Australian Tumbleweeds
Got the Love, Got the Love
Ben Pobjie would be the first to tell you he isn’t a TV critic. Rather, he’s just a guy with an opinion about television and who really cares what he thinks because everyone’s opinions are equally valid and it’s just television anyway, right? Let’s pause to salute the Fairfax press for giving someone with such commitment to television reviewing a job as a television reviewer.
But with his long-standing commitment to “so what?” as a guiding principle of reviewing, it was something of a surprise to see him take a firm stand in this week’s column – in the form of this sentence:
And then there’s our current best comedy, Laid, centred around the hapless Roo McVie.
“Current best comedy”? Laid? That might seem like a controversial statement, but let’s do the math. Pobjie would have to submit his Saturday column ahead of time, so it’s certain he wrote it before Mad As Hell went to air on Friday night. Laid didn’t start until May 2nd, so both Woodley and Santo, Sam & Ed’s Sports Fever had finished before it went to air. Agony Aunts started May 2nd too, but it started after Laid (at 9.30pm). Therefore, from all this we can deduce that if Pobjie wrote that Laid was “our best current comedy” during – but not one second after – the very first episode of Laid, he would have been correct. Wow, tight deadline.
Of course, there’s a slight chance he wrote that sentence at some other time, in which case what the hell? His view isn’t one supported by the ratings – even fellow writers at Pobjie’s employer The Age have noted the decline of the ABC’s Wednesday line-up, though clearly the ABC itself doesn’t seem to get that people first and foremost want to watch shows that aren’t crap:
Brendan Dahill, controller of ABC1, tells Green Guide the performance of Randling should be understood within a broader context of the evolving free-to-air offering.
”The media landscape has changed dramatically,” he says.
”It is hard to launch any new show at this time, so we need to be patient … The audience needs time to find new shows and be comfortable with them. We need time to assess them as well.”
(A problem: Randling’s 27-episode season is in the can, so there’s little chance of fine-tuning to alay viewer concerns.)
Dahill adds Spicks’ February 2005 debut had an average of just 669,000 viewers. By the time it ended, the ABC had arguably become over-dependent on it as the anchor of Wednesdays. It also may have erred in giving people so long to wean themselves off the habit, announcing the series was coming to an end in May 2011 but not screening the last episode until November.
Nothing it has thrown at the slot has held the audience to the same degree. The ABC has been struggling since. At some point, it will get the mix right or try something else – or accept the audience has moved elsewhere. Dahill hasn’t given up the fight. ”Inevitably we have to refresh our schedules. If we don’t try new programs, we’ll be criticised for playing it safe.”
In contrast to being criticised for airing shows no-one is watching? In contrast to being criticised for giving second series to shows no-one was watching the first time around? Or just in contrast to being criticised for having no idea what people actually want to watch on television? And as for this:
”It is hard to launch any new show at this time, so we need to be patient … The audience needs time to find new shows and be comfortable with them. We need time to assess them as well.”
Since when? For at least the last decade the rule across the board in television is that if you don’t get viewers in early, you don’t get them in at all. He’s right that the new media landscape has made it difficult to launch new shows, because people no longer have to stick around to see if a show is going to get better. If it’s a dud that doesn’t improve fast, viewers move on to something else and they don’t come back. As any look – even ours – at the ABC’s Wednesday night ratings will tell you.
But ratings are completely separate from a reviewer’s deeply held opinions, right? Reviewers shouldn’t be swayed in the slightest by a show’s ratings whether they be good or bad – they should stick by their personally held view of a show’s quality no matter what the outside world is saying. Which brings us back to Pobjie. Hang on, why? After all, as he reminds us every now and again, opinions – especially about television – don’t really matter. As he famously said:
It’s only TV, after all – it’s important but it doesn’t matter.
Well, for one thing, television helps pay both his and Laid creator Marieke Hardy’s bills; presumably where their next meal is coming from matters a little to them. For another, typing [“ben pobjie” “marieke hardy”] into google gets you (after four hits for a news aggregation service), a link to a tweet from Hardy saying “I love you, Ben Pobjie”. Again, so what? It’s not like she has a history of professing her love (check the comments) to Pobjie. Or Pobjie’s on record giving the love back to Hardy’s work.
Snark aside – wait, come back! – there’s nothing at all wrong in any way with this mutual love-in. So they admire each other’s work: big hairy deal. Surely that just makes it MORE likely that Pobjie’d be a massive fan of Laid? Just take this quote from Pobjie (from his “Top 10 Funny Moments of 2011” – Laid was number three) about Laid‘s thinly veiled Marieke Hardy surrogate Roo:
Alison Bell… played angel of death Roo with a smashing mix of awkwardness, bewilderment, irritation and adorably hapless embarrassment that made her intensely easy to fall in love with.
Especially if you already had a stockpile of tweets from Hardy professing her love for you.
Nice as it might be to pretend that opinions are just opinions and television “doesn’t matter”, television is a massive, expensive, time-consuming business that reviewers like Pobjie have at least some small influence on. Then again, nice as it might be to pretend that reviewers and television creators should stay well away from each other, in Australia’s tiny media pond the two are bound to overlap – and even become friends.
Again, there’s nothing actually wrong (or surprising) about any of this. Very worst case scenario, it might dent any credibility as a reviewer that Pobjie might have had. It’s not like he spotted the conflict of interest and decided to keep quiet about his friend’s show; he’s inserted a reference to Laid into a column that could easily stand without it and called it “our current best comedy” without providing a single word to back up his view.
But it’s not like Pobjie’s a reviewer. He’s just a guy with an opinion about television and who really cares what he thinks because everyone’s opinions are equally valid and it’s just television anyway. Right?
It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World
There are a lot of reasons to like the work of Shaun Micallef, but the one that stands out to us today is that he’s his own man. When Shaun Micallef shows up, you get The Shaun Micallef Show: he has his own style of comedy, he knows what works for him, and that’s the kind of comedy he does. Which might sound a little obvious but as fans of, say, Tony Martin and Mick Molloy (to name two comedians of roughly similar vintage) know, it doesn’t take much for someone formerly known for being their own performer to have a setback or two and become just another interchangeable cog in the Australian comedy machine. A machine that isn’t really all that interested in comedy these days.
So in one sense there’s not a whole lot to say about Shaun Micallef’s new show Mad As Hell. It’s a Shaun Micallef show: you know the deal by now. In fact, if you saw his SBS news comedy series Newstopia – which many haven’t; even we have to admit that Talkin’ ’bout Your Generation (Micallef’s least impressive work) has brought him a lot of new fans – you might know the deal better than you expected.
It’s not quite a straight do-over – there’s a live audience and Micallef spends a bit more time chatting away – but otherwise it ticks all the Newstopia boxes: jokes about news footage, sketches involving fake political advisors, fake ads, wacky vox pops (both fake and real), Veronica Milson (from Hungry Beast and Live From Planet Earth) doing a spot-on Kat Stewart impersonation… pretty much all it’s missing is Inspektor Herring and the Bunning’s Warehouse gags. Though hopefully fake “comedy” Back Benched will be a regular feature because yes, taking swipes at lame political comedy is a sure-fire way to win us over.
What does make Mad As Hell slightly different from Newstopia is the way that the live audience / in-studio stuff makes the Newstopia ingredients feel more like a traditional ABC political comedy. And by “traditional”, we’re reaching back to the days of The Gillies Report and Australia, You’re Standing In It (and okay, the somewhat more recent and less impressive BackBerner). It’s a blessed relief to see that live (on tape) sketches can still work on Australian television if they’re done by people who know what they’re doing; if we’re lucky, this might even start a trend.
Not every joke here worked and there really should have been more Francis Greenslade, but unlike your average Australian television comedy this one actually had jokes – so many, in fact, that it could afford to have some fail. Some of the political sketches fizzled out (the one about the Liberal and Labor parties stealing each others ideas for things to stick politicians in front of comes to mind), and the online Al Qaeda underwear joke was a serious clunker, but the ghost of Kerry O’Brien was brilliant stuff and the entire ten-episodes are going to be worth it just for asking “is Peter Slipper a vampire?”
Mad As Hell is exactly the kind of thing the ABC should be doing first and foremost: hiring a seasoned comedy professional to do something they’ve already proven to be good at. It’s the ABC’s first artistic hit of the year comedy-wise, and while 8pm on a Friday doesn’t hold out a lot of hope for it to be a ratings hit as well, here’s hoping Micallef and company figure out a way to keep this on the air for as long as they want. Smart and silly in equal measure and hilarious across the board, Mad As Hell deserves to run and run.
Things to be kind of positive about
You know us, we’re not exactly the home of Australian comedy positivity. So as balance here are a small number of Australian comedy things which may not want to make you slash your wrists. Well, not slash them heaps of times.
The Randling App
These days TV’s all about extending the experience, hence the plethora of show-related apps for your smartphone. The new app (for Apple smart devices) to accompany Randling is a word game which combines Tetris and Scrabble. Like the TV show it isn’t funny, unlike the TV show it’s addictive and worth coming back for. Not that that justifies 27 weeks on ABC1. Or anything Andrew Denton’s been involved in since that time he hosted the Logies.
Sir Murray Rivers QC on YouTube
We’ve banged on before about Sir Murray Rivers, a character that John Clarke’s offsider Bryan Dawe has been doing for yonks on ABC radio. Sir Murray is a very right-wing lawyer who some consider to be the Graham Richardson of the Liberal party. If you like the weekly sketch on 7.30 from Clarke and Dawe you may enjoy Sir Murray’s rants on the Carbon Tax and various other matters.
Rant
You’ve probably been wondering when the team from The Bazura Project will pop up next. Apparently it’s not any time soon, but you can now enjoy a pilot called Rant made by team member Shannon Marinko as part of SPAA and Network Ten’s Eleven Out of Ten initiative. We enjoyed the pilot and think it has potential, but it also didn’t seem much like a Network Ten show. Maybe it’s an ABC2 show? Tell us what you think.
Monday Roast
We’ve been sent another press release!
ABC2 and The Comedy Channel on Foxtel have taken a bold step towards massively increasing the level of local content on Australian TV by screening The Roast News Update for two minutes each night, Monday to Friday, at 8:28pm on ABC2 and 6:28pm on The Comedy Channel.
Each episode of The Roast offers a highly condensed, satirical take on the day’s headlines, as interpreted by a young team of non-journalists. Director Nich Richardson calls the program “a less-farcical version of the regular nightly news, and one of Australian television’s few scripted comedies – other than Parliament Question Time”.
The press release goes on in this vein, adding the detail that the 50th episode of The Roast will air tomorrow night, so congratulations to them.
We’ve seen the odd episode of The Roast over the past few months and haven’t been that impressed. Imagine Good News World meets mainstream satirical stand-up meets an over-ambitious student revue and you’re kinda there. You may also remember Nich Richardson as the host of WTF! a daily two minute comedy show created by Chaser alumni Charles Firth which aired on GO! in 2010. Anyone who remembers WTF! will spot the similarities between the two shows.
Broadly speaking, we’re in favour of newcomers getting a chance to try out ideas and gain experience in a low key timeslot, on a low key channel – 8:28pm on ABC2 and 6:28pm on The Comedy Channel is certainly that. What’s disappointing is that The Roast seems to be a re-make of a not terribly good show. Yes, The Roast has more of a news and current affairs bent than WTF!, which focused more on celebrity, but the concept and execution are basically the same. Not that the concept for either show couldn’t work – the bigger problem here is the execution, i.e. the material, which needs to improve before this goes from being “that thing after Doctor Who” to “must watch”.
The House Always Wins
Just to cap off a week of Randling posts, let’s pause to note the fact that – unlike, oh, every other Wednesday night ABC comedy show in living memory – Randling is now being repeated on ABC1 Friday nights in prime time (9.30pm to be exact). Wow, who would have thought the demand for a show that lost half its’ viewers in three weeks would be so great the same episode needed to be shown twice in three days? Presumably if you don’t start watching it now that it’s on twice a week they’ll simply start showing it three times a week. Hey, they can show it 24/7 if it’s what it takes to make it a hit. AND DENTON ONLY HOSTS HITS.
Let’s just posit an alternative here: when serious people start calling for Randling to be dropped – again, lost 400,000 viewers in three weeks – the ABC are going to pull out the “combined” rating figures across the week for Randling (being shown twice in the same week means both figures can be added together). “What are you naysayers talking about – Randling is a hit,” they’ll say, pointing to figures more rubbery than a mobile condom warehouse, “look at how well it rated across the week”.
Bollocks to that. They could have turned Strictly Speaking – you know, that exciting public-speaking based gameshow no-one watched – into a ratings “hit” if they’d played it five or six times in a week. This isn’t a case of the ABC repeating a popular show by public demand; this is a case of them trying to disguise a dud by playing funny buggers with the figures. If only they’d hired some funny buggers to make the damn thing in the first place…
The Future Of Australian Comedy Is Here At Last
We may have been a bit hard on the ABC of late, what with all that pointing out that their current Wednesday night “comedy” line-up is not only a bit shit but currently rating like people have realised it’s actually a bit shit. Don’t worry though, we’ve just been forwarded a press release letting us know that when the current drek winds up it’s all clear sailing ahead:
MYF WARHURST’S NICE
STARTS WEDNESDAY JUNE 13 AT 8PM, ABC1
Myf Warhurst (Spicks and Specks) returns to ABC1 on Wednesday June 13 at 8pm, with her own six-part series Myf Warhurst’s Nice. The series will take viewers on a cultural crusade to explore some of Myf’s favourite things from her youth in music, food, fashion, photography, art and design.
The series embraces cultural icons of the past and takes a closer look at what surrounds us – the stuff you’d find in your own living room rather than in a gallery or museum. It’s a celebration of all the things that are just, well… ‘nice’.
Like all of us, the fabric of Myf’s youth has gone on to shape her tastes today. Over six themed episodes, Myf will explore everything from the awkward family portrait to the humble dim sim, to questionable fashion choices and an unhealthy obsession with cheesy love duets.
Along the way, Myf meets some familiar faces including; one of her personal heroes Kenny Rogers; TV Chef Peter Russel-Clarke; food journalist Matt Preston; Chicko Roll poster girl Danielle Scandrett; portrait photographer Douglas Kirkland; iconic artist Ken Done; art aficionado Steve Vizard; Myf’s perm idol Craig McLachlan; artist and designer Jenny Kee; celebrity hairdresser Edward Beale; the face (and voice) of Copperart Pete Smith and host of the UK TV series ‘Bargain Hunt’ Tim Wonnacott, plus many more.
Here’s a sneak peek at what happens when Myf gets to live out a dream 25 years in the making – to sing a love duet with Wa Wa Nee’s Paul Gray … http://bit.ly/ISSH3o
Myf Warhurst’s Nice is a That’s Nice Productions/ABCTV co-production. ABC TV Executive Producer: Kath Earle; Director: Aaron Smith; Series Producer: Susie Jones.
6 x 30min.
Just when you thought dragging out bland relationship chit-chat over twelve half hour episodes was taking the piss, we’re now being promised an entire half hour on dim sims. Oh and Steve Vizard talking about art. What, Richard Fidler wasn’t available to talk about sand castles? Austen Tayshus didn’t feel like discussing cowboy boots?
While you’re here, click on that link in the press release. Don’t worry, we’ll wait for you to get back… okay, while it’s fresh in your memory – what exactly was the point of all that? It’s basically a straight, not-all-that-good duet between Myf and some guy almost no-one remembers. Presumably the idea is that we’ll be super happy and excited for Myf as she gets to sing with one of her heroes, but for that to work we have to be so amazingly focused on how awesomely great Myf is that we simply don’t give a shit that what we’re actually seeing contains no real entertainment value whatsoever.
It’s more than a little unfair to be discussing a show we haven’t even seen yet, but bugger it: whatever Myf’s charms this simply doesn’t look like prime time material. We know this because NOTHING the ABC has screened on Wednesday nights this year – with the possible exceptions of half of In Gordon Street Tonight and Woodley and maybe a third of Outland – has been prime-time material. Their 2012 comedy output to date has consisted entirely of crap that should have either been put on Sunday afternoons or shunted over to ABC2. Or better yet, not given the green light in the first place: who the holy heck thought another series of Laid was a good idea?
*
We interrupt this rant for a quick look at last night’s ratings:
It wasn’t a good night for ABC1 despite starting out well with ABC News (951,000), then 7:30 (687,000), Wild Life at the Zoo (538,000), Randling (491,000), Agony Aunts (332,000) and Laid letting down the team on just 262,000.
That sound you hear is the world’s biggest toilet flushing just for the ABC. Randling has lost almost half its’ audience in three weeks; Laid has performed about as poorly. Even Agony Aunts has shed a hundred thousand viewers in a week. If this was happening on any other network, we’d be seeing a very rapid return indeed to the Wednesday Night Movie. Or just a whole lot of static.
The fact that the next big line-up change to the current crop of ripe turds is a show seemingly built around the concept of a likable television personality wandering around an op shop for six weeks shows just how adrift from the concept of actual “comedy” the ABC currently is. Not only are these shows deliberately aimed at no-one who actually watches television, it was obvious from the outset that the only way this story could end was in headlines like DENTON SPELLS RATINGS DISASTER; ONCE POPULAR HOST DEAD IN DITCH. Randling, let us remind you, was promoted as a “word-based gameshow”. A phrase that conspicuously fails to contain a single synonym for “entertaining”.
There’s meant to be better stuff in the pipe – well, The Chaser are coming back – and maybe Offspring on Ten is luring away some traditional ABC comedy viewers. Big hairy deal: through sheer incompetence the ABC has pissed away whatever value their Wednesday night line-up may have had in terms of audience loyalty. At this stage you’d expect someone to get the sack for such a consistent string of foul-ups and blunders; give it another week and we’ll start demanding it.
We’re Bashing Our Heads Against a Brick Wall Over Here
Sometimes it’s good to take on board opinions diametrically opposed to yours to broaden your view on a subject. Other times you find yourself reading something that’s just plain wrong. Guess which is which with regards to The Sunday Age‘s Melinda Houston and her most recent write-up of Randling?
Everyone, including the audience at home, is settling into the rhythm of this new word quiz show, meaning it’s more “funerer” by the week.
Putting aside all right-thinking people’s instinctive violence towards a TV critic who uses a show’s made-up promotional words as a positive in their reviews, how to reconcile this with the actual ratings? According to fellow Fairfax writer David Dale, they show that Randling is “proceeding down the plughole of history“:
Week 1: 10 RANDLING ABC1 859,000 264,000 276,000 153,000 66,000 100,000
Week 2: 18 RANDLING ABC1 621,000 153,000 200,000 112,000 73,000 83,000
(the first figure is the national figure, followed by the ratings in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. We’ve attached the first week figures to show just how steep the drop-off from week one to week two was).
Just to rub it in: over 200,000 people didn’t come back after episode one. One quarter of the audience tuned in and went “nope”. Those aren’t people who might jump on board after hearing the show’s become more “funerer” – they tried it and didn’t like it. The only way to win them back now is by making radical changes, and considering the show has already been filmed (all 27 weeks worth), it’s not like Denton and the Randling crew can take on board any feedback they might be getting.
The most positive reading of Houston’s review is that while a quarter of “the audience at home” stopped watching after one episode, those left behind are getting into the swing of things. Presumably by week twenty there’ll be only a half dozen people watching Randling but they’ll be really, really into it. Though where Denton is going to find five other people who love him as much as he does remains a mystery.
The other Australian comedy Huston is big-upping is, of course, Laid 2. Again, it’s worth quoting her in full (because it doesn’t seem to be online):
It’s a little bit Keystone Cops on Laid this year as Roo maniacally chases down gruesome little Marcus in an effort to (a) sleep with him and (b) cure herself of her killer lady parts. In tonight’s ep, after a touching if less than perfect reunion with her beau Charlie, she’s stalking Marcus once more. But despite the rather circular nature of the action, this is still a fabulous night’s entertainment, largely thanks to the captivating performances from Alison Bell and Celia Pacquola. We don’t often get to see a couple of ladies holding the floor in Australian comedy; to see the two of them do it so well is particularly gratifying.
At least she’s not even pretending to claim it’s a ratings smash, probably because even by week one it was obvious that, to again quote Dale, “the second season of Laid turned out to be a ratings disaster.”
Week 1: 27 LAID ABC1 424,000 106,000 144,000 90,000 36,000 48,000Week 2: 32 LAID ABC1 336,000 69,000 128,000 57,000 36,000 47,000
Ouch.
Instead, Huston says that Laid is worth your time for the double act of Bell and Pacquola, because “we don’t often get to see a couple of ladies holding the floor in Australian comedy”. Two words, one ampersand: Kath & Kim. You know, the biggest Australian comedy hit of the 21st Century? To be fair, that was a while ago now, so… well, The Librarians had Robyn Butler interacting with all manner of women, Roz Hammond especially. And isn’t Laid currently followed by Agony Aunts, which is wall-to-wall ladies “holding the floor”?
It’s one thing to say Bell and Pacquola are a great double act – though then you’d have to address the fact that they don’t seem to be having all that many scenes together in this series of Laid – it’s another to pretend that seeing two women being funny together is so rare it alone makes the show “a fabulous night’s entertainment”. Yes, there are loads more men than women at pretty much every level of Australian comedy, but funny women aren’t so rare they should be supported on the basis of their gender alone. That way lies Kate Langbroek.
Slightly more interestingly, Laid is clearly so bad even Houston is forced to address at least one of its many faults: “the rather circular nature of the action”, AKA nothing ever fucking happens. Week one’s introduction of the sleazebag with the magic penis held out the hope that this second series might come up with a few fun twists and turns. But it seems Marieke Hardy thought “magic penis”, put down her pen, and decided she could write the rest of the series by transcribing chit-chat with her friends and sourcing comedy catchphrases from the internet. So just like everything else she’s written for TV then.
When it was first announced that Shaun Micallef’s new show Mad As Hell would be airing Friday nights at 8pm, we were worried this was the ABC dumping one of its brightest comedy prospects in a timeslot not exactly on the radar of most comedy fans. Now it looks like they’ve done Micallef a massive favour. Thanks to what can best be described as “fucking shit up”, the ABC have destroyed whatever value the Wednesday night comedy timeslot may have had as far as attracting an audience: from here on in, it’s every show for itself.
Laughing at The Boss’ Jokes
A brief glimmer of hope came when watching Randling last night – before we realised wait, we’re watching Randling – with an increasingly rare appearance of one Anthony Morgan. Hurrah! It’s always far too long between television gigs for this particular funnyman (he moved to Tasmania around a decade ago), which prompted us to wonder exactly why he’d come out of semi-retirement to appear on what could charitably be described as “a word-based game show”. And then we figured it out: Morgan had been a regular on Denton’s “ill-fated” talk show on Channel Seven back in the 90s. Morgan was doing a mate a favour.
This revelation went a long way towards explaining a somewhat creepy vibe hanging over the Randling set. Sure, it was kind of obvious that Denton would be calling in a few favours to put together such a heavyweight – in Australian mid-range television performer terms – cast. There are newcomers and up-and-comers and Wendy Harmer and Dave O’Neil and Rob Carlton and lot of the contestants probably could be pretty funny in a show with a format that allowed them to be funny. Presumably a lot of them jumped at the chance to be on TV with Denton; it’s just as likely that Denton asked a few to come on board and help him out.
So what? This is the way television works. Only thing is, this isn’t a long-time comedy veteran calling up a few mates to see if they want to appear on his new show. This is one of the more powerful producers in the land giving them a call to ask if they want the chance to help him out and get in his good books. More importantly for those of us at home, this isn’t happening behind the scenes: the guy they want to help out – the guy who, if he likes them, could slot them in as the next host of a Gruen Transfer-style hit and literally make them a star – is the host of the show. A show that isn’t just some cosy chat show, but a game show where he asks the questions, he makes the jokes, and he hands out the points – points that seems to actually mean something, if all the talk of ladders and finals are any guide.
This bizarre focus on scoring, by the way, is why all the increasingly desperate talk about how this kind of show requires time to bed down, settle in, get snuggly, rug up and drop a couple farts before somehow magically coming together as a hilarious half hour around week four is complete tripe. Oh, it’s often true this kind of show needs time to bed down. But that process involves making changes, which Randling can’t do. Why? Because unlike every other comedy game show since the dawn of time, Randling has made a big deal of the scoring. There are going to be QUARTER-FINALS: the scoring is not to be messed with.
[“but hang on, isn’t Denton the final judge as far as hanging out points? And wasn’t Denton’s actual no-fooling wife, Jennifer Byrne, on just last night? Doesn’t that make the entire idea of having a fair and unbiased scoring system a sick pathetic joke?” Well spotted, mysterious voice from the ether]
So they can’t change the show in any substantive way, because if they did then what happens to the scores of the first few teams? “Sorry guys, all the games now involve physical challenges… yeah, we know those guys didn’t have to do it, but, uh, SLIME ATTACK!!” You can’t have a scoring system that runs across twenty-odd weeks and change the nature of the show halfway through… well, you can, but then you have to throw the whole “scoring” thing in the bin – which is going to make those quarter finals pretty awkward. And if by week seven Randling is suddenly getting contestants to play “physical Scrabble” involving carving letters out of potatoes and frying them into a tasty meal that also spells out the name of Winston Churchill’s favourite brand of cigars… well, at least something on the show will be a joke.
Anyway, what this means is that Randling is a show where the host in a very real sense has the future job prospects of everyone else on-camera in the palm of his hand. Which, and forgive us if we’re off target here a little, doesn’t exactly sound like a formula for relaxed fun. Who knew the definition of Randling would turn out to be “on-air job interview”?
The upshot of all this is, Randling is a show where the guests want to please the host rather than the audience. And why wouldn’t they? The ABC certainly does. Unless you think anyone else but Denton could have gotten a “word-based game show” up in a prime-time slot on the ABC for 27 weeks. Unless you think anyone but Denton would have been given free reign to make a show so amazingly drawn-out and dull that it makes even Letters & Numbers look like an explosion in the excitement factory. Unless you think anyone but Denton would think a show where the contestants seem constantly on edge and afraid to do anything that might put them offside with the smug, self-satisfied, last-laugh-getting host would be anything but a grim, dispiriting ordeal deserving of nothing more than a quick and unmourned demise.
Laid 2: Face/Off
When a series such as Laid gets renewed, the conversation around it changes a little. No longer is it sufficient merely to attack it for being a complete and utter waste of time, for clearly by being renewed the ABC have indicated that they want it to be a complete and utter waste of time. If the ABC wanted decent and funny shows about people in their 20s, they would have renewed twentysomething; if the ABC liked the first series of Laid enough to order a second, it’s now their fault that we’ve been given a second series of pointless, unfunny, bland, erratic television. What was a massive flaw in series one becomes par for the course in series two and so our attention must drift elsewhere.
Likewise, when the unstoppable promotional onslaught from the Fairfax press that greeted the arrival of the first series of Laid has become a mild shrug of indifference to series two, another bone of contention gets thrown out for the dog. The totally disgusting and completely egregious displays of sucking up that appeared in the pages of The Age week after week as Fairfax staff fought for the right to tell us how amazing Fairfax employee and Laid creator Marieke Hardy was have largely been replaced by bugger all, presumably due to a combo of Laid series one not being all that popular and Hardy herself having to cough up a hefty sum after somehow managing to libel someone on the internet. So again, our focus moves on.
What remains is a show that manages to remain the completely pointless and borderline-creepy-in-its-attitudes-to-sex mess it was last time around while also somehow managing to come just that tiny bit closer to a show that might, with major structural and casting changes, actually work. If you think there might be a compliment somewhere in that last sentence, you’re right and we’re just as surprised as you are.
Laid 2 sees all our annoying, vapid, drivel-spouting friends back – yes, even the one they tried to suggest letting you know was back would violate some kind of last-season cliffhanger, to which we say if you’re going to do a cliffhanger do it right and have everyone in a bus that goes off a cliff and explodes and then DON’T COME BACK – only this time… well, it’s more of the same. Except that in the kind of logic that makes you want to nail bits of wood to your forehead then headbutt a circular saw, where last series Roo had a vagina that killed, now we have a new sleazebag comedy character with a penis that “heals”.
How this magic penis knows what parts of you to “heal” – it’s not like every woman he roots turns into a supermodel with a Stephen Hawking-level IQ, so clearly some flaws are beyond its magic thrust – remains as much a mystery as how Roo keeps pulling those gormless faces without someone kicking her head off. And the fact that most of what makes him such a sleazy scumbag are attitudes that are simply opposed to Roo and company’s hipsterdom is just another example of this show’s relentless opposition to anything or anyone existing outside the confines of the innermost of inner-city locales. But at least he’s markedly different to all the other cool kids! At least he sparks some minor conflict! At least he’s a semi-plausible source of character-based comedy!
The biggest lesson to come out of Laid is that it’s a lot easier to go around being hailed as a genius-level writer when no-one’s actually seen anything you’ve written. The hyperbole around Hardy has taken some serious blows over the last year, with Laid turning out to be one of those shows where everyone who feels they have to say something positive – that is to say, every professional TV critic in the land – ends up praising the acting while remaining tactfully silent on the way the plot made no sense, the episode to episode continuity was a mess, the characters were erratically written and the conclusion was plucked out of nowhere and answered nothing.
In that light, the ABC’s decision to almost immediately greenlight a second series was probably a blessing for Hardy. Without the pressure to come up with a second series she might very well have cut her losses, gone back to various media frippery for a few years until the accepted wisdom around Laid was that it was “under-appreciated” and “overlooked” and – well, go dig up any post 2008 references to her seemingly unflushable quasi-drama /blatant Secret Life of Us knock-off Last Man Standing, you’ll get the idea – before returning to television to once again show us she’d learnt nothing from her mistakes.
Instead, she’s found herself in a corner she can’t get out of by flashing her boobs. While you wouldn’t want to say she’s stepped up and proved us all wrong, the grey flavourless slurry that is Laid 2 does now occasionally manage to feel like something you might watch voluntarily rather than by accident. It’s still not actually funny in any way shape or form, but at least now it feels like the possibility of actually laughing at something on screen is there. Maybe.
In A Word: Rubbish
Is there anything more insufferably cringeworthy than announcing to the world your ‘love of words’? Those who gigglingly formulate DISCOMOBULATED and KUMQUAT with their fridge magnets and then expect a round of applause for this public display of their lexicographical lustings surely remain, second to men who put ‘bore water’ signs on their lawns, the most punchable people on the planet. Some go one step further, however, and devise entire quiz shows based on their self-congratulatory linguistophilia, of which Randling (which began tonight on ABC1) is the latest in a long and woeful line.
Fridge magnets were, in fact, enclosed as part of Randling‘s press release, ensuring that all reviewers were (literally) playing the game well ahead of the show’s debut.
Even before I watched the first ep, I was randling away merrily…
gushed Melinda Houston in the Sunday Age. (And yes, she did use the word ‘ep’. No doubt the suffix ‘isode’ had fallen down the back of her vegetable crisper.)
The thing with Randling is that it’s neither a geeky Letters and Numbers-style quiz nor a copper-bottomed Micallef-quality comedy show. Afraid of wearing either intellectualism or humour too visibly on its sleeves, it all amounts to very little: a pottage of half-remembered rounds from other quiz shows good and bad (My Word, QI, Talkin’ ‘Bout Your Generation, Spicks and bloody Specks), the result inevitably feels scattershot and half-hearted. The ‘words’ gimmick is itself fairly tenuous, especially since nobody involved seems to have any particular linguistic dexterity. You’d think, for a start, that a quiz show about words could manage to get the lyrics of its theme tune to scan.
So if it’s not a quiz or a comedy, what is it? Well, it’s a sports show. Thank God You’re Here had a bizarre habit of treating its ad-libbing comics like sweat-drenched pentathletes, and Randling does much the same. It’s not just the barely-tongue-in-cheek-enough-to-be-funny team blazers and the tatty trophy, or the AFL ladder-style scoreboard (which looks more like a spreadsheet, grimly reminding us that we have another 26 weeks of randletime to sit through), or indeed the tiresome mic-in-the-face post-match interviews over the closing credits: it’s the fact that the entire show is taken so goddam seriously as a competition. A competition at which viewers are invited to patriotically cheer, rather than simply titter. The inevitable implication is that failure to ‘randle away merrily’ is some kind of unAustralian thought crime.
Host Andrew Denton (who himself is a fan of words, but probably doesn’t hear ‘no’ very often) opened the first show by giving us the definition of the word ‘randling’ itself. The obvious thing to do here would be to announce a different erroneous definition at the top of every show, with the meanings becoming increasingly convoluted and ridiculous as the series wears on. ‘Now ‘randling’, of course, means…’ could become his new catchphrase. They could also cast the teams in the style of Wacky Races, with duos of fogies competing against hipsters, or thicko couples battling against brainboxes. Have some fun with the whole thing. Maybe call it The Cunning Linguists if they have to. But no, Denton’s too boring for that. That’s the kind of thing a comedy show might do. This is comedy-sport, and it seems all jokes have to be approved by the TV equivalent of the International Olympic Committee. Go team panel-show!
The whole enterprise is clearly an attempt to fill the gap left by Spicks and Specks, which you’d think wouldn’t exactly be difficult. Replace a mediocre music quiz aimed at people who don’t give a toss about music with a mediocre word quiz aimed at…well, you get the idea. Unfortunately, such is the sheer neediness and desperation on display that it’s hard not to will Randling to failure, and harder still to forgive the on-message reviewers who obediently sing from the Church of Denton hymn-sheet.