Australian Tumbleweeds
What Hillsy did next
Looks like In Gordon Street Tonight must have got the arse – how else to explain the plethora of Adam Hills projects in the UK at the moment? TV Tonight reported on Thursday that Hills is to host a new panel game for BBC Northern Ireland and that he’s developing a show for BBC Radio 4 (which airs multiple sitcoms, sketch shows and panel games each week). He’s also currently presenting a nightly programme, The Last Leg, about the Paralympics for Britain’s Channel 4, although he did find time to co-host the Paralympics Opening Ceremony for the ABC the other night.
Hills is well known and well-liked in this country on the back of his work on Spicks & Specks, and his show In Gordon Street Tonight looked set to be a hit purely because he was hosting. But after a second series which dipped in the ratings we’re guessing it’s been dropped, and Hills has gone off to seek work in the UK where he’s maintained a significant profile over the years by living and working there for part of each year. Hills may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but he’s a popular Australian comedian that Australia doesn’t seem to have been able to find TV work for, and that’s kind of a pity.
The Last Leg (available to illegally download from various places) isn’t necessarily an example of a show which is a great idea, but given that it appears to have a budget of about £5 it’s not bad. It airs every night at 10.30pm following on from Channel 4’s coverage of the Paralympic Games, and aims to take a lighter look at the day’s events.
As with In Gordon Street Tonight Hills has a co-host who sits on the sidelines and chips in with the odd zinger; that co-host is up-and-coming British stand-up Josh Widdecombe and he’s quite funny. Another regular on the show is sports journalist Alex Brooker, who’s part of Channel 4’s Paralympics commentary team; like Hills he’s a nice guy who’s mildly amusing. A regular segment on the show is an update on a bet between Hills and Brooker, who both have prosthetic legs, about whether Australia or Britain will end up with the most Gold Medals (the loser of the bet has to paint his leg in the other team’s colours, so that’ll obviously be hilarious). The rest of the show consists of daily news round-ups, amusing clips, a special guest learning a Paralympic sport (i.e. English cricketer Freddie Flintoff is taught blind Judo) and discussions on what is and isn’t offensive to say to about the Paralympics. That last one has its own Twitter hashtag – #isitok – although that’s pretty much the extent of the social media integration in the show.
Like we said, The Last Leg isn’t bad – although the small studio audience don’t laugh much at Hills’ jokes – but it’s hard to see why anyone in the UK would deliberately stay up to watch this (especially in the case of the second episode, which was delayed by an hour to cover Great Britain’s win in a wheelchair basketball game, meaning The Last Leg didn’t finish until after midnight). Late night comedy shows are traditionally a lot more edgy than this, while this programme with its lightweight discussions and feel-good segments wouldn’t be out of a place at 6.30pm. Perhaps Channel 4, like broadcasters in this country, are utterly paranoid about putting out something which will be offensive? Or maybe Hills is the wrong fit for late night British television, where comedy usually pushes it a bit further than we Australians would?
In the can
Channel 10’s Can of Worms is back and it’s totally different! Although not in a way that’s rating really well or better than Series 1, it seems. But before we get into why, let’s go back to Series 1 for a second. Here’s our blog premiering the series and our follow-up post. If you haven’t got time to read them, we’ll summarise:
Prior to it airing last year a media release was issued stating that Can of Worms was ”an original and controversial concept” which would bring back healthy debate and challenge the political correctness that (supposedly) pervades public discourse. It sounded promising, except that in order to be truly original and controversial, and to allow people to say what they think, the show would also have had to be willing to annoy a decent percentage of its audience…which as a new show with a lot riding on it, it wasn’t. The result? Can of Worms tried to appeal to everyone and ended up pleasing no one – broadsheet-reading inner city types were promised it’d be a sort of comedy version of Q&A, while the rest of the nation was assured that they wouldn’t need to know about politics to enjoy it – and the result was a mess.
There were also a number of other problems: the episodes were pre-recorded and poorly edited, and some audiences felt that social media should be an integral part of the programme. Sure, people could vote in a number of the polls which appeared on the show, and a selection of live tweets and Facebook posts were superimposed on the bottom of the screen during the broadcast, but the public couldn’t guide the panel’s discussion in any meaningful way. Of course, Q&A doesn’t really offer that either – and even if they did it probably wouldn’t be an improvement – but this element may have improved Can of Worms. It’s not like most of the panellists had anything interesting or funny to say.
When Series 1 ended, creator and star Ian “Dicko” Dickson came out and declared that he’d “sacked himself”, and that the search would be on to find a new host – the excitement! There followed months of rumours as to who it would be, with Breakfast’s Paul Henry one of the supposed front-runners, but eventually The Circle’s Chrissie Swan was chosen. And Dicko was not the only departure, co-host Meshel Laurie was dropped and Series 1’s “man on the street” Dan Ilic has taken on her duties in Series 2 whilst continuing to do his own (subtext: having two fat chicks on Australian television really would be like opening a can of worms).
The rounds and order of the show in Series 2 are also slightly different, plus they seem to have ironed-out those editing problems, but while the show is smoother it’s not necessarily better or funnier, and Can of Worms now seems even less likely to deliver us an interesting debate. For one thing it now comes across as way too soft and cuddly to be a worthwhile look at “the issues”. Also, if you wanted to make a show which was about robust and interesting debate, wouldn’t you need a panel of people from a variety of industries, backgrounds, political persuasions and age groups, debating topics that mattered in a way which wasn’t pitched at people who don’t know who the Prime Minister is? The Can of Worms panels for Series 2 so far seem to consist of well-known media and sporting personalities, aged between about 25 and 45, who mostly rely on crap gags and personal anecdotes when forming their “opinions”. Series 1 may have had a lot of problems, but at least you felt that different generations and different types of people were getting heard, even if that meant John Elliott one week and Tom Ballard another.
As for the comedy element, that’s, as ever, heavily dependent on the guests in the chairs that week. And in this series so far there’s always been at least one panellist who’s done commercial radio, so we’ve had…let’s put it this way…humour of a certain type. And perhaps there’s a clue there as to why this, and lots of other local panel shows, just don’t work: commercial radio’s crap enough on radio, so why would you televise it?
Randling Ain’t Nothing But Turd Misspelled.
The funniest thing about watching Randling at this stage isn’t just the grim suspicion that you might be the only person on Earth doing so; it’s the knowledge that all the people you’re seeing on-screen have no idea of the train wreck this series has turned out to be. In case you’ve spent the last three months – fuck, has it really only been three months, it feels like a decade since the ABC came out and said they were no longer in the “entertainment” business – frantically rubbing a magnet over your head trying to erase all memory of this square window onto a world choked by smug, let us remind you that so convinced were the ABC of Randling‘s success they recorded all 27 episodes before a single one had gone to air. Audience feedback? Not at your ABC.
The black comedy seeps out in all manner of ways. Hearing host Andrew Denton utter the line “The show that’s more fun than a barrel of monkeys and only half as cruel” is the kind of leaden doubleplusunjoke that Denton’s other ABC mainstay The Gruen FapFapFap delivers on a slightly-better-rating basis, but “two teams attempt to step over each other for the glory of being named the 2012 Randling premiers” is flat-out hilarious. Yeah, you’d better make sure we know they’re the 2012 premiers, Mr Denton. This is a series that’s going to run and run and run and runnnnn.
But wait – didn’t Randling rate 519,000 last week? Isn’t that’s a lot better than many of the other disasters the ABC’s programmed on a Wednesday night in 2012 – a once-proud comedy night they’ve so convincingly shat all over that the second series of Adam Zwar’s Lowdown is now going to air 9.30pm Thursdays? Well yes, and well done spotting the shift in Lowdown‘s timeslot (it’ll be paired with series two of Rake, which actually makes sense). But to put it into perspective, Randling‘s lead-in at 8.30pm Gruen Sweat – which ran for 45 minutes – rated 918,000. There is nothing to watch on Australian television that starts at 9.15pm on a Wednesday: 400,000 people would rather turn their televisions off than watch a second of Randling.
Here’s why: the first game is called “Either Or” – Denton gives each team three names, and they have to say whether each name belongs to a Shakespearean Character or a Car. The fuck? On what planet does this make for entertaining viewing? Or, to be slightly less snarky about it, what about this game is either going to provide the home audience with interesting information or provide the comedians on screen with solid comedy material? Because when the first name is “Fairlady” even solid laugh-getters like Anthony Morgan and Dave O’Neil flail around something savage. Don’t worry though: after six odd-minutes we go over to the other team and DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN. This is at best a rapid-fire 90 second bit; when it takes up a third of your show, you have got yourself one dull show.
We’ve gone on plenty of times about just how insanely boring the very concept -“WORD! BASED! GAME! SHOW!” – of Randling is, but the fact is that it’s the kind of idea that could have worked if – like QI, a show this so desperately wants to be – it was put together by a tight-knit team of highly talented comedy professionals. Instead, Denton’s asked the Gruen gag writers to stay back over lunch to come up with some half-baked questions and just assumed the professional panel guests he was roping in could pick up the slack. But there is no slack. They have nothing to work with. “I reckon Tiburon is a late model Dodge” says the usually very funny Morgan*. Great. Is someone naked on Puberty Blues? Let’s go look.
There’s twenty minutes more of this and it never gets any better. When a question as to which word is older; Google, online or hypertext – and we swear we’re not making this up, this really did go to air on a national broadcaster in prime time – is answered by Dave O’Neil with “I don’t even know what hypertext is, what is it”, you can really feel a part of yourself die inside. No-one cares about this show. It was not made with love, or a dedication to quality, or a desire to entertain. It was made, like Pollyfilla, to fill a gap. Only the people who make Pollyfilla are funnier. Pollyfilla itself is funnier.
It’s hard to isolate individual elements in this depressing dirge of a wake for the very concept of laughter, but let’s give it a shot: when Morgan makes an okay joke about a fake plastic fist so “only children” (as in “only child”) can do his team’s patented two person fist-bump, cutting to Denton shitting himself with hilarity pushes the audience out of the show.
Whether you like it or not, the idea of having a live audience is to create the feel of being there for the viewers at home, and when handled correctly it can work. Cutting away from the cast to show home viewers the actual live audience – as every show Denton’s ever done does as often as possible – doesn’t achieve the same thing: when you’re in the audience, how often do you stop to look at everyone else around you? It’s more like a clip around the ear – these guys are laughing, therefore that joke was FUNNY. And fuck you for not laughing.
Showing the actual host laughing is even worse than that, because it doesn’t involve the audience at all: we’re all having a great time here, it says, and we don’t need you. How often did you see Shaun Micallef doubled up with laughter in Talkin’ ’bout Your Generation? We’re going to go with zero – which is the same amount of audience shots we saw across that show’s entire run – because he knew his job was to do things that actually make people at home laugh, not amuse himself and assume that the audience was so desperate for his approval they’d laugh along.
That’s the real turn-off with Randling, above and beyond the leaden pace, dull games and fumbling attempts by the comedians to try and make the whole thing work: it’s a show too concerned with entertaining itself to bother trying to entertain the viewer. The constant cuts to shots of the audience or Denton or the contestants laughing away aren’t trying to make us laugh: they’re there to try and make us think that we’re watching something that’s funny. Randling isn’t a show, it’s a commercial for how charming and funny Andrew Denton and the cast are. An old adage about the difficulty of polishing a turd comes to mind.
*Seeing Morgan make his television comeback on this show is perhaps the most painful thing about it. He’s a great comedian who’s been much missed since he moved to Tasmania, and hearing he’d be on Randling was a guarantee we’d be tuning in, for his episodes at least. It’s a sign of just how limp the show as a whole is that someone as naturally funny and charming as he is can’t make more than the barest impact here.
Get your Fix
Plenty of talented people have been burnt by commercial radio. Get This with Tony Martin, Ed Kavalee and Richard Marsland, and The Sweetest Plum with Declan Fay and Nick Maxwell were axed by Triple M for what you might call “business reasons”, e.g the network felt they weren’t rating well enough, or that they were too expensive, or that they didn’t fit with their overall profile. The latter “problem”, the one about a network or station’s profile, is key: the strategy of most commercial radio is to appeal to the sorts of demographics who will tune in and then buy from their sponsors. One of the ways in which this is achieved is by playing music with an appeal to the target demographics and by asking on-air talent to produce content which is “relatable” to those demographics. It’s also quite a bad idea for the talent to take piss out of either of the music or the drive to be “relatable” on air – presumably those demographics to whom commercial radio wishes to appeal have no sense of irony whatsoever.
Oh wait, who are we kidding? The real reason is that management don’t really get comedy at all, or music, because for them it’s just about making money and anything that seems to be against that is regarded as bad. The origins of this thinking in Australian commercial radio are laid out in Peter Grace’s article You turn on the hot tap…A personal observation of how painting by numbers and turd polishing choked the fun out of music radio. Here’s a sample:
Today’s risk-averse scientific formulas for predictability, blandness and hot water from the hot tap have pretty much eliminated commercial radio as a place to find new, different and innovative music beyond what the kiddies and the record companies other vested interests are voting for on the Hot 30.
Exactly the same is true of comedy on radio. Where once commercial radio’s weekday line-ups were bookended by breakfast shows and drive shifts in which actual comedians were paid to be funny generally, today we have on-air teams (which may include a comedian or two) who talk about the latest thing that happened in their live or react to other people’s real life stories. Reminder: it’s all about trying to present “relatable” content, something people can connect to their own lives. Take this to its logical conclusion and you have the likes of Kyle and Jackie O, who get around the fact that they are highly paid entertainers living a glamorous lifestyle which almost no one can relate to by inviting real people with sensational stories to tell on to their show.
In 2009 when The Kyle and Jackie O Show aired a lie detector segment in which a 14 year old girl was asked by her own mother if she had ever had sex many people were horrified, not just because the girl claimed she had been raped at the age of 12 or because someone so young was being asked about their sex life on live radio by their own mother, but because of Kyle Sandiland’s insensitive reaction to the revelation of rape. Sandilands was censured online and in the media, and lost a lucrative TV contract as a result, but his career has otherwise been unaffected and his on-air style has not noticeably changed.
Surprisingly, this incident hasn’t been satirised in any notable or biting way (that we can recall), although the strategies and tactics of commercial radio have. Tony Martin and Ed Kavalee have made much comedic hay from the topic (i.e. Gary Sizzle), and in recent months Declan Fay and Nick Maxwell’s podcast The Sweetest Plum has been peppered with references to commercial radio strategy (based on their own experiences at Triple M). Now Fay and his some-time writing partner Chris Kennett (The Pinch) have written a parody of Kyle and Jackie O called The Bevo & Mimi Show which features Nick Maxwell (The Sweetest Plum) and Kate McLennan (The Mansion, Live From Planet Earth, Dogstar) in the title roles. The first video, The Confession Session, is a direct parody of the 2009 lie detector incident. The second video, The Baby Gwayne Incident, sees Mimi embarrassed when it becomes public that she left her own child in the corner of a bar during the launch party for a new cider drink. They’re both worth a look.
Equally amusing are the Facebook page and Twitter account for Bevo and Mimi’s employer The Fix 96.6 – “[YOUR CITY]’s favourite radio station”. The updates on both are pretty good parodies of what you might hear on-air should you tune in to a Today Network or Nova station, i.e,:
So #Ecuador is trending? Sounds like you guys are ready for a Christina Aguilera triple-play!
Fans of the Bevo & Mimi videos are also joining in the fun:
Hey guys, loving the better music variety during my workday. The top two at two along with the hot three at three is simply must listen to radio.
Where Bevo & Mimi go from here is anyone’s guess. The videos could easily air on TV in short timeslots, as Audrey’s Kitchen or Kane & Disabled have, or perhaps there are plans to pitch this concept as a sitcom. Either way, we recommend you check it out.
Willing and Disabled
Continuing their fondness for squeezing in comedy shorts wherever they can, tonight on ABC2 we saw the debut of yet another… one of those things we just described, Kane & Disabled. Designed to tie-in with ABC2’s upcoming coverage of the paralympics, this “VHS Sports presentation” sees old school TV host – his first line is “women just aren’t funny” – Ernie Kane (Lawrence Mooney) hosting a talk show where he deals with paralympians. Hilarity ensues! Mother-in-law gags! Questions about what kind of disability the athlete has! Beating up on a person in a mascot costume! They’re cheap gags, but for the most part they work.
As we’ve said before about these kind of shows, being short – roughly four minutes – is a huge advantage. As an out-of-touch old fart Kane is a rock-solid comedy cliche, but that’s all you need here. Across the ten episodes the paralympians – whose acting ability varies, but are generally well up to the task – are there so Kane can make a dick of himself, and Mooney has no trouble whatsoever making his character work. Sam Pang as his hapless producer contains even less surprises but again, the more cliched the characters are the more room there is for jokes. Plus Tony Martin turns up in the final episode, returning us to the golden days of 2009 when no Australian comedy show was complete with a T. Martin cameo.
Fingers crossed that one day – maybe over summer even – ABC2 will put together a half hour show featuring this, Working dog’s Audrey’s Kitchen, Charles Firth’s The Roast, Beached Az clips, and whatever other short series they’ve commissioned over the last few years. As five minute gap-fillers these shows – all of which are at the very least watchable and in this case actually funny in parts – are all too easily missed.
Tom Ballard bags out the Jews
Occasionally we’re asked what we think about stuff; Kevin e-mailed us with this query over the weekend:
I’m interested in whether you’ve heard about the heat Tom Ballard and Triple J have faced for the Holocaust jokes he made as part of a segment with Alan Brough on Thursday morning (the offending segment seems to have been clipped out of the podcast version of the show). There’s been media back and forth about the subject and whether jokes about the Holocaust can ever be acceptable and Triple J and Ballard have released apologies (in Ballard’s case what reads to me as a half-hearted apology which apologised for how his joke was received rather than the content of his joke). Figured it might be of interest considering how vocal Ballard’s been about ‘every possible taboo’ being on the table in comedy.
None of us heard the Triple J breakfast show on Thursday, but as that’s never stopped us commenting on Ballard’s stupid utterances before here’s some thoughts…
All the media articles we can find about this matter agree that the gag in question was made during what Mumbrella described as…
…an on-air game to link two things together, Hitler and a wind-farm. In a reference to gas chambers used in concentration camps, Ballard suggested “fan-forced ovens”.
Obviously there could be a context to the game and the gag that we and the various other articles on this aren’t picking up on, but we doubt it. What it looks like to us is a bit of comedic improv gone wrong. Ballard was asked to link a couple of things together, his goal was to do that in a funny way, he ended up making a link but it wasn’t very funny, and even worse it was a bit offensive – FAIL.
Various articles and Twitter commentators have since taken Ballard’s comedic FAIL and argued that jokes about the Holocaust, and even Hitler, aren’t on. Several Jewish commentators including Dvir Abramovich in the Sydney Morning Herald and Jonno Seidler in The Vine have also made a link between Ballard’s gag and anti-Semitism. For us the gag itself doesn’t indicate that Ballard is an anti-Semite – we’d need to hear at least one other gag which suggested a casual disregard for, or a downright hatred of, the Jewish people and/or the Holocaust for us to agree with that, so we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.
If the gag indicates anything it’s that Ballard’s crap at his job. Comedians do improv games such as this on the radio all the time, and what marks out the better ones is that they know how the game will go in advance allowing them time to plan. Take the long-running British radio show I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, in which a panel of comedians improvise whilst play a series of silly games. When asked in interviews, the team members admit that they see the games a few hours in advance allowing them just enough time to work out some decent gags. This is what Ballard and friends should have done.
But they didn’t, and the nation was treated not just to Ballard’s fan-forced oven gag but another shitstorm about comedy and how offensive it’s allowed to be. We’ve also been here several times before with Tom Ballard, who has stated on many occasions that he thinks comedy should be allowed to shock people and break barriers and so on. Fair enough, it should. But shouldn’t it also do that in a smart way? There may well be hilarious gags to be made about the Holocaust, but wouldn’t it be better if they made a point we could all agree with? Making a gag which could easily be read as “Ballard’s handy suggestion for how to speed up the Holocaust, by using fan-forced ovens”, isn’t exactly smart. Or funny.
Back in February we wrote about another “controversy” involving Tom Ballard and his “anything goes in comedy” mantra. We made the point that Australian comedians often don’t put enough thought into individual gags or the context in which they sit, and that a gag isn’t funny or worthy simply because it’s an example of freedom of speech. Especially when dealing with topics like this there’s got to be a point to the joke, and the main point has to be funny. Tom Ballard has failed to do either once again.
Worst Friday Book Club ep 1: Bargain Bin Scab
One of the big advantages of being a comedy fan when it comes to books is that pretty much everything ends up in second hand stores. Even the cruddiest used bookstore usually has an A-grade collection of comedy books on their shelves, simply because comedy books are the most disposable, throw-away books there are. A store’s fiction shelves may be lined with faded Robert Ludlum and Jackie Collins paperbacks, but hit the comedy shelves and everything from a bunch of Barry Humphries’ collections to the Fast Forward book to Tony Martin’s Lolly Scramble to the excretable Double the Fist book are yours for the taking. Unless we get there first.
Often lumped in with the more overtly comedic books are biographies of comedians, and recently we picked up two covering the lives of two of Australia’s biggest comedy figures: Ross Fitzgerald & Rick Murphy’s biography of Sandy Gutman Austen Tayshus: Merchant of Menace and Grahame “Aunty Jack” Bond’s autobiography Jack of All Trades, Mistress of One. What do these books have in common apart from being purchased at bargain prices? We’re glad you asked.
There’s something of a dividing line in Australian television comedy between those who rose to fame before the late 80s and those who came afterwards. It’s not hard and fast by any means, but it’s safe to say pretty much everyone who hit the big time before 1985 or so is now long forgot (or branched out into serious acting, a la Garry McDonald and Shane Bourne), while at least some of those who rose to fame in the late 80s are still kicking on in comedy: Paul McDermott, Working Dog, Andrew Denton, Jane Turner & Gina Reilly. So what happened? Why did the comedy door close for some people yet stay open for others just a few years later?
Buggered if we know, and neither of these books – both of which, in case you hadn’t guessed, involve people who’s careers peaked before the cut-off date for lasting success – offers any kind of wider explanation. We’re not going to delve too deeply into their overall contents or approach here, which is to say this isn’t going to be a proper review of either. But if you’ve come here for a review, in summary:
* Bond’s book has a lot of interesting anecdotes, is generally fairly self-serving (he’s brilliant, many of the people he worked with less so) but not overly spiteful, has lots of photos and is generally pretty entertaining, if not exactly insightful.
* Fitzgerald & Murphy’s book is full of praise for Gutman without ever really explaining why he’s so funny (it’s clearly aimed at his fans, so this approach makes some sense), but if you want loads of stories about Gutman embarrassing people he’s with or acting like a jerk this is the book for you, even if Gutman himself comes across as an interesting and likable, if troubled, fellow.
What both these books do manage to provide is some insight into why their individual subjects didn’t continue their early successes in comedy. In Bond’s case, after hitting it big massively with Aunty Jack he fairly quickly grew sick of the character:
“As Garry [McDonald] was discovering his alter-ego Norman Gunston, I was falling out of love with mine”
“It felt strange playing second fiddle to my own creation”
“I lost my freedom”
“It was demeaning”
“In the end that’s why I killed Aunty Jack – because I found that I was losing myself to a fantasy character”
So that’s pretty clear then. That wasn’t the end of his comedy career right away – he tried his luck overseas, did a successful stage show, and so on – but it’s fairly obvious that advertising was increasingly becoming an option for him, especially when a mate called him up and asked him if he wanted to be the creative director of his newly-purchased ad agency. Sold!
But then there’s this:
“The reason I dropped out of comedy in the late 1980s was because I became aware that comedy was about to change forever with the gradual rise of political correctness. PC was like an unstoppable plague spreading through the entertainment industry. It was so all-pervasive comedians had to stay within very tight guidelines. I went back to advertising”
Which reads to us a little like “I used to be with it, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now, what I’m with isn’t it, and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary.” Thank you Grandpa Simpson.
Okay, let’s be slightly less of a dick about it: comedy was changing by the late 80s and Bond either didn’t like or didn’t want to change with it. Watching clips of Aunty Jack now – both complete series of the Aunty Jack Show are available on DVD, which is a sign of just how popular the show was – it’s pretty clear that loud costumes, cartoon violence, local references and comedy gibberish wouldn’t really fly up against Kylie Mole, which was actually referring to something going on in Australian culture.
Meanwhile over on the other book being covered here, it’s fairly obvious that Gutman’s career tanked after the massive hit that was 1983’s Australiana largely because the writer of that hit single, Billy Birmingham, didn’t want to work with him any more. In fact it looks like no-one wants to work with Gutman, as he seems to be both self-destructive and something of a massive pain to have to deal with.
Seriously, just opening the book completely at random uncovers the following quotes:
“His reputation was making many venue operators nervous, and post show complaints were increasing at an alarming rate” (p.142)
“Gutman went beyond reasonable boundaries of forgiveness” (p.231)
“He eventually found a niche working on rock videos. His outrageous nature was right at home on the drug-and-alcohol fueled sets. The money was good and the access to coke even better” (p. 70)
“Trevor Farrant escaped the Austen Tayshus circus halfway through a series of gigs in Sydney. ‘Things were going well,’ Gutman says. ‘Until I gave him the shits so badly he just disappeared.’ (p. 199)
“‘Although I admire his talent and intellect, it could be said that Sandy uses his middle-class education to bully people’ [Rachel Berger] says” (p.251)
“His cocaine use was out of control by any reasonable standard” (p.158)
“‘I was his driver on tour for a while,’ Poltorak says. ‘I got sick of it. He was always very aggressive. I felt like a punching bag after a while. He treated me, and most other people, like second class citizens, always using the self-serving rationale of ‘his art’, which excused some pretty disgraceful behaviour” (p.153)
You get the idea. There’s plenty that’s positive here as well, and we wouldn’t want to give the impression that Gutman’s career hasn’t been a strong one since Australiana – for one thing, he wrote and starred in the Paul Fenech directed short Intolerance, which won at Tropfest in 1998 – but the overall picture in this book is of a very angry and somewhat erratic performer who thrives on adversarial relationships, both professionally and with his audience. Not surprisingly, professional success hasn’t so much eluded him as been hurled from his grasp; the praise from the various big names quoted here tends to swing between “underappreciated” and “untameable”.
As for “funny”… well, like we said, this one’s for the fans. And presumably the fans know his material, because aside from some examples of scripted material (written by other people) and numerous references to him calling police, politicians and personalities “cunts”, there’s next to no examples of his actual on-stage comedy material. Supposedly he’s a skilled improvisor which explains the gaps a little, but it still puts a major dent in the book’s argument that Gutman is a powerful comedy force. If you pick this up wondering why anyone would still care about someone best known for a comedy single that’s 30 years old, you’ll put it down none the wiser.
As for our big question, it seems safe to say these guys seemed ground-breaking and innovative at the time because, well, they were. But once the ground was broken, those who followed built on what had come before. The earlier performers fought hard to make it, and once they had – once they’d established that there was a market for this comedy stuff – the people that followed could put more of their efforts into actually being funny. Which helped them carry on longer than their predecessors; when the path to success is relatively easy and a winning formula is widely known*, it’s a lot easier to keep on going than when every step is a struggle.
In short: if you think biographies get written when there’s nothing more left to say, both these books will confirm that view. They’re looking back at comedians who’s best days are behind them: these books are, in part, for people who want to know why.
[edit: Sandy Gutman has contacted us via Facebook to let us know that more information about his career can be found at his website.]
*part of which is, “don’t try to crack the States”: both Gutman and Bond gave it a go, and it’s fairly clear their failures sapped a lot of energy out of them.
Going for Bronze
After this morning’s “Aussie Gold Rush” at London 2012 it’s easy to forget the pain of last week, when sports fan hoping for Aussie Gold after Aussie Gold really needed a laugh. Hopefully they managed to tune in to Triple M Melbourne, where Santo Cilauro and Sam Pang were filling-in for James Brayshaw and Billy Brownless on the Rush Hour.
Rush Hour Going For Gold, Cilauro and Pang’s special Olympics-themed show, is now well in to its second and final week but it’s already proved to be comedic the highlight of the London 2012 Olympics. What makes it a good listen isn’t that it takes the Gruen Sweat approach of trying to highlight all the dodgy behind-the-scenes goings on, or that it offers much in the way of analysis of Australia’s (lack of) sporting success – it doesn’t even do anything particularly original in terms of comedy, well, not if you’re familiar with anything the Working Dog team have done for the past couple of decades – it’s more that it simply takes a major event, and wrings as many laughs and as much fun from it as it possible.
Unlike so many other radio programmes which include comedians in their team this is actually a comedy. There are some straight-ish interviews with sportsmen and women, and the odd visiting celebrity, but it’s mainly just a couple of experienced piss-takers raking through the news of the day, just as they did on Sports Fever!, and managing to make it something that even non-sport fans can enjoy.
If nothing else it’s worth listening to the quiz segment hosted by regular guest Tom Gleisner. From the dodgy buzzers to the hilariously incorrect answers, it’s a skillful and deceptively simple piece of radio. And we say “skillful and deceptively simple” because it’s one of those segments that, if asked, the team would probably claim was something they hastily cobbled together to fill in air time. They said this about most of the segues in The Late Show, though, and some of them were pretty funny, so it’s probably best not to get sucked into the modesty. And let’s face it, they probably do cobble it together to fill in air time, but it takes a lot of skill to cobble something together that’s that entertaining.
Apart from the quiz, there’s also the awarding of the Bronze Medals for the worst jokes in that day’s show, and the occasional cameo from Rob Sitch, so if you haven’t been listening why not download the shows from the Triple M Melbourne website right now.
The show is also, perhaps, testament to Working Dog’s drive to get their shows up anywhere they can. What was originally a World Cup soccer show on SBS (Cup Fever!) has gone on to be a weekly sports show on Seven (Sports Fever!) and is now this Olympics special series on Triple M. Where will this loose team/concept turn up next, we wonder? And why no Ed Kavalee this time ‘round?
A Twenty Year Old Corpse
Is The Late Show the most overrated Australian comedy of the last twenty years? The answer may surprise you: yes it is. Not only is it massively overrated, it continues to be overrated to this very day – which, considering we’re currently celebrating the twenty year anniversary of its initial airing on the ABC, gives you an idea of just how overrated it is.
Wait what? Isn’t this the show that Ben Pobjie recently stopped vaguely discussing half-arsed trends in television to praise? The show that popular TV blog TV Tonight gave a shout out to? The show the Australian Film Institute website recently saluted? The show that inspired the Champagne Comedy site, AKA the only Australian television comedy forum of note? Overrated? But Marieke Hardy loves it!
[pause for effect]
Okay, now that all the hard-core Late Show fans have stormed off to go hold their own “bring back Jo Bailey” style protest outside the front gates of Tumbleweeds HQ, we can wheel in the qualifier: The Late Show isn’t overrated in terms of quality. It’s actually really good – so good, in fact, it’s odd how many of the glowing testimonials that have surfaced in the last few weeks have barely addressed the actual quality of the show. Sorry, but calling it “an hour of precision chaos” doesn’t count. Or even really mean anything (we’d go with “tightly scripted but presented in a ramshackle fashion”, which might explain why we don’t work at Fairfax).
What is truly, massively overrated about The Late Show is its influence on the actual shape of Australian comedy. Largely because, despite what its’ fans will tell you, it had no real influence at all.
C’mon, if you want to talk about lasting influences, let’s talk The Comedy Company. When that clumsy sketch show beat 60 Minutes in the ratings in 1988 it literally changed the face of Australian comedy for the next two decades. And, if its wikipedia page is to be believed, gave the country the word “bogan” in the process.
Fast Forward, which along with its various spin-off ran for a decade, was a direct response / knock-off of The Comedy Company. Every single sketch show made in Australia since has used the Comedy Company formula – even The Wedge, close to two decades later, was basically a direct rip-off of The Comedy Company. The Comedy Company didn’t come out of nowhere, but it locked in a dull, lowbrow, producer-led formula that everyone’s looked back to since. And yet, on its 20th anniversary, where were the articles praising it? Where was the sappy “you changed my life and taught me to laugh” columns about a show that rated way better than The Late Show ever did? And let’s not even start on The Big Gig, which aired around the same time and had just as big an impact.
Obviously we’re not saying that the people behind The Late Show – Tom Gleisner, Rob Sitch, Santo Cilauro, Tony Martin, Mick Molloy, Jason Stephens and Jane Kennedy (with Judith Lucy joining in the second series) – didn’t help shape Australian comedy. Two words: The Panel. There’s a show that steered the turnip truck of Australian comedy off a cliff and laughed as everyone followed close behind. Meanwhile on radio, Martin / Molloy opened the door for countless comedian-heavy double acts all the way through to Hamish & Andy. But The Late Show? What shows did it influence? What style of comedy did it inspire? Where is the raft of imitators? In what way was it not a complete and total dead end, the “ill-fated” Mick Molloy Show aside?
To be fair, the vanishing without trace of everything The Late Show stood for wasn’t entirely the fault of the (group then known as the) D-Generation. In many ways The Late Show was the culmination of their already decade-long comedy careers, the kind of show that could only be made by performers who’d honed their skills on television, on radio and in live performance and could do pretty much whatever it took to get the maximum possible laughs from an idea.
Putting together an hour of live material, sketches, pre-recorded material, vox pops, musical numbers and commentaries on commercials and Countdown clips, as well as re-dubbing television serials, sourcing old talent show clips and finding celebrities willing to make fools of themselves was a massive task; it’s no wonder no-one in Australia has tried anything similar since.
It also came at the tail-end of the comedy boom, and was the kind of show that really only could flourish with an audience already firmly up to speed with television comedy in all its many forms. Even at the time it wasn’t a mainstream hit – that would have been your Fast Forwards and your Tonight Live with Steve Vizards, not to mention your Hey, Dad!s – but the years of high-profile and much-loved comedies that had gone before had created enough of an audience for comedy that a show packed with in-jokes and personal obsessions with hardly any reoccurring characters (let alone catchphrases) could make its mark.
When people talk about the influence of The Late Show, what they’re talking about is its influence on them. It was a show that connected with its viewers* in a way that few Australian shows – but pretty much all its overseas counterparts because don’t tell us you didn’t notice it had pretty much the same format as the American Saturday Night Live (and to some extent Monty Python) – ever have. That’s because the format creates stars in a way few others do: it not only makes you laugh, it shows you the actual people who are making you laugh. The Late Show didn’t need reoccurring characters to succeed because the cast were the characters.
In regular sketch shows you occasionally get a glimpse of this when a performer cracks up – or “corpses” – during a take (yes, this is a link to Steve Vizard and Peter Moon corpsing on Fast Forward – and it’s no surprise that Vizard’s regular corpsing made him the most popular cast member of that show); in sitcoms and other pre-recorded shows you never see it at all. As for panel shows, there the tone is much more combative (everyone is fighting to get the biggest laugh) and the results much less impressive.
[it doesn’t always work: no-one corpsed harder or more often on Australian television than Daryl Somers. Though in his case his crack-ups weren’t so much an expression of sheer joy and enjoyment than the royal seal of approval.]
The Late Show was full of this stuff and it gave the show a real feel of a bunch of mates getting together to have fun. It certainly helped that they were some of the sharpest comedy minds in the country – the best remembered bits of The Late Show are either the extremely well-crafted stuff (Bargearse, The Last Aussie Auteur, Beware of Wog) or the incredibly slipshod stuff (Graham & the Colonel, Rob Sitch going off-book doing impressions, dodgy album covers), with the merely solid material in between largely overlooked** – but by coming across as themselves on television they also became personalities in their own right. Remember “Girls Just Want To Have Mick”? You didn’t see anyone writing about the sex appeal of Mark Mitchell.
Whether this chummy tone existed off-camera – and while everyone certainly seems to be friends now*** there were a lot of rumours about off-screen tensions and a hard-partying Molloy at the time of the second series – is beside the point; even at the time the whole “we’re just being ourselves” angle was clearly an act. Remember those “date” sketches with Tommy G and Jane when in real life Jane was dating Rob – something they went out of their way to conceal for years afterwards?
Whether the daggy atmosphere was manufactured to prop up the occasionally wobbly material or not, it’s clear that to an extent not seen since (making it another way it completely failed to influence Australian comedy) The Late Show turned its cast into much-loved television personalities. People might laugh at The Chaser or Chris Lilley, but (teenage girls aside), no-one loves those guys because those guys are always performing. They never let the audience in the way Rob and Santo would as they laughed at their failed jokes as Graham & The Colonel. Whatever the quality of the material you’re delivering, if you can do that – if you can let the mask slip and show yourself to be just an average guy who likes a laugh – then you’ve got fans for life.
Well, twenty years at least.
*it didn’t hurt at all that the audience for The Late Show was the kind of nerdy cool kids that grow up to either make comedy or work in the media.
**This is also partly due to the massive edit job done on the essential but slightly disappointing Late Show DVD, which reduces many lesser sketches to a handful of jokes and loses a lot of the piss-farting around. There’s a clear divide between people who saw the show live (or have tracked down complete episodes) and those who’ve only seen the DVD.
***Apart from Mick and Tony, obviously.
Could barely give a Stuff
What with the Olympics period being a bit of a down time in the local TV industry, we’ve been back scouring the torrents sites for stuff to blog about. Or Stuff to blog about, because Wendy Harmer’s 2008 series of that name is available on one such site (and on a legitimate, but seemingly out of print, DVD).
If you disliked Myf Warhurst’s Nice (and as a reader of the blog we’re assuming you probably did) then you’ll also dislike Wendy Harmer’s Stuff…because they’re basically the same show. The main difference is that Stuff is less about personal memories and nostalgic themes, and more of a rattle around the living spaces of various ordinary Aussies. Their weird, wonderful, normal and non-existent possessions are all explored, and as you might expect the people in the series range from obsessive hoarders to people who’ve discarded as many worldly goods as possible.
One point of minor interest about this series is that some notable comedy personnel are involved – apart from Harmer, who created and presents the series, the director is Ted Emery (whose credits include The D-Generation, Fast Forward, Full Frontal, The Micallef Programme and Kath & Kim) and the producer is Laura Waters (responsible for Chris Lilley’s various series) – but despite their credentials the series isn’t remotely funny. Mind you, it isn’t really trying to be, it’s more of a lightweight entertainment show that in a previous era would have aired at 6pm rather than 8pm. Ah well, it’s least it’s not the bloody Olympics – is it just us who’re sick to the back teeth of that already?