Australian Tumbleweeds
Vale Outland
And so we bid farewell to Outland, the long anticipated and much delayed ABC-1 sitcom about a gay science fiction group. We really enjoyed the first two episodes and encouraged you all to watch it, but it seems the public didn’t and we’re guessing that’s a bad sign as far as a second series goes. Maybe that theory we had about Outland benefiting from the In Gordon Street Tonight crowds was crap? Maybe we should have stuck to our other theory?:
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.
On the other hand, it may have helped if the ABC hadn’t based its marketing strategy for Outland on the assumption that Australians are too homophobic, or too mainstream in their interests, or too in to realistic mockumentaries, to want to watch a sitcom with proper jokes in it which centres on five out and proud gays who like Doctor Who? A strategy which effectively saw them stick their heads in the sand at every possible opportunity. Then again, maybe ABC publicity might have been more proactive if Outland hadn’t started to tank badly around episode three?
We haven’t been the only ones wondering what the hell happened to the series at that point. Initially we thought that perhaps there’d been a decision to stick the dud shows in the middle, but as the weeks have gone by things have not improved. What started out as a series with a great mix of warmth and laughs that only homophobes could object to, has morphed in to a series which increasingly relied on obtuse science fiction references, invented gay stereotypes (what the hell was that “Coming Out Dance” thing in last week’s show?) and conceits which didn’t work – this week’s attempt to inject suspense and danger in to a plot where very little was at stake for any of the characters was just didn’t work for us (i.e. they were chased by a some teens who was threatening to bash them, but the teens weren’t remotely scary – also, did anyone seriously think the group was breaking up?).
Overall, it felt like a huge amount of effort had gone in to getting Outland to the point where it would be commissioned, and then the makers realised they had to make a whole stack more shows on top of that in a short space of time. It’s a great shame. If there’s a time when Australia should be ready to embrace five loveable gay nerds it’s at a time when gay marriage is a hot topic of conversation and when nerdism’s actually in fashion. Ah well, at least it was a proper sitcom with over-the-top characters and traditional gags, we almost never get those any more – especially ones that kind of work.
Vale Jim Schembri
Well, it’s not like Jim Schembri is dead exactly, but as Crikey reported on Friday he has left The Age:
Age film critic and senior writer Jim Schembri has been sacked from his position following revelations he had repeatedly dobbed on the employers of his Twitter critics and hinted at taking legal action under the auspices of Fairfax Media.
This came after a rough few weeks for Schembri, first having whipped up a fair amount of internet angst about a review of Outland where he said the show – about a group of gay science-fiction fans – was “too gay”, then being exposed by Crikey as… well, they said it best:
Age film critic Jim Schembri has repeatedly contacted the employers of Twitter critics — in some cases issuing them with veiled legal threats — in an apparent attempt to shut down dissent on the social networking site.
While this may have had its slightly silly side – Schembri went after people running comedy twitter accounts too – it seems many of his victims were less inclined to laugh it off. Neither, it seems, was Schembri’s boss at The Age.
Schembri first came to our notice as far as comedy is concerned on, of all places, the website for the Martin / Molloy radio show. Sadly, as far as we can find the relevant page has vanished, even from the wayback machine (though if you’re interested a few bits and pieces of their 1998-era site can be found though the remaining links here – the real interest being the cast bios and segment listings), but thanks to a printout we made a number of years back when there was a bit more to be found we can quote the following from a “Twenty things that had us giggling like schoolgirls this week” list:
20. Oh, and Jim Schembri – you’re still a sad bitter little troll (and always will be).
(personally, we’d be pretty happy to make it onto a list with entries like 8. “The Evil Beardo” and 12. Jugglin’ fool Paul Barry, but maybe that’s just us)
The point being, Schembri’s been attracting scorn for a fair while now. Most of that’s been for his film reviewing (who could forget this classic AFI Award acceptance speech?), but he’s also written a lot about comedy – largely for The Age‘s Green Guide. While his film reviews often read like the work of someone more interested in attracting attention for his controversial views than providing a useful service to his readers, at least as far as comedy goes he seemed to have both a serious interest and a serious desire to write about it. Even with his recent dismissive and controversy-seeking review of Outland he went back and wrote an extended version on-line to clarify some points – something he noticeably didn’t bother doing with his short, scathing review of the ‘unreleasable” A Few Best Men from around the same time.
While we almost never agreed with his opinions and found many of his views on comedy to be laughable (in a bad way) or downright stupid, even we can’t deny that he had a serious, long-term interest in the form. One that extended beyond his work as a reviewer: not only did he have a brief stint as a writer on Fast Forward (not, as we previously thought, Full Frontal), and write the light-hearted (but somewhat off-putting) memoir Room For One, but we’ve also heard rumours that he worked as a stand-up comic around Melbourne in the 1990s under the name “Jimbo”.
He was also personally supportive of a number of Melbourne television comedians when they were starting out: if nothing else, there’s a glowing quote from him on the cover of one of The Shambles‘ DVDs. Five years ago, what other Melbourne television critic would even bother to watch a sketch comedy show on Channel 31? Hell, who’s willing to do it now?
And that’s why we’re bothering to salute a critic we – for the most part – disliked and dismissed. Because while The Age‘s Melinda Houston often seems to just throw words together in the hope the end result will feel like a review:
that familiar, inspired collision of irreverence, LOL moments and tenderness that define this series at its best. (Angry Boys)
(“inspired collision”? You mean putting one scene after the other, right? Is “familiar” even a good thing in a comedy?)
and Ben Pobjie doesn’t seem to get that being a reviewer* means standing behind your opinion about the quality of a program and actually arguing about whether it achieves the goals it sets out for itself, even when it’s a comedy:
none of that actually means I’m ”right” and anyone else is ”wrong”. When you’re judging comedy, there’s no such thing as right or wrong – there’s just ”I laughed” or ”I didn’t”. Nothing is objectively good or bad, and anyone trying to convince you otherwise is kidding you and themselves.
at least Schembri would say what he thought in a relatively clear and straight-forward manner. We almost never agreed with what he said and occasionally we’d suspect his motives for saying it, but at least he seemed to actually be interested in comedy and the mechanics of getting a laugh. When he wrote a review, even if he was heaping crazy praise on some piece of absolute garbage, there was some awareness of how comedy comes together (in that wrong-headed Outland review he at least displayed a refreshing awareness of the need for tonal variety in comedy), some sense of engagement with the material beyond the most basic “I like this”. For that – and, it seems fairly safe to say considering the glee that the news of his axing received on twitter, that alone – he’ll be missed.
*Pobjie is clearly a talented writer, but when you’re writing a review and you find yourself actually spelling out “nothing is objectively good or bad” aren’t you writing yourself out of a job? Isn’t it fair to assume that this is something your readers a): already know and b): are willing to suspend their awareness of for the sake of hearing you argue your opinion on something? It’s not quite as obvious as putting “I think” at the start of every sentence you write, but it’s understood that you’re writing a review: constantly saying “hey, it’s just my opinion” is a bit of a cop-out. Especially when you don’t feel the need to remind us of that whenever you have something good to say about a show.
The One That Takes Four Paragraphs To Get To The Point
Being the committed couch-dwellers that we are, stand-up comedy isn’t exactly something we cover all that often here. But even we were slightly surprised to see that this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival has once again paired up with The Herald-Sun (Melbourne’s News Ltd tabloid) as its major media partner. Why, wasn’t it only last year that this pairing (then brand-spanking new) led to controversy and howls of outrage as The Herald-Sun sent pretty much anyone to cover the festival and generally made a dog’s breakfast of it up to and including running a review containing the line “Very few female comedians can pull off funny funny”? Why yes it was.
Comedian Justin Hamilton launched a scathing attack on Comedy Festival reviewers this week in a piece published on The Scriveners Fancy.
In it, Hamilton claims no comedy reviewer in Australia can be respected because they don’t cover comedy all year round. Many don’t understand how comedy works and they’re ill-informed and threatened by new media
As we all know and continually mourn, The Scriveners Fancy is no more, gone even from the internet wayback machine. (that quote came from Comedian Justin Hamilton launched a scathing attack on Comedy Festival reviewers this week in a piece published on The Scriveners Fancy. In it, Hamilton claims no comedy reviewer in Australia can be respected because they don’t cover comedy all year round. Many don’t understand how comedy works and they’re ill-informed and threatened by new media, he writes Read more: this well-reasoned look at the controversy around the Herald-Sun reviews – there’s a few more quotes from it here). Suffice to say plenty of people who weren’t Justin Hamilton were also unhappy with the paper’s coverage of the MICF – so much so that at least one presumably knowledgeable person we spoke to later in the year said there’d be no way the Festival would continue with the Herald-Sun. More fool us for believing them.
We bring this up because a): it’ll be interesting to see what happens at this years Festival – we’re guessing more of the same only slightly less so, because a paper like The Herald-Sun does what it wants and if the Festival didn’t think the added coverage was worth the hassle they would have gone back to The Age, and b): we’re going to review some live comedy ourselves! Okay, live on DVD in the form of Greg Fleet’s now on sale Thai Die.
Thai Die the stand-up show dates back to 1995, though the events it re-tells – Fleet, cashed up from writing for The Big Gig, decides to go on a holiday to Thailand and ends up in all manner of strife – are circa 1989. But this performance was recorded in 2011, so if you’re expecting the hairy chap from the cover of the 2002 book edition you’ll be disappointed, especially because that photo was from the 1995 stage version. All of which goes to show that this show has been around for a fair while in a variety of forms, so it’s no surprise that the material is pretty polished both-line-by-line and structure-wise and Fleet seems to have it down pat. He’s not just going through the motions or anything; he’s a seasoned performer, he knows how to make material seem spontaneous even when it’s pretty much word-for-word from the book, and even after fifteen years he’s still trying out new lines and additions*.
A fair amount of Australian stand-up is available on DVD these days. Thai Die stands out not just because Fleet is a pretty big figure in Australian stand-up – he’s been around for decades, he’s still doing it when most of his contemporaries have given up or moved on, and he’s pretty good at it – but because, unlike a lot of what’s out there, Thai Die tells an actual story. Yes jokes, yes they’re funny, but where most Australian stand-up at best is a bunch of gags held together with a loose theme or concept, this is a funny guy telling the start-to-finish story of what happened on a pretty dodgy holiday. As in, he has guns pointed at his head by criminals and ends up in a Burmese rebel camp that is promptly shelled by the government. Hilarious!
Well, large parts of this actually are hilarious, and the parts that aren’t are usually pretty dramatic. It’s the kind of material that’d make for a decent film, so it’s no surprise to read that at one stage he was turning it into a screenplay. According to that article, he was also writing a book based on his tale of heroin addiction Ten Years in a Long Sleeved Shirt (and turning it into a screenplay too) and that doesn’t seem to have happened yet so… well, movies can take a while to get off the ground. Fingers crossed.
If you’re at all interested in Australian stand-up comedy this is a DVD you really should own. Hell, if you’re interested in comedy in general this is a good get. There’s over a half-hour of extras to sweeten the deal (clips of Fleet doing various stand-up bits and some short Ben Cousins vs His Manager skits), though hopefully the lack of his half hour version of Ten Years means that show just might get its own DVD somewhere down the line. This is long-form stand-up at its best and one of the few stand-up DVDs that’s actually worth more than just dipping in and out of. We say: go buy Thai Die.
*if you’re amazingly nerdy and happen to have a copy of the 2002 book of Thai Die, why not read along with Fleety? It’s a great way to see how he expanded on the material for the book, plus you get to see where he’s clearly added new material over the years. For example, the 2002 version has a bit where he talks about how much he dislikes casinos and why, but it’s all fairly general stuff (they don’t have clocks so you don’t know how long you’ve been gambling and so on), while the DVD version has a much more specific indictment on casinos that’s a much stronger bit.
Danger! Parody!
Making its TV debut on SBS last Monday was Danger 5, the cheesy 1960s action series send-up that pits five international spies against the Nazis. Oh, and they have to kill Hitler too. Sounds like a hoot, right?
Let’s start with the positives. Genre comedy, or even comedy that involves sets and costumes, is something we see less and less of these days, so it’s a minor cause for celebration when anything like this gets made in this country. Similarly, it’s hard to think of a comedy show that’s been made in South Australia since the 1985 series News Free Zone, so it’s great that funny people from that state got a go. And let’s not forget that Danger 5 is made by some guys off the internet who managed to get funded on their strength of the web series Italian Spiderman, which was a hit on YouTube a few years back, so it’s nice to know that online comedy is good for something.
But all that feel good stuff aside, let’s get to the point: is it any good or not? For us the answer is “not really”. While Danger 5 gets a lot of things right – the colourful but cheap-looking sets and costumes, the cheesy dialogue, the bad dubbing, the Nazis getting killed all over the place – the makers seem to have spent most of their time crafting an authentically shithouse look for the series, and not enough time on putting some actual jokes in the script. And as we’ve seen with a lot of sitcoms over the past decade, making it “real” doesn’t necessarily make it funny. You also need performers who can deliver lines well, and particularly in the case of over-the-top parodies, lots and lots of silly gags.
Take Shaun Micallef’s “Roger Explosion” sketches, where lame dialogue was ten times funnier thanks to some great performances; The Late Show’s “The Pissweak Kids”, which perfectly captured the spirit of kiddie crime solving adventures through clever scripted gags, earnest-but-awful acting and purposely-bad work from the props department; or even Funky Squad, which managed to both look like an early 1970s cop show and get laughs from it, largely through the superior comic timing of its comedy performer stars. Now contrast those comedies with Danger 5, where the focus of the script is the absurd adventure, and the performers seem to be a mix of straight actors, people who look the part and production personnel. You could argue that it doesn’t matter how great the comic timing of the performers is because what they say will be badly dubbed. On the other hand, the bad dubbing gag works for maybe a couple of seconds yet it’ll still be there – becoming increasingly boring – in episode 7, whereas great comic timing will deliver new laugh after new laugh throughout the series. Again, it’s down to that realism thing; realism seems like an asset in a comedy, but in this case it’s preventing a lot of potential laughs from being had.
Overall with Danger 5, we like the fact that some guys from South Australia have taken their internet hit to the small screen, and we like the idea of absurd genre comedy being on TV, we just think there needs to be more to the joke than “it’s a hunt for the Nazis set in an authentic 1960s action series”.
Bigger Than Ben-Derr
Well, there ain’t no getting around it now*; after three weeks, the much-hyped Australian comedy film Any Questions For Ben is a flop:
Roadshow’s latest local comedy Any Questions For Ben? had a 66 per cent fall on last weekend, grossing $103,030 from 146 screens. After opening on February 9, it has taken $1.4 million – a less-than-expected result from the creators of Australian favourites The Castle and The Dish (Working Dog).
In contrast, the somewhat less fancied Australian comedy A Few Best Men has made over $5 million since it opened on Australia Day**. With that kind of box office drop-off Ben won’t be around past mid-March at the latest, meaning it probably won’t make much over $1.5 million. To put in even more depressing context, the Marky Mark and the Smuggling Bunch movie Contraband made more money ($1.9 million) in its first week in Australia.
Of course, box office returns – much like ratings – don’t mean anything artistically, even if box office returns are loads more accurate than ratings and a firm indication of actual money-in-someones-pocket financial returns. All that this figure means is that Ben didn’t make a lot of money. Who cares, right? Everyone knows audiences have no taste and classics are often ignored first time around. Just so long as it’s funny, it’s a win for comedy.
Well… not exactly. Whatever you might think of the film itself – and it does kinda seem that the somewhat obvious problem of asking audiences to go see a film where a guy who has everything wonders that it might not be enough for him turned out to be an actual problem – the fact is that this was the third film from the first Australian comedy figure(s) to make a third film since Paul Hogan (okay, Yahoo Serious). Like it or not, there was a fair bit riding on this film; Australia hasn’t had a comedy hit since Kenny, and that hardly created a comedy dynasty.
Ben‘s flop is akin to the fizzle that was Angry Boys: a former big name (and obvious go-to example for anyone trying to claim that Australian comedy can draw in a big mainstream audience) comes back after a decent absence only to prove that they have feet of clay. This kind of high-profile failure from a seemingly sure thing makes it that much harder for anyone else to have a go at making something aimed at the general public – what, you thought it was a coincidence that the ABC’s entire 2012 comedy line-up is compromised of shows that, whatever their actual quality, will only appeal to niche audiences?
We’re now stuck in a frankly insane situation where broad, crowd-pleasing, mainstream comedy is seen as a risky audience-alienating venture; if the upcoming Kath & Kim movie Kath & Kimderella flops as well, Australian big-screen comedy will be as dead as… well, as dead as it’s been since 2003.
*Actually, there are loads and loads of ways to get around it – overseas sales, television deals and DVD / Blu-ray profits could all push it a lot closer to breaking even. If the rumors are true that much of the financing was done in-house by Working Dog burning off their profits from selling the Thank God You’re Here format pretty much everywhere, then they may be able to eat much of the eventual losses as a gamble that didn’t pay off rather than a massive black mark that will prevent them from getting financing for anything movie-length ever again. You wonder why Mick Molloy is only ever just talking about making a third film even though Crackerjack was a big, big hit? Because once you make a dud in Australia, you never get the money to make another film here.
**Sadly, A Few Best Men isn’t the kind of film whose success helps Australian movie comedy all that much: it was a UK co-production, it stars actors rather than comedians, was directed by a director-for-hire rather than a committed comedy creator and was written by a UK screenwriter based on a previously successful formula (he wrote the very similar Death At A Funeral). It’s like claiming Bridesmaids as a boost for Australian comedy because it features two Australian actresses – it’s certainly a success, it’s just not a success story local comedy creators can replicate.
Queer eye for the misogynist line
Corinne Grant and Tom Ballard got in to a spat the other day about the attitude of gay male comics towards women. The whole thing started when Grant wrote an article for Daily Life called Should gay men make sexist jokes?, in which she argued that gay stand-ups can get away with misogynist gags because there’s a fear amongst women that if they object to the material they’ll be labelled homophobic. She then went on to make the point that gay stand-ups, particularly younger ones, aren’t aware of the arguments against – or even the concept of – misogyny in the way that the generations who proceeded them were.
Grant cites as an example a joke told by a gay comedian in which he said that he is disgusted by vaginas. She then quotes Tom Ballard’s reaction to her question about whether this joke is misogynist:
…I wouldn’t say that someone saying that they’re disgusted by vaginas is necessarily misogynist; it could just be them being brutally honest.
Grant argues that this response from Ballard proves her point about younger generations of gay comics:
I know Tom and I know he cares about women; his routines often point out the hypocrisy of discrimination against them. However, this may be an example of what [Dr] Peter [Robinson, lecturer in sociology at Swinburne University and author of The Changing World of Gay Men] is talking about—it’s not deliberate sexism, it’s simply not always recognising it for what it is.
The reaction to Grant’s piece, particularly amongst gay comics, was strong. Tom Ballard wrote a long response on his blog, in which he complained that Grant had tarred all gay comedians with the same brush, before re-stating his oft-stated view that comedy is about exposing uncomfortable truths, that comedians should be able to shock and that nothing should be off limits. There was also quite a lot of discussion about the issue on Twitter, with Adam Richard reducing the whole issue down to following piece of snark:
…as a gay comedian, I am a raging misogynist.
And so another internet/media spat came to the end of its short but brightly-burning life cycle, and we are left to reflect on what happened.
We could obviously spend ages debating whether that vagina gag was misogynist or just brutally honest. In comparison to a lot of so-called gags we’ve heard over the years – from straight and gay comics – it doesn’t seem that hate-filled towards women. It’s a gay man finding the female sexual organs distasteful and no doubt some gay men do feel that – they prefer dicks, who knew? It seems strange that some gay men would have such a strong reaction to a body part they could quite easily ignore, but there you are. Shouldn’t the main focus here be whether the gag is actually funny or not?
Indeed, the notion of whether any of the potentially misogynist jokes cited were funny was almost missing from the debate. The issue is hinted at in Corinne Grant’s piece, but it seemed to be missing from Tom Ballard’s mantra that you should be able to speak truths/shock/annoy people.
Just because something is true or shocking doesn’t make it funny. Shockingly and truthfully, thousands of people die every day of starvation or preventable diseases, excuse us as we piss ourselves laughing at that fact. In the great gay misogynist comedy debate Adam Richard’s glib reduction of the issue seems to be the closest things got to actual humour, which is kind of a shame.
This is not to say that we don’t welcome serious debate on this issue – it would be kind of contradictory if we didn’t – it’s more that we wish that debates on comedy were about comedy, in the sense that there was debate about whether different types of comedy are actually funny. And this line that Ballard, and a great many other comedians, push, that shockingly uncomfortable truths are the be all and end all of comedy, really needs some examination too. We know why lots of comedians push this line – recent tabloid OUTRAGES have seriously undermined their work, freedom of speech is important and vital – but what you might call “shock comedy” quite often results in unfunny, gittish comedy. Comedians have a perfect right to be unfunny and gittish, of course, but that doesn’t make “shock comedy” entertaining.
Comedic examinations of all topics need to be thoughtful in order to be funny. If they’re unthoughtful they won’t ring true and make us laugh, they’ll just be gratuitous and pointless. Some gay men may be disgusted by vaginas but that fact alone isn’t funny, nor does talking about it make a particularly interesting point. There’s no doubt some context and build-up to that gag, but we don’t get to see it in Corinne Grant’s piece, which is a shame because the context and build-up are important to the argument.
In this country and on this blog we often complain that we don’t produce very good comedy. Perhaps the way this spat played out hints as to why. Often there isn’t enough thought going in to either individual gags or the context in which they sit. Often comedians reduce complex arguments down to glib one liners. Sometimes what comedians do really misfires. Uncomfortable truths and honesty won’t prevent that from happening, only the writing and telling of good thoughtful jokes and routines will.
Mime Your Language
If you’re a fan of Australian comedy, almost by definition you have to have broad tastes. If you’re only going to enjoy Australian sitcoms, you’re going to spend a lot of time watching Kingswood Country waiting for the next new one to come along; if you’re only really a fan of really funny Australian shows, you’ll have to borrow the Kingswood Country DVDs from that other guy. Often you’re going to find yourself watching something that isn’t really your cup of tea on the off chance you’ll find some gold, and sometimes you’ll find yourself watching Woodley.
Frank Woodley’s first solo series has him playing the bungling but endearing father to seven year-old Ollie (Alexandra Cashmere) and the ex husband to the somewhat exasperated Em (Justine Clarke). If you’re reading this you’ve probably already seen the first episode; next week’s installment starts off with Woodley turning up on his postie bike then pulling a range of faces while coughing in time to various cat noises that turn out to be actually happening rather than just comedy sound effects. Don’t worry, it’s funnier than the description. Well, a little.
Woodley is built almost entirely around slapstick and mime, and while Mr Bean is the obvious comparison Woodley is a slightly more grounded character, an almost believable bungler rather than an almost alien weirdo. As you might expect from a show with not a whole lot of dialogue, each episode’s story is fairly slight when it comes to plot. It does, however, make up for it somewhat by being packed with comedic set-pieces; making a cup of tea leads to a tea-bag being stuck on the ceiling and trying to get it down requires standing on a rocking chair and it’s not hard to figure out things are going to get worse from there.
The smaller notes are often funnier than the big moments – repeatedly being hit in the head with a lampshade isn’t quite as funny as the wary look Woodley gives it later on after he’s escaped its repeated blows – but the big moments are extremely inventive and each episode skilfully builds to the point where just seeing Woodley with a crowbar is enough to raise a smile.
Problem is, a smile is pretty much all this raises. It’s not exactly a children’s show – the failed romance is a little too bittersweet for that – but Ollie’s presence does suggest repeats could end up in a kid-friendly timeslot (if 8pm on a Wednesday isn’t kid-friendly already). After all, The Umbilical Brothers did a broader kind of slapstick & mime work on various 90s ABC comedy series and they’ve done very well with their more recent children’s shows. Adults, on the other hand, should keep in mind that there’s a reason why mime and clowning isn’t something many of us spend a lot of time watching.
This is a show that’s clear about what it’s trying to achieve and for the most part it does it well. But there’s a lack of variety to the material that – in our case at least – we quickly found wearying. We’re probably not the world’s biggest mime fans in the first place so a full half hour of it, no matter how well done, is almost certainly putting a lot more on our plate than we’re comfortable swallowing. It’s Woodley’s show and he’s playing to his strengths – and perhaps overseas sales, as a near-wordless comedy has to be a decent option when it comes to sales in Europe and Asia – but the occasional pun or wisecrack would have helped vary things up a little.
This is an extremely well made show starring a very funny man and it deserves all the success it can find; it just may not be something you want to watch half and hour of every single week.
And in overseas news
Remember that story last year about how Britain’s Channel 4 were working on a supposed rip-off of The Gruen Transfer called The Mad Bad Ads Show? If you don’t, we blogged about it here. Either way, it went to air on Friday night and we’ve managed to see it.
First thing first: is it a Gruen rip-off? Well, possibly, in that it’s a humorous panel show about advertising. But things are a little less cut and dry than when the BBC made Olympics sitcom Twenty Twelve; there was a clear paper trail there, demonstrating that the producers of Twenty Twelve spent several years working with John Clarke and Ross Stevenson on a UK version of The Games (we blogged about that here). When it comes to The Mad Bad Ads Show there’s been no real evidence, or even solid-ish accusations, that the format was actually stolen, apart from a couple of articles last year in The Australian and on TV Tonight which were kind of a beat-up.
Objective Productions, the producers of The Mad Bad Ads Show, may have heard of The Gruen Transfer – a pilot for a UK Gruen Transfer was made for the BBC a couple of years ago, TV’s an international industry and personnel move around a lot, Zapruder’s Other Films (makers of Gruen) may have had conversations with people from Objective, or with people who later re-worked their idea and sold it to Objective – but they equally might not have. As a poster called TheUnrelatedFamily pointed out on the Chortle message board, Britain has seen panel shows about advertising before, such as The Best Show in the World…Probably, and while Zapruder’s Other Films have “engaged lawyers” this will probably be quite a difficult case for them to prove, even if they can establish a relationship between their personnel and Objective’s. Even then, John Clarke and Ross Stevenson had a clear connection with the BBC and as far as we’re aware they didn’t get very far with their legal action (a second series of Twenty Twelve is coming soon, for one thing).
The Australian’s article summarised this situation quite neatly…
Format plagiarism is particularly hard to prove, especially in generic format areas such as panel shows.
The news comedy Good News Week was involved in a stoush with the British staple Have I Got News For You, and the ABC music show Spicks and Specks attracted rancor following Rockwiz‘s pitch to the ABC.
…and that’s without mentioning that Spicks and Specks was quite a clear rip-off of UK panel show Never Mind The Buzzcocks.
Speaking of Spicks and Specks (or more possibly Never Mind The Buzzcocks), that seems as likely an influence on The Mad Bad Ads Show as The Gruen Transfer, in that The Mad Bad Ads Show involves a team of two comedians and one ad executive (Never Mind The Buzzcocks and Spicks and Specks generally went with two comedians and one musician, whereas The Gruen Transfer always had two ad execs on its panels), the teams answer questions about ads to score points (unlike in Gruen where it’s a discussion format), and there are physical games (in episode 1 of The Mad Bad Ads Show three actors dressed as famous characters from ads are brought out and the teams have to place them in the order in which they first appeared on TV, similar games are often played in Buzzcocks and Spicks). You could even argue that The Mad Bad Ads Show stole the idea of pre-filming part of the show from Thank God You’re Here, as there’s a round where the team captains go to an ad agency or run a focus group in order to create an ad for a hard-to-sell product. At the end of the show the team captains show their ad and then the audience votes for their favourite, just like how the Balls of Steel audience chooses their favourite stunt. Oh, and the host of The Mad Bad Ads Show is Mark Dolan, host of the original UK Balls of Steel, a show which is made by Objective Productions, so at least they don’t have to worry about lawyers there.
Perhaps more interesting than any analysis of possible ways The Mad Bad Ads Show may have ripped off some other show (and if it has, we suspect The Best Show in the World…Probably is the most likely candidate), is an analysis of why The Mad Bad Ads Show is better than The Gruen Transfer. We’re not saying it’s a great show – because it isn’t – but the fact that it’s comedy-led is a vast improvement. What would you rather see: a bunch of smug advertising executives talking up their tiresome and manipulative craft, or a bunch of comedians pointing out that advertising is a tiresome and manipulative craft in a piss-takey way? For us, it’s the latter every time.
It’s Not Easy Being Green
We were going to talk about a review of Outland, but… ah, what the hell, let’s start with that. In The Age‘s Green Guide television supplement for Feb 16th, Jim Schembri had this to say about Outland: “The problem with this stab at a hip, savvy sitcom is that it is too gay”. Considering the show is about a group of gay science-fiction fans, that’s like saying the problem with The Love Boat is that it contains too much shipboard romance. Or that the problem with Cheers is that it glamourises alcohol abuse. Or that the problem with Two Broke Girls is that it’s about two poverty-stricken females. You see our point.
Fortunately, Schembri hasn’t just thrown this somewhat eye-catching statement out there simply to shock and annoy. He goes on to describe the episode he’s talking about (episode 3) before getting to the crux of his issue with the show: “Now, to be clear, penis jokes can be funny. The trouble is that there’s no relief from it, nobody to set up punchlines or to say to Fab ‘Does moisturising your elbows really enhance your prospects in the gay community?’ Outland is badly in need of a straight man, figuratively and literally.” Last things first: why does the show need a literal straight man? Why would only a straight-as-in-heterosexual man make a show about gay nerds funnier? Why not a woman? Why does the character have to be heterosexual? Are only straight men funny? What the hell?
He’s made his argument – one with a massive hole in it that we’re about to point out, don’t worry about that – and that argument is that the show needs a figurative “straight man” to set up the jokes and question the wacky behaviour of the rest of the cast. But why does that “straight man” have to be a heterosexual male for Schembri’s argument to work? Because the show does have a straight man: Max (Toby Truslove), who spent all of the first episode acting exactly how Schembri seems to want a straight man character to act: he was embarassed by his flamboyantly gay friends and constantly questioned their behaviour while setting up numerous punchlines with his frantic actions. While being gay.
Thing is, each episode of Outland focuses on a different character, which means that Max is a background player in the rest of the series. So the actual complaint should have been more along the lines of “the straight man is woefully under-used”… but then Schembri probably wouldn’t have been able to make his “too gay” and “Outland is badly in need of a straight man, figuratively and literally” comments, because they wouldn’t have made sense: the show HAS a straight man, he’s just not heterosexual.
Maybe we’re off base here, but what exactly does sexual orientation have to do with being funny? Outland covers a wide range of queer stereotypes and plays them all for laughs; no-one’s saying you have to find any of this funny (and Schembri’s problems with the show’s one-note comedy are reasonable) but to flat-out say that a comedy about gay characters needs a heterosexual male to make it funny is a somewhat strange – and frankly, distasteful – view of comedy.
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To get back to what we were planning to bring up here, it seems that the rumours everyone but us heard about The Chaser leaving the ABC aren’t even true. From the same Green Guide: “Reports The Chaser team has left the ABC would seem to be premature, given the group has at least two television projects slated for the national broadcaster later this year.” Presumably the reports were based around the news that some of The Chaser team are working on a pilot for Seven; the fact that Chaz from The Chaser is currently appearing on the ABC on Planet America (Fridays, 6pm) seems to have passed these commentators by.
More importantly, so has the fact that The Chaser seem to be moving from a model where every show they make is a 100% full-time commitment on their part to a model where they rapidly go from show to show with a couple of projects on the go (this year it’s a panel show on Seven, maybe more Hamster Wheel, and maybe a “consumer affairs” show, not counting solo projects) at any one time.
Think of Working Dog (chances are The Chaser are, as they’re a massively successful model of comedians stretching themselves and developing a long-term television career): while they started out putting all their eggs into the Frontline basket, these days they go from network to network – they’ve had shows on Ten, Seven and the ABC in the last five years – while putting out books, movies and a whole range of shows.
It’d be silly to say “Has Working Dog left the ABC?” now, because they’ve gone and come back at least once already. Presumably that’s the model The Chaser are looking for: one where they – oh, Andrew Denton’s a good example too, having done shows on Pay TV, Ten and Seven as well as the ABC – aren’t beholden to any one network’s limited timeslots and programming choices.
Thing is though, with this broadening of options and opportunities comes something of a dilution in terms of actual output. Frontline is a rightly acclaimed television classic; The Panel and Thank God You’re Here were lightweight fluff that are, for the most part, already forgotten. Would The Hollowmen have taken so long to find its feet if it had been Working Dog’s sole project for eighteen months? Perhaps, perhaps not – but diversification is how you grow a company and these days Working Dog have a business to run. By the looks of things, so do the artists formerly known as The Chaser.