Australian Tumbleweeds
The Plummeting Value of the Euro
Hamish and Andy are back! And why shouldn’t they be? Yes, their 2011 show Gap Year didn’t quite deliver the kind of gangbuster figures Nine was no doubt hoping for, but it’s not like they soiled the rug with Live From Planet Earth numbers either. Whatever you think of them as comedians, having them back on air should be cause for at least minor celebration – this country has a tragically consistent record when it comes to kicking comedy talent to the curb for even slight failings and seeing someone buck the trend is good news all round.
Though hang on a sec – isn’t there one big fat exception to the whole “your comedy show didn’t save our network, you’ll never work on Australian television again!!” rule? Sadly, yes: if you’re willing to do sports-based comedy, you can fall over a whole bunch of times and still have the networks bending over backwards to pick you up (hang on a minute…). May we direct your attention to the careers of Roy & H.G. and Peter Helliar as exhibits A) and B), with Mick Molloy’s shift into sports-based material not far behind.
Which is where Hamish & Andy have shown a bit of nous: while their first show may not have set the world aflame, their second – which sees them hanging around Europe (while being based in London) doing, well, we’ll get to that – has been pushed as a lead-in to Nine’s Olympics coverage. This is to say, Sport! Australian television’d just be a test pattern without it.
Hamish & Andy have kept what they felt worked first time around – them going out doing wacky stuff both large-scale and small – and ditched what didn’t, which is the more traditional comedy bits and pretty much all the talkshow stuff. So this is pretty much the end of them trying anything different on television for now, as the talkshow stuff was the only stuff that made Gap Year different from their earlier Channel 10 Caravan of Courage specials. Which rated their arses off, so in the “we need to be a success because commercial television will fire you in a heartbeat if you’re not” sense it makes a fair bit of sense.
(That’s not to say it’s a good thing; more of the same works right up until the moment it doesn’t, and then you’re left with nowhere to go)
The big plus here is Hamish & Andy themselves. They know what works for them – their natural charm and the chemistry between them – and they give themselves plenty of opportunity to show it off. We get Hamish & Andy going off to Eastern Europe to jump off a stupidly high bridge; challenging a pair of London cabbies to a race (they have their knowledge of the city’s streets, H&A have a Ferrari); battling each other to see who can best repeat a phrase in a language they don’t speak; and going to Sweden to compete in a rabbit jumping competition. Pretty much business as usual for the likable duo, though they at least know enough to bookend the show with the two big adventures and fill the middle with the shorter, slighter sketches. It doesn’t prevent it from feeling like more of the same, but at least it keeps things moving forward.
Hamish & Andy have, at least up until now, always shown an interest in pushing their work beyond the “and then we went here and did this wacky thing, then we went over here and did another wacky thing” formula. Even in last year’s Gap Year they gave Ryan Shelton a couple of minutes each week to do his thing. But this week’s episode confined Shelton to merely commentating (briefly) on one of their stunts; hopefully they’ll give him more to do in coming weeks.
Judging on the first episode, this feels more like a consolidation project for H&A than anything really memorable. They’ve already talked about wanting to do another show for Nine before the end of the year, which you’d think would have to contain more than just a change in location to be worthwhile. There’s only so many overseas locations they can wander around in: eventually they’re either going to have to narrow their focus and risk turning into another Safran / Leuing / Lucy type exploration of a issue, or they’re going to have to give the talkshow thing another try.
Hamish & Andy’s Euro Gap Year is boilerplate Hamish & Andy, with the hosts doing what they do best and bugger-all else besides. After five years of being the biggest comedy duo in the nation there’s nothing on offer here to recommend it to anyone who isn’t already a fan; presumably they figure they already have enough of those to make this show a success.
Willing to pay the Nice
So, Nice has made it to air and we finally got to see the context in which that duet of “Islands in the Stream” sits: Myf Warhurst realised that her childhood was shaped by a love for music and a love for love duets, and so she uses that as an excuse to go and talks to others whose lives were also defined and shaped by their love for music. There’s a bit of social history and a few long bows drawn (Chantal Cantouri won that Logie because she rebelled against her parents and went to see The Beatles when they came to Adelaide? Umm…), but as per the title of the show it’s all good, wholesome, feel good hits and memories.
Or is it? Because like a lot of nice things – Belgian chocolate, expensive wine, lounging by a pool reading Viz – it’s also a fair bit self-indulgent. Here’s the problem as we see it: Myf Warhurst has seen all those “a comedian looks at…” shows and thought she’d give it a try. She’s an ordinary Australian who’s had some experiences, experiences which many other ordinary Australians have had too. Tick! It’s relatable. Also, she’s got a childhood diary and a brain which remembers things that happened to her ages ago, and as anyone who’s seen comedy in the past couple of decades can tell you, stories from people’s childhoods are an absolute cack. Bang! We’ve got a show!
Except…when a comedian reads out extracts from their childhood diaries they take the piss out of them, by mocking the weird theories they had as kids for example. In Nice, the diary entries and memories are used simply as an excuse for Myf to duet with her heroes. You could argue that Lawrence Leung, Judith Lucy, John Safran and all the other comedians who’ve made this sort of show haven’t always succeeded in turning their pasts in to comedy gold, but their intentions were most certainly to do so. Myf Warhurst’s intentions were to, well, we’re not entirely sure a lot of the time. She seemed to be trying to have it a lot of ways, resulting in a show which didn’t really satisfy anyone.
Next week Nice looks at the food we ate all those years ago in the 70s and 80s. Join Myf Warhurst as she chats to Peter Russell Clarke, Matt Preston and the Chicko Roll girl. Oh, and she also gets to be the Chicko Roll girl too, but not in a funny way, just in the way that most people dressing up in those tiny shorts would…so that’s kinda pointless.
Meanwhile, proper comedies with scripts by people who are actually pretty talented get turned down every other week. But don’t worry comedy fans, someone from Agony Uncles will soon discover an old sporting trophy and manage to spin that into a 6 parter. Hooray! Wednesday nights on ABC1 are saved!
Vale Agony Aunts
It’s taken us a little while to get around to farewelling Agony Aunts because… well, to be honest, we thought we’d already done it. Turns out we just thought we had – in fact it was Agony Uncles we’d given a good kicking to on the way out. Easy mistake to make really, seeing as they were basically the same show. Yes, in 2012 the ABC is happy to spend 12 episodes on the kind of shithouse relationship “advice” even the Sunday tabloids generally shy away from. What’s next, a 27-part series on the breakfast habits of b-list sportspeople? Hang on, that just might – back in a sec, we’ve got to make a call to the ABC…
Aunts proved to be a slightly better take on the material than Uncles though, thanks almost entirely to the presence of Denise Scott and Judith Lucy. Not just because they’d actually made relationships part of their comedy work for the last twenty years or so, but because they were slightly older than the norm and so actually had some wisdom and insight to impart.
Yes, both Aunts and Uncles had the token old person, but they were there either to shock with sexy tales (Aunts) or shock with unreconstructed sexism (Uncles). Otherwise the casting seemed to be almost entirely based around the concept of “how many semi-famous good looking youngish people can we get to talk about their relationships in such a way that viewers might think they could cop off with them if ever they met up”.
These two series weren’t funny enough to be comedies, insightful enough to be useful as advice, interesting enough to be worth watching purely on their limited merits or even sleazy enough to be sleazy. Let’s say it again: we got twelve full weeks of edited-to-buggery sound bites from people not really famous enough to be talking about anything that wasn’t their day job. And what did we learn? Relationships require work, breaking up is painful, some people stalk their ex’s and others don’t, some people like men to make the first move and some people don’t, lesbians share clothes and old people have had lots of sex. Twelve weeks, six hours of television.
It’s understandable that the ABC needs cheap programming. Isn’t that what imported comedies are for? After all, the ABC now only has three dedicated half-hour comedy timeslots a week to fill – Wednesday’s from 8.30pm to 9.30pm, with options for 8pm and now Friday’s at 8pm – surely there’s some decent* UK or US comedy they could be showing while saving their local budgets for shows with expensive elements like scripts and sets?
Ideally the Agony series would have been a 90 minute special. No, strike that: ideally the Agony series would have been good. The cast was weak and the topics repetitive, sure – but it was a steadfast refusal to provide any kind of depth, any kind of exploration of relationships beyond the utterly superficial that made it a waste of time. Like we said earlier, Aunts managed to burrow a little deeper into the guts of the topic, but only a little. There’s only so much you can do when you’re not allowed to say more than two sentences in a row.
For example – and yes, everyone hates it when critics think they can do better, but in this case this really is pretty basic stuff – why not give a more rounded portrait of the people speaking so we could at least get to know where their advice was coming from? Denise Scott’s talked about having an affair in her stand-up: we didn’t see her go into that on Aunts (though to be fair, we may have missed it).
Wait, why be fair: why not build the show around the individuals so each episode had, say, three people going into their situations in some depth? Arrange it so they contrast with each other so it’s not the same thing over and over, give them enough time to dig at least a little into their past – or just explain themselves and their situation better – and you might have something actually informative and fun.
Instead we just got sound-bites that never added up to anything, glued together with ye olde stock footage and host Adam Zwar’s voice-over. The gimmick with that was that he needed help understanding relationships… wait, isn’t that his actual no-fooling wife on the show? Why is a married man asking about going on first dates, or what to do after you’ve been dumped? This is either one long cry for help or it’s so sloppy it can’t even be bothered pretending its hook matters in the slightest. And either way, who cares? No-one making it did, and now it’s over.
*Life’s Too Short? Decent? You are fucking joking. Which is more than anyone’s said about Ricky Gervais in the last two years.
Talkin’ ‘bout 31 Questions
At the risk of overstating the following observation in the following review, there’s quite a strong Talkin’ ‘bout Your Generation vibe to the new Channel 31 game show 31 Questions (which airs in Melbourne and surrounding regions at 10pm on Saturdays but can also be seen on YouTube). Maybe it’s the Micallef-esque mannerisms of host David M. Green, or the unexpected interjections from the show’s Moderator Alasdair Tremblay-Birchall, or that the questions are written by comedy writers? Put it this way, we’d be surprised if the production team aren’t Micallef fans. And that’s fine with us, because of those Australian comedians currently in the spotlight Shaun Micallef’s the one we’d prefer to be influencing the next generation.
But leaving the possible Micallef influence aside for a second, 31 Questions is doing a lot of other stuff right. Aware that it will never be able to compete with flashy shows like Deal or No Deal, it uses its low budget to its advantage by getting laughs out of a deliberately crappy set, the host’s outfit (a cheap-looking question mark-covered jacket), and their inability to offer a decent prize (the winner gets a signed photo of David M. Green). There’s also a fair bit of scripted material; episode 1 starts with a sketch in which David M. Green meets ex-Sale of the Century host Glenn Ridge, and throughout the show there are lots of scripted (and a few improvised) tête-à-têtes between the Host and Moderator.
What you won’t get from 31 Questions (so far, at least) are any Talkin’ ‘bout Your Generation style physical challenges – they’re probably way beyond the budget of the show – but it’s interesting to note that this is one of the few game shows we can think of which puts the comedy elements associated with celebrity panel games into a show with real contestants. In Australia the only examples we can think of are Rockwiz and (stretching the definition of comedy a bit) It’s A Knockout; thinking internationally, you probably have to go back to the early ‘90s and Sticky Moments with Julian Clary or seek out an episode of the BBC’s game show Pointless, a straight game show which is enlivened by the back-and-forths between the hosts, comedian Alexander Armstrong and comedy writer/producer Richard Osman. (If you can think of any other comedic games shows we’ve missed please leave a comment.)
Whether making more game shows into quasi-comedies, or even fairly overt comedies like this one, is the next big thing in TV…who knows? But in the meantime, why not check out the low-budget hijinks of 31 Questions. Apart from everything else, it’s the kind of show which looks set to get funnier over time. What’s on the bookshelf? What’s with the various items on the Moderator’s desk? Is there some kind of tension between the cast members? And how’s the role of hostess Melanie Valentine going to develop? We’re intrigued…
Vale Laid 2
By the time you read this Laid will have vanished from our screens forever and we’re not really sure how we’re going to cope. Remember what life was like early in 2010, before Laid started on the ABC? Remember how – you’ll laugh to remember this – we all thought that a comedy was meant to be sunny and bright and full of characters you actually wanted to spend time with doing funny things you couldn’t wait to tell your friends about the next time you saw them?
And then Laid came along and said in a firm but sassy voice that no, comedy was all about grey people in gloomy surroundings committing sex crimes and then standing around being awkward and the whole thing felt like something you wouldn’t even want to confess to your therapist. If there’s one area in which it can be said that Laid has truly succeeded, it’s in making the act of watching a comedy feel like something you should be deeply ashamed of. Laid feels like a show made by someone who may have actually killed someone. It feels like a show made by someone who wants the joy in the world to die.
If that sounds over the top to you, go and watch an episode – I mean, really sit down and pay attention to one. Why is the sun never shining? Why does everyone have bad hair? Why are all the relationships messed up? Why does everyone look like they’re freezing? Why – and this is the big one for anyone over the age of consent – is it a show about a person who kills whoever they have sex with via mystically toxic genitals? What kind of person do you have to be to find that idea – not, let us stress, as a problem afflicting an already established comedy character, nor as a once-off joke about a supporting character, but as the very centre of your comedy show – something people would laugh at week in week out?
The big problem with the first series of Laid was that for the show to make even the slightest bit of sense the lead’s toxic genitals had to somehow take on some larger significance. They had to be a metaphor for something and if your deadly genitals are a metaphor, chances are it’s a metaphor for something that isn’t very good. But Laid was a show created and written (with Kirsty Fisher and the cast) by Marieke Hardy, a writer who to date has been incapable of writing anything that, at its core, isn’t about herself. She created a show about three men called Last Man Standing and managed to make it about her: pretty impressive feat that.
She has a blog (about her), at least one newspaper column (about her), she wrote a book titled You’ll Be Sorry When I’m Dead (about her), she writes regular newspaper articles (about her), appears on The First Tuesday Book Club (as herself) and has in every possible way built a career on being Marieke Hardy. So it’s safe to say that when the lead (Roo McVie, played by Alison Bell) in Laid dresses like Hardy, acts like Hardy and talks like Hardy, you can guess who she’s meant to remind us of.
There are people around the place who’ll tell you with a straight face that there’s nothing all that wrong with the Australian media being dominated by people who basically do nothing but be themselves – you know, the stand-up comedians and professional commentators who dominate the panel shows that dominate the tiny non-reality slice of television.
They’re wrong and here’s why: Hardy came up with a difficult and challenging idea for a show, then made the central character a carbon copy of herself. The only way for the difficult and challenging part of the show to be resolved in a fashion that was dramatically and emotionally satisfying to an audience was by – to be blunt – having the lead turn out to be a massive turd. Innocent people are dying because she had sex with them: it’s hard to turn that into a reflection of a positive character trait.
But because this is a show where the lead character is basically the creator of the show – and a creator who, if her blog and columns and book are any guide, has a fairly well-developed sense of her own worth – the lead character can’t be a turd because that would be saying the creator of the show may not be quite as awesome as the last decade of her writing has been designed to make us believe. So the first series of Laid wimped out with some pathetic “I was bad, but you dead guys were pretty shithouse too” crap that satisfied no-one except the commissioning editor at the ABC because no sooner had the credits rolled than Hardy was announcing a second series.
For those of you thinking she may have learnt something from the end to series one we’d laugh in your face but we’re too busy with this whole weary headshake thing we’ve got going on. While series two started off slightly interesting with the addition of a creepy sex pest (Marcus, played by Damon Herriman) whose magic genitals “healed” people – he’s the opposite of the lead character GEDDIT? – it then promptly proceeded to have nothing at all happen for the next five episodes apart from some moderately creepy attempted rape and everybody trying to pash on with everybody else.
Oh, and some guy thought he was Jesus and the last root of our lead (Charlie, played by Abe Forsythe) would sometimes be almost dead and other times seem to be okay depending on factors never explained in the script because presumably we were meant to be too busy laughing at someone trying to have sex with an unconscious man by making a splint for his flaccid penis using icey-pole sticks. You know, like Chaplin did that time. But then we got to the final episode, and let’s just run through it because otherwise a lot of the ranting to come may be hard to follow.
Roo has been trying to sleep with Marcus since episode one because she thinks his magic penis will cure her of her death crotch and bring Charlie back to full health. Marcus until now hasn’t wanted to do so because he thinks their powers will somehow swap and put him out of a job (he is so creepy according to the show no woman would sleep with him unless they knew it would cure an ailment, and he’s built a business around this even though they often insult him to his face about it). But now he’s fallen in love with Roo and says “okay, I’ll sleep with you, but only if it leads to an actual relationship”.
Roo doesn’t want a relationship but does want a root – cue “doesn’t everyone lie to have sex”, oh ho ho ho – and eventually, after much hand-wringing, decides to just lie to him. They have sex, she says “uh, this isn’t going to work out” and bails. Good news; Charlie is all better! Bad news: Charlie knows how he was cured and says he can’t forgive Roo for what she’s done. What, had meaningless grudge sex to save his life? Still, it does make sense that after all that they wouldn’t end up together. Meanwhile Marcus is so distraught-slash-angry he’s wrecking his house when a innocent and perfectly ordinary client arrives for a healing root. He says “I’m going out of business, but what the hell”. So they have sex AND SHE DIES.
Meanwhile Roo hears a knock at the door – it’s Charlie! And he’s decided to forgive her because he can’t live without her! And the final scene of this whole misbegotten split trashbag of a show is Roo in bed with her boyfriend looking about as happy as it’s possible for Alison Bell to look.
Lets spell it out: this show’s idea of a happy ending is one where the lead lies to a guy for sex which results in some other woman dying while she ends up curled up in bed with the man she loves. The only way this makes sense is if the lead is meant to be such an amazing person that we don’t give a shit about anything she does so long as she ends up happy.
So forget the earlier episode where she drugged Marcus and tried to rape him! Forget her lying to someone – someone who said “I’m in love with you” – to have sex with him! Forget that this led directly to someone actually being killed! Roo is so awesome her happiness is all that matters! It’s a good thing we’re not inclined to read things into television viewing because otherwise a show like this coming from someone who only ever writes about herself would seem like a pretty fucking creepy half hour of television.
But who knows? The show as a whole has been so consistently garbled and messy – drifting from subplot to subplot with no clear structure, padding some developments out for weeks while tossing others aside, having characters act completely out of character for the sake of a joke that never actually materialises – that accusing the writers of any kind of plan at all seems overly optimistic.
It was bad enough that after an utterly undistinguished first season it was given the go-ahead for a second straight away while a string of far better shows died – twentysomething, to name just one that was better in every single measurable way – but to have it return and somehow be even worse than the first series suggests that every single person at producer grade and above responsible for the second series of Laid should be held to account in a fashion that at the very least requires some form of public apology followed by repaying every cent of the costs and signing a document forbidding them from involvement in television production at any level until at least a decade after their deaths.
You wouldn’t want to say Laid was utterly incompetent, because clearly the cast and the director and the lighting guys and the people in wardrobe and everyone else who’ve been involved in even a single other television show are clearly capable of doing so much better than this. The best thing that can be said about Laid is that it’s over. The worst thing that can be said is that such a complete and total waste of time and money and human effort was made in the first place.
If you can’t say something…
You know us, we’re not scared to pre-judge, so welcome to the third blog we’ve devoted to Myf Warhurst’s Nice, an upcoming series about nostalgia and pop culture presented by everyone’s favourite female member of the Spicks & Specks team.
In our first blog on this topic we took a look at the initial press release and concluded that Nice…
…looks set to be a fatuous meander around a topic that’s basically irrelevant to everything…
In our second blog we had not just a press release to get annoyed at but this preview video featuring Warhurst singing “Islands in the Stream” with Wa Wa Nee’s Paul Gray:
Our reaction was:
…what exactly was the point of all that? It’s basically a straight, not-all-that-good duet between Myf and some guy almost no-one remembers. Presumably the idea is that we’ll be super happy and excited for Myf as she gets to sing with one of her heroes, but for that to work we have to be so amazingly focused on how awesomely great Myf is that we simply don’t give a shit that what we’re actually seeing contains no real entertainment value whatsoever.
Not that anyone down at the ABC listens to us, because in yesterday’s Switched On e-newsletter there was more…
What happens when Myf Warhurst dons some stonewash denim and teams up with Craig McLachlan to perform his 80s hit, ‘Mona’? Take a look. http://www.abc.net.au/tv/watchnow/?play=/tv/streams/promos/NICE-Monclip_hi.flv
And while that’s a pretty good shot-for-shot recreation of the original video clip, we make the point again: why bother? Because unless this piece of footage sits within a funny, interesting context – and it isn’t funny or interesting enough to work well on its own – then it’s 100% self-indulgence.
We’re perfectly happy to accept that this video could be funny if small bits of it are used in the show with an amusing narration over the top, or as part of a sketch or dream sequence – or maybe it’s something the production team cut together as a DVD extra and thought we’d all enjoy seeing now? – but that seems kinda unlikely. Especially when you go back to those press releases we blogged about previously and remind yourself of this…
Myf will take viewers on a cultural crusade exploring some of the favourite things from her youth.
…and this..
“I’m digging out the bedazzler, putting on my oversized koala wool knit jumper, and travelling the country to rediscover some of my favourite things, and meet some of my teenage heroes along the way,” says Myf.
and also…
The series will take viewers on a cultural crusade to explore some of Myf’s favourite things from her youth in music, food, fashion, photography, art and design.
To be fair, one of them also said…
The series embraces cultural icons of the past and takes a closer look at what surrounds us – the stuff you’d find in your own living room rather than in a gallery or museum. It’s a celebration of all the things that are just, well… ‘nice’.
…which suggests they’ll be some purpose to the series, but as that line’s followed immediately by this…
Like all of us, the fabric of Myf’s youth has gone on to shape her tastes today.
…then we can probably rule out the idea that this show is going to be about anything other than Myf Warhurst living out her teenage fantasies. And call us out for prejudging if you want, but that doesn’t sound like great TV.
Rebel Without Applause
Now that she’s a big Hollywood star – appearing in the now-in-cinemas What to Expect When You’re Expecting for one thing – it’s sometimes hard to remember that Rebel Wilson was also solely responsible for perhaps one of the most pointless “comedy” series ever shown on Australian television: Bogan Pride. A leaden, cripplingly unfunny show that somehow managed to completely fail to surf the wave that made Glee a worldwide hit even though it also was about a surprisingly musical high school, it was the kind of multi-media flop (the Bogan Pride book can still be found in many remainder book stores, sometimes priced at a single solitary dollar) that would have killed her career stone dead if not for the fact she was off in Hollywood turning a minor role in the comedy Bridesmaids into the foundation for an even bigger career. Good on her!
For once we’re not being entirely sarcastic. Think about it for a moment: can you name one other Australian comedy actor who’s had any kind of significant overseas success in the last twenty years? We can’t, and that’s because we can’t even think of one other Australian comedy actor. We have actors who can be funny – Stephen Curry comes to mind – but as far as performers go the current under-40 comedy scene is basically stand-ups and bugger all else.
Which goes at least some of the way to explaining why Australian comedy – especially sitcoms and movies – is in such a crap state. You write a comedy in Hollywood and you’ve got a whole bunch of actors who not only can do comedy properly, but can be sold to the general public as being funny. If Will Ferrell or Steve Carrell wants to make your movie, it gets made. If you can get Adam Scott or Paul Rudd or Kristen Wiig or Tina Fey, you’ve got a pretty good chance people will at least be interested to see it. In Australia… well, maybe Hamish Blake? Who hasn’t starred in a film yet.
That’s not to blame Australian actors. You’d have to be crazy to specialise in comedy here considering our film industry would be lucky to make even a single comedy a year. There are actors out there who can be funny – Lachy Hulme comes to mind – but we just don’t have any actors who’ve made their names in comedy and who can get people to watch a comedy because they’re in it. Without them and the big fat marketing hook they provide, movies and sitcoms are always going to struggle to find a wide audience in this country. And look, so they are!
Ironically, this points to what could be the downfall of Wilson’s Hollywood career. She’s successful, but she’s not currently “name-brand” successful – she shows up in movies and presumably gets laughs, but she’s not a big enough star to actually get people to go see a movie simply because she’s in it. Which means that if someone funnier comes along doing what she does, it’ll be easy to kick her to the curb. She won’t even have fans to notice she’s gone.
Clearly she needs to step up to some kind of high-profile gig. And for a little while there, Super Fun Night – a sitcom for free-to-air network CBS she wrote and starred in, produced by Conan O’Brien – looked like being it. And then CBS said “thank you, no”, and that was that. Back to the salt mines for another year. And with what to Expect When You’re Expecting fizzling out at the box office, the pressure to come up with another attention-grabbing hit increases ever-so-slightly…
But that won’t be a problem for Wilson, right? She’s always got so much work on her plate – just ask her!
“I’ve also been working with Ben Stiller’s production company Red Hour on the development of a new narrative comedy series, which has been a great experience and introduction into the U.S. comedy scene. My partner-in-creativity on that project is Stuart Cornfeld who produced Tropic Thunder, Blades of Glory, Dodgeball and Zoolander. So I’m in excellent hands.”
Yeah, that show never happened.
Remember that article we linked to at the very start of this post? Notice there how Wilson talks up a whole bunch of projects – a movie musical she’s writing, a Bridesmaids spin-off starring her and Matt Lucas – that aren’t actually taking place? THAT’S WHAT SHE DOES. Every chance she gets, she talks up upcoming projects like crazy. Not only does it make her sound like someone insanely busy and constantly in demand – unless you happen to notice almost all of these projects are things she’s doing for herself (making them the equivalent of claiming to be writing a hilarious novel because that morning on the bus you thought Chubb Love would be a good title for a story about a fitness instructor who falls in love with a fatty who doesn’t want to lose weight) – but it seems stories about projects that might happen get a lot more press than stories about projects that didn’t.
(Put another way, we could find loads of reports on the internet focused on how exciting Super Fun Night was shaping up to be, but not one that mentioned its failure in more than a passing way.)
The end result is stories like this from the US:
Super Fun Night, CBS
Bridesmaids scene-stealer Rebel Wilson created this sitcom about three girlfriends, including Jenny Slate, who decide to have more exciting Friday nights.
Big loss? No. CBS is not a particularly hospitable environment for good comedy, and the network already has Mike & Molly, a show starring Bridesmaids‘ Melissa McCarthy — and it’s terrible and a total waste of her talent. Wilson et al. can do better.
Ripple effect: Wilson’s big break won’t come for a little while longer, but at least Slate now has room in her schedule to make more Marcel the Shell videos, please oh please.
Thing is, Wilson’s already had her big break in Australia. It was called Bogan Pride. And considering every single performance she’s given since has been the exact same thing* – annoying dimwit does embarrassing or rude things, which to be fair is 70% of comedy at the moment so it’s no wonder she’s doing well – chances are she hasn’t developed creatively since then.
None of this is to say we don’t want her to hit big in the USA Far from it: having her become an actual, bona fide star as a comedy actress would send a great signal to people here that you really can make a successful career out of trying to be funny. And just as importantly, the more success she has over there the less chance there is that she’ll ever come back here.
*in 2008 TV Tonight said: “So far her persona has been fairly synonymous with loud, cynical, mostly simple, working class characters. It remains to be seen whether there’s more depth behind her cheesy grin.” Can we say “there isn’t” yet?
Got the Love, Got the Love
Ben Pobjie would be the first to tell you he isn’t a TV critic. Rather, he’s just a guy with an opinion about television and who really cares what he thinks because everyone’s opinions are equally valid and it’s just television anyway, right? Let’s pause to salute the Fairfax press for giving someone with such commitment to television reviewing a job as a television reviewer.
But with his long-standing commitment to “so what?” as a guiding principle of reviewing, it was something of a surprise to see him take a firm stand in this week’s column – in the form of this sentence:
And then there’s our current best comedy, Laid, centred around the hapless Roo McVie.
“Current best comedy”? Laid? That might seem like a controversial statement, but let’s do the math. Pobjie would have to submit his Saturday column ahead of time, so it’s certain he wrote it before Mad As Hell went to air on Friday night. Laid didn’t start until May 2nd, so both Woodley and Santo, Sam & Ed’s Sports Fever had finished before it went to air. Agony Aunts started May 2nd too, but it started after Laid (at 9.30pm). Therefore, from all this we can deduce that if Pobjie wrote that Laid was “our best current comedy” during – but not one second after – the very first episode of Laid, he would have been correct. Wow, tight deadline.
Of course, there’s a slight chance he wrote that sentence at some other time, in which case what the hell? His view isn’t one supported by the ratings – even fellow writers at Pobjie’s employer The Age have noted the decline of the ABC’s Wednesday line-up, though clearly the ABC itself doesn’t seem to get that people first and foremost want to watch shows that aren’t crap:
Brendan Dahill, controller of ABC1, tells Green Guide the performance of Randling should be understood within a broader context of the evolving free-to-air offering.
”The media landscape has changed dramatically,” he says.
”It is hard to launch any new show at this time, so we need to be patient … The audience needs time to find new shows and be comfortable with them. We need time to assess them as well.”
(A problem: Randling’s 27-episode season is in the can, so there’s little chance of fine-tuning to alay viewer concerns.)
Dahill adds Spicks’ February 2005 debut had an average of just 669,000 viewers. By the time it ended, the ABC had arguably become over-dependent on it as the anchor of Wednesdays. It also may have erred in giving people so long to wean themselves off the habit, announcing the series was coming to an end in May 2011 but not screening the last episode until November.
Nothing it has thrown at the slot has held the audience to the same degree. The ABC has been struggling since. At some point, it will get the mix right or try something else – or accept the audience has moved elsewhere. Dahill hasn’t given up the fight. ”Inevitably we have to refresh our schedules. If we don’t try new programs, we’ll be criticised for playing it safe.”
In contrast to being criticised for airing shows no-one is watching? In contrast to being criticised for giving second series to shows no-one was watching the first time around? Or just in contrast to being criticised for having no idea what people actually want to watch on television? And as for this:
”It is hard to launch any new show at this time, so we need to be patient … The audience needs time to find new shows and be comfortable with them. We need time to assess them as well.”
Since when? For at least the last decade the rule across the board in television is that if you don’t get viewers in early, you don’t get them in at all. He’s right that the new media landscape has made it difficult to launch new shows, because people no longer have to stick around to see if a show is going to get better. If it’s a dud that doesn’t improve fast, viewers move on to something else and they don’t come back. As any look – even ours – at the ABC’s Wednesday night ratings will tell you.
But ratings are completely separate from a reviewer’s deeply held opinions, right? Reviewers shouldn’t be swayed in the slightest by a show’s ratings whether they be good or bad – they should stick by their personally held view of a show’s quality no matter what the outside world is saying. Which brings us back to Pobjie. Hang on, why? After all, as he reminds us every now and again, opinions – especially about television – don’t really matter. As he famously said:
It’s only TV, after all – it’s important but it doesn’t matter.
Well, for one thing, television helps pay both his and Laid creator Marieke Hardy’s bills; presumably where their next meal is coming from matters a little to them. For another, typing [“ben pobjie” “marieke hardy”] into google gets you (after four hits for a news aggregation service), a link to a tweet from Hardy saying “I love you, Ben Pobjie”. Again, so what? It’s not like she has a history of professing her love (check the comments) to Pobjie. Or Pobjie’s on record giving the love back to Hardy’s work.
Snark aside – wait, come back! – there’s nothing at all wrong in any way with this mutual love-in. So they admire each other’s work: big hairy deal. Surely that just makes it MORE likely that Pobjie’d be a massive fan of Laid? Just take this quote from Pobjie (from his “Top 10 Funny Moments of 2011” – Laid was number three) about Laid‘s thinly veiled Marieke Hardy surrogate Roo:
Alison Bell… played angel of death Roo with a smashing mix of awkwardness, bewilderment, irritation and adorably hapless embarrassment that made her intensely easy to fall in love with.
Especially if you already had a stockpile of tweets from Hardy professing her love for you.
Nice as it might be to pretend that opinions are just opinions and television “doesn’t matter”, television is a massive, expensive, time-consuming business that reviewers like Pobjie have at least some small influence on. Then again, nice as it might be to pretend that reviewers and television creators should stay well away from each other, in Australia’s tiny media pond the two are bound to overlap – and even become friends.
Again, there’s nothing actually wrong (or surprising) about any of this. Very worst case scenario, it might dent any credibility as a reviewer that Pobjie might have had. It’s not like he spotted the conflict of interest and decided to keep quiet about his friend’s show; he’s inserted a reference to Laid into a column that could easily stand without it and called it “our current best comedy” without providing a single word to back up his view.
But it’s not like Pobjie’s a reviewer. He’s just a guy with an opinion about television and who really cares what he thinks because everyone’s opinions are equally valid and it’s just television anyway. Right?
It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World
There are a lot of reasons to like the work of Shaun Micallef, but the one that stands out to us today is that he’s his own man. When Shaun Micallef shows up, you get The Shaun Micallef Show: he has his own style of comedy, he knows what works for him, and that’s the kind of comedy he does. Which might sound a little obvious but as fans of, say, Tony Martin and Mick Molloy (to name two comedians of roughly similar vintage) know, it doesn’t take much for someone formerly known for being their own performer to have a setback or two and become just another interchangeable cog in the Australian comedy machine. A machine that isn’t really all that interested in comedy these days.
So in one sense there’s not a whole lot to say about Shaun Micallef’s new show Mad As Hell. It’s a Shaun Micallef show: you know the deal by now. In fact, if you saw his SBS news comedy series Newstopia – which many haven’t; even we have to admit that Talkin’ ’bout Your Generation (Micallef’s least impressive work) has brought him a lot of new fans – you might know the deal better than you expected.
It’s not quite a straight do-over – there’s a live audience and Micallef spends a bit more time chatting away – but otherwise it ticks all the Newstopia boxes: jokes about news footage, sketches involving fake political advisors, fake ads, wacky vox pops (both fake and real), Veronica Milson (from Hungry Beast and Live From Planet Earth) doing a spot-on Kat Stewart impersonation… pretty much all it’s missing is Inspektor Herring and the Bunning’s Warehouse gags. Though hopefully fake “comedy” Back Benched will be a regular feature because yes, taking swipes at lame political comedy is a sure-fire way to win us over.
What does make Mad As Hell slightly different from Newstopia is the way that the live audience / in-studio stuff makes the Newstopia ingredients feel more like a traditional ABC political comedy. And by “traditional”, we’re reaching back to the days of The Gillies Report and Australia, You’re Standing In It (and okay, the somewhat more recent and less impressive BackBerner). It’s a blessed relief to see that live (on tape) sketches can still work on Australian television if they’re done by people who know what they’re doing; if we’re lucky, this might even start a trend.
Not every joke here worked and there really should have been more Francis Greenslade, but unlike your average Australian television comedy this one actually had jokes – so many, in fact, that it could afford to have some fail. Some of the political sketches fizzled out (the one about the Liberal and Labor parties stealing each others ideas for things to stick politicians in front of comes to mind), and the online Al Qaeda underwear joke was a serious clunker, but the ghost of Kerry O’Brien was brilliant stuff and the entire ten-episodes are going to be worth it just for asking “is Peter Slipper a vampire?”
Mad As Hell is exactly the kind of thing the ABC should be doing first and foremost: hiring a seasoned comedy professional to do something they’ve already proven to be good at. It’s the ABC’s first artistic hit of the year comedy-wise, and while 8pm on a Friday doesn’t hold out a lot of hope for it to be a ratings hit as well, here’s hoping Micallef and company figure out a way to keep this on the air for as long as they want. Smart and silly in equal measure and hilarious across the board, Mad As Hell deserves to run and run.
Things to be kind of positive about
You know us, we’re not exactly the home of Australian comedy positivity. So as balance here are a small number of Australian comedy things which may not want to make you slash your wrists. Well, not slash them heaps of times.
The Randling App
These days TV’s all about extending the experience, hence the plethora of show-related apps for your smartphone. The new app (for Apple smart devices) to accompany Randling is a word game which combines Tetris and Scrabble. Like the TV show it isn’t funny, unlike the TV show it’s addictive and worth coming back for. Not that that justifies 27 weeks on ABC1. Or anything Andrew Denton’s been involved in since that time he hosted the Logies.
Sir Murray Rivers QC on YouTube
We’ve banged on before about Sir Murray Rivers, a character that John Clarke’s offsider Bryan Dawe has been doing for yonks on ABC radio. Sir Murray is a very right-wing lawyer who some consider to be the Graham Richardson of the Liberal party. If you like the weekly sketch on 7.30 from Clarke and Dawe you may enjoy Sir Murray’s rants on the Carbon Tax and various other matters.
Rant
You’ve probably been wondering when the team from The Bazura Project will pop up next. Apparently it’s not any time soon, but you can now enjoy a pilot called Rant made by team member Shannon Marinko as part of SPAA and Network Ten’s Eleven Out of Ten initiative. We enjoyed the pilot and think it has potential, but it also didn’t seem much like a Network Ten show. Maybe it’s an ABC2 show? Tell us what you think.