Australian Tumbleweeds
Getting Dark Early These Days
In yesterday’s Green Guide Debi Enker wrote something that will come as no surprise whatsoever to long-suffering readers of this blog: “Wednesday night ratings are not giving Aunty much joy”:
In recent years, the ABC has established Wednesday as a home for crowd-pleasing light entertainment. Reliably anchored by Spicks & Specks, it offered a selection of popular local and imported comedies and chat shows – The Gruen Transfer, The Chaser, Angry Boys – before David and Margaret moved in at 10pm.
Not this year. At 8pm, the wonderful Woodley – which, in a just world, would be attracting a couple of million viewers a night and rivaling My Kitchen Rules – started with about 534,000 viewers nationally and has steadily dropped about 200,000 of them.
She goes on to point out the following:
*In the key 8.30pm slot formerly occupied by Spicks & Specks, Adam Hill’s variety chat show, In Gordon St Tonight, hasn’t cracked 600,000 and usually attracts around 500,000 in a slot that should be getting double that.
*At 9.30pm Outland was a ratings disaster, starting out at 300,000 viewers and rapidly dropping to less than 200,000 – less than Kitchen Cabinet was attracting on ABC2 at the same time.
(Agony Uncles seems to have done better than that, rating around 400,000 on its first night. It was still beaten by every commercial network.)
There’s a fair bit to digest there. Fortunately, we took a good hard chew at it back when Spicks & Specks wrapped up:
What we will miss about Spicks & Specks is the way that it delivered around a million viewers week in week out to whatever comedy show the ABC decided to screen after it. Yes, this did mean that a lot of crap got a ratings boost it didn’t deserve – hello Gruen family of programs – but it also meant a lot of other comedy shows managed to rake in respectable viewing figures too, which helped create the impression that Australian comedy was actually popular out there amongst ABC viewers.
…
If we’re lucky, the ABC will come up with a new series to anchor Wednesday nights. Ah, who are we kidding: there’ll be a string of also-rans and not-quite-theres and series two of Laid and eventually Wednesday will become the night for docos or UK dramas or whatever the hell crap it is the ABC shows on Tuesdays or Thursdays. The passing of Spicks & Specks is the end of an era: we only wish it’d had been a show more deserving of its’ success.
Making the real question here, if we could spot how the loss of Spicks & Specks was totally going to screw over everything else of Wednesday nights, why didn’t the ABC? So, in the spirit of steering them in the right direction because they seriously don’t seem to have a friggin’ clue, may we suggest the following:
1): Bring back Spicks & Specks. Okay, the horse has pretty much bolted here. So why the hell didn’t they keep the show going and just change the host? It was extremely obvious from the second In Gordon Street wasn’t a massive car crash that Hills was going to bail on S&S. Fair enough too, he’d clearly had enough. But let’s be honest: unless you are a relative or close personal friend of Hills, he’s not exactly irreplaceable. He’s a moderately handsome host who can come out with ABC-level quips. Two words: Will Fucking Anderson. Or pretty much anyone else, including your local postie. Yes, he was good at his job. His job was hosting a musical quiz show. IT’S NOT THAT HARD. Just look at the UK, where they have loads of this kind of long-running show and think nothing of swapping out hosts when need be.
(Alan Brough would have been equally easy to replace – comedians who are passionate about music aren’t exactly rare. Ironically, Myf, who was the least likely to walk, would have been the hardest to replace)
2): Move In Gordon Street Tonight to Monday nights 9.30pm. Despite Enker’s wild’n crazy claim, Wednesday nights on the ABC have never been the home of chat. In recent years there have been panel discussion shows on that night, true, but they’re a very different beast from a talk show. Even in today’s crazy mixed-up televisual landscape having an interview-based talk show on in the middle of the week (and at 8.30pm) just doesn’t sit right.
We’d be willing to guess that if Gordon Street had been hosted by anyone but Hills the ABC would’ve known this and given it the once massively successful and now basically disused Monday 9.30pm Enough Rope timeslot – it’s not like Q&A is doing anything useful with it. But they seem to have fallen for the idea that ABC viewers are fans of Adam Hills, not of the specific shows he hosts, and would therefore watch anything he got up to on a Wednesday night. Unfortunately, the career path of pretty much every single long-running television host makes it fairly clear that people watch television shows, not hosts. People watched Spicks & Specks, not Adam Hills.
3): Make the occasional mainstream comedy. You know us: so long as it makes us laugh we don’t give a shit about what a show’s “about”. But let’s be honest: a show like Outland* is the kind of narrowcast program a network can only make if they either have a remit to target niche markets or don’t care about ratings. Last we checked the ABC does care a heck of a lot about ratings and as for niche markets, maybe in drama: when it comes to televisualised Australian comedy, they’re the only game in town.
Again, don’t get us wrong. We’re glad Outland was made. It’s just the kind of series you make once or twice a year as a fun sidebar and currently the ABC, in their wisdom, has nothing on their current new comedy slate BUT fun sidebars. Laid 2 is for inner-city Marieke Hardy fans while the upcoming Josh Thomas sitcom Please Like Me promises new levels of quirky annoyance from the title alone – fuck, according to the press release it even stars his fucking dog:
As well as writing the series, Josh Thomas stars in PLEASE LIKE ME as Josh, alongside his cavoodle, John
And if the ABC is pinning their ratings hopes on Randling, here’s a quick reminder of its mainstream appeal: IT’S A WORD-BASED QUIZ SHOW. Yeah, that’ll set the world on fire. The Einstein Factor sounded like more fun, and that was a wank.
We get that it’s the start of the year, which is traditionally the time when the ABC burns off its’ comedy duds to clear the desks for a big ratings push mid-year. But a show like Woodley – which despite Enker’s burblings was never going to rate well because despite all the skill, care and effort put into it it’s basically a show built around mime – should have aired surrounded by shows with wider appeal.
(Not that wider appeal cures all ills: Agony Uncles is as mainstream as a Sunday tabloid and about as informative and entertaining. As for Myf Warhurst’s Nice, well, if you can’t say something nice there’s always room for you here.)
Later in the year Gruen will return in some form, along with The Chaser and Shaun Micallef’s news-based comedy Mad As Hell, and the ABC’s Wednesday ratings will mostly likely lift. But chances are they’ll never regain their Spicks & Specks figures**, and once that sinks in that’s when the weaker examples of what Enker calls “light entertainment” will start to vanish. Panel chat and cheap crap like Agony Uncles will survive much like they have on commercial television; scripted comedy? At a time when even Chris Lilley can’t deliver a ratings hit? Well, probably not.
It was fun while it lasted.
*[edit] Just to make it clear, the problem as we see it with shows like Outland is that by the very nature of their subject matter it’s going to take solid word of mouth to win people over, and when you’re talking about a six part series you don’t really have a lot of time to get that word of mouth. Whatever the quality of the comedy itself, “gay science fiction nerds” is not a topic with an automatic connection to a lot of viewers, as it’s about a very small segment of the population (and a somewhat cliched one too – both gays and nerds are well-worn comedic territory).
In contrast, and to use the two big sitcom successes of recent times, Kath & Kim was about mothers and daughters in the suburbs; Summer Heights High was about high school kids.They may be as cliched comedy-wise as gays and nerds, but at least they’re cliches a lot of Australians feel some connection to – which may at the very least translate into “let’s see how badly they screw this up” viewers out the gate. We’ve argued for years that the big ignored factor behind Summer Heights High‘s success was the fact it tapped into the captive schoolkid /school parent audience and gave them crap stereotypes they could laugh at.
Again, we like comedy that’s funny no matter what it’s about, but considering the most popular comedy shows on television are the various Footy Shows (make that “comedy”), it’d be foolish to deny that if you’re talking about popularity (and that’s ALL we’re talking about here) there are some subjects that will initially attract more viewers than others.
**[edit] as at least one commentator has pointed out below, the ABC does pretty well viewer-wise out of iView and other non-traditional viewing methods, not to mention the cash money from selling their shows on DVD, which muddies the waters somewhat as to whether shows are actual successes or failures. Problem there is that the traditional ratings figures are – at least for the moment – still the main way that the public are told whether a show is a hit or a miss. And for the ABC, which gains no commercial benefit from their ratings (they have no advertisers who care about actual viewing numbers and pay accordingly), public opinion is what counts. So until they can get everyone else in the media to agree that those other methods should add towards whether a show is a success or failure, the ratings figures are the ones that count, at least perception-wise. After all, no-one feels the need to bring up iView figures for shows that are rating well.
The Agony and the… nope, that’s it.
Some shows come to us on a clear wave of passion and enthusiasm. Others arrive as the result of extensive product-testing and marketing. And then there’s Agony Uncles, which looks like the winner of a competition to come up with the cheapest possible programming alternative to running a photo of Tony Jones for half an hour.
Ordinarily that wouldn’t be a problem, what with comedy often thriving under conditions where “cheap and shoddy” would be a compliment. But despite a tagline of “When you have absolutely no-one else to turn to” and an on-line description of “Confessional. Illuminating. Inappropriate. Wrong.” Agony Uncles isn’t really a comedy. What it is, is EXACTLY what it looks like: a bunch of male actors and comedians mostly in their 20s and 30s giving out advice about women and relationships.
See, from the aforementioned publicity we thought they’d be playing characters – or maybe just exaggerated versions of themselves – telling funny stories and giving over-the-top and just plain bad advice to comedic effect. No. These guys are giving the kind of vague, bland “honest” advice you’d expect to hear from guys down the pub. And like guys down the pub, their advice is not that interesting when you’re sober and utterly useless once you’re drunk.
Just to give you the gist from tonight’s episode, it seems that opening up emotionally to a woman early on is bad. Pick-up lines are lame, but they often work. Women are attracted to the pheromones of a male, and also money and power (if you’re John Elliot). The supermarket is a good place to pick up. A woman’s relationship with her father is an important guide to how she’ll be with a man. Women over 35 who’ve never married you should avoid. Also avoid psychos, but the sex can be great. Married guys are bang up for gay sex. Crack onto the hot girl’s ugly friend to make her jealous. Wingmen are really handy, unless they aren’t. It’s more masculine to call a girl than text. Landlines were bad for romantic calls because you’d always get their dad. John Elliot won’t date people from the Labor Party. Okay, that last one was kinda good.
Whether you find this stuff useful or not, it’s not really all that funny. Nor, about seventy percent of the time, is it trying to be, which makes the various promotional activities around this show feel a little like the ABC was handed an utterly pointless turd – and let’s be honest, this show has no point whatsoever unless you’re either a rabid Lawrence Mooney fan (he had an anecdote that was a firm highlight) or a fifteen year-old boy craving the kind of cliched advice that turns out to be completely crap in real life – and desperately tried to come up with an angle to lure people in for at least the first week.
Part of the problem is that most of these guys don’t do relationship comedy, so while a handful of the anecdotes are pretty funny, the bulk of this material is presented like it’s actually interesting on its own merits. Remember, this is a show that seems to think you need to be told that unmarried women over 35 are undatable and that texting a girl you like makes you less of a man.
A bigger part of the problem is that nobody in their right mind wants to hear a guy like Josh Lawson or Brett Tucker talk about how hard it is to pick up. These guys are movie stars and comedians and to be honest they’re all pretty easy on the eye; when it comes to meeting women (or men) none of these guys are on struggle street.
(ironically, creator and voice-over man Adam Zwar actually does have the comedy persona to make this “it’s hard out there” material work. Yet apart from some frankly mystifying shots of him at the start of episode one – seemingly taken from various earlier projects – he doesn’t appear on camera. And as a voice-over man he’s a great writer.)
But this show’s biggest problem is that, the occasional funny story aside, the actual advice here is the same old tired sexist junk everyone over the age of sixteen already knows. That’s not to say the “facts” they’re handing out aren’t actually applicable in the real world. But if you’re going to make a television show based around information on the level of “treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen”, you can’t simply present these insights as surprising and new. They’re not. Again, they could be an accurate reflection of the way things are between men and women, but if you’re going to trot out cliches and pass them off as entertainment you really have to add something new to the mix. This show doesn’t.
So there’s nothing new here, and what is here is nothing more than a bunch of Zwar’s mates talking to camera, intercut with old stock footage of men and women doing average things. Maybe if they were saying insanely entertaining things this would be a worthwhile half hour. Instead they’re just coming up with the kind of tripe you’d get from a “men’s columnist” in a Sunday tabloid. Occasionally smug, generally pointless, often annoying, sometimes insulting and in at least two cases a great way to make a formerly likable comedian seem like a bit of a tool, Agony Uncles is no help to anyone.
Catch a Falling Star
So in 1994 when we read this:
After ten years on the road, on record, CD, radio, TV and in print, the [Doug Anthony] Allstars have finally decided to call it a day. At the end of their current national tour, at the Regal Theatre in Perth on December 17, they will send a fond, sad, undoubtedly rather raucous farewell to their fans and go their separate ways. Each is adamant there is no animosity, purely a parting based on the mutually exclusive plans of each member.
Tim Ferguson, 31, wants to stay home with his family more in Melbourne. Paul McDermott, 32, wants to go to New York to concentrate on his music career. Fidler, 29, wants to return to Britain, where he intends to become heavily involved in a fledging CD-ROM business.
What was actually going on was this:
What would eventually be diagnosed as multiple sclerosis would mean an end to the frenetic, high-energy life that was the Doug Anthony All Stars.
It seems that, rather than breaking up in 1994 because they’d achieved everything they set out to, the Doug Anthony All Stars – Tim Ferguson, Paul McDermott and Richard Fider – broke up on the verge of committing to a UK career because Ferguson was developing MS and didn’t feel he could go on. Considering it’s 2012 and all this is old, old news (Ferguson having revealed his MS a few years back), who cares?
For one, it’s a reminder that much of the “news” in comedy goes unreported. In 1994 DAAS were a very big deal, one of the few remaining hold-overs from the comedy boom of the late 80s that still seemed vital. They didn’t seem all that funny to us – their astonishingly self-indulgent ABC series DAAS Kapital put a pretty big stake through any warm feelings we had for them from their Big Gig days – but they were still huge figures on the local scene. But when they broke up the usual “it’s mutual” line was swallowed by the media without too much fuss.
Sure, there was speculation; years later even we’d heard that Ferguson was the one who’d split up the group and McDermott wasn’t happy about it. Obviously Ferguson wanted to keep his medical condition private, and we’d go along with that. But the actual story here was that one member (for whatever reason) wanted to stay in Australia, which now seems more than a little obvious just from the wacky career paths the other two claim in that 1994 article. While we’re here, let’s just fix that section for The Australian:
Tim Ferguson, 31, wants to stay home with his family more in Melbourne. Paul McDermott, 32, wants to go to the ABC, where he intends to become heavily involved in television hosting and minor radio gigs. Fidler, 29, wants to go to the ABC, where he intends to become heavily involved in drive time radio and minor television hosting gigs.
We don’t need to know the specifics behind Ferguson’s personal reasons for breaking up the group, but we should be told that his personal reasons are why the group broke up, even if it’s just a “speculation is rife that…” line in there somewhere. If it was a popular band, we’d get that. If it was a sporting figure, we’d get that non-stop for a fortnight plus a half-dozen opinion columns waffling on about “the real story”. Why is it that when it comes to comedy we just get a shrug and “whatever you guys say”?
This kind of thing cuts both ways, just in case you were thinking of making some snarky-yet-true comment about how Ferguson’s medical issues are none of our business. When the media gives comedy sloppy, inaccurate coverage as a matter of course then you get inaccurate stuff like – to take merely the closest example to hand – this from that 1994 article:
“They directly contributed to shows like Wogs Out of Work, Fast Forward and the quick, nonsensical satire of D Gen, a sort of extension of the Python tradition, but very much in an Australian context.”
Which, of course, DAAS didn’t actually do (the D-Gen’s first shows for Channel Seven aired in early 1986 after more than a year as a university revue; Paul McDermott didn’t even join DAAS until 1985) : they were simply part of the early 80s zeitgeist where comedy became more performance-based and aimed at a younger, university-educated audience.
[That’s another reason why the reason behind their demise is important: by 1994 their style of comedy was largely played out and increasingly replaced in Australia by the more mainstream and traditional stand-up we still enjoy (or “enjoy”) today. There’s a big difference between breaking up because one of your members has a personal reason for sticking close to home and breaking up because no-one cares about you any more.]
We’re not calling for more muck-raking (unless we’re talking about the Muck-Raking segment on The Late Show, in which case more Muck-Raking please). It’d just be nice if journalists covering comedy stories – on the rare occasions when comedy contains actual news – treated it like actual news: as something to be investigated seriously, with a commitment to uncovering facts and reporting them where relevant.
Seriously, that 1994 story actually does contain the real story: when on one hand you’ve got Ferguson saying he wants to stay in Melbourne and on the other Fidler is saying: “we’ve explored every avenue of creativity for a group in Australia”, a journalist really should connect the dots. The news doesn’t come from Ikea, and it’s not up to the reader to construct it from a jumble of random facts you’ve dumped on their lawn.
After all, if the professionals don’t get the real story out there then it’s left to people like us to do it. And really, no-one wants to read yet another one of our barely coherent yet supposedly “shocking” 3000 word exposes on that episode of Last Man Standing that totally ripped off Andy Richter Controls the Universe.
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.