Australian Tumbleweeds
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.
Adam Zwar ate my hamster
Making its debut tonight is the second series of Lowdown, the Adam Zwar sitcom set in the world of celebrity tabloid journalism. Series 1 ended with columnist Alex Burchill (Zwar) and photographer Bob Geraghty (Paul Denny) carting their boxes down the street after their employer, The Sunday Sun, had been shut down. Now The Sunday Sun has re-opened with almost all of the same staff back in place as if nothing had ever happened: business as usual.
Also very much the same is Alex’s on-again-off-again relationship with artist girlfriend Rita (Beth Buchanan), and that plot about how Bob fancies or hero worships (or somethings) Alex. There’s laughs to be had from all of this, but we’ve kinda seen it before.
The same goes for the plots, which pick up on recent tabloid scandals and re-work them a bit. In episode one Alex is sent saucy pictures of a prominent female politician…but they turn out to be of a porn star. So heavily does this reference the Pauline Hanson nude photos scandal of several years ago that the politician in question is controversial for making racist remarks. Slightly more original is the second episode where Alex gets a film director’s phone hacked in order to prove that the director is involved in some casting couch action, and the third episode in which a gay AFL footballer decides to come out.
Not that Lowdown goes very deeply into the ethical quandaries involved in this sort of thing – it’s all trad gags, slapstick and over-the-top characters – and while that’s a perfectly reasonable way to pitch a sitcom, the topic of tabloid journalism kinda lends itself to something a bit deeper. What’s missing is an overall satirical point or some character development, or something other than some wacky adventures involving some crazy characters each week. In this series the character’s lives have changed a bit – Bob’s girlfriend has moved in with him and Alex which causes tension, and peripheral character Dr James (Dalian Evans) has given up General Practice to focus on alternative medicine – but there’s no overall driving narrative other than Alex’s need to get a particular story each week while other stuff goes on too. Perhaps this is all leading up to something which will start to emerge as the series progresses? Or maybe we should just enjoy this weekly cartoon-like look at journalism for what it is and turn to Clarke & Dawe for our satire?
Three cheers for the beer
The Beer Factor, a rare piece of original comedy for GO!, started up on Saturday night. Hosted by stand-up Tom Gleeson it’s basically The New Inventors but where all the inventions are solving beer-related problems – one guy invented a machine which can pour perfect glasses of beer, a lady invented a way of keeping ants out of your beer at picnics, etc, etc. Perhaps unsurprisingly the show is being paid for by one of this country’s best known brewers.
There’s possibly more laughs to be had from the pointlessness of some of these inventions than Gleeson manages (why not just pour a beer using your hands?) but this isn’t one of those programmes that sets itself up to be great television. This programme is piece of blokey fluff designed to sell even more of the beer made by its well-known sponsor, and given that fact the attempts at product integration are remarkably restrained.
Gleeson is joined on the show by a judging panel consisting of Sally Dominguez (The New Inventors) and stand-up Tommy Little (The Project, Slapbang Radio), plus there’s a house band called Elbow Skin (who are a bit like The Scared Weird Little Guys). In its late night slot on Saturdays it’s easy viewing after you thrown down a few of the sponsor’s products, but we wouldn’t recommend you watch it sober: if you do you’ll probably start reflecting on how sad it is that digital channels a) haven’t given us more niche comedy programmes, and b) that when they do they’re there to sell something. And no one wants to think about that sort of thing when there’s beer to be drunk.
Husbanding Your Resources
House Husbands might not be a comedy, but it’s certainly the future of comedy. This wildly uneven, supposedly ‘heartwarming” look at four men who for various reasons are the primary caregivers to the children in their households is, like pretty much every single prime-time drama series that’s premiered on commercial television since the ABC invented Seachange, trying to be all things to all people. “All people”, in case you were wondering, means rich white people. Welcome to Australian television!
Race-baiting aside, this is the format that ate situation comedy in this country: a bunch of mildly quirky people, either in the one family, a group of oddly age-diverse friends, or twentysomethings who still spend an awful lot of time with their parents (gotta tap all the age demographics), get in all manner of strife – only with added comedy to remind you that we’ve come such a long way since A Country Practice. Look, that one from Underbelly‘s meant to be Lebanese! That other one from Underbelly is playing a gay who sells pies! Gary Sweet is, well, the only one who actually feels like he should have a media career! Babies!
In our version of an ideal world this would be two completely separate shows. The one with the Lebanese ex-footballer fighting to gain custody of his kid from his ex and her douchebag new partner would be a semi-serious drama we could safely ignore, while everyone else would be off in a wacky comedy because that’s basically what they’re already doing here – only because this isn’t a straight-up comedy their wacky antics don’t have to be actually funny. Which explains why the main plot for the three wacky guys involved “losing” a school principal and the shock revelation that the pie seller doesn’t actually make his own pies. Oh ho ho ho ho.
The idea behind this blend of wacky and touching – as seen in everything from Offspring to Winners & Losers oh wait aren’t they basically the same show? – is that the more bases you can cover with the one show the more likely you are to have a show that rates well. We’d argue the exact opposite: the more bases you cover with the one show the more likely you are to create a bland mess that does nothing right. If this was pure drama, the pressure’d be on for it to be actually dramatic; if it was pure comedy, people would expect to actually laugh at something more than its inept struggle to make “oh no, my girl has left me for a douchebag” anything more than a whinge from a somewhat douchey guy down the pub.
Comedy is the big loser in this world of blended families, because while crap drama is still drama albeit crap, crap comedy is nothing. Anything that dilutes comedy makes comedy worse because anything that dilutes comedy makes it less funny. If this was two separate shows, fans of “quality drama” could enjoy the sight of an actor sitting on the floor looking at bills while his baby cries in the background and sad music plays (THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENED), while comedy fans could play the drinking game where you take a shot every time there’s a shot of a tram because all the comedy here is crap.
This is a show where a male character washes dishes in a wading pool with a hose and it’s played as serious drama; this is a show where five year olds steal a school bus and it’s played for laughs. This is a show that doesn’t have to focus on being one thing because it’s trying to be everything. We just wish it was trying to be good. At anything.
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?