Australian Tumbleweeds
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.
Saving Schembri
Sometimes problems just solve themselves. Put another way, who knew that two of our recent posts – one on the demise of Jim Schembri, disliked film critic but avid comedy watcher, the other on the slightly surprising news that the Melbourne Herald-Sun would again be sponsoring the Melbourne International Comedy Festival despite the general disapproval of many of the comedians involved – would combine to cancel each other out? Or put a third, actually coherent way: It seems Jim Schembri, having left Fairfax media a few weeks ago, is now working away reviewing MICF shows for the Herald-Sun.
It’s hard to know at this early stage if Schembri will be unleashing his trademark vitriol, borderline sleaze, quasi-homophobia and general condescension in his comedy reviews. In fact, to date his reviews have largely been very positive. Which is a refreshing change both for Schembri and for the Herald-Sun‘s MICF reviews.
[Meanwhile, back at Schembri’s former home The Age, where of course they’d never have any sour grapes over losing the MICF sponsorship, it seems the very existence of the MICF – nay, laughter itself – is threatening the foundations of our society. Or at least, “the saturation of the comedy festival is working against Melbourne being a home of original ideas”:
When humour becomes the default field for social discussion, serious proponents of controversial material are less attractive in the media and less influential in the community itself… Comedians have begun to disproportionally inhabit the places where we meet to talk.
Considering that for this argument to make sense the author must be referring to people like Dave Hughes and Libby Gore, let’s just say his definition of “comedian” is disturbingly broad. And going by the number of times the headline IT’S NO LAUGHING MATTER pops up whenever a “comedian” cracks a joke about a topic the tabloids deem to be of import, it’s safe to say his concerns about laughs crippling serious discourse – at least on celebrity pregnancies, Logies outfits and Anzac Day – seem unfounded.]
While we’re on the subject of the media settling scores, far be it for us to point out the fairly typical way in which a much-derided foe – in this case, one Jim Schembri – becomes a font of wisdom simply by changing employers… ah, why not. From News Ltd’s Australian, less than a year ago:
Losing the plot
AGE movie critic Jim Schembri did the unthinkable last week — he posted an online review of Scream 4 that gave away the ending. The response on The Age’s website, and on Twitter, was immediate: “Why would you post that spoiler in your opening sentence?” said one reader. “You’re a real A-hole for ruining the film,” said another. In what looked like an effort to contain the damage, the online review was changed within hours, after which Schembri went on Twitter to say: “I didn’t give away the ending!” Nobody believed him, mainly because the Google cache version of his story was still available. Diary called Schembri, expecting to find him chastened, but mostly he sounded defensive. “I can’t talk to you,” he said. “I must direct all calls to the personal assistant of the editor-in-chief, Paul Ramadge. And I have a review of Thor that my editor is screaming for, so I’m hanging up.” If that weren’t strange enough — since when can’t reporters talk to the press? — Schembri has now posted a long piece saying he always intended to trick “the internet” into thinking he’d run a spoiler (which he had). “I decided to create an online event . . . I wanted to become the scourge of the Twitterverse . . . I ignited the firestorm by writing two Scream 4 reviews, one with a genuine spoiler, one without,” Schembri wrote. “The latter ran in print . . . the one containing the spoiler went online, but only for a limited time . . . once outrage had been stirred, the online version was altered.” And so on, and so forth. Now, this is merely Diary’s honestly held, personal opinion, but that sounds like utter bollocks.
From News Ltd’s Australian, less than a month ago:
AFTER a number of Twitter indiscretions, The Age’s long-serving entertainment writer Jim Schembri negotiates an exit.
In a memo sent to staff last night, editor-in-chief Paul Ramadge wrote: “After 28 years of dedicated service and hard work bringing a distinctive voice to The Age’s entertainment coverage as a film and TV critic and feature writer, Jim has decided to embrace other challenges.”
Last week, website Crikey erroneously reported Schembri had been “sacked from his position following revelations he had reportedly dobbed on the employers of his Twitter critics and hinted at taking legal action under the auspices of Fairfax Media”.
In fact, management only asked Schembri to take early leave after Crikey broke news of his Twitter transgressions. It is understood Schembri had a substantial amount of time owing and Fairfax Media did not comment on Schembri’s misdemeanours.
…
Schembri has since negotiated his departure. It is believed he will continue writing on pop cultural matters elsewhere.
From News Ltd’s Herald-Sun, less than 72 hours ago:
Review: Dom Romeo in Stand-Up Sit-Down: Comics in Conversation
Jim Schembri
From: Herald Sun
March 30, 2012 2:54PM
Guess the days of “utter bollocks” are far behind him. At least the Australian‘s hair-splitting defense of Schembri regarding his “negotiated” departure – what, does anyone think he would have left The Age if the Crikey story hadn’t blown up? – makes a little sense now. And if they have no problem with someone they recently claimed to be speaking “utter bollocks” now being the official voice of their best-selling Australian publication when it comes to comedy… well, considering the respect comedy usually gets from our major media outlets, is anyone really surprised?
Nattering on for the hell of it
With almost all Australian radio comedy consisting of two or three people having a natter, it’s perhaps not surprising that most Australian comedy podcasts follow a similar format. The (refreshing) point of difference with some of the better podcasts, however, is that the level of conversation often raises its sights above the odd-spot stories in that morning’s paper. Two podcasts which feature worthwhile comedic nattering – and an exploration of the craft of comedy – are The Little Dum Dum Club and Can You Take This Photo Please?, both of which have been going for around 18 months. If you don’t listen to them already we recommend you start.
The Little Dum Dumb Club is hosted by stand-ups Karl Chandler and Tommy Dassalo. Amongst the escalating in-jokes about Sunshine Johnson (a local character from Chandler’s hometown of Maryborough) and the fact that Dassalo’s real surname is not Dassalo, have been some good insights in to the Australian industry. Kate McLennan spilled all about Live From Planet Earth, Robyn Butler and Wayne Hope talked about their move into not-for-profit online video, and Weird Al Yankovic was interviewed for far too short a time. Other guests on the show have included Mick Molloy, Shaun Micallef, Charlie Pickering, and a number of prominent figures from the live scene.
Can You Take This Photo Please? with Justin Hamilton and Bron Robinson is similar to Dum Dum, but often gets more serious and in-depth. Comedians you may have dismissed as “that guy from that show” (i.e. Lehmo) turn out to have some interesting insights into their craft, while veterans of the industry like Tony Martin, Tim Ferguson and Greg Fleet require two podcasts each to go through their professional histories.
The latest episode of Can You Take This Photo Please?, in which Hamilton explains why his new Comedy Festival show The Goodbye Guy may be his last for a while, sees him get very reflective on his career and the local industry in general. If you’ve been listening to Can You Take This Photo Please? for a while, Hamilton’s decision to stop doing one hour shows for a bit doesn’t come as much of a surprise. Last year’s MICF reviewing fiasco, particularly as regards comments made about his show Circular, and a few other factors (which he outlines in the podcast), have prompted Hamilton to make the change. It’s a massive shame if you’re a fan of one of this country’s more experimental and interesting stand-ups, but at least the podcast will continue; a series of video podcasts filmed at MICF are apparently coming soon.
What is perhaps worth questioning about The Little Dum Dum Club and Can You Take This Photo Please? though, is that these podcasts are made by working comedians who can’t necessarily be relied upon to take a neutral or critical stance on the comedy industry. While you do get the sense in those shows that you’re eves-dropping on the sorts of conversations stand-ups have with each other after gigs, the reluctance of those involved to openly question bad work from their fellow comedians is problematic. If people aren’t willing to be honest and critical in one of the few regular outlets for serious discussion of comedy, then where will they? Sometimes you wait years for the likes of Jon Faine, who regularly has comedians on ABC Melbourne’s The Conversation Hour, to host a worthwhile discussion about comedy (more often you get this sort of thing), and we can’t think of another show apart from The Little Dum Dum Club and Can You Take This Photo Please? which does it better. [Okay, Tony Martin’s A Quiet Word With was pretty good too, but that didn’t feature many local comedians, and Tony Martin’s hardly a neutral party.]
But that aside, the long-form, often rambling, comedian-on-comedian chats you get in The Little Dum Dum Club and Can You Take This Photo Please? are still interesting. Very interesting. No one’s got anything to plug (mostly), they’re interesting conversations, and in the end, that’s perfectly fine.
Pictures of Matchstick Men
Working Dog has a new television show out? As Mick Molloy used to say, hurrah! These are the guys that gave us Frontline (excellent), The Panel (ground-breaking, if of variable quality), The Hollowmen (a steady improver), Thank God You’re Here (massive smash hit, occasionally hilarious), Cup / Sports Fever! (a sports comedy show sports haters can actually enjoy) not to mention roughly half of the various D-Gen television shows up to and including The Late Show. They know what they’re doing, and they do it well.
So it’s something of a disappointment to discover that Pictures of You is exactly what it looks like: host Brian Nankervis (who’s a steady pair of hands) holds up photos (brought in by his celebrity guests) and said celebrities talk about them. “I remember that,” they say, before launching into either a funny anecdote or moderately revealing tale of their past. And that’s it. It’s lightweight chat with a bit of a hook. That’s all.
We bring it up for two reasons. One, the show does seem to be focusing on comedians to some extent. The first episode featured Shane Jacobson and Anh Do, both of whom have been known to crack wise in the past (even if here the focus was also on their somewhat grim childhoods), while next week sees Julia Morris once again telling everyone she’s a comedian without actually providing any concrete evidence of it. The fact that, so far at least (and this does seem like the kind of show that would want to lead with its strongest guests first), none of the comedy guests are A-list comedy talent is just a sign of the times *cough Agony Uncles cough*. Australia currently likes its TV comedy talent to be “likable” rather than “funny”… which leads us to our second point.
TV Tonight described Pictures of You as “a Tonight show void of punchlines and performers”, and we’d go along with that. But where they meant it purely as a descriptive term – their overall review is generally positive – we’d say a talk show devoid of jokes and performances is a pretty shithouse talk show. And coming from people who used to pack every second of their shows with jokes? This frown on our faces didn’t get there by accident.
Yet this is merely an example of Working Dog knowing which way the wind is blowing in television. The days of comedy – pure, unadulterated, make-’em-laff comedy – seem to be rapidly fading. Today shows have to appeal to as wide a (dwindling) audience as possible, and that means comedy is just an ingredient (alongside family trauma, tales of struggle and everything else from the Enough Rope cookbook) instead of the main course.
So Pictures of You features comedians, and then gets them to talk about their childhood and their family in the hope that they’ll grab both the comedy and the personal insight / tearjerking crowd. Of course, comedy fans would like a lot more comedy in their viewing, but these days we’re told you have to take what you can get. And despite their comedy background, Working Dog aren’t afraid to dial down the laughs if they think the viewers want something a little blander. Sometimes they get it wrong – their recent feature film Any Questions For Ben? didn’t exactly set the box office on fire (it didn’t even set a soaked-in-lighter-fluid Polaroid picture of a box office on fire), but their logic remains sound.
With audiences having an increasing range of things to watch in their viewing time, it’s perfectly legitimate to assume that the blander and more wide-ranging you make your projects, the better the chance you’ll have of luring in as many viewers as possible. That said, it does also mean you have a pretty good chance of turning people off, what with “bland” not yet becoming high praise even in television reviewing circles.
And oddly enough, there’s a counter-example currently on-air that’s also out of the Working Dog warehouse: Sports Fever!. Resolutely specific – it’s not just about sport, it’s about sports like soccer that most Australians know root-all about, and THEN it’s about obscure figures in soccer – and with no real wide-ranging appeal, it works because it sticks to a handful of things and does them well. It’s made by people who know their subject (sport), and they use this sports knowledge to create comedy that even non-sports fans can find funny. Seems almost simple when you put it like that.
Getting Dark Early These Days
In yesterday’s Green Guide Debi Enker wrote something that will come as no surprise whatsoever to long-suffering readers of this blog: “Wednesday night ratings are not giving Aunty much joy”:
In recent years, the ABC has established Wednesday as a home for crowd-pleasing light entertainment. Reliably anchored by Spicks & Specks, it offered a selection of popular local and imported comedies and chat shows – The Gruen Transfer, The Chaser, Angry Boys – before David and Margaret moved in at 10pm.
Not this year. At 8pm, the wonderful Woodley – which, in a just world, would be attracting a couple of million viewers a night and rivaling My Kitchen Rules – started with about 534,000 viewers nationally and has steadily dropped about 200,000 of them.
She goes on to point out the following:
*In the key 8.30pm slot formerly occupied by Spicks & Specks, Adam Hill’s variety chat show, In Gordon St Tonight, hasn’t cracked 600,000 and usually attracts around 500,000 in a slot that should be getting double that.
*At 9.30pm Outland was a ratings disaster, starting out at 300,000 viewers and rapidly dropping to less than 200,000 – less than Kitchen Cabinet was attracting on ABC2 at the same time.
(Agony Uncles seems to have done better than that, rating around 400,000 on its first night. It was still beaten by every commercial network.)
There’s a fair bit to digest there. Fortunately, we took a good hard chew at it back when Spicks & Specks wrapped up:
What we will miss about Spicks & Specks is the way that it delivered around a million viewers week in week out to whatever comedy show the ABC decided to screen after it. Yes, this did mean that a lot of crap got a ratings boost it didn’t deserve – hello Gruen family of programs – but it also meant a lot of other comedy shows managed to rake in respectable viewing figures too, which helped create the impression that Australian comedy was actually popular out there amongst ABC viewers.
…
If we’re lucky, the ABC will come up with a new series to anchor Wednesday nights. Ah, who are we kidding: there’ll be a string of also-rans and not-quite-theres and series two of Laid and eventually Wednesday will become the night for docos or UK dramas or whatever the hell crap it is the ABC shows on Tuesdays or Thursdays. The passing of Spicks & Specks is the end of an era: we only wish it’d had been a show more deserving of its’ success.
Making the real question here, if we could spot how the loss of Spicks & Specks was totally going to screw over everything else of Wednesday nights, why didn’t the ABC? So, in the spirit of steering them in the right direction because they seriously don’t seem to have a friggin’ clue, may we suggest the following:
1): Bring back Spicks & Specks. Okay, the horse has pretty much bolted here. So why the hell didn’t they keep the show going and just change the host? It was extremely obvious from the second In Gordon Street wasn’t a massive car crash that Hills was going to bail on S&S. Fair enough too, he’d clearly had enough. But let’s be honest: unless you are a relative or close personal friend of Hills, he’s not exactly irreplaceable. He’s a moderately handsome host who can come out with ABC-level quips. Two words: Will Fucking Anderson. Or pretty much anyone else, including your local postie. Yes, he was good at his job. His job was hosting a musical quiz show. IT’S NOT THAT HARD. Just look at the UK, where they have loads of this kind of long-running show and think nothing of swapping out hosts when need be.
(Alan Brough would have been equally easy to replace – comedians who are passionate about music aren’t exactly rare. Ironically, Myf, who was the least likely to walk, would have been the hardest to replace)
2): Move In Gordon Street Tonight to Monday nights 9.30pm. Despite Enker’s wild’n crazy claim, Wednesday nights on the ABC have never been the home of chat. In recent years there have been panel discussion shows on that night, true, but they’re a very different beast from a talk show. Even in today’s crazy mixed-up televisual landscape having an interview-based talk show on in the middle of the week (and at 8.30pm) just doesn’t sit right.
We’d be willing to guess that if Gordon Street had been hosted by anyone but Hills the ABC would’ve known this and given it the once massively successful and now basically disused Monday 9.30pm Enough Rope timeslot – it’s not like Q&A is doing anything useful with it. But they seem to have fallen for the idea that ABC viewers are fans of Adam Hills, not of the specific shows he hosts, and would therefore watch anything he got up to on a Wednesday night. Unfortunately, the career path of pretty much every single long-running television host makes it fairly clear that people watch television shows, not hosts. People watched Spicks & Specks, not Adam Hills.
3): Make the occasional mainstream comedy. You know us: so long as it makes us laugh we don’t give a shit about what a show’s “about”. But let’s be honest: a show like Outland* is the kind of narrowcast program a network can only make if they either have a remit to target niche markets or don’t care about ratings. Last we checked the ABC does care a heck of a lot about ratings and as for niche markets, maybe in drama: when it comes to televisualised Australian comedy, they’re the only game in town.
Again, don’t get us wrong. We’re glad Outland was made. It’s just the kind of series you make once or twice a year as a fun sidebar and currently the ABC, in their wisdom, has nothing on their current new comedy slate BUT fun sidebars. Laid 2 is for inner-city Marieke Hardy fans while the upcoming Josh Thomas sitcom Please Like Me promises new levels of quirky annoyance from the title alone – fuck, according to the press release it even stars his fucking dog:
As well as writing the series, Josh Thomas stars in PLEASE LIKE ME as Josh, alongside his cavoodle, John
And if the ABC is pinning their ratings hopes on Randling, here’s a quick reminder of its mainstream appeal: IT’S A WORD-BASED QUIZ SHOW. Yeah, that’ll set the world on fire. The Einstein Factor sounded like more fun, and that was a wank.
We get that it’s the start of the year, which is traditionally the time when the ABC burns off its’ comedy duds to clear the desks for a big ratings push mid-year. But a show like Woodley – which despite Enker’s burblings was never going to rate well because despite all the skill, care and effort put into it it’s basically a show built around mime – should have aired surrounded by shows with wider appeal.
(Not that wider appeal cures all ills: Agony Uncles is as mainstream as a Sunday tabloid and about as informative and entertaining. As for Myf Warhurst’s Nice, well, if you can’t say something nice there’s always room for you here.)
Later in the year Gruen will return in some form, along with The Chaser and Shaun Micallef’s news-based comedy Mad As Hell, and the ABC’s Wednesday ratings will mostly likely lift. But chances are they’ll never regain their Spicks & Specks figures**, and once that sinks in that’s when the weaker examples of what Enker calls “light entertainment” will start to vanish. Panel chat and cheap crap like Agony Uncles will survive much like they have on commercial television; scripted comedy? At a time when even Chris Lilley can’t deliver a ratings hit? Well, probably not.
It was fun while it lasted.
*[edit] Just to make it clear, the problem as we see it with shows like Outland is that by the very nature of their subject matter it’s going to take solid word of mouth to win people over, and when you’re talking about a six part series you don’t really have a lot of time to get that word of mouth. Whatever the quality of the comedy itself, “gay science fiction nerds” is not a topic with an automatic connection to a lot of viewers, as it’s about a very small segment of the population (and a somewhat cliched one too – both gays and nerds are well-worn comedic territory).
In contrast, and to use the two big sitcom successes of recent times, Kath & Kim was about mothers and daughters in the suburbs; Summer Heights High was about high school kids.They may be as cliched comedy-wise as gays and nerds, but at least they’re cliches a lot of Australians feel some connection to – which may at the very least translate into “let’s see how badly they screw this up” viewers out the gate. We’ve argued for years that the big ignored factor behind Summer Heights High‘s success was the fact it tapped into the captive schoolkid /school parent audience and gave them crap stereotypes they could laugh at.
Again, we like comedy that’s funny no matter what it’s about, but considering the most popular comedy shows on television are the various Footy Shows (make that “comedy”), it’d be foolish to deny that if you’re talking about popularity (and that’s ALL we’re talking about here) there are some subjects that will initially attract more viewers than others.
**[edit] as at least one commentator has pointed out below, the ABC does pretty well viewer-wise out of iView and other non-traditional viewing methods, not to mention the cash money from selling their shows on DVD, which muddies the waters somewhat as to whether shows are actual successes or failures. Problem there is that the traditional ratings figures are – at least for the moment – still the main way that the public are told whether a show is a hit or a miss. And for the ABC, which gains no commercial benefit from their ratings (they have no advertisers who care about actual viewing numbers and pay accordingly), public opinion is what counts. So until they can get everyone else in the media to agree that those other methods should add towards whether a show is a success or failure, the ratings figures are the ones that count, at least perception-wise. After all, no-one feels the need to bring up iView figures for shows that are rating well.
The Agony and the… nope, that’s it.
Some shows come to us on a clear wave of passion and enthusiasm. Others arrive as the result of extensive product-testing and marketing. And then there’s Agony Uncles, which looks like the winner of a competition to come up with the cheapest possible programming alternative to running a photo of Tony Jones for half an hour.
Ordinarily that wouldn’t be a problem, what with comedy often thriving under conditions where “cheap and shoddy” would be a compliment. But despite a tagline of “When you have absolutely no-one else to turn to” and an on-line description of “Confessional. Illuminating. Inappropriate. Wrong.” Agony Uncles isn’t really a comedy. What it is, is EXACTLY what it looks like: a bunch of male actors and comedians mostly in their 20s and 30s giving out advice about women and relationships.
See, from the aforementioned publicity we thought they’d be playing characters – or maybe just exaggerated versions of themselves – telling funny stories and giving over-the-top and just plain bad advice to comedic effect. No. These guys are giving the kind of vague, bland “honest” advice you’d expect to hear from guys down the pub. And like guys down the pub, their advice is not that interesting when you’re sober and utterly useless once you’re drunk.
Just to give you the gist from tonight’s episode, it seems that opening up emotionally to a woman early on is bad. Pick-up lines are lame, but they often work. Women are attracted to the pheromones of a male, and also money and power (if you’re John Elliot). The supermarket is a good place to pick up. A woman’s relationship with her father is an important guide to how she’ll be with a man. Women over 35 who’ve never married you should avoid. Also avoid psychos, but the sex can be great. Married guys are bang up for gay sex. Crack onto the hot girl’s ugly friend to make her jealous. Wingmen are really handy, unless they aren’t. It’s more masculine to call a girl than text. Landlines were bad for romantic calls because you’d always get their dad. John Elliot won’t date people from the Labor Party. Okay, that last one was kinda good.
Whether you find this stuff useful or not, it’s not really all that funny. Nor, about seventy percent of the time, is it trying to be, which makes the various promotional activities around this show feel a little like the ABC was handed an utterly pointless turd – and let’s be honest, this show has no point whatsoever unless you’re either a rabid Lawrence Mooney fan (he had an anecdote that was a firm highlight) or a fifteen year-old boy craving the kind of cliched advice that turns out to be completely crap in real life – and desperately tried to come up with an angle to lure people in for at least the first week.
Part of the problem is that most of these guys don’t do relationship comedy, so while a handful of the anecdotes are pretty funny, the bulk of this material is presented like it’s actually interesting on its own merits. Remember, this is a show that seems to think you need to be told that unmarried women over 35 are undatable and that texting a girl you like makes you less of a man.
A bigger part of the problem is that nobody in their right mind wants to hear a guy like Josh Lawson or Brett Tucker talk about how hard it is to pick up. These guys are movie stars and comedians and to be honest they’re all pretty easy on the eye; when it comes to meeting women (or men) none of these guys are on struggle street.
(ironically, creator and voice-over man Adam Zwar actually does have the comedy persona to make this “it’s hard out there” material work. Yet apart from some frankly mystifying shots of him at the start of episode one – seemingly taken from various earlier projects – he doesn’t appear on camera. And as a voice-over man he’s a great writer.)
But this show’s biggest problem is that, the occasional funny story aside, the actual advice here is the same old tired sexist junk everyone over the age of sixteen already knows. That’s not to say the “facts” they’re handing out aren’t actually applicable in the real world. But if you’re going to make a television show based around information on the level of “treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen”, you can’t simply present these insights as surprising and new. They’re not. Again, they could be an accurate reflection of the way things are between men and women, but if you’re going to trot out cliches and pass them off as entertainment you really have to add something new to the mix. This show doesn’t.
So there’s nothing new here, and what is here is nothing more than a bunch of Zwar’s mates talking to camera, intercut with old stock footage of men and women doing average things. Maybe if they were saying insanely entertaining things this would be a worthwhile half hour. Instead they’re just coming up with the kind of tripe you’d get from a “men’s columnist” in a Sunday tabloid. Occasionally smug, generally pointless, often annoying, sometimes insulting and in at least two cases a great way to make a formerly likable comedian seem like a bit of a tool, Agony Uncles is no help to anyone.
Catch a Falling Star
So in 1994 when we read this:
After ten years on the road, on record, CD, radio, TV and in print, the [Doug Anthony] Allstars have finally decided to call it a day. At the end of their current national tour, at the Regal Theatre in Perth on December 17, they will send a fond, sad, undoubtedly rather raucous farewell to their fans and go their separate ways. Each is adamant there is no animosity, purely a parting based on the mutually exclusive plans of each member.
Tim Ferguson, 31, wants to stay home with his family more in Melbourne. Paul McDermott, 32, wants to go to New York to concentrate on his music career. Fidler, 29, wants to return to Britain, where he intends to become heavily involved in a fledging CD-ROM business.
What was actually going on was this:
What would eventually be diagnosed as multiple sclerosis would mean an end to the frenetic, high-energy life that was the Doug Anthony All Stars.
It seems that, rather than breaking up in 1994 because they’d achieved everything they set out to, the Doug Anthony All Stars – Tim Ferguson, Paul McDermott and Richard Fider – broke up on the verge of committing to a UK career because Ferguson was developing MS and didn’t feel he could go on. Considering it’s 2012 and all this is old, old news (Ferguson having revealed his MS a few years back), who cares?
For one, it’s a reminder that much of the “news” in comedy goes unreported. In 1994 DAAS were a very big deal, one of the few remaining hold-overs from the comedy boom of the late 80s that still seemed vital. They didn’t seem all that funny to us – their astonishingly self-indulgent ABC series DAAS Kapital put a pretty big stake through any warm feelings we had for them from their Big Gig days – but they were still huge figures on the local scene. But when they broke up the usual “it’s mutual” line was swallowed by the media without too much fuss.
Sure, there was speculation; years later even we’d heard that Ferguson was the one who’d split up the group and McDermott wasn’t happy about it. Obviously Ferguson wanted to keep his medical condition private, and we’d go along with that. But the actual story here was that one member (for whatever reason) wanted to stay in Australia, which now seems more than a little obvious just from the wacky career paths the other two claim in that 1994 article. While we’re here, let’s just fix that section for The Australian:
Tim Ferguson, 31, wants to stay home with his family more in Melbourne. Paul McDermott, 32, wants to go to the ABC, where he intends to become heavily involved in television hosting and minor radio gigs. Fidler, 29, wants to go to the ABC, where he intends to become heavily involved in drive time radio and minor television hosting gigs.
We don’t need to know the specifics behind Ferguson’s personal reasons for breaking up the group, but we should be told that his personal reasons are why the group broke up, even if it’s just a “speculation is rife that…” line in there somewhere. If it was a popular band, we’d get that. If it was a sporting figure, we’d get that non-stop for a fortnight plus a half-dozen opinion columns waffling on about “the real story”. Why is it that when it comes to comedy we just get a shrug and “whatever you guys say”?
This kind of thing cuts both ways, just in case you were thinking of making some snarky-yet-true comment about how Ferguson’s medical issues are none of our business. When the media gives comedy sloppy, inaccurate coverage as a matter of course then you get inaccurate stuff like – to take merely the closest example to hand – this from that 1994 article:
“They directly contributed to shows like Wogs Out of Work, Fast Forward and the quick, nonsensical satire of D Gen, a sort of extension of the Python tradition, but very much in an Australian context.”
Which, of course, DAAS didn’t actually do (the D-Gen’s first shows for Channel Seven aired in early 1986 after more than a year as a university revue; Paul McDermott didn’t even join DAAS until 1985) : they were simply part of the early 80s zeitgeist where comedy became more performance-based and aimed at a younger, university-educated audience.
[That’s another reason why the reason behind their demise is important: by 1994 their style of comedy was largely played out and increasingly replaced in Australia by the more mainstream and traditional stand-up we still enjoy (or “enjoy”) today. There’s a big difference between breaking up because one of your members has a personal reason for sticking close to home and breaking up because no-one cares about you any more.]
We’re not calling for more muck-raking (unless we’re talking about the Muck-Raking segment on The Late Show, in which case more Muck-Raking please). It’d just be nice if journalists covering comedy stories – on the rare occasions when comedy contains actual news – treated it like actual news: as something to be investigated seriously, with a commitment to uncovering facts and reporting them where relevant.
Seriously, that 1994 story actually does contain the real story: when on one hand you’ve got Ferguson saying he wants to stay in Melbourne and on the other Fidler is saying: “we’ve explored every avenue of creativity for a group in Australia”, a journalist really should connect the dots. The news doesn’t come from Ikea, and it’s not up to the reader to construct it from a jumble of random facts you’ve dumped on their lawn.
After all, if the professionals don’t get the real story out there then it’s left to people like us to do it. And really, no-one wants to read yet another one of our barely coherent yet supposedly “shocking” 3000 word exposes on that episode of Last Man Standing that totally ripped off Andy Richter Controls the Universe.