe he just can’t find enough female comedians to put on his shows. Maybe despite having two of the three shows currently showing in the ABC’s Wednesday night comedy timeslots (with Denton prodigies The Chaser in the third), Denton and his production company Zapruder’s Other Films doesn’t really have any influence on the amount of women in comedy on the ABC. Let’s just keep moving that buck along folks, nothing to see here…
* Something else worth considering: perhaps part of the problem – if you consider The Chaser to be part of the problem – is that the ABC have kept The Chaser on board as their resident satirists for the last decade. Shaun Micallef aside, they’ve had the field to themselves pretty much since 2002 – an extremely long run for a comedy team on the national broadcaster. As this run seems set to continue and it’s unlikely any of them are going to spontaneously change gender any time soon, those unhappy with this situation may continue to be so for a while yet.
** But what about Zapruder’s Q&A knock-off for Channel Ten, Can of Worms? Isn’t that now hosted by a woman? Sure – but as Chrissie Swan is a pre-established Channel Ten personality (after her work on The Circle and Big Brother) and is replacing the show’s original (male) host, we’re going to suggest her appearance has less to do with Zapruder’s original vision for the show and more about Ten wanting changes before giving it a second series.
Reading the Tea Leaves
Is Q&A a terrible show or what? Answers accepted only in the form of a snappy tweet that we can run across the bottom of the screen as we co-op social media into not realising that the ‘debate’ we offer is nothing more enlightening than the dregs of the letters page in your local News Ltd publication. Y’all do realise Q&A was basically foisted on the ABC by the Howard government as a way to create “balance” on the left-leaning ABC? Yay Howard government, right guys? Guys?
Q&A isn’t really a comedy program, so usually our total loathing for the way large sections of the internet act like it’s somehow something more than an utterly pointless gab-fest designed solely to entrap the chattering classes in a vortex of vapid self-absorption is neither here nor there. But occasionally they do have comedians on, which presumably only further enrages the Q&A fans: if this really is a conversation-shaping debate show that tackles the real issues with figures of national import and interest, what the hell is Charlie Pickering doing there?
Which is what we’ve been wondering over the last week or so. It’s not like he has anything to plug, which is usually the great explanation behind pretty much everyone’s appearance on someone else’s show, and it’s not like he could do anything on Q&A that he couldn’t do on his own news-based panel show The Project. He did an alright job, all things considered, but it’s been roughly a geological age since turning up on Q&A gave anyone’s career any kind of boost and again, he’s already doing this shit five or so times a week on his very own show. So we have a mystery.
Of course, it could be your usual garden variety no-mystery mystery: Q&A could have been after Pickering to appear on their show because he’s a fresh face (to them) who already does a similar-ish show so he’d probably do a good job on theirs. It’s not like Q&A doesn’t already have a long and proud tradition of dragging onto the panel pretty much anyone they think can string two sentences together and suddenly we’re back to ranting about how fucking stupid you’d have to be to take anything that happens on this idiotic show even remotely seriously we mean goddammit-
[ten ranty minutes later]
And we’re back. So it seems Q&A have a history of getting on board comedians who can talk news (as in, at least half The Chaser have been on panel): they reportedly spent well over a year wooing John Safran before he finally caved and made an appearance in 2011. Though if you check wikipedia’s list of panellists here, it doesn’t seem like Q&A goes out of its way to give air time to comedians working on other networks*… even if Ten entertainment reporter Angela Bishop did turn up one week and we are totally spewing we missed what must been world-class insights into having a mum who’s a politician. Unless she was hosting their short-lived “celebrity gossip” segment. Which wouldn’t surprise us in the least.
Anyway, so maybe they just had Pickering on for shits and giggles. But what if there’s more to it? What if this is him putting a toe in the government-funded water to see how he likes it? Ten is cutting staff left right and center and The Project has to be looking a little shaky, not to mention Pickering’s been hosting that show since the begining and five(-ish) nights a week of television every week has to be taking a bit of a toll.
Also boosting our case, former Talkin’ ’bout Your Generation castmates Shaun Micallef and Josh Thomas are now over at the ABC, even if Thomas’ sitcom seems to be always a day away from going to air (baseless speculation based on nothing but hate and past experience: because it’s awful), so it’s not like he’d be walking in a stranger. And with Adam Hill’s career supposedly taking off yet again in the UK while the second series of In Gordon Street Tonight didn’t even rate a DVD release, the ABC just might be in the market for someone new who can make chit-chat with celebrities from behind a desk.
Who knows? We don’t. Do we want to see Pickering at the ABC? Not particularly. He’s not quite as painfully smug as he was in the golden age of TAYG but he does still have the aura of the know-it-all-fucknuckle about him (of course, this could be a big plus at the ABC). More importantly, he’s been a straight host / panel guest for so long – the days of actual comedy on The Mansion with his sidekick Michael “Chambo” Chamberlin were 2008 – that we’d be slightly more than averagely surprised if he turned up on the ABC with a six-part series about his experiences in the world of, oh, we don’t know, inner-city Melbourne hipster hangouts. Watch as he finally re-grows his beard!
None of this might happen. All of it might happen, up to and including a paragraph we deleted where Pickering somehow gets the lead in an Ugly Dave Gray biopic and becomes a sensation in the US a la Eric “Poida” Bana and Chopper. Only one thing is for certain: Q&A remains an astoundingly shithouse excuse for a television show.
*Yeah, we know there aren’t really any other comedians working on the other non-community networks, outside of Paul Fenech on SBS and The Project team.
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.