Australian Tumbleweeds
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…
Greeks bearing gifts
You may or may not recognise Tony Moclair. He’s one of those comedians who gets regular work, but hasn’t quite broken through to become either a beloved cult figure (Tony Martin) or a mainstream act with a big fanbase (Wil Anderson). If he does become either it will definitely be the former, because Moclair consistently does interesting, character-based work. Yes, he and comedy partner Jules Schiller made the mainstream panel show The White Room, but it wasn’t the natural fit for them that clever, scripted shows like Restoring the Balance were – and it’s no wonder it died on its arse.
More reflective of Moclair’s talents, and with much lower stakes, is the new podcast This Is Not The News, a parody of a BBC World Service-style international news round-up. Cecilia Ramsdale (who you may remember as one of several people who answered the phones during Get This) joins Moclair in the show, in which they play British journalists Tiffany Woodcock Jones and Martin Middlebrook. The result is a series of fake news reports and headline stories which cover a mix of topical and social issues from around the world. Unfortunately many of these are a bit student radio, over-written, not very funny and drawing on lazy stereotypes.
Ironically, the best sketches feature Guido Hatzis, Moclair’s well-established Greek Australian hoon character – hardly a subtle or un-stereotypical creation. In his new guise as Greek Finance Minister, Hatzis appears in several news reports speaking in the Greek parliament about his plans to solve his country’s economic crisis. Typically, Hatzis’ ideas of what is best for Greece are as self-serving and yobbish as a guy in a hotted-up Commodore doing burn-outs in a McDonalds car park. Hilarity ensues.
This Is Not The News has only been going for two episodes, so it’s probably a bit early to judge it properly and no doubt it will improve after Moclair and Ramsdale have made a few more episodes. Perhaps what is needed is more of Moclair’s well-established characters – young Liberal Stiring Addison, perhaps – or simply for the sketches to get a bit more spit and polish before they appear in the show. Oh, and if there was an RSS feed on the Podbean site so we could subscribe to the show that’d be great.
Vale Danger 5
Parody isn’t exactly the lowest form of comedy, but the law of diminishing returns kicks in pretty fast when your jokes are all about making fun of something else. And Danger 5 wasn’t even a parody of anything real; anyone trying to tell you otherwise wasn’t paying attention last time their local cinema put on a Matt Helm / Our Man Flint festival. Unlike Funky Squad, which was at least sending up something at least some of their audience knew first hand – 70s television in the 90s – Danger 5 was just riffing on a vague idea of 60s spy dramas and men’s adventure fiction with a whole bunch of extra stuff thrown in.
Other people have made the point that at its heart Danger 5 wasn’t really a comedy at all. Instead, it was basically a “straight” spy / action show, only for a value of “straight” that included a shitload of over-the-top elements. That’s probably why a show that really wasn’t all that funny has received a solid dose of praise: it’s easy to see what it’s trying to do, and what it’s trying to do is so out there it’s hard to tell if it’s failing. Nazis in shark costumes? Well, this show has them, so presumably that’s a tick in the Nazis in shark costumes column. Definitely more Nazis in shark costumes than Packed to the Rafters has presented us with to date.
Without some kind of grounding or point to the parody, non-stop wacky hijinks gets both boring and pointless pretty quickly. The original 60s spy spoofs – and there was a heck of a lot of them even before Bond himself turned into one – were playing around with something real (the success of the Bond films). Danger 5 doesn’t have that luxury; it’s riffing on something that’s fifty years old and a footnote in the history of pop culture. What it does have is a segment of the comedy audience willing to heap praise on what should be the backdrop to a successful comedy without noticing that the foreground isn’t there.
Danger 5 was made by talented people who did a solid job of realising their ambitions. It just would have been nice if their ambitions had stretched beyond making a wacky spy series and had touched on telling a few more decent jokes. There was enough decent material stretched across the series to make one really good episode, and that’s all this idea really deserved (especially as none of the running gags and repeated story elements actually built up to anything special).
So what have we learnt? Basically, Australia clearly needs some kind of regular comedy showcase – whether a series made up of one-offs or a weekly hour-long sketch show – where guys like the Danger 5 team can test out their ideas without having to go directly to series. As a regular five minute segment this would have survived being basically a one-joke idea: across six half hour episodes even Nazis can wear out their welcome.
Have we still got the Fever?
Santo, Sam and Ed’s Sports Fever finished up on Monday night after 10 weeks. Apparently it hasn’t been axed, it’s on a break, so the question is: when will it be back? The show’s producers, Working Dog, are famously tight-lipped about such matters – now that we think about it, they didn’t even say how long the series would be – so the only thing we can do is speculate on the show’s future. And our speculation is this: if the money and ratings were/are acceptable to Seven/7Mate, it’ll be back when the “proper” sport is over.
By proper sport we, of course, mean footy – either AFL or NRL – codes which risk drowning in a slurry of coverage on a daily basis, and games which are almost never discussed with any wit beyond hackneyed stereotypes and “jokey” abuse. In this climate Sports Fever and its predecessor Cup Fever have been radical departures, not just because they featured real comedians writing and performing sketches and doing cheesy prop gags (themselves almost radical departures for TV comedy these days), but because they dared to suggest that other sports existed and deserved a mention. Or were smart enough to realise that it’s possible to engage non sports fans by producing something which is entertaining in its own right.
TV shows about sport needn’t be po-faced and serious, or hosted by a group of ex-players trying to out bloke each other. This is a show which ended with its presenters gleefully reading out the worst gags they could think of and chucking them in a bin – oh for the day Eddie McGuire has the sense to throw out a proportion of his output!
Whether the show rated well enough to come back is probably going to be the sticking point. Being bumped from 10.45pm to 11.30pm on Seven was a sign that things weren’t going as well as hoped, but that the show stayed on air for 10 weeks does indicate a certain amount of network faith in it. Or perhaps no one, Seven or Working Dog, wants another of those high profile failures on their hands. If this show is over we won’t get confirmation of that for a very long time, and if it’s back, which we hope it will be, we’ll most likely hear about it when the footy ends.