Australian Tumbleweeds
What’s So Funny About the Future of Australian Comedy?
For a few years now – well, it feels like years at least – we’ve been complaining / warning that Australian television likes everything about comedy but the making-people-laugh stuff. Of course, who listens to what we have to say? And so it has come to pass that in a few short weeks (July 25th) the ABC’s Wednesday night “comedy” line-up will consist of 14 episodes of The Gruen Whatever at 8.30pm followed by the remaining 14 episodes of Randling at 9.15. We put “comedy” in inverted commas for a good reason.
It’s hardly an isolated trend – Myf Warhurst’s Nice was many things, but comedy was not one of them – but in the past a couple of factors traditionally conspired to keep comedy at least somewhere in the mix. For one, Spicks & Specks was a comedy variety show disguised as a game show. How do we know that? The same way we know that Talkin’ ’bout Your Generation was a showcase for Shaun Micallef’s waky worldview disguised as a gameshow and Thank God You’re Here was an attempt to turn theatresports into a money-making scheme disguised as a gameshow: no-one gave a fuck about the scores.
Randling, on the other hand, not only cares about the scores, it has a league ladder at the end of each episode. It may seem minor, but it’s not: once the scores come first, getting laughs comes second. Once getting laughs isn’t the point of the show, it’s not a comedy. Which also helps explain why Randling isn’t funny.
Gruen, on the exact same hand as mentioned in the previous paragraph because that hand is attached to Andrew Denton, the man single-handedly turning the ABC’s Wednesday night comedy line-up into an two-fisted attempt to convince viewers that “smug” is another word for “hilarious”, is a consumer affairs show featuring a bunch of smart-arse pricks. It’s not even trying to be a comedy in any but the loosest, most Wil-Anderson-allowing sense of the term. It’s advertising executives talking about advertising – presumably the fact it’s on the supposedly ad-free ABC is where the laughs come from.
It gets worse. Yes, it’s time to talk about ABC2’s Dumb, Drunk & Racist, which also screens Wednesday nights. Your host and failed stand-up comic turned professional News Ltd smarmy git Joe Hildebrand has collected a bunch of Indians for the purposes of presenting them to a variety of racist Australians and then turning to the camera while pulling the “ain’t I a stinker?” face. It’s been sold as a show that will “stir debate” – a debate, we’re guessing, that largely revolves around who’s going to change the channel.
It’s not comedy and it’s not funny and that’s not an insult because it’s not trying to be either; what it is, is the logical end product of the ABC increasingly focusing it’s “comedy” efforts on shows best described as “local comedian has a hobby”. There are plenty of international ancestors to these shows (ABC2 is currently showing Louis Theroux, who’s one of them), but John Safran’s the big local one. He made shows that were funny; Judith Lucy, Lawrence Leung and The Bazura Project (to name three) took different approaches to the same basic idea and also made shows that were funny. Now Myf Warhurst and Joe Hildebrand are giving it a go without bothering with the funny stuff. And with both shows rating well (or “well”, considering the ABC’s struggle on Wednesdays), it seems that funny stuff was just getting in the way of the host standing by watching people shout at and/or hug each other.
The worry here is that being funny is hard. If these shows can work without trying to be funny, in the future they’re not going to be funny. If DD&R rates well simply by being semi-competent at shit-stirring, then the future is shit-stirring because shit-stirring is easy. Make a show that says people are overweight because they’re lazy slobs, call it Fat Fucks, job done. Get a bunch of wiry Aussie bush types to come into Sydney and look appalled at the people chowing down at a western suburbs fast food outlet, there’s your promo right there. “Where has Australia gone wrong?” says the voice-over, “are we really a nation of… Fat Fucks?”
Bugger it, let’s end on a positive note: at the other end of the scale, John Clarke’s Sporting Nation – a show that is also not a comedy, despite being about sport – is proving to be, much like its’ host (who is a comedian), both funny and intelligent. Sure, he’s talking about sport, so he gets a lot more leeway that he would if he was talking about, say, the railways – you don’t have to sell sport as being interesting to Australians. But the show is well-judged, informative, full of familiar faces saying unfamiliar things, and not at all interested in buying into cheap and easy stereotypes.
Would that we could say the same about Dumb Drunk & Racist.
The un-late Clive James
It was revealed in the British press last Thursday that Australia’s own Clive James is dying of cancer. The story, which first appeared in the Daily Mirror, was based on a transcript of an interview James had given to BBC Radio 4’s Meeting Myself Coming Back (which wasn’t due to air until Saturday evening, and is now on the BBC website). In the interview James said:
I’m getting near the end. I’m a man who is approaching his terminus.
In this context it sounded pretty serious. Thankfully it isn’t quite that bad. Writing in Britain’s Daily Telegraph on Saturday, James said:
The newspaper [the Daily Mirror] had got hold of a transcript of the instalment devoted to me of the BBC radio show Meeting Myself Coming Back (to be transmitted tonight) and selected a few dozen quotes so that I seemed to be practically expiring in the arms of the journalist assigned to register my dying breath.
The process of lifting the transcript was made easier by the Beeb’s weird decision to dress it up as a news story and hand it to its website several days before the scheduled transmission.
And:
I’m not objecting, because I haven’t got time. In the interview I am represented as saying that I am losing my battle with leukaemia. Well, of course I am. Eventually I must. But the main thrust of the broadcast is, I can assure you, quite merry.
Indeed it is – take a listen if you’ve time – and it’s good to hear that James will be with us for a little while longer, because at the risk of this turning in to an obituary (as much of the coverage in the press and on social media last week kinda did) Clive James’ death would be a significant loss to Australian comedy.
Clive James isn’t strictly a comedian of course, he’s probably best described as a journalist, broadcaster and writer (and not necessarily in that order), but he has a background in comedy and has always produced erudite and witty work.
After spending his undergraduate years at Sydney University in the early 60s, Clive James sailed off to see world. Eventually he ended up as a postgraduate student at Cambridge, where he joined the university’s revue society the Footlights Club (whose alumni includes half of Monty Python, all of The Goodies, Peter Cook, Douglas Adams, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Mitchell & Webb, Miriam Margoyles, Sasha Baron Cohen and many others). In 1966 James appeared in and wrote some of a Footlights revue with Eric Idle and fellow ex-pat Germaine Greer; in 1967 he was Footlights Club President as well as a writer and performer.
After Cambridge James went to London and became a journalist and sometime comedy writer. He enjoyed most success a journalist, notably as TV critic of The Observer, a post he held for a decade. If you like good writing about television, track down copies of Visions Before Midnight, The Crystal Bucket and Glued to the Box, which contain his best columns.
In the early 80s Clive James stopped writing about television because he was getting far too much work on it. His shows, made for the BBC and ITV (he switched networks several times), included the Postcards series, where he travelled to various cities and gave his commentary, a number of interview programmes (including The Late Clive James – not another pre-emptive obituary, it was a late night show), various programmes about television (Clive James on Television, Saturday Night Clive, The Clive James Show), Fame in the 20th Century – a decade by decade show looking at the electronic media and celebrity, and several New Year’s Eve specials. If you were watching the ABC regularly in the 90s it was almost impossible to avoid his trademark witticisms and droll delivery (if you weren’t, Madman released a best of DVD, The Clive James Collection, last year).
James’ other works includes essays, novels, stage tours, poetry, some pioneering online TV efforts, and five volumes of autobiography. If you like good comic writing track down the latter; the first two volumes, Unreliable Memoirs and Falling Towards England, cover his early life in Australia, the third, May Week Was in June, his early life in the UK, the fourth, North Face of Soho, his early journalistic career, and the fifth, The Blaze of Obscurity, his famous television work. For those old enough to remember the Bicentenary, James’ account of Australia Live, of which he was one of the hosts, is fascinating.
It’s also a devastatingly frank critique of the Nine Network’s approach to television, in which he argues that Australia Live focused too heavily on heart-warming tales and celebrity success stories, forsaking cultural and scientific achievements. This is typical of Clive James; throughout his career he’s referenced history, art, literature and many other “high” disciplines in his writings, even his writings on commercial television and pop culture. His work is insightful and critical, but also funny – he once described Arnold Schwarzenegger as looking like “a condom stuffed with walnuts”. He’s not strictly a comedian, but he’s inspired many of them (Charlie Pickering was among those paying tribute to him last week), and like his fellow ex-patriot Barry Humphries he was one of the first Australians to prove that you can be funny AND intelligent.
May Clive James live as long as he can, uninterrupted by the Nine Network’s sensationalist approach to television, but munching on as many Cherry Ripes as he can get hold of. Anyone got his address? We feel like sending him a box.
Thinking About Political Comedy?
Here’s a question: when exactly did Australian political comedy go soft? Put another way, when Shaun Micallef, cuddly game-show host and master of light-hearted surrealism, can moderately startle at least one of the hard-boiled Tumbleweeds team by confusing John Howard’s biography with Mein Kampf and making a Tony Abbott joke based on not quite calling him a cunt, then you know things have been off the boil for a very long time.
Micallef’s Mad as Hell has been getting more and more sure of itself with each passing week and it’s not like Micallef didn’t make political jokes with Newstopia a few years ago, so his removal of the gloves wasn’t perhaps as shocking as the opening paragraph may have suggested. But still, since the end of John Howard’s reign political comedy in this country has, Clarke & Dawe aside, been basically non-existent. Why?
It’s not like Australians actually like their current politicians. Both Abbott and Gillard have astoundingly high disapproval ratings, and the prospect of being led by either isn’t exactly filling the nation with joy. You’d think now would be the time to take a few hard swings at our leaders – and, as Mad as Hell has shown, you’d be right. But how did it get to this point?
For one thing, it’s been a very long time since the ABC was serious about political comedy. Backberner was axed in 2002, and since then The Chaser have basically had the domain all to themselves (okay, there was The Glasshouse until 2006, but its political coverage largely consisted of Wil Anderson saying “look at me! C’mon guys… *crickets chirp*… um, hey, fuck John Howard! …are they looking now?”).
The Chaser’s approach to politics has always been a bit softer, more cynical – even, dare we say it, more “insider”. The Chaser come across – or did back when they tackled politics in The Chaser’s War on Everything – like they think one side of politics is pretty much interchangeable with the other. Basically, everyone involved in politics is kind of a dickhead but no-one’s really all that bad. It’s a perfectly reasonable view to have; it’s just not a particularly funny one.
The Chaser’s kind of political comedy often revolved around stunts and pranks, which were easily co-opted by politicians as a way to seem in on the joke. We were scathing about their pranks at the time as being little more than pointless fluff, but at least they were engaging with politicians: nothing anyone’s done since has managed even that.
Of course, there was The Hollowmen in 2008, but that was about politics as process. It was also pretty much out-of-date as soon as it aired: the idea that politics was just a smokescreen for processes that ground on no matter what anyone involved did was a standard of the Howard years, but with Labor in power it became clear that the actual government of the day really did have some say in how the country was run. Sorry to startle you there.
One thing The Hollowmen had in common with The Chaser was a kind of over-view of politics: it didn’t matter who was in power, the system would grind on reguardless. Again, it’s a perfectly valid point of view. It’s also pretty much the only even remotely intelligent point of view that fits with the ABC’s long-time obsession with “balance” when it comes to covering politics. If neither side really matters, it’s fine to give equal time to attacking each – or in The Hollowmen‘s case, ignoring the idea of party politics all together.
Oddly*, it seems in recent years the ABC’s obsession with “balance” when it comes to political swipes seems to have lessened. At Home With Julia wasn’t At Home With Julia and Her Wacky Neighbour Tony Abbott, after all. Then again, once Labor got in at a Federal level The Chaser have basically sworn off politics entirely and despite occasional rumbles The Hollowmen is yet to return. While At Home With Julia had its moments, it also felt a lot like a last-ditch attempt to get in a swipe at Labor before they fell in a heap.
So now – finally – Mad as Hell is taking real swipes at federal politicians. Swipes the ABC are actually using in the promos. Micallef has little to lose by going for laughs by going hard – he can actually get work outside the ABC if the ABC’s political masters take a serious dislike to him. Not that anyone at the ABC would ever make programming decisions based on anything apart from a program’s quality. Of course not.
Micallef being the new comedy attack dog** on the block might work out well for The Chaser too. The Chaser, despite having the “political comedy” brief largely to themselves at the ABC, have never seemed all that interested in going hard at politicians (two words: dodgy pranks). And as they’ve moved to put “The Chaser Boys” days behind them, they’ve put politics behind them too. No complaints there – their swipes at the media have often been their best work – but it has meant that for the last 6 or so years there’s been next to no political comedy*** on Australian televisions.
No wonder someone actually making a joke about Tony Abbott came as such a shock.
*Not really – Under Abbott the Liberals are basically getting equal media time with the government, making it easier to attack them without looking like you’re kicking them when they’re down.
**Not even remotely true
*** Clarke & Dawe are great, but five minutes of 7.30 once a week isn’t exactly high profile
Chris Lilley’s nuts
Down towards the “pointless” end of the Australian comedy news spectrum was this story which emerged on Saturday on the 3AW website. In brief, the story was that Chris Lilley had been banned from Facebook for posting a “lewd picture” (this one, apparently) in which some testicles were visible, i.e. a “sneaky nuts” photo. Anyone who sat through Angry Boys will be familiar with the concept of “sneaky nuts”, in which the characters Nathan and Daniel get their balls out for family photos.
Lilley’s banning from Facebook prompted outrage from his fans, and declarations from Lilley himself that they needn’t worry about missing out on their regular “sneaky nuts” fix; “sneaky nuts” photos would continue to appear on Tumblr, Instagram and Twitter, who apparently don’t mind that kind of thing. (For your academic interest here is the Tumblr, where to our mind many of the nuts are disappointingly un-sneaky.)
Since Saturday Lilley has got his Facebook page back, and this morning there’s been a new piece in the Herald-Sun. Actually, that piece appeared overnight which meant that Lilley could respond fairly quickly to it:
The Herald Sun and Daily Telegraph once again proves themselves to be full of shit. Do some research dickheads.
And then respond to his fans who tweeted him with their unquestioning support.
Thanks for the support guys! Media is just stereotyping themselves as the BS con artists we know them for. Enjoy the sneakynuts once again!
What exactly is “full of shit” about that story is unclear (did the Herald-Sun make up the quote from him? Was the bearded photo which had been “supplied” actually a file photo?), and it scarcely matters, for us the important points about this are:
1) The way in which the “sneaky nuts” ban was framed almost as a freedom of speech issue, giving the matter far more importance than it deserves. (Go visit Chris Lilley’s twitter and the Chris Lilley fans twitter for lots of examples of the hashtags and campaigning, many of them jokey, admittedly.)
2) Lilley is actively encouraging his fans to copy his material, and doesn’t care if they do it badly, i.e. if the nuts aren’t sneaky at all. Which says it all for us: here’s a guy who came up with a semi-amusing idea – teenage boys deliberately ruin family photos by secretly exposing themselves – but seems oblivious to why that idea is funny. In case he’s wondering the clue’s in the name, it’s funny because the nuts are sneakily put out there, not simply because they’re put out there. What’s funny about sneaky nuts is the devilish facial expressions on Nathan and Daniel’s faces and the reactions of their family when they discover what they’ve done to their carefully-posed group photo. No wonder Lilley’s comedy’s over-hyped and hit and miss – Lilley doesn’t understand what hits and what misses in his comedy, but hey, as long as there’s still people interacting with it that’s totally fine.
The Plummeting Value of the Euro
Hamish and Andy are back! And why shouldn’t they be? Yes, their 2011 show Gap Year didn’t quite deliver the kind of gangbuster figures Nine was no doubt hoping for, but it’s not like they soiled the rug with Live From Planet Earth numbers either. Whatever you think of them as comedians, having them back on air should be cause for at least minor celebration – this country has a tragically consistent record when it comes to kicking comedy talent to the curb for even slight failings and seeing someone buck the trend is good news all round.
Though hang on a sec – isn’t there one big fat exception to the whole “your comedy show didn’t save our network, you’ll never work on Australian television again!!” rule? Sadly, yes: if you’re willing to do sports-based comedy, you can fall over a whole bunch of times and still have the networks bending over backwards to pick you up (hang on a minute…). May we direct your attention to the careers of Roy & H.G. and Peter Helliar as exhibits A) and B), with Mick Molloy’s shift into sports-based material not far behind.
Which is where Hamish & Andy have shown a bit of nous: while their first show may not have set the world aflame, their second – which sees them hanging around Europe (while being based in London) doing, well, we’ll get to that – has been pushed as a lead-in to Nine’s Olympics coverage. This is to say, Sport! Australian television’d just be a test pattern without it.
Hamish & Andy have kept what they felt worked first time around – them going out doing wacky stuff both large-scale and small – and ditched what didn’t, which is the more traditional comedy bits and pretty much all the talkshow stuff. So this is pretty much the end of them trying anything different on television for now, as the talkshow stuff was the only stuff that made Gap Year different from their earlier Channel 10 Caravan of Courage specials. Which rated their arses off, so in the “we need to be a success because commercial television will fire you in a heartbeat if you’re not” sense it makes a fair bit of sense.
(That’s not to say it’s a good thing; more of the same works right up until the moment it doesn’t, and then you’re left with nowhere to go)
The big plus here is Hamish & Andy themselves. They know what works for them – their natural charm and the chemistry between them – and they give themselves plenty of opportunity to show it off. We get Hamish & Andy going off to Eastern Europe to jump off a stupidly high bridge; challenging a pair of London cabbies to a race (they have their knowledge of the city’s streets, H&A have a Ferrari); battling each other to see who can best repeat a phrase in a language they don’t speak; and going to Sweden to compete in a rabbit jumping competition. Pretty much business as usual for the likable duo, though they at least know enough to bookend the show with the two big adventures and fill the middle with the shorter, slighter sketches. It doesn’t prevent it from feeling like more of the same, but at least it keeps things moving forward.
Hamish & Andy have, at least up until now, always shown an interest in pushing their work beyond the “and then we went here and did this wacky thing, then we went over here and did another wacky thing” formula. Even in last year’s Gap Year they gave Ryan Shelton a couple of minutes each week to do his thing. But this week’s episode confined Shelton to merely commentating (briefly) on one of their stunts; hopefully they’ll give him more to do in coming weeks.
Judging on the first episode, this feels more like a consolidation project for H&A than anything really memorable. They’ve already talked about wanting to do another show for Nine before the end of the year, which you’d think would have to contain more than just a change in location to be worthwhile. There’s only so many overseas locations they can wander around in: eventually they’re either going to have to narrow their focus and risk turning into another Safran / Leuing / Lucy type exploration of a issue, or they’re going to have to give the talkshow thing another try.
Hamish & Andy’s Euro Gap Year is boilerplate Hamish & Andy, with the hosts doing what they do best and bugger-all else besides. After five years of being the biggest comedy duo in the nation there’s nothing on offer here to recommend it to anyone who isn’t already a fan; presumably they figure they already have enough of those to make this show a success.
Willing to pay the Nice
So, Nice has made it to air and we finally got to see the context in which that duet of “Islands in the Stream” sits: Myf Warhurst realised that her childhood was shaped by a love for music and a love for love duets, and so she uses that as an excuse to go and talks to others whose lives were also defined and shaped by their love for music. There’s a bit of social history and a few long bows drawn (Chantal Cantouri won that Logie because she rebelled against her parents and went to see The Beatles when they came to Adelaide? Umm…), but as per the title of the show it’s all good, wholesome, feel good hits and memories.
Or is it? Because like a lot of nice things – Belgian chocolate, expensive wine, lounging by a pool reading Viz – it’s also a fair bit self-indulgent. Here’s the problem as we see it: Myf Warhurst has seen all those “a comedian looks at…” shows and thought she’d give it a try. She’s an ordinary Australian who’s had some experiences, experiences which many other ordinary Australians have had too. Tick! It’s relatable. Also, she’s got a childhood diary and a brain which remembers things that happened to her ages ago, and as anyone who’s seen comedy in the past couple of decades can tell you, stories from people’s childhoods are an absolute cack. Bang! We’ve got a show!
Except…when a comedian reads out extracts from their childhood diaries they take the piss out of them, by mocking the weird theories they had as kids for example. In Nice, the diary entries and memories are used simply as an excuse for Myf to duet with her heroes. You could argue that Lawrence Leung, Judith Lucy, John Safran and all the other comedians who’ve made this sort of show haven’t always succeeded in turning their pasts in to comedy gold, but their intentions were most certainly to do so. Myf Warhurst’s intentions were to, well, we’re not entirely sure a lot of the time. She seemed to be trying to have it a lot of ways, resulting in a show which didn’t really satisfy anyone.
Next week Nice looks at the food we ate all those years ago in the 70s and 80s. Join Myf Warhurst as she chats to Peter Russell Clarke, Matt Preston and the Chicko Roll girl. Oh, and she also gets to be the Chicko Roll girl too, but not in a funny way, just in the way that most people dressing up in those tiny shorts would…so that’s kinda pointless.
Meanwhile, proper comedies with scripts by people who are actually pretty talented get turned down every other week. But don’t worry comedy fans, someone from Agony Uncles will soon discover an old sporting trophy and manage to spin that into a 6 parter. Hooray! Wednesday nights on ABC1 are saved!
Vale Agony Aunts
It’s taken us a little while to get around to farewelling Agony Aunts because… well, to be honest, we thought we’d already done it. Turns out we just thought we had – in fact it was Agony Uncles we’d given a good kicking to on the way out. Easy mistake to make really, seeing as they were basically the same show. Yes, in 2012 the ABC is happy to spend 12 episodes on the kind of shithouse relationship “advice” even the Sunday tabloids generally shy away from. What’s next, a 27-part series on the breakfast habits of b-list sportspeople? Hang on, that just might – back in a sec, we’ve got to make a call to the ABC…
Aunts proved to be a slightly better take on the material than Uncles though, thanks almost entirely to the presence of Denise Scott and Judith Lucy. Not just because they’d actually made relationships part of their comedy work for the last twenty years or so, but because they were slightly older than the norm and so actually had some wisdom and insight to impart.
Yes, both Aunts and Uncles had the token old person, but they were there either to shock with sexy tales (Aunts) or shock with unreconstructed sexism (Uncles). Otherwise the casting seemed to be almost entirely based around the concept of “how many semi-famous good looking youngish people can we get to talk about their relationships in such a way that viewers might think they could cop off with them if ever they met up”.
These two series weren’t funny enough to be comedies, insightful enough to be useful as advice, interesting enough to be worth watching purely on their limited merits or even sleazy enough to be sleazy. Let’s say it again: we got twelve full weeks of edited-to-buggery sound bites from people not really famous enough to be talking about anything that wasn’t their day job. And what did we learn? Relationships require work, breaking up is painful, some people stalk their ex’s and others don’t, some people like men to make the first move and some people don’t, lesbians share clothes and old people have had lots of sex. Twelve weeks, six hours of television.
It’s understandable that the ABC needs cheap programming. Isn’t that what imported comedies are for? After all, the ABC now only has three dedicated half-hour comedy timeslots a week to fill – Wednesday’s from 8.30pm to 9.30pm, with options for 8pm and now Friday’s at 8pm – surely there’s some decent* UK or US comedy they could be showing while saving their local budgets for shows with expensive elements like scripts and sets?
Ideally the Agony series would have been a 90 minute special. No, strike that: ideally the Agony series would have been good. The cast was weak and the topics repetitive, sure – but it was a steadfast refusal to provide any kind of depth, any kind of exploration of relationships beyond the utterly superficial that made it a waste of time. Like we said earlier, Aunts managed to burrow a little deeper into the guts of the topic, but only a little. There’s only so much you can do when you’re not allowed to say more than two sentences in a row.
For example – and yes, everyone hates it when critics think they can do better, but in this case this really is pretty basic stuff – why not give a more rounded portrait of the people speaking so we could at least get to know where their advice was coming from? Denise Scott’s talked about having an affair in her stand-up: we didn’t see her go into that on Aunts (though to be fair, we may have missed it).
Wait, why be fair: why not build the show around the individuals so each episode had, say, three people going into their situations in some depth? Arrange it so they contrast with each other so it’s not the same thing over and over, give them enough time to dig at least a little into their past – or just explain themselves and their situation better – and you might have something actually informative and fun.
Instead we just got sound-bites that never added up to anything, glued together with ye olde stock footage and host Adam Zwar’s voice-over. The gimmick with that was that he needed help understanding relationships… wait, isn’t that his actual no-fooling wife on the show? Why is a married man asking about going on first dates, or what to do after you’ve been dumped? This is either one long cry for help or it’s so sloppy it can’t even be bothered pretending its hook matters in the slightest. And either way, who cares? No-one making it did, and now it’s over.
*Life’s Too Short? Decent? You are fucking joking. Which is more than anyone’s said about Ricky Gervais in the last two years.
Talkin’ ‘bout 31 Questions
At the risk of overstating the following observation in the following review, there’s quite a strong Talkin’ ‘bout Your Generation vibe to the new Channel 31 game show 31 Questions (which airs in Melbourne and surrounding regions at 10pm on Saturdays but can also be seen on YouTube). Maybe it’s the Micallef-esque mannerisms of host David M. Green, or the unexpected interjections from the show’s Moderator Alasdair Tremblay-Birchall, or that the questions are written by comedy writers? Put it this way, we’d be surprised if the production team aren’t Micallef fans. And that’s fine with us, because of those Australian comedians currently in the spotlight Shaun Micallef’s the one we’d prefer to be influencing the next generation.
But leaving the possible Micallef influence aside for a second, 31 Questions is doing a lot of other stuff right. Aware that it will never be able to compete with flashy shows like Deal or No Deal, it uses its low budget to its advantage by getting laughs out of a deliberately crappy set, the host’s outfit (a cheap-looking question mark-covered jacket), and their inability to offer a decent prize (the winner gets a signed photo of David M. Green). There’s also a fair bit of scripted material; episode 1 starts with a sketch in which David M. Green meets ex-Sale of the Century host Glenn Ridge, and throughout the show there are lots of scripted (and a few improvised) tête-à-têtes between the Host and Moderator.
What you won’t get from 31 Questions (so far, at least) are any Talkin’ ‘bout Your Generation style physical challenges – they’re probably way beyond the budget of the show – but it’s interesting to note that this is one of the few game shows we can think of which puts the comedy elements associated with celebrity panel games into a show with real contestants. In Australia the only examples we can think of are Rockwiz and (stretching the definition of comedy a bit) It’s A Knockout; thinking internationally, you probably have to go back to the early ‘90s and Sticky Moments with Julian Clary or seek out an episode of the BBC’s game show Pointless, a straight game show which is enlivened by the back-and-forths between the hosts, comedian Alexander Armstrong and comedy writer/producer Richard Osman. (If you can think of any other comedic games shows we’ve missed please leave a comment.)
Whether making more game shows into quasi-comedies, or even fairly overt comedies like this one, is the next big thing in TV…who knows? But in the meantime, why not check out the low-budget hijinks of 31 Questions. Apart from everything else, it’s the kind of show which looks set to get funnier over time. What’s on the bookshelf? What’s with the various items on the Moderator’s desk? Is there some kind of tension between the cast members? And how’s the role of hostess Melanie Valentine going to develop? We’re intrigued…
Vale Laid 2
By the time you read this Laid will have vanished from our screens forever and we’re not really sure how we’re going to cope. Remember what life was like early in 2010, before Laid started on the ABC? Remember how – you’ll laugh to remember this – we all thought that a comedy was meant to be sunny and bright and full of characters you actually wanted to spend time with doing funny things you couldn’t wait to tell your friends about the next time you saw them?
And then Laid came along and said in a firm but sassy voice that no, comedy was all about grey people in gloomy surroundings committing sex crimes and then standing around being awkward and the whole thing felt like something you wouldn’t even want to confess to your therapist. If there’s one area in which it can be said that Laid has truly succeeded, it’s in making the act of watching a comedy feel like something you should be deeply ashamed of. Laid feels like a show made by someone who may have actually killed someone. It feels like a show made by someone who wants the joy in the world to die.
If that sounds over the top to you, go and watch an episode – I mean, really sit down and pay attention to one. Why is the sun never shining? Why does everyone have bad hair? Why are all the relationships messed up? Why does everyone look like they’re freezing? Why – and this is the big one for anyone over the age of consent – is it a show about a person who kills whoever they have sex with via mystically toxic genitals? What kind of person do you have to be to find that idea – not, let us stress, as a problem afflicting an already established comedy character, nor as a once-off joke about a supporting character, but as the very centre of your comedy show – something people would laugh at week in week out?
The big problem with the first series of Laid was that for the show to make even the slightest bit of sense the lead’s toxic genitals had to somehow take on some larger significance. They had to be a metaphor for something and if your deadly genitals are a metaphor, chances are it’s a metaphor for something that isn’t very good. But Laid was a show created and written (with Kirsty Fisher and the cast) by Marieke Hardy, a writer who to date has been incapable of writing anything that, at its core, isn’t about herself. She created a show about three men called Last Man Standing and managed to make it about her: pretty impressive feat that.
She has a blog (about her), at least one newspaper column (about her), she wrote a book titled You’ll Be Sorry When I’m Dead (about her), she writes regular newspaper articles (about her), appears on The First Tuesday Book Club (as herself) and has in every possible way built a career on being Marieke Hardy. So it’s safe to say that when the lead (Roo McVie, played by Alison Bell) in Laid dresses like Hardy, acts like Hardy and talks like Hardy, you can guess who she’s meant to remind us of.
There are people around the place who’ll tell you with a straight face that there’s nothing all that wrong with the Australian media being dominated by people who basically do nothing but be themselves – you know, the stand-up comedians and professional commentators who dominate the panel shows that dominate the tiny non-reality slice of television.
They’re wrong and here’s why: Hardy came up with a difficult and challenging idea for a show, then made the central character a carbon copy of herself. The only way for the difficult and challenging part of the show to be resolved in a fashion that was dramatically and emotionally satisfying to an audience was by – to be blunt – having the lead turn out to be a massive turd. Innocent people are dying because she had sex with them: it’s hard to turn that into a reflection of a positive character trait.
But because this is a show where the lead character is basically the creator of the show – and a creator who, if her blog and columns and book are any guide, has a fairly well-developed sense of her own worth – the lead character can’t be a turd because that would be saying the creator of the show may not be quite as awesome as the last decade of her writing has been designed to make us believe. So the first series of Laid wimped out with some pathetic “I was bad, but you dead guys were pretty shithouse too” crap that satisfied no-one except the commissioning editor at the ABC because no sooner had the credits rolled than Hardy was announcing a second series.
For those of you thinking she may have learnt something from the end to series one we’d laugh in your face but we’re too busy with this whole weary headshake thing we’ve got going on. While series two started off slightly interesting with the addition of a creepy sex pest (Marcus, played by Damon Herriman) whose magic genitals “healed” people – he’s the opposite of the lead character GEDDIT? – it then promptly proceeded to have nothing at all happen for the next five episodes apart from some moderately creepy attempted rape and everybody trying to pash on with everybody else.
Oh, and some guy thought he was Jesus and the last root of our lead (Charlie, played by Abe Forsythe) would sometimes be almost dead and other times seem to be okay depending on factors never explained in the script because presumably we were meant to be too busy laughing at someone trying to have sex with an unconscious man by making a splint for his flaccid penis using icey-pole sticks. You know, like Chaplin did that time. But then we got to the final episode, and let’s just run through it because otherwise a lot of the ranting to come may be hard to follow.
Roo has been trying to sleep with Marcus since episode one because she thinks his magic penis will cure her of her death crotch and bring Charlie back to full health. Marcus until now hasn’t wanted to do so because he thinks their powers will somehow swap and put him out of a job (he is so creepy according to the show no woman would sleep with him unless they knew it would cure an ailment, and he’s built a business around this even though they often insult him to his face about it). But now he’s fallen in love with Roo and says “okay, I’ll sleep with you, but only if it leads to an actual relationship”.
Roo doesn’t want a relationship but does want a root – cue “doesn’t everyone lie to have sex”, oh ho ho ho – and eventually, after much hand-wringing, decides to just lie to him. They have sex, she says “uh, this isn’t going to work out” and bails. Good news; Charlie is all better! Bad news: Charlie knows how he was cured and says he can’t forgive Roo for what she’s done. What, had meaningless grudge sex to save his life? Still, it does make sense that after all that they wouldn’t end up together. Meanwhile Marcus is so distraught-slash-angry he’s wrecking his house when a innocent and perfectly ordinary client arrives for a healing root. He says “I’m going out of business, but what the hell”. So they have sex AND SHE DIES.
Meanwhile Roo hears a knock at the door – it’s Charlie! And he’s decided to forgive her because he can’t live without her! And the final scene of this whole misbegotten split trashbag of a show is Roo in bed with her boyfriend looking about as happy as it’s possible for Alison Bell to look.
Lets spell it out: this show’s idea of a happy ending is one where the lead lies to a guy for sex which results in some other woman dying while she ends up curled up in bed with the man she loves. The only way this makes sense is if the lead is meant to be such an amazing person that we don’t give a shit about anything she does so long as she ends up happy.
So forget the earlier episode where she drugged Marcus and tried to rape him! Forget her lying to someone – someone who said “I’m in love with you” – to have sex with him! Forget that this led directly to someone actually being killed! Roo is so awesome her happiness is all that matters! It’s a good thing we’re not inclined to read things into television viewing because otherwise a show like this coming from someone who only ever writes about herself would seem like a pretty fucking creepy half hour of television.
But who knows? The show as a whole has been so consistently garbled and messy – drifting from subplot to subplot with no clear structure, padding some developments out for weeks while tossing others aside, having characters act completely out of character for the sake of a joke that never actually materialises – that accusing the writers of any kind of plan at all seems overly optimistic.
It was bad enough that after an utterly undistinguished first season it was given the go-ahead for a second straight away while a string of far better shows died – twentysomething, to name just one that was better in every single measurable way – but to have it return and somehow be even worse than the first series suggests that every single person at producer grade and above responsible for the second series of Laid should be held to account in a fashion that at the very least requires some form of public apology followed by repaying every cent of the costs and signing a document forbidding them from involvement in television production at any level until at least a decade after their deaths.
You wouldn’t want to say Laid was utterly incompetent, because clearly the cast and the director and the lighting guys and the people in wardrobe and everyone else who’ve been involved in even a single other television show are clearly capable of doing so much better than this. The best thing that can be said about Laid is that it’s over. The worst thing that can be said is that such a complete and total waste of time and money and human effort was made in the first place.