Australian Tumbleweeds
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.
*
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.
You’ve Got To Ask Yourself A Question
Working Dog might be a tight-knit team of twenty years standing with an admirable track record of success across pretty much all forms of Australian media – and a global success under their belt with Thank God You’re Here – but it’s still possible to take a guess at which member is the driving force behind their various individual projects. The books always seem to be largely the work of Tom “Tommy G” Gleisner because he’s the “writer” of the bunch (he’s written a bunch of Warwick Todd cricketing parodies on his own). Their current television series Sports Fever! feels like a Santo Cilauro project, in part because it’s spun off from their World Cup sports show and Santo’s a soccer tragic, and in part because he’s the one hosting. And Any Questions For Ben, Working Dog’s latest feature film, feels like something Rob Sitch has got his shoulder behind… which is where the problems start.
One of our favourite Rob Sitch stories comes from an episode of Working Dog’s big TV success of the late 1990s, The Panel. Mick Molloy was a guest on this particular evening’s episode, and at one stage Rob had the show cut to a new car commercial that was an especially slick example of the form. (it may have even been this one… or maybe not) When the ad was done Rob turned to Mick and said “what do you think, Mick?” Mick just laughed and said “it’s shithouse”.
Mick had a point: whatever its’ technical achievements, whatever its’ conceptual brilliance, the ad was, like every single other ad made in the history of humanity, ultimately shithouse. It’s nothing but a slick product designed to evoke a feeling then use that feeling to sell you something. Unfortunately, that’s as good a description as any to describe Any Questions For Ben. Like the ad, it’s all surface polish and feel-good vibes, with nothing underneath but a vague sense that you’re being sold something you probably don’t really want.
For those that don’t know, the plot of AQFB is simple… a little too simple in fact. Ben (Josh Lawson) is 27 years old and living the good life in Melbourne. He dates models, he makes a fortune in some kind of media / branding job, he has good friends and good times. But when he goes back to his high school for careers day and none of the kids have any questions for him, he’s thrown. Is his life as empty and shallow as all that? Better date a few more models and go to a few more parties to figure this shit out.
The film’s one big obvious problem is that once Ben realises he has a problem he does nothing about it. In fact, there is so little dramatic development in this film that while there are SPOILERS AHEAD they’re barely worth the name because Ben literally does nothing to change his life once he enters his “quarter-life crisis”. He just continues down the same path, occasionally asking questions of those around him then doing nothing with the answers. Worse, while his problem has been in part that he’s been dating gorgeous women he knows nothing about and has zero in common with, the solution to his mounting ennui turns out to be… dating a gorgeous woman he knows nothing about and has zero in common with. It’s a film that has to end exactly when it does because it’s obvious that six months later she’d be out of his life and the cycle would begin again.
Despite what we said earlier, just because Sitch is out front on this project as the director doesn’t mean it’s entirely his baby (much like having Santo as host of Sports Fever! doesn’t mean the other two aren’t shaping the show from behind the scenes). In fact, from what we’ve heard about the production Working Dog is a real team effort: Gleisner does script re-writes on the set, Santo handles the technical side of filming and Sitch is the one who deals with the actors and their performances. Add in Jane Kennedy (who handles casting and music) and Michael Hirsh (the business side of things), and you have a fairly self-contained unit.
But this feels like a “Rob Sitch” Working Dog project because the “Rob Sitch” projects (the other one that really fits the bill is The Panel) are all about shallow fun. A Gleisner project is about jokes and plenty of them; Santo’s projects feel passionate and rambling. Reportedly Sitch was the one who said if they made a third movie (after The Castle and The Dish) they should make an urban film set in the present day; if nothing else, AQFB is certainly that. Then again, so was Death in Brunswick, and that had a hell of a lot more laughs.
Of course, there’s a fourth kind of Working Dog project: the commercial kind. Even now, after they let both The Panel and Thank God You’re Here linger past their use-by dates, they’re still seen as a team that jumps from project to project once they get bored. So let’s say that’s true: after pretty much achieving all their artistic goals in comedy with the successes of both the sitcom Frontline and the movie The Castle, it’s fair to assume that their next round of goals would be commercial.
The Panel was a long running chat show that was a massive commercial success in Australia; Thank God You’re Here was a format sold around the world. The Jetlag series of comedy travel books were best-sellers; Jane Kennedy did well with a non-comedy cookbook. They’ve had their share of misfires (did anyone even know they put out Audrey Gordon’s Tuscan Summer, a fake foodie book, a year or so ago?), but their only really biggish failure was The Dish, which did well in Australia but fizzled in the US market. Not that they’d admit they were looking for overseas success, but you don’t bring US actors into an Australian film – or make a film saying that Australia’s minor role in a US project shaped our nation – unless you’re looking beyond our shores.
In that light trying again at the movies, especially with their coffers flush with Thank God You’re Here cash, makes sense. It also explains why AQFB is a film with next to no artistic reason for existing. This isn’t a story anyone was demanding be told, because it’s barely a story; it’s a glamour photography session with Melbourne lounging around trying to look sexy. Aerial shots of the city at night! Cool music! Major events! Hip bars! Everyone looks great!
To be fair, romantic comedies often rely on a polished, hyper-real atmosphere as a backdrop for their tale of true lurv. But as mentioned, there’s little sense of true love in action here. Instead, Ben’s personal dramas seem to be kept as low key as possible so as to not disrupt his regular appearances at hip night spots. If he was going through a real personal crisis, he might not feel like attending the Spring Racing Carnival or going snowboarding at Queenstown. So it seems fair to assume that making sure he visited loads and loads of cool-looking places was a higher priority story-wise than giving him an actual story, let alone making him a funny guy. After all, comedy is one of the hardest things to export, even between English-speaking countries; if you want to make a film that’ll do well overseas, downplaying the Australian sense of humour may not be a bad idea.
Mind you, Working Dog are smart cookies and they know to hedge their bets, so while the main characters are a largely bland and laff-free bunch living the good life the extensive supporting cast are given plenty to work-with comedy-wise. Okay, perhaps “plenty” is an exaggeration. Still, people like Lachy Hulme (basically playing Marty Boomstein from Boytown, only with better hair and worse jokes), Ed Kavalee and John Howard have solid comedy cameos, while Alan Brough, David James (from The Hollowmen) and Sean Lynch (from The Shambles) also get laughs from their small roles. Sitch also makes a funny appearance as Ben’s high school headmaster, proving once again that he’s one of Australia’s better comic actors. Maybe next time instead of hiring good looking up-and-comers whose comedy skills are average at best Working Dog could build a film around Sitch?
The problem is that Working Dog have nothing to prove artistically. They’re never going to make a film funnier or more beloved than The Castle, and they’d be foolish to try. Instead, they’ve focused their film efforts on trying to come up with something that looks good and will appeal to as wide an audience in Australia and globally so as to rake in the really big bucks (sadly, it seems they’ve already failed). The result is that Any Questions For Ben passes on being dramatic or funny or all that interesting in favour of selling an image of Melbourne as a swinging international city full of handsome people having fun. It’s basically a 110 minute car commercial; wonder what Mick Molloy would have to say about that.
Roast the Host with The Most
Australian television doesn’t have comedians any more, it has hosts. Think about how many much-loved laugh-getters from radio and sketch comedy have, under the relentless all-bland pressure of Australian television, turned into little more than less competent versions of Larry Emdur. Think about all the “comedians” coming through now who, first chance they get, throw away all but the first two pages of their joke book as they settle in to introducing celebrity guests and giving “funny” answers on panel / game shows. Now you might have some idea why we hold Shaun Micallef in such high regard.
Unlike pretty much everyone currently working on Australian television – with the notable exception of Chris Lilley – Micallef isn’t a host. Sure, he plays one on Talkin’ ’bout Your Generation, but that’s just it: he’s clearly playing a host. Australian television wants its’ hosts to be friendly, open, approachable – basically, radio jocks with slightly less edge. And a big, big part of being a jock is swapping being funny for opening up about your private life.
Again, it comes from radio. With so much pressure to produce material, sooner or later radio jocks end up strip-mining their own lives. Stories about their weekends, stories about their kids, stories about their relationships, stories about what they think of the issues of the day: it’s what a host talks about. It’s all a host talks about. Frankly, we couldn’t care less what Dave Hughes thinks about anything, but it seems we’re in the minority there.
Micallef, on the other hand, works on television. He knows that he doesn’t have to “be himself”to win viewers over; all he has to do is be funny. When he’s on panel shows or giving interviews he dials it down a little but he’s still more about cracking jokes than revealing who he is. Fun fact: out of all the Australian comedians to write a book in the last five years, he’s the only one who wrote a work of fiction.
All of this would seem obvious – hell, maybe it is obvious and you stopped reading three paragraphs ago – if it wasn’t so unusual for this day and age. Let us now point out that after years of struggle doing comedy his biggest success has been hosting a game show, which is about as mainstream a hosting job as they come. It’s easy to imagine pretty much anyone in Australian comedy doing roughly the same thing – it’s just not possible to stay awake while doing it.
Micallef doesn’t want to “share” with us. He doesn’t even want us to “like” him if he can get bigger laughs from being a bit of a jerk. And this is why we’re still paying attention to Talkin’ ’bout Your Generation, long, long after the show itself ceased to amaze and enthrall. We even waited an extra week before writing about the latest season just in case it had any surprises up its’ hilariously retro sleeves. It didn’t: apart from a steady drip of new games (which all seem the same to us) and more cross-promotional theme shows than regular episodes, it hasn’t really changed since the early days when Micallef wrestled it to the ground and put his brand right on its meaty flank.
Don’t get us wrong, we appreciate Micallef’s endless nutty touches. Using the chair from Blade Runner still gets a smile ’round these parts, as does his hammy fake organ playing. But everyone else on the show (with the surprising exception of the otherwise painful Josh Thomas) is dead weight. Amanda Keller is at best a comedy mirror – fire enough comedy her way and eventually she’ll reflect something back – and these days Charlie Pickering is clearly a host, not a comedian. Don’t believe us? What’s his comedy persona? What does he do that’s funny beyond saying smart-arse things? Okay, maybe he’s kinda smug and above it all. Wow, that’s hilarious.
At least with Josh, Micallef has something to work with. Josh may be actually like he is on the show, we don’t know, but on the show he comes off as a comedy character, dim and distracted, with stupid hair and a bogus voice. It’s often annoying; it’s also occasionally somewhat funny. If you’d never seen the show before you’d assume as a matter of course that a comedy game show about a battle between the generations would involve team leaders who somehow embodied the cliches about those generations, but clearly that fell into the too-hard basket for the casting director and so apart from Josh the other two are just… well, collecting a paycheck for starters.
Talkin’ ’bout Your Generation works to the limited extent it does because Micallef is hosting, and because as a host Micallef is a talented comedian trying to be funny. “Be more funny” is a simple thing but considering how many times Peter Helliar’s scored work hosting sports shows clearly it’s not a high priority for the networks. It’s not a lesson you think will be learnt by them in a hurry either: if this proves to be the last season of Talkin’ ’bout Your Generation (and it really should be), you know the fact that the only long-running successful comedy show on Australian commercial television was hosted by a comedian, not a blandly-grinning host, will be glossed over the second Micallef’s out the door.
There may be only one Shaun Micallef, but there are (presumably) other funny people in Australia; next time someone thinks it’s a good idea to try a comedy game show, maybe hire one of them for a change.
A little outlandish, and quite entertaining
The ABC’s new Wednesday comedy line-up kicked off last night with the return of Adam Hills In Gordon Street Tonight and the long-awaited debut of the sitcom Outland.
In Gordon Street Tonight episode 2.1 gave us more of the same mix of live music, celebrity interviews, and larking about with members of the public in studio, on location and via social media. It was a fun show and had a good line-up of guests last night including Rob Sitch and Josh Lawson (Any Questions for Ben?) and Jonathan Lynn (Yes Minister).
Hannah Gadsby was also back as Hill’s sidekick, sending over the odd well-observed zinger from her side of the studio. Apart from being pretty funny, she adds a bit of much-needed edge to the show, although not really enough for our tastes. But with it’s lightweight mucking about, In Gordon Street Tonight has the sort of mainstream appeal that provides ABC-1’s Wednesday night line-up of entertainment and comedy with a rusted-on audience. And as an act of pure pragmatism or strategy that’s kind of necessary (remember the days when kinda decent new Australian comedies would be scheduled poorly and end up dying on their arses?). Helpfully, In Gordon Street Tonight is entertaining enough to be worthwhile pragmatism, although it’s casual audience, the one who only tunes in to see specific guests, must be fairly high.
Of more interest (to us) was the show which presumably benefited from In Gordon Street Tonight‘s appeal, Outland, a new sitcom about a gay science fiction club. It proved to be funny, feel good and a bit alternative, so, we feel compelled to ask, why did it get delayed for a year? Was it ABC pragmatism or strategy again? Get the bloated, mega-hyped mess that was Angry Boys to air when it suits the BBC and HBO? Or put the semi-topical At Home with Julia to air while it’s still “relevant”? Maybe someone at the ABC got shitscared about the science fiction aspect, or even the gay aspect?
Either way Outland is well worth a look, and judging from our preview copy of episode 2 it’s worth sticking with. It’s a long time since we’ve seen an Australian sitcom that goes hell for leather with the over-the-top characters and situations, and hey, guess what? That makes it funny! Time to ditch that tedious noughties realism and documentary-style camera work, kids. Just fill a room with zany characters and let them be funny.