Australian Tumbleweeds
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.
Vale Agony Uncles; or The King Is Dead, Long Live The Queen
Sometimes a show succeeds despite itself. While Agony Uncles may have positioned itself as a source for all that hard-hitting relationship advice men have secretly been crying out for, our straw poll of people who’ve actually watched the thing boiled down to two separate results: every man we spoke to thought it was a crap show populated by smug and smarmy wankers humblebragging about their sexual conquests – and so they watched as little of it as possible – while the two women we found who’d watched it thought it was hilarious because (and they both used the exact same word) the guys on it were “dickheads”.
It’s always tricky to try and guess the intent of the people behind a creative endeavour, especially one that proved to be as muddled and unfocused (in intent if not format) as Agony Uncles. So let’s just say, judging by the serious fashion in which every single man on the show imparted his just-down-from-the-mountain “advice” about women and relationships (even when they were telling a funny story, this was a show that took its’ funny stories seriously), it’s possible to conclude that this “they’re all dickheads” result was not the one Adam Zwar and company intended.
Still, you take your laughs where you can get them and even a stopped clock is right twice a day if you’re too lazy to just chuck the damn thing out. Yes, the show’s many flaws were obvious right out the gate: where Agony Uncles‘ obvious inspiration Grumpy Old Men featured, well, grumpy old men griping about the state of the world today – a world that, in a lot of ways, they are no longer an active part of, thus disarming their criticisms and making them easy to enjoy as moaning from no longer powerful-figures – this featured men in the prime of their lives talking earnestly about something central to their emotional well-being. Even if they’d been hilariously witty (and they weren’t) or shockingly insightful (and they weren’t), they wouldn’t have been very funny. Unless, it seems, you just thought they were dickheads.
So what was the point of all this, apart from getting host /creator Zwar a paycheck? Apart from being a sop to a pissweak version of “celebrity culture”, what is meant to be interesting about having attractive, financially well-off, socially successful men talk about relationships? These aren’t guys who are getting it wrong, they aren’t getting it amazingly right either (then this’d be a show about how to pick up chicks) and they certainly aren’t particularly self-aware; for example, while no doubt they had preferences when it comes to women none of that mattered (or at least, they weren’t really mentioned) because when it comes to picking a mate “it’s ladies choice”.
Really? No-one connected that with the also expressed “it’s not a good sign when a woman approaches you” view to conclude that ladies are only allowed to choose from the men offered to them? Presumably that insight into the raw prawn women get partner-wise was being held over for the upcoming Agony Aunts (about which more later).
These weren’t men so famous that anyone wants to know what they think just for the sake of it and they weren’t so sharp or funny that their insights into anything had merit on their own. Agony Uncles was television-length rather than actual television, the kind of thing that simply exists without purpose or value.
Agony Aunts, on the other hand – and yes, thanks to a buddy with a time machine we’ve seen the first episode – is slightly different. For one thing, it features Denise Scott and Judith Lucy, who’ve been tackling this sort of area in their stand-up for a few decades now. They know what they’re talking about and they’re funny with it: big tick there. Wendy Harmer is also present, which is kind of the same thing only not as funny. The cast as a whole seem slightly more aware, which lifts the material as a whole a little.
Don’t worry though, Zwar somehow manages to come off as even more creepy with his “tell me how to LOVVVVE!” voice-over here, especially as he actually has his wife in front of the camera this time. And of course, just like the previous version this features plenty of cliches getting a dust-off. Men are hunters? Women like their men to be financially successful? Stop the press, I want to throw it at someone. Basically, whenever Sarah Wilson comes on just wack yourself in the face with a Sunday tabloid.
[actually, one of the big problems with this series is that it’s just not shocking and offensive enough. Anyone who’s ever spoken to anyone else about sex and relationships knows that people have insanely horrid and disgusting preferences when it comes to getting a root, and yet all this series serves up is bland “stay away from crazy women” and “men with cash are more attractive” pap. Where are the hilarious yet creepy fetishes? Where are the shocking yet arousing tales of asked-for abuse? These people don’t seem to have actual relationships; they barely even have bunkmates.]
The real question of course is, why are we getting twelve weeks of this stuff? There’s barely enough insight from the men & women combined to fill a half hour special. Let’s say it again: they’re not famous enough to be interesting in their own right. They’re not experts in this area – no more than anyone else – so what they have to say isn’t informative enough to be useful. They take it too seriously to be funny – a few of the female comedians excepted and even then not always – but the show is too flippant to make their comments hang together as anything remotely serious. Even “tepid” is too strong a word to describe this crap.
Randling is a Word Based Game Show. The word is Denton.
If you like comedy and didn’t have reason to dislike the inordinately smug Andrew Denton before now, thanks to a recent interview he gave to Fairfax, now you do:
In a perfect world, Denton says, Randling would have been a companion piece to the popular music-trivia show Spicks and Specks.
But two weeks after pitching Randling to the ABC, the producers of Spicks and Specks announced their intention to wind it up at the end of last year. Randling now has Spicks’ ”Broadway” slot on Wednesday night.
”It’s not ideal to come after Spicks and Specks, which has been so loved,” Denton says. ”We’ll have to find our way through the clouds of comparison … with every show, it takes a while for the audience to find its feet as much as the show.
”I’d prefer Spicks was still on, though I understand why they made that decision.”
We’ve gone on here before about how important Spicks & Specks has been to the last few years of Australian comedy. Short version: by ratings its arse off at 8.30pm then finishing at 9 while every other network was screening hour-long shows from 8.30 to 9.30, it meant anything running after it got a all-but-guaranteed ratings boost that made it – and Australian comedy in general – look more popular that it probably really was.
We bang on and on about this because ratings are important in television: without the security of that solid Spicks & Specks lead-in, many of the ABC comedy hits of the mid 2000s would have been flops, and therefore many of the ABC comedies of the late 2000s would never have happened. So of course Denton wanted his word-based game-show to have that hit-making slot. It’s only fair really…. until you realise that while most Australian comedy series on the ABC run six weeks (eight at most), according to the preview information we’ve seen Randling is scheduled to run for 27 weeks.
Basically, Denton wanted to fuck over every other Australian comedy on the ABC in 2012 (okay, apart from Woodley, which aired at 8pm, and Shaun Micallef’s Mad As Hell, which will air Friday’s at 8pm) by locking up the only decent comedy timeslot for his word-based game-show from now until November; that is to say, the end of ratings season 2012. That’s his right, of course. He’s only doing the best by his word-based game-show to wish it the best possible timeslot.
We, on the other hand, are well within our rights to find the fact that his word-based game-show will now have to win viewers based entirely on its’ word-based merits pretty darn funny. And the ABC are well within their rights to be quietly shitting themselves that they’ve given a 27 week commitment to a game show that is, above all else, word-based. After all, we all know how much Australians love their words.
A bit too raw?
Yesterday we got an e-mail from one of our readers, Patrick. Amongst other things, Patrick wrote:
Tom and Alex interviewed the 2012 Raw Comedy winner on Monday on their triple j breakfast show. The winner is a trio called Lessons with Luis and they interviewed Luis.
Aside from winning Raw, Luis also currently has a Golden Gibbo nominated show at MICF and got a 4 star review from Schembri. I’ve seen the show and one of his Raw heats and it’s quite a different act (a bit Tim and Eric maybe) but very funny. It killed at the Raw heat and the show at MICF was very good.
Basically Luis is a character based act (check out vids on YouTube), sort of awkward anti-comedy, which admittedly didn’t translate very well on radio in the interview on JJJ. The interview is quite awkward and stilted but it sort of spirals downwards when Luis sings a song about cats. Tom and Alex don’t really handle this character very well.
At this point (at the end of the interview) Tom Ballard calls the act shit, questions whether JJJ should be supporting Raw and brings up how he himself didn’t win but “shit like this gets through”.
It was pretty condescending and unsupportive of comedy in my opinion. Interesting also given that JJJ are supposed to be supporting/fostering young comic talent (Luis I’m guessing is about 20). Interesting also as this is pretty out there, alternative comedy, hence the Golden Gibbo nom, yet Ballard, a very well known and influential comedian, wrote it off as shit. Surprising. There was a subsequent Twitter backlash towards Lessons with Luis.
Anyway, I’m not sure what to make of it, but it’s on the Monday 16th Tom and Alex podcast about 14 mins in if you’re interested. Seems to fit in the topic area of the site.
As regular readers of this blog know we don’t really cover live comedy – largely because we don’t often get a chance to see it – but when there’s a media shitstorm about live comedy, we’re right in there. So here we go…
First up, we haven’t seen the live show Lessons with Luis. But we have watched the YouTube videos, listened to the Tom and Alex interview, and heard from several other sources – including this online review – that the show was really good. Here’s what we’ve concluded:
- Lessons with Luis is an act which probably works best in a long-form, live format. Viewed in isolation (i.e. in 1 minute YouTube videos, or as part of a short radio appearance) Luis’ knowingly poor gags and deliberately lame songs seem, well, poor and lame. But in the context of an hour-long show Luis would have lots of time to set the scene and establish his character. Lessons with Luis is probably one of those shows that becomes more and more enjoyable as it goes along and you start to get it.
- Ballard wasn’t entirely wrong to describe Luis as “shit”. Like we said above, in isolation the cats song is shit. And Luis’ banter on Tom and Alex wasn’t exactly side-splitting.
- Calling Luis “shit” on live radio was wrong. It’s not that we care too much about the fact that Ballard, one of the most high-profile personalities on the radio station which sponsored Raw Comedy, slagged off the winner of Raw Comedy on that radio station – he’s got a perfect right to hold and express whatever opinions he likes, and indeed it’s quite refreshing that he’s diverted from what we imagine is the company line – it’s more that as a professional comedian Ballard should have known better than anyone that Luis is an inexperienced, surreal character act who was struggling a bit on what was probably his most high-profile radio appearance to date. Whatever happened to showbiz people helping each other out for the good of the show? Or is it everyone for themselves these days, and bugger the show?
- Ballard is being contradictory. To us (and others we’ve spoken to) Luis’ act seems a bit like Sam Simmons’, and Tom and Alex have Sam Simmons on their show all the time. We don’t find Sam Simmons funny, but Tom and Alex seem to, so why didn’t they get Luis?
Have you seen the live show Lessons with Luis? Did you like it or hate it? Is Tom Ballard a thundering dickhead for what he said? Let us know, leave your comments.
Hamish Blake is Unpopular Fraud, Steals Gold Logie From Deserving Blandoids
Did Hamish Blake deserve to win his Gold Logie? Well, it depends: considering the Gold Logie usually signifies a career about to come to a screeching halt… again, it depends. But you’d expect that kind of snark from us; one place you probably wouldn’t expect it from is the celebrity-worshiping pages of yes, you guessed it, the Herald-Sun via the current grumpy sod in their TV writer’s chair, Colin Vickery:
Hamish Blake is hard to dislike. But it is hard to accept him as most popular personality on the basis of Hamish & Andy’s Gap Year, which even fans concede doesn’t match his talent.
…
The Logies gain huge exposure from the voting campaigns, but you can’t help but think the awards are becoming more about marketing and less about genuine popularity.
Event organisers must put a stop to the campaigns. The gloss comes off the gold if there’s suspicion it has gone not to the most popular personality, but the most cleverly promoted
Gee Colin, why don’t you tell us what you really think? “Genuine popularity”? “Most cleverly promoted”? What, wouldn’t the lawyers let you lead with STOP, THIEF?
This particular spray from Vickery – strangely unavailable online, though published in the April 16th edition – was bolstered after Blake gave Vickery an interview featuring the somewhat self-deprecating comment “I feel like… an imposter. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to seeing my name on that list of winners “. So of course April 17th’s Herald-Sun ran the headline “Hamish Ponders Cred Gap” while Vickery started his story with “GOLD Logie winner Hamish Blake reckons he is an imposter”. Sadly, the lawyers clearly cut out Vickery’s next line, which was presumably AS DO I AND ALL RIGHT-THINKING AUSTRALIANS.
(yes, we did notice the “…” in Blake’s quote, which usually indicates something was cut out. Wonder what it was? Especially as the actual tone of what Vickery did leave in seems to suggest Blake is merely surprised that he won, not feeling like a fraud because he won)
This vitriol is slightly puzzling. What, does Vickery really think that Carrie Bickmore, toiling away on a show that changed timeslot twice in the last year and is currently struggling in the ratings, was vastly more popular than a guy who, as Michael Bodey (writing for the Herald-Sun‘s sister paper The Australian) points out in a piece supportive of Blake, was hosting top-rating TV specials little more than a year ago?
Of course, it could just be that Blake is a comedian who makes jokes, seems likable and has fun in the spotlight, rather than the usual Logie-winning pointless actor or completely superfluous “host”. Lord knows the Herald-Sun couldn’t play favourites when reporting on a news story, even though Vickery made sure to stick the following in his Blake interview:
Blake’s win certainly surprised many observers who had picked Carrie Bickmore or Karl Stefanovic to take out the Gold Logie.
The Logie-winning Hamish and Andy’s Gap Year started strongly but faded in the ratings. Blake’s trump card was popularity on radio and across social media as well as TV
That’s right, he’s not a REAL television star, and don’t you forget it! Sure, Stefanovic hosts a breakfast show that rates even worse than Gap Year did, and Bickmore spent the last year doing nothing memorable on a struggling show, but, uh… HAMISH CHEATED! By being popular. With people who voted for him. For an award based on popularity.
Let’s not forget, this sustained attack on the credibility of the Logies comes in the wake of the award putting its’ voting process entirely online, thus enabling regular folk to vote at the same rate and volume as the awards traditional fans: network publicists. And everyone who counts knows the Logies aren’t about being popular with voters, they’re about being popular with the people who count.
Like Colin Vickery.
The inconsistent world of comedy and the Herald-Sun
Is it just us or have this year’s MICF reviews on the Herald-Sun website been really positive? A bit too positive? Check out their page’s Laugh-O-Meter, which shows that the average rating for shows is 4 stars. Seriously? Even assuming that different reviewers will rate shows on slightly different scales, and that all comedians performing will be doing their best material because MICF is an internationally-renowned showcase event, and that Australia being a relatively small place some reviewers will have industry connections or interests which may cause them to score the acts more highly than others, shouldn’t the average show rating still be more like 2½ or 3 stars? What could be going on here?
Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with last year’s Herald-Sun/MICF reviewing “fiasco” (if not, this blog post gives a good run down), for which the Herald-Sun received a lot of industry flack. Could this be our nation’s largest newspaper attempting to redress the balance, to protect their sponsorship investment in one Australia’s largest cultural events? A sponsorship which we’re guessing was intended to draw a slightly different audience to their core readership.
It could equally be the result of inexperienced reviewers. The Herald-Sun is not exactly noted for its arts coverage, nor is there any major publication in this country which has a dedicated live comedy reviewer. And indeed, if there was a dedicated live comedy reviewer what exactly would they review? Despite a number of people keeping the Melbourne live scene going, it can hardly be said to thrive at any other time of the year. So how can reviewers be expected to keep churning out fair and balanced reviews of a style of performance they rarely see? Better be nice and score them higher to be on the safe side.
(in case you were wondering, the Herald-Sun’s rival newspaper and former MICF media partner The Age has also been reviewing the fest in somewhat glowing terms. While a lot of shows are getting three stars from them, you have to be pretty bad to do worse and a lot of shows have done better. So while they’re not as bad as the Herald-Sun – their reviewers generally have more live reviewing experience as well – the general consensus again seems to be “better-than-average”.)
Not that any of the acts can be worrying too much about this. As a recent blog post demonstrates, there’s a great deal at stake for anyone putting on a MICF show…
They’ve got an average of $8,000 on the line.
…especially if you don’t have much of a profile. In this context word of mouth and good reviews are vital. As is profile-raising, which possibly explains why comedians – who by virtue of their profession should be above this sort of thing – are increasingly prepared to turn up on, for example, morning television, even when they’ve got nothing to plug.
And who can blame them for trying to get their faces out there? Much as everyone involved – apart from the audience – is a winner when comedy shows get glowing reviews (the sponsors – which includes the Herald-Sun – know good reviews help drag in punters who don’t know any better, the organisers can claim the festival was a success because everything was “well-reviewed”, and the performers can put the star ratings on their posters as promotional tools), this kind of constant praise ends up hurting comedians because it leads to disgruntled and distrusting audiences.
Take us for example, for we are the prime market for MICF: people who are interested in comedy. But because we don’t see a lot of live comedy – which makes us like everyone else, because outside of MICF there really isn’t much live comedy on offer in Melbourne (and what there is, is short sets, not 50 minute solo shows) – we have to rely on reviews. And because we can’t trust the reviewers – everything can’t possibly be three stars or better unless three stars doesn’t actually mean “three stars”* – we stay at home unless it’s someone we know about from outside sources. Like television appearances.
Which means comedians will do anything these days, they kind of have to. Over the past decade or so comedy has morphed from something which was almost pure and isolated from other artforms – like a loner standing in a corner at a party, cynically analysing what all the cool, popular people are doing – to a mere ingredient in any number of creative enterprises. Apparently, audiences don’t really want proper news any more, or indeed proper comedy, hence The Project. It’s a situation which frustrates a lot of comedians, who would quite rightly prefer to be off creating comedy than appear on, say, The Circle, for which they don’t make much money anyway.
So, it’s no wonder that comedians (and all the management companies and promoters who grew up around and professionalised the comedy industry in the 90s) get so stressed about people bagging them, or even re-telling their gags, online. Remember, there’s lots of money at stake, and reputations, and indeed an entire career path and industry. But as we’ve argued before, for a bunch of people who are professional funny buggers and want to spend their lives telling edgy gags – gags which out of context can sound like personal attacks and which are liable to be controversialised by newspapers like the Herald-Sun – comedians have a remarkably thin skin and a staggering lack of insight.
If they’re so worried about things like their “personal brand” what the hell are they doing taking-on members of the public who dislike their work? When the public takes to Twitter to express their dislike of a comedian, 99.9999999% of the time they’re objecting to that comedian’s work, not to them personally. Even if in isolation their comments seem like a personal attack (such as “I could just kill Dave Hughes for that”). As Graeme Garden once said “irony doesn’t work in print”, or it least it doesn’t always work in print, and we all – audience members, comedians, promoters, media – need to accept that in all circumstances.
Which brings us back (slightly clunkily) to our friends at the Herald-Sun, a newspaper with an ever-changing and often contradictory set of business strategies, all of which are ultimately intended to make Rupert more money. And if making Rupert money can be achieved by wilfully misinterpreting a joke on one day to boost readership, and handing out four- or five-star reviews to MICF shows on the next to boost takings at an event they’re sponsoring, then that’s what they’ll do. It’s what they’ve always done, and will do for ever more. And it seems the MICF is just fine with that.
*Other artforms – music, movies and television – are measured against a much wider range of examples. A newspaper can give every album they review 3 stars or better and when pressed about their soft reviews counter with “we don’t review anything that gets less than 3 stars” because there’s no way they can review everything that comes out. Movie reviewers can give most movies 3 stars or better because there will be a handful of really, really horrible films released each year that deserve 1 star. But with MICF everything on offer is being reviewed and because it’s the only real source of live comedy for the year the only valid comparison for a show is with other shows on around it – which means that, ideally, a reviewer would see everything first then hand out star ratings. As this isn’t possible, the star ratings are close to useless… but sadly, are the only things anyone pays attention to.
Vale Woodley
Last weekend Sunday Age TV critic Melinda Houston revealed exactly why Woodley has been a bit of a fizzle ratings-wise: “It’s complex and full of thoughtful detail while still able to be thoroughly enjoyed by a six-year old.” While this is true, the problem is that it’s true of the show as a whole, not of the comedy within the show. Put another way, across the eight episodes it rapidly became obvious that the “complex and thoughtful detail” stuff was for grown-ups; the funny man doing silly things was for kids. Grown-ups who want to laugh, enjoy the complex and thoughtful detail while you wait.
Frank Woodley’s not to blame for the way his show was reviewed, but this particular review does highlight the kind of highbrow condescension that this kind of “quality” comedy often attracts. When Houston feels the need to reveal to us that “every episode – and they’re only 30 minutes long” BECAUSE OBVIOUSLY AUSTRALIA HAS A LONG TRADITION OF HOUR-LONG SITCOMS AND TEN MINUTE SITCOMS AND SITCOMS RUNNING PRETTY MUCH HOWEVER THE FUCK LONG THEY FEEL LIKE IT SO SHE’D BETTER LET US KNOW RIGHT NOW THAT THIS PARTICULAR ABC SITCOM IS *ONLY* 30 MINUTES LONG PHEW THANK FUCK OUR LONG NATIONAL NIGHTMARE OF UNCERTAINTY IS OVER, she’s letting us know that she thinks her readers are complete fucking idiots.
No, wait, she’s letting us know that this is a show for people who don’t normally watch television, because people who normally watch television tend to know how long a sitcom runs for. This isn’t regular television, people: it’s a “quality” comedy, based on applause-gathering pratfalls and mime and clowning… you know, the kind of thing they have in those “quality” comedies that gather dust while everyone’s off watching a woman take a shit in a sink in Bridesmaids. One of us recently had a conversation with a friend who hailed Frank Woodley as “a genuine successor to Jacques Tati”, which is nice and maybe even true but probably not something you’d want to put on a DVD cover in Australia in 2012.
We could – and probably should – go on about the critical reception this show got, because most of the time the critics hailed it as an oasis in the wasteland. Which it wasn’t. It was just a little different from the prime-time norm. When you’re a general-purpose TV critic who’s expected to be up-to-date on the reality television and prime-time dramas that make up most of Australia’s television output, simply being different – and not in a car-crash WTF way – is probably enough to have you hailed as a genius. For everyone else who can pick and choose their viewing, Woodley was a little more problematic.
Let’s be clear here: Woodley was a good series – maybe even on its best days (the circus ep and the funeral ep come to mind) a great one – but it was never going to be a hit. Rather than just being flat-out unfunny, it failed in ways we’re more used to seeing a drama fail: it’s a show where all the elements are polished and every piece works as it should, but the project as a whole never quite manages to take off. It doesn’t do anything fatally wrong… it just doesn’t do enough right.
Frank Woodley is brilliant when it comes to mime and physical comedy but you can have too much of a good thing when that good thing often involves falling over, being hit in the head and pulling a sad face. It’s hard enough to get laughs on television when everything is fair game, and when you actively decide to limit your comedy palette – this was a show to avoid if you wanted snappy one-liners or wordplay – the bar is raised just that little bit higher. We’re not saying it needed gag writers and a laugh track: we are saying a little bit more variety in the comedy on offer would have been nice.
More importantly, the core of the show – Frank the sad man tries to win back justifiably disgruntled ex-wife – too often shaded into what in lesser hands we’d call “the tears of a clown”. Mostly Woodley used it to add depth to the pratfalls, but occasionally – a little too occasionally – it slid into mawkishness. And at the other end, sometimes it got a little creepy. Maybe eight episodes was four too many, as the show only found its sweet spot about 50% of the time.
There were plenty of other minor problems – the old-fashioned feel was half-charming, half silly-in-a-bad-way and the groan-worthy gags needed a few more really smart ones to balance them out – but most of them came from the central idea of making a 21st century comedy for grown-ups that was 80% mime and clowning. It’s simply not a field that’s developed much since… let’s say the 1960s… and four hours worth of it stretched over eight weeks with emotional arcs and realistic characterisation (neither of which Mr Bean particularly bothered with) was always going to be a massive stretch.
Even the great movie clowns tended to set up a basic problem then spin routines out of that, but the episodic structure here meant the story had to be reset each week while Frank’s specific nature didn’t allow him to break out into completely different situations. In contrast, by the limited (he wasn’t flying to the moon or anything) standards of Mr Bean, Bean could be anywhere and be doing anything in one episode then be elsewhere doing something else entirely in the next, while Tati would set up a situation for Monsieur Hulot and build riff after riff on that for an entire film.
Frank was trapped between the two approaches. He was too specific a character to provide the variety of a Mr Bean, and having to start again each week story-wise meant Woodley ended up covering the same ground (and often repeating gags) rather than building up to anything truly amazing. Clowning and mime is not an artform that lends itself to extensive character development, while Woodley refused to let its lead be just a… well, a clown.
Much as it breaks our hearts to say it, in Australia these days comedy is niche programming. Woodley was a niche within that niche. As part of a balanced comedy diet, or even with other stronger comedies around it, it might have been both vital and exciting; in today’s climate “sweet” and “often charming” just aren’t enough.
It’s Two-Edged Sword Time Again
While we’re working away on a post about the not-at-all-surprising soft ride reviewers have been giving acts at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival – and we’re also working on a Vale Woodley post that shouldn’t be far off either – it’d be remiss of us to ignore what is perhaps the funniest thing we’ve seen all year:
COMEDIANS have ventured into the last no-go zone of bad language, with many shows at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival featuring the C-word.
The liberal use of the offensive swear word has divided audiences and critics, prompting debate about its place in contemporary performance.
It is estimated up to a quarter of the 400 shows at this year’s festival use the C-word at least once, but there have been “very few complaints” to organisers.
Do we really have to tell you that this comes from The Herald-Sun? The media partner of this year’s MICF? The paper that ran “They Spat In The Face of Dying Children” on the front page while stoking the outrage about the Chaser’s “Make a Realistic Wish” sketch a few years ago (in case you were wondering: the Chaser did not literally spit in the face of dying children. The Herald-Sun ran a lie on their front page). Clearly their fear-mongering skills have dropped off a bit since then:
But parents have been caught off-guard by a potty-mouthed puppet who drops the C-bomb in the first 10 seconds of Sammy J and Randy’s performance.
Sammy J said the show had a recommended age of 15 and over at a venue where children needed adult supervision.
Geez Herald-Sun, everyone knows you get in at least one quote from an “appalled” or “disgusted” parent before you let the comedian mount a defense. More interestingly, there’s this:
Reviewers are divided over its relevance. Some said its use had been appropriate and a winner with audiences, while others said it was lazy, unnecessary and crude.
Aww, come on; name the reviewers who think using the C-word is “unnecessary”. Considering the C-word use has been going on on-stage – according to Justin Hamilton, and why wouldn’t he know – for “more than a decade”, we’d guess it’d be a reviewer new to the live comedy review gig, someone with a record of taking counter-intuitive views on review-related issues for the sake of gaining attention…
(okay, yes, we’re hinting that maybe it’s Jim Schembri. He didn’t quit covering film and television for The Age to be exposed to this filth!)
Seriously though, considering it seems to be the basis for the entire story, why not name these “reviewers” who are divided over a single word that’s been used in live comedy regularly for over a decade? Maybe because it would make them look out of touch and unqualified to be reviewing comedy in 2012? Though if some of the reviews that’ve seen print in the Melbourne papers are anything to go by, a reviewer’s qualifications are the least of anyone’s concerns…