Australian Tumbleweeds
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?
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.