Australian Tumbleweeds
Australian Tumbleweed Awards 2011 – Worst Game or Panel Show
Panel shows in which kinda known people from breakfast radio, the stand-up scene and, increasingly, other panel shows improvise funny answers to questions have all but replaced scripted offerings such as sketch and variety shows. You can see the appeal to producers – sketch and variety is expensive and often risky. The problem is that by avoiding the risk of not being funny, they just end up with bland.
Can of Worms promised to delve into the complexities of our attitudes to various social issues, but succeeded in doing little more than skim over the surface of all of them. Good News Week did exactly the same, but to such an extent that even its makers realised it need a re-think – unfortunately that re-think didn’t involve axing the team entirely.
Before it aired The Trophy Room seemed to have it all – Australians love sport and panel shows, right? So putting them together would definitely work? Um, no. Even ABC audiences are prepared to call time on a show which looks poor in comparison to the ageing repeats and dud imports that litter the commercial networks over summer.
The problem with Can of Worms wasn’t so much that it took a number of existing ideas, changed them a bit and put them to air – that’s basically all television ever does – it was more that it took a series of “bound to shock” attitudes, coaxed them into being expressed by some B-list celebrities and then assumed this would be enough to entertain us.
THE RESULTS OF THE NEXT CATEGORY, WORST SKETCHES, WILL BE ANNOUNCED AT 1:00PM EDT.
Australian Tumbleweed Awards 2011 – Worst Sitcom or Dramedy
In recent years we’ve seen an upsurge in the number of locally-made sitcoms. And thanks to the trend over the past decade or so for shooting on location and beefing up the drama quotient, there’s now almost no need to include anything in your sitcom which is capable of making a real life audience laugh.
Take Chris Lilley’s long-awaited series Angry Boys, which was praised for its realism, and complexity, and for the way it hit the target with niche audiences. Niche audiences were so fundamental to the show, apparently, that even the show’s social media producer was out there talking it up. That’s great and all, but aren’t we, the rusted-on audience for Australian comedy, a sort of a niche anyway? Where’s the targeting of us?
In comparison, Laid seemed to be trying to be an actual sitcom, as opposed to a cynical marketing exercise. And if you didn’t like the style of humour there was at least a plot to follow. If you didn’t like the plot you were kinda buggered, though.
As for At Home with Julia, it was an easy watch and it had some laughs, but by focusing on the home life of Julia Gillard and Tim Mathieson rather than the professional life of Julia Gillard it missed a lot of opportunities to serve up some comedic insights into our political system. Actually, on second thoughts, whenever the show did attempt a bit of satire it was so surface-level they needn’t have bothered. So perhaps they pitched it just right.
Like Chris Lilley’s past work Angry Boys looked impressive because it was a series of character studies on a scale not often attempted in Australian television. Problem is, none of the years of Lilley’s detailed research and improvisation, on and off camera, mattered a jot because the end product was boring, unfunny and went on for way too long – as free-falling audience ratings on at least two continents have now demonstrated.
THE RESULTS OF THE NEXT CATEGORY, WORST GAME OR PANEL SHOW, WILL BE ANNOUNCED AT 12:30PM EDT.
Australian Tumbleweed Awards 2011 – Worst TV Light Entertainment Show
As a format, Good News World could have worked. Make that should have worked: topical comedy (or at least claiming to be a local version of The Daily Show) is a success around the world. So it seems the blame should rest entirely with the on-air talent, who after fifteen years spent making the exact same jokes clearly couldn’t sell even the slightest change in format. Or perhaps changing the format was enough to break the spell around the talent, who suddenly looked like what they are: people who haven’t done anything fresh or new this century.
Balls of Steel Australia took a used up UK format, stuck a member of the Chaser out the front, and… well, that seems to have been it. Pranks involving hot chicks can’t miss, can they?
Thinking about it, Live From Planet Earth is the kind of title that screams “crap”. Remember the not-at-all-missed Hard Rock Café in Melbourne and its hilarious “No Nuclear Weapons Allowed” sign over the door? Yeah, it’s that kind of dad joke. Ha.
Perhaps Ben Elton simply didn’t realise that Australia doesn’t have any currently viable tradition of live television. In its early weeks, AKA the only weeks it had, Live From Planet Earth felt like the kind of show that might have found its way to competence if it’d had a rusted-on audience that didn’t know any better, let alone how to change the channel. You know, like the way even rubbish reality series keep on going week in week out. Unfortunately for all involved, there is no goodwill or slack in the system for a live sketch comedy show, and the second it became clear that it wasn’t going to be what it needed to be to survive – the funniest thing on commercial Australian television in twenty years – it was gone.
THE RESULTS OF THE NEXT CATEGORY, WORST SITCOM OR DRAMEDY, WILL BE ANNOUNCED AT 12:00PM EDT.
Australian Tumbleweed Awards 2011 – Worst Comedy Personality or Performer
Some comedians you’ll watch in anything, whether they’re presenting a 300-part documentary on invertebrates or appearing in a panel show about actuarial science. Ben Elton was someone who used to be able to brighten up even the dullest of those interview specials Ray Martin did in the 90’s, then he ruined it all by getting his own Australian comedy show.
At least Elton’s stand-up on Live From Planet Earth wasn’t too bad. He may have sucked at getting other people to deliver his comedy, but he himself did a good job. That’s something Chris Lilley can’t really claim to have done, although it may have helped his cause if he’d bothered to extend himself beyond gags related to dicks and their emissions.
Wil Anderson is highly regarded in the Australian industry and is often praised for his topical material and improvisational skills. He is currently best known as the host of the various Gruen programmes, where his semi-topical comedy fills the gaps between those bits where representatives of the advertising industry make out they’re telling us something we haven’t already spotted. This is enormously helpful to Anderson as with his bland personality and lightweight gags he’s easily the least offensive person on screen.
Chris Lilley spends months developing his characters, studying people like them, working out their costumes and mannerisms…and then totally forgets to make them remotely funny or interesting, or to place them in an interesting, coherent storyline. Apparently this is all that’s required to be called a comedy genius in this country. Barry Humphries and John Clarke must often wonder why they bother to write actual material.
THE RESULTS OF THE NEXT CATEGORY, WORST TV LIGHT ENTERTAINMENT SHOW, WILL BE ANNOUNCED AT 11:30AM EDT.
Australian Tumbleweed Awards 2011 – Worst New Comedy
With short episode runs and rapid axings preventing a lot of new talent from getting any real experience before being thrown onto the main stage, new comedy usually deserves a bit of slack. Unfortunately, this year the new comedy on offer was either the same old output from people who’d been at it a decade or more – Angry Boys and Good News World – or a series from a long-time media professional whose idea of hilarity involves calling a gynocologist “G-Bomb”. With nothing fresh to say and no real idea how to say whatever it is they wanted to say, all three series here are worthy nominees – and, no doubt, the people behind all three will be finding work on Australian television for years to come.
A song titled “Poo On You”. A line of fashion accessories called Gay Style that come in penis-shaped bottles. A running joke involving a teenager urinating on his twin brother. Extensive discussions about replacing a man’s shot-off testicles with fake ones. A song titled “Grandmother Fucker”. A water bottle shaped like a penis. A song titled “Dick On Your Shoulder”. One teenager complaining constantly about his brother’s masturbation habits. “Skateboarding Gay Style”. Pissing in a Gatorade bottle and trying to get someone to drink it. A diet built around regular farting. “Sneaky Nuts.” Dog wanking. Chris Lilley is a comedy genius how exactly?
THE RESULTS OF THE NEXT CATEGORY, WORST COMEDY PERSONALITY OR PERFORMER, WILL BE ANNOUNCED AT 11:00AM EDT.
Australian Tumbleweed Awards 2011 – Worst Newcomer
The nominees in this category represent the future of Australian comedy, which means if they don’t lift their game we’ll be seeing some of them in our other categories in years come…assuming any of them ever work again.
The cast of Balls of Steel Australia seem unlikely to do anything other than Balls of Steel Australia. Their improvisational skills saw them survive being flung out on to Sydney’s streets with only a costume and a zany schtick, but can taking your clothes off in a car showroom really be classified as any type of skill? It’s barely a type of comedy.
For those who stepped straight out of acting school and in to Live From Planet Earth, the task wasn’t so much to come up with the funny, but to find it in Ben Elton’s scripts. Reports that some of them went mad trying and decided to leave the industry entirely wouldn’t surprise us at all.
Jess Harris and Josh Schmidt from TwentySomething seem a strange pair to receive a nomination here. Even when you factor in the sheer hatred some people seemed to have for Jess’s character in their show. Including an unpleasant character in your show qualifies you for a Worst award now? Can someone retrospectively award a dozen or so British Tumbleweeds to Ricky Gervais?
Not much of the blame for Live Planet From Planet can be put at the door of the comedy newcomers in the cast. Those kids were trying super hard. Super, super hard. We therefore present this award not them but to the writer, Ben Elton – he may not be a newcomer, but choosing that female bodybuilder sketch as one of the openers to a brand new comedy show sure made him look like one.
THE RESULTS OF THE NEXT CATEGORY, WORST NEW COMEDY, WILL BE ANNOUNCED AT 10:30AM EDT.
Australian Tumbleweed Awards 2011 – Introduction
Welcome to the Australian Tumbleweeds 2011. This year we will be announcing all the winners throughout today via this blog. You can “experience” all the action on Twitter by following us or using the hashtag #tumblies. We also have a Facebook page if you prefer that sort of thing.
The results of the first category, Worst Newcomer, will be announced at 10:00am EDT. But while we’re waiting, here are a few thoughts from us on the 2011 Australian comedy year…
2011 was a bad year for Australian comedy – on television at least – but not in the ways we’ve come to expect. Yes, the energy level was down across the board, with old favourites either tanking hard or stuck in a rut while the fresh faces were shunted off to digital channels where they wouldn’t upset the Spicks & Specks fans. But there was more to it than that: for the last decade or so the big problem with Australian television comedy has been there just hasn’t been all that much of it. Especially if you consider shows like the various Gruen efforts and Spicks & Specks to be more like chat show mutations than scripted hilarity.
Ironically, this has worked to comedy’s advantage: without much of it around, audiences were free to create brilliantly hilarious examples of the form in their own minds and assume that was the standard we’d achieve if only we made enough of the stuff. If that sounds far-fetched, consider how a decade off-air – and the remorseless efforts of Daryl Somers – led a large chunk of viewers to believe that Hey Hey it’s Saturday was actually a highly entertaining variety show. The poor, deluded fools.
Sadly, actual exposure to the real thing soon revealed Hey Hey for the steaming turd it always had been (well, since 1990 at least). And so it has proven with Australian comedy in 2011. In previous years comedy’s low profile, combined with the occasional big ratings winner (Summer Heights High, The Chaser’s War on Everything), had made it seem like comedy might actually become something the majority of Australians might like to watch. Not after 2011.
This was the first year in recent memory that a commercial network (Nine) made a concerted effort to put local comedy anywhere near the heart of their promotional push. Unfortunately, “The Home Of Comedy” turned out to be more of a house of horrors. Nine’s first big effort, Ben Elton’s Live From Planet Earth, was to be the biggest flop of the year, a disaster of epic proportions that the media tried desperately to blame on twitter snark instead of the slightly more realistic proposal that the show itself was arse.
It was all downhill from there: Tony Martin’s The Joy of Sets was thrown away in a dud timeslot, Hamish & Andy’s Gap Year failed to do the massive numbers Nine was hoping and a revival of John Clarke and Ross Stevenson’s The Games in time for the 2012 Olympics was quietly shelved. Comedy may not be dead on the commercial networks – Hamish & Andy will be back, and The Chaser are working on a panel show for Seven – but the boundaries have firmly been set.
Things were no better on the ABC. Chris Lilley’s triumphant return turned out to be a ratings disaster as Angry Boys shed over half its audience during its three month run. New comedy was increasingly shunted across to the low-ratings digital channel ABC2, while Spicks & Specks – the bland but extremely popular music-based game show – finished up, thus knocking out the lynchpin of the ABC’s Wednesday night comedy line-up. An Andrew Denton-hosted word-puzzle game show will replace it in 2012: it will be very interesting to see if it comes close to replacing it ratings-wise.
While there were individual signs of success throughout the year, the overall picture is one of high profile efforts failing to deliver. If comedy is to survive as anything more than just an ingredient added to news-talk shows and prime-time soap operas, good comedy needs to be made and just as importantly, bad comedy – the subject of the Australian Tumbleweed Awards – needs to be identified.
If television networks, producers and the media continue to claim that below-par shows are anything more than below-par shows – if they say, as they did in 2011, that Live From Planet Earth was brought down solely by smart-arses on twitter and Angry Boys was a huge hit once you take into count various non-ratings methods never before taken into count – then audiences will lose the little faith they have in the media’s television coverage and will take their interest in trying new comedy with them. If someone serves you a shit sandwich and when you complain you’re told that according to all the experts you were served a delicious steak sandwich and there’s plenty more where that came from, chances are you’re not going to order that sandwich again. Or even visit that restaurant.
Good comedy has always been in the minority in Australia, as it is around the world. It doesn’t help anyone – viewers, networks, or creators – to pretend otherwise. Praising bad comedy as good – or even as merely average – treats the audience as idiots and the industry as little more than a home for hacks and skilled self-promoters. After a year where the bad was firmly on the rise and the industry pointed fingers everywhere but at themselves, it’d be nice to say there’s hope on the horizon. But we’ll leave the foolish optimism and wilful ignorance to the experts.
Congratulations to all the 2011 AACTA Winners!
… no, we’re not being sarcastic. Though you’d be forgiven for thinking so, as those winners – well, the only winners who fall under our gaze here – happen to be Chris Lilley (for best performance in a comedy) and Laid (for best comedy series). Suffice to say we wouldn’t have been voting for them unless the prize was a much-needed copy of Kochie’s Joke Book.
While we might be deeply disappointed with the result, we can’t even pretend to be in the slightest way surprised. The AACTAs – previously known as the AFIs, and still run by the Australian Film Institute – are not entirely voted on by hard core comedy fans. Or even people who like comedy. Or even people who watch comedy. What they do like, is “quality”.
For some of them, that means saluting people who have power within the industry – and considering a second series of Laid was greenlit pretty much the moment the first ended while numerous other ABC comedy series either had to wait months for the thumbs up to a follow-up (Judith Lucy) or don’t seem to have announced anything yet, which can’t be good (Twentysomething, The Bazura Project), it’s safe to assume creator Marieke Hardy and clout are not complete strangers. As for Lilley, get him to put in a good word for you with HBO, okay?
For others, it means saluting all the things we here at Tumbleweed Central firmly believe have nothing whatsoever to do with making people laugh: art direction, fancy camerawork, nice dresses, “serious moments”, a high media profile and so on. Which both series had in spades, largely to make up for the fact that neither could tell a joke to save a life. Plenty of jokes that were dead on arrival though.
Look, while we might be constantly, irrationally angry we’re not entirely stupid. Comedy is a populist art form and the AACTAs (though they’ve firmly broadened their scope since the days when Somersault won everything) are still largely focused up the highbrow / quality end of the street. As they should be: we’ve already got the Logies. And the Tumbles [/plug].
It just means that the AACTA voters’ view of what makes a comedy great – which gets reported in every major newspaper and news website across the land – is wrong while ours – which gets reported, uh, here – is the one that actually takes into account the fact that comedy is about making people laugh.
Project Budget Defict
In what passes for television news at this time of year, may we present this Channel Ten press release someone slid under our clubhouse door:
Kicking off on Sunday January 22, The Project will take up permanent residence at 6pm, six days a week. This move returns Ten News at Five to its traditional one hour format and introduces an exciting new 30-minute edition of The Project to kick-start TEN’s Sunday nights.
Further details have since come to hand – The Age reports the first half of the new Project will focus exclusively on the news headlines of the day, for one – but we’re long past caring about the actual content of The (7pm) Project here. It’s been a soft-soap version of Today Tonight for well over a year now, hosted by the increasingly self-satisfied Charlie Pickering, the now completely pointless Dave Hughes, and an ever-increasing roster of people who’s names we see no reason whatsoever to recall. Pickering and Hughes might still put down “comedian” on their census forms, but out in the real world they’re currently standing shoulder to shoulder with professional bland guys like Larry Emdur. And he’s doing a much better job.
No, what’s of interest here is the way Ten seems to be going out of their way to sink The Project after spending so very, very long trying to make it work. Short version of the story: The 7pm Project rated so badly during its first few weeks and months its doom seemed assured (and yes, we weren’t going to be sad to see it leave). But Ten stuck by it to an amazing extent as it changed casts and approaches and pretty much everything else until it started to click. Even then it was largely reliant on what was happening around it – during the MasterChef heyday it did gangbusters because it latched onto the more successful series and never let go – but through thick and thin Ten kept it in the 7pm timeslot where people could find it and gave it a chance to build an audience.
To quote from the classics, now all that’s changed. First it went to an hour format starting at 6.30pm, and now it’s going to 6pm, where it will go head-to-head with the regular nightly news on Seven and Nine. Where it will lose. And it won’t be going back to 7pm, because Ten plans to stick all its top-rating food-related reality shows on then. And then someone is going to ask why they’re spending all that money on a show that comes third in a timeslot they used to do perfectly well in by showing repeats of The Simpsons, and that will be the end of that story.
But if you’re sick of our snark, here’s an alternative prediction: with the spotlight sliding off them, the Project team decide to actually do what they originally semi-promised to do – make fun of the daily news. They take their occasional quips and news footage bits and expand them until they make up the show itself – a show that’s smart enough to pull back the curtain on how politicians and big business use the media to get their points across, yet silly enough to make sure the jokes keep on coming.
Dave Hughes quits to go stare at his kids, Charlie Pickering implodes into a white-hot ball of smug, and the fill-on hosts keep on doing a better job than the big names. The guest comedians get more airtime, the on-panel pundits get less, the stories that actually tackle issues keep coming while the Today Tonight-style button-pushing ones get the chop, and somehow despite all these changes audiences keep on watching.
And then Graham Kennedy comes back from the dead to host, because that’s actually slightly more likely than everything else on our wish list.
Beans Beans, The Musical Fruit…
Chris Lilley’s been doing a lot of press for the US launch of Angry Boys lately, and when he hasn’t been talking about hanging out with teenagers at parties or painting Australia as a racist land that just doesn’t get him* he’s been talking up his global achievements in a manner that’s more than a little surprising to those of us who’ve actually been paying attention. Quick example from an interview he did for The Atlantic:
The S.mouse song “Slap My Elbow” is a pretty dead-on Soulja Boy parody.
It ended up getting on the charts here in Australia and doing quite well, and it was really surprising. It’s funny because I wrote all of the music myself and recorded it all at home while I was writing the show, in the pre-production period, and it ended up winning this music award we have in Australia called ARIAs and S.mouse’s album, which is the soundtrack, won the ARIA. It’s really weird because the songs are ridiculous. But that was really cool.
That must have upset some legitimate artists.
I know, I know. All these actual composers and stuff.
Wow, he’s an ARIA winner! For best comedy CD, of course? Uh, no – that’d be Hamish & Andy. In fact, going by this fairly comprehensive list, Lilley doesn’t even rate a mention. That’s because he didn’t win a regular ARIA but instead won the basically ignored “Best Original Soundtrack / Cast / Show Album” in the “Fine Arts” category. As for the “legitimate artists” that were upset, well, it seems he was up against the soundtracks to Snowtown, Mad Bastards, the Mary Poppins cast recording and some symphony. Wow. Way to put the rest of the Australian music industry in its place.
[actually, the Mad Bastards soundtrack was reportedly pretty good. Unfortunately, Chris Lilley pretending to be black is clearly more popular than actual black musicians.]
Yeah yeah self-promotion, yeah yeah he’s got a show to sell, yeah yeah, winning the ARIA for Angry Boys was “really weird” even though he won the same ARIA for Summer Heights High back in 2008. But to be fair for perhaps the first time ever in our Chris Lilley coverage, what’s really interesting to us in this rash of Lilley interviews is the way that he basically doesn’t seem to give a shit about other comedy shows:
I’m not a big comedy show-watcher, but I love Ricky Gervais’ stuff and Sacha Baron Cohen’s things. But I’m not an expert on them. I’ve seen them once.
So don’t go suggesting with his awkward pauses and comments to camera and media-obsessed famewhore characters and racially charged insult-heavy comedy that he’s basically been ripping off the UK version of The Office since the dawn of time, that’s obviously not the case at all. Oh no no no no. Then there’s this line:
I don’t collaborate with anyone. I’m so independent in writing stuff and controlling what I do
Which is interesting considering Ryan Shelton helped write We Can Be Heroes:
Comedian and Rove regular Ryan Shelton helped his friend develop Ja’mie and worked on the other characters as he helped write WCBH.
“Chris goes out and meets people his characters are like and he makes studies of them, takes notes or interviews people and sometimes film them,” Shelton said.
“He watches those videos over and over and over and I’m sure he’s done it with Jonah. You watch him, the way he moves and all the little nuances. He’s fidgety, he’s always touching something or fiddling with it in that ADD way and you know he’s spoken with kids and studied them.”
“We’d spend two hours a day on Ja’mie, talking about what school girls do – his personal experiences, what I remembered from school.”
But, of course, digging up actual facts isn’t what these interviews are all about. They’re promotional tools whereby Lilley gets to push his latest effort. And if he doesn’t mention that Angry Boys was a ratings flop in Australia, why would he? That’s our job. As it is to point out that even the US reviews seem to have been mixed.
Increasingly Lilley looks set to follow the lead of the man he took absolutely nothing from comedy-wise, Ricky Gervais, and focus on making shows for the lucrative US market. Well, at least until he stops being able to play his much-loved teenage characters, which considering he’s already in his late 30s and it takes him twice as long to deliver the goods between each series (2005 for We Can Be Heroes, 2007 for Summer Heights High, 2011 for Angry Boys) may have already happened. At least all these interviews should make it difficult for the local press to keep calling Lilley “reclusive“. Shouldn’t it?
*also from that Atlantic interview: “Well, Australia has a thing where apparently it’s fine for me to dress up as an Asian woman. No one has questioned that. But there was—which I totally expected—there was a bit of an outcry about me playing a black person.” Not that we expect Lilley to read our website, but we’ve been asking questions about how dubious his work as Ricky Wong was for years. See here and here and here. And that’s just us – over the years a lot of people have questioned whether his use of the “brainy Asian” cliche was racially dodgy. Australia doesn’t have “a thing” where Lilley’s use of racial stereotypes goes by unquestioned; Lilley has a thing where he doesn’t pay attention to criticism. And another completely different thing where he thinks he can get away with hoary old racial stereotypes because he’s such a brilliant and unique artist. Ahem.