Australian Tumbleweeds
This Toilet Just Won’t Flush
While we’ve been busy of late putting together the Tumbleweed Awards – don’t forget, you can vote for all the shows you loathe here – we’ve still managed to find time to check out the various other year’s best and worst lists that have started to pop up around the place. Well, clearly not that much time: we only just looked at this week’s Green Guide “Year in TV” special, and it’s the usual quasi-hilarious mix of the creepy (the topless fight scene in Underbelly: Razor was listed in “Things to be grateful for about TV in 2011”, for fuck’s sake) and the just plain wrong (Gran from Angry Boys was one of the “Great TV Characters of 2011” – as they put it, “fierce, loving, so wrong but, oh, so right”. You utter prats). Oh, and they liked The Jesters, so it wasn’t all bad.
As you’d expect from us and our long-standing burblings against various Age personalities, three things stood out: first, The Hamster Wheel was praised for its “ruthless pursuit of shoddy on-line journalism”. Well yes, but didn’t The Chaser name the Schembri Awards after Green Guide writer and notorious on-line bullshit artist Jim Schembri? Was this latest comment a swipe at Schembri by a fellow Green Guide writer, or actually written by Schembri (who did contribute to the Green Guide‘s “Year in TV” special) in an attempt to shore up his dubious “they were supporting me” claims? Just fire him already.
Second, Angry Boys was one of the top 10 shows of the year. Uh, okay, whatever. You might want to make a better claim for greatness than saying Gran “was a monster we couldn’t quite believe, yet couldn’t take our eyes from” then point out in the very next line that “audiences seemed unprepared to invest in all 12 episodes” though.
As for “the conclusion that several vocal critics arrived at – that [falling ratings] somehow turned the whole enterprise into a wasteful flop – is risable” – no, the endless knob and gay jokes made it a wasteful flop. And the pointless, laughless surfer character. And making “pissing on things” into a running gag. And trying to making S.Mouse’s “Grandmother-fucker” into a real-life novelty hit. And S.Mouse in general. And not actually having any actual storylines for any of the characters despite running for twelve long weeks. And we could go on.
[In actually funny Angry Boys news, this article from the Telegraph about his US push is gold, especially this:
Mainstream press reviews for the series, including responses to blacked-up character S.Mouse, are expected in the coming weeks.
Regardless of the response, Lilley’s ability to make such strong inroads into the tough US market should be heralded as a brilliant achievement.
“Regardless of the response” you say. Wow, that almost sounds like you expect a racist shitstorm followed by a near total collapse in the ratings… kinda like what happened here. And we’re just going to herald as a “brilliant achievement” someone’s ability to sell shows to America now? The actual quality of the show itself doesn’t count?]
Finally, they couldn’t leave Laid out of it, could they? Of course it was one of their favourite shows of 2011 – Hardy worked for them for years! Not that they mentioned that, of course, despite sniping at other shows’ “bloated self-promotion”. How many positive reviews did the Green Guide give Laid again? Seven? Eight? Plus a cover story? For a show that only ran six weeks?
Oh well, at least this particular gush-job said that Laid was “refreshingly difficult to categorise” – because it sure as shit wasn’t funny – and that “season one ended on a brutal cliffhanger, so hurry up already”… except that the press release for Laid 2 (you know, the one everyone at the Green Guide received months ago) listed the new seasons cast and THE LOVE INTEREST FROM THE FIRST SERIES WHO HAD THE POTENTIALLY FATAL ROOT WITH ROO IS STILL IN IT. So, uh, he’s not dead. Unless he’s a fucking ghost, which is the kind of twee bullshit you’d expect from this series really.
Either way, the fact remains: why is the Green Guide talking up a “brutal cliffhanger” when they – or anyone who looks up Laid on IMDB – already knows how it pans out? Unless, you know, they’re just trying to drum up interest in a mate’s poorly rating show. Again.
Our seemingly pointless griping here is the story behind this year’s Tumbleweed Awards. When the mainstream media in this country is quick to praise obviously sub-standard programs for reasons clearly unrelated to the actual quality of the program itself, we need an award designed to point out that yes, you were right the first time: much of this supposedly “much-loved” and “critically-acclaimed” comedy is just plain crap.
Australian Tumbleweeds 2011 – Nominations now open
Nominations are now open in this year’s Australian Tumbleweeds 2011. Now in its 6th year, the Australian Tumbleweeds hails the failures (and occasional successes) of this nation’s comic talent.
Your online nominations form can be found here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/tumblies2011noms
You have until midnight on Friday 16th December to nominate. Please make no more than 4 nominations in each category. Full rules and instructions can be found with the nominations form.
Voting will start on Sunday 18th December with the winners announced on Australia Day.
As always, the official Twitter hashtag is #tumblies.
Vale The Hamster Wheel
Yeah, sorry about the delay with this one. But hey, it’s not like The Chaser really need anyone rushing to judgment at this point in their career. Their position at the ABC is about as secure as it gets at this stage of the game: if there hasn’t been a mention of what they’ll be doing in 2012, it’s only because everyone automatically assumes they’ll be back.
This apathy is slightly odd, because The Hamster Wheel was about as big a change in direction for the “Chaser Boys” as one could reasonably expect from a rock-solid ratings machine whose formula brings in the viewers even when the Murdoch press is all but claiming they set fire to an orphanage. For one, they dropped the stunts. For another… umm…
Okay, the differences are subtle but noticeable. The focus is firmly on the media – though not quite as much as you might have expected from the pre-release publicity, as Chaser 101 stuff like fake news and an opening monologue were still there – only they’re explaining its insanity rather than just reveling in it. We’re not the first to point out that in some ways Hamster Wheel is largely an expanded version of the “What Have We Learnt From Current Affairs” segment from The Chaser’s War On Everything, and as that was by far our favourite segment of that show you’ll notice we’re not complaining.
As always with The Chaser, there was also plenty to complain about. Even Shaun Micallef’s Newstopia struggled to make fake news funny so it’s no surprise the fake news here was, as Krusty the Klown put it, “always death”. Politics with Cats was an okay idea that only really deserved a handful of outings rather than a weekly segment, while the Schembri Awards for crap internet news fizzled out and ended up being dropped before the end of the series.
But overall, turning the focus on the media and making fun of its increasingly sleazy and desperate tactics proved to be a winner. Well, more of a winner than anything the superficially similar Gruen factory churned out, largely because Denton’s show is a thinly disguised celebration of the scumbag tactics advertisers / marketers / PR companies use to lie to us and rip us off (every campaign they look at is either “how clever” or “this doesn’t work – as an advertising person, I would instead do this”, where what it needs is the bit where someone goes “the very basis of this industry is bullshit”?) whereas The Chaser seem to hold the media in justifiable contempt for solid comedy results.
So where to from here? While the media’s ability to churn out tripe is endless their strategies for doing so are fairly limited, so a second season of The Hamster Wheel might see them struggling to find new rorts to expose. Not that the ABC would mind; after a decade of solid ratings success it seems safe to say that The Chaser could offer the nation’s broadcaster a show made entirely out of un-filmed outtakes from Packed to the Rafters and be sure of getting at least one season out of it. If they want to bring The Hamster Wheel back in 2012, it’ll be back; if they decide to do a show called The Chicken Shop about the business cards taped to the register of their local fast food outlet, we look forward to eight episodes of poultry-related comedy.
[Rumours that The Chaser’s somewhat sudden return in 2011 – word about the show first surfaced around the middle of the year and it aired in October, whereas most ABC comedy series are usually announced months or years in advance – bumped the long-time-coming Outland back to 2012 remain just rumours. But if that was the case it’d also explain why At Home With Julia only ran for four episodes (the first time a prime-time comedy has had such a short run in many a year) instead of the originally planned six. If it’d been coupled with Outland we would have had the usual situation: the 9.30 Wednesday comedy timeslot featuring two shows at six episodes each across the final twelve weeks of ratings. Instead, as The Hamster Wheel ran for eight weeks, Julia was cut back to just four episodes and Outland was bumped to 2012.]
But what if they don’t come back at all? Chas Licciardello is already lined up to do the non-Chaser Planet America, a show covering the US Presidential election, while no doubt the rest of the team will pop up in various hosting gigs as they’ve done since the dawn of time itself. It’s hard to know whether 2012 will be the year when the team finally does drift apart as it occasionally threatens to do; then again, Chris Taylor and Craig Reucassel hosted drive on TripleJ for a while before returning to the fold and Dominic Knight’s been writing solo novels for a while now. Even the now long-gone and somewhat missed Charles Firth stuck around on the fringes after moving to America.
To be blunt, they just don’t seem like they’re passionate enough to get into the kind of angry artistic spat that tears a comedy team apart. If someone wants to try something different, away they go. If they want to come back, the door’s never fully closed. And by choosing to stick with the ABC instead of jumping ship at the height of their fame the ABC seems to be sticking by them as well, giving them the kind of career security that’s basically unknown in Australian comedy these days.
If there’s a down side to this, it’s that the programs released under the Chaser banner tend to be fairly predictable. The Hamster Wheel / Chaser’s War / Yes We Canberra format is clearly the kind of format they all agree on; meanwhile, the occasional hints of anything startlingly new or different tend to fizzle out to nothing. Not that the ABC wouldn’t be complaining about this consistency – running the same old same old until it gets old is how you get steady ratings. Which just leaves the folks at home who’re looking for something surprising and new…
Vale Spicks & Specks
Tonight Spicks & Specks died the way it lived: as a bland, largely forgettable chunk of televisual muzak that actively repelled any attempt to engage with it beyond the occasional glance at the screen. Of course it was a massive hit watched by millions: how could it have possibly failed?
Just to make things very clear, we’re fully aware that creating a hit show is amazingly difficult and requires large amounts of both skill and luck. It’s even more impressive when said hit show relies to a large extent on looking like no-one involved is really trying all that much. So on that level – a level we really don’t care about all that much, being fans of shows that are, you know, actually worth our time – Spicks & Specks deserves both our respect and admiration.
On the level we do care about, Spicks & Specks was a ghastly waste of effort and talent. Week after week, year after year, the funniest comedians in the land – both local and on tour – would turn up and get to gasp out a couple of one-liners in between performing the kind of party games that get your house burnt down by disgruntled guests. Some of the games were funny; some of the performances even more so. THEY’RE STILL PARTY GAMES.
What Spicks & Specks was, both on stage and inside your home, was a complicated device designed to guarantee mediocrity. The games and quiz segments and musical numbers were so restrictive that the actually funny people were stifled and rendered bland; on the other hand, by being so restrictive the crap guests usually came out looking okay. If you want to watch a show that makes crap guests look okay, more power to you; we’d much rather watch the funny people being funny, thanks very much.
[which is probably why the really funny people – your Tony Martins and Shaun Micallefs – only made the occasional appearance. We did get an awful lot of Hamish Blake though, which isn’t surprising considering he’s pretty much the only high-profile radio talent around who can tell a joke. Considering it was a show built entirely around talking and music and jokes, imagine how good Spicks & Specks might have been if Australia had a functioning radio industry it could’ve tapped for talent…]
Beyond that, it was a show of cardboard depth: people sat there and answered questions and… yep, that’s about it. The aforementioned mediocrity ensured things never got too funny – if someone seriously started riffing they were cut short (all those people complaining about the obvious editing in The Joy of Sets clearly never watched an episode of Spicks & Specks) plus there was always Adam Hills handy to kill a joke with some over-egged laughter – and with nothing at stake in the quiz itself all that was left was the illusion of entertainment. Things happened constantly, they just never meant anything.
Against this backdrop, no wonder the hosts stood out. Not too much, mind you: Hills was Your Gracious Host, Alan Brough was The One Who Took Things Seriously, and Myf Warhurst was Australia’s Sweetheart. Seven years of having them hanging around for months and months on end and that’s all we got. That’s all we needed to get: anything more than that and people might have started paying attention. They displayed just enough personality for the folks at home to differentiate between them so they could pick a team to cheer on and no more.
[Well, no more in recent years; remember how a while back there was the occasional hint in the TV review pages that Brough was coming off as a little too serious about his desire to win? Looks like the ABC nipped that in the bud – even if he is the only cast member who hasn’t had his own solo ABC series announced yet…]
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.
This might not seem like a big deal now. After seven years of Spicks & Specks the Wednesday night comedy block on the ABC is firmly entrenched, and while people complain about the occasional dud on the whole the idea of showing locally-made comedy on the ABC has general acceptance. But around the turn of the century the ABC had no fucking idea what to do with Australian comedy, and so for the most part decided not to make any and threw away the little they did.
Sure, Kath & Kim rated well, but anything that couldn’t pull in viewers on its own was left to sink or swim in a number of seemingly random timeslots. The first series of Double the Fist screened late Friday nights just before Rage; the first series of The Chasers War on Everything struggled with a Friday night start time that depended on whenever the UK murder mystery before it ended; Eagle & Evans was taken off air after three weeks and dumped months later in a graveyard timeslot.
The success of Spicks & Specks made it possible to find Australian comedy without having to search for it. It’s hard to underestimate how important that’s been over the last seven years. Without Spicks & Specks, Chris Lilley’s We Can Be Heroes (which aired after it in 2005) might never have found an audience… so yes, there’s a dark side to all this too.
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.
What Happens When You Don’t Explain the Joke
There’s a proper Vale Hamster Wheel post on its way, but we wanted to bring this up first: it seems Age TV critic Jim Schembri either can’t take a joke, or simply doesn’t get it:
For me – and this will come as no surprise – the biggest laugh came when their awards for outrageous online reporting were dubbed The Schembris. My deep hatred for the laziness, fabrications and irresponsibility of what occurs online under the guise of journalism is well-documented, and it was a tribute as humbling as it was hilarious.
Sadly for his version of events, Schembri’s one-man war on bloggers isn’t nearly as well-documented as the somewhat tangled mess that occurred late last year (*edit* actually earlier this year, as Daniel G has pointed out) when he wrote an on-line review that contained a massive spoiler in the opening line. He then went back and changed it after numerous complaints, then pretended the original never happened, then claimed the whole thing was a prank he’d played on the internet, especially twitter users.
You can read the whole saga here and here. Or if you feel like giving your head a good scratching, you can read Schembri’s official version of events here. Please, if you can explain exactly what he was trying to prove (if his version of events was what actually happened), let us know.
So we have three options here. One, that The Chaser really are such massive fans of Schembri’s hither-to unknown efforts to stamp out internet flim-flammery that they’d name a running segment after him in sheer admiration of his good works. Unfortunately, it seems that in a decade of television The Chaser have only ever named bogus awards after people they wish to mock and make fun of. But who knows? Maybe after over a hundred episodes of televisiual satire they’ve decided that the whole comedy thing is for saps and have decided to just straight-out praise people they like rather than laugh at those they don’t. Maybe.
Option two: Schembri simply didn’t get the joke. Problem there is, if he’s missing jokes as obvious and as blatant as that one, what the hell is he doing writing about television (or film, his other job at Fairfax)? It seems unlikely that he’d have much of a clue about anything if something as screamingly obvious as that one got by him. How can anyone trust anything he has to say on anything if he can’t tell when he’s being made fun of ON NATIONAL TELEVISION BY PROFESSIONAL COMEDIANS ON THEIR OWN COMEDY SHOW.
Option three: Schembri knows full well the joke is at his expense and is trying to spin the coverage (or just muddy the waters – now his version of events is out there, even we have to pretend it’s moderately plausible) to make him look good. In other words, he’s lying to his readership purely for his own benefit. “Lying” might sound a bit strong, but how else to put it? If he knows they were making fun of him and chooses to say otherwise to his readership, he’s not telling them the truth. Of course, he’ll never admit it and we have no way of knowing what he really thinks. But for the sake of argument, let’s suggest that this scenario is at least plausible.
In which case, what the hell is he doing being paid to write about anything? This kind of media manipulation is rightfully scorned and despised by journalists when it’s practiced by politicans and corporations: what are we expected to think when we see one of them doing it for no other reason than for covering his own arse? Whether you laugh at The Chaser or not is a matter of personal taste: whatever your views on comedy, Schembri’s antics stopped being funny a long, long time ago.
Rove (B)la(h)
Nice looking but dull, that’s how you might describe Rove McManus; it’s also not a bad description of his chat show Rove LA, which finished up the other night. Normally on this blog we wouldn’t bother with a chat show, but as this one had a fair bit of comic pretension and represents a very large percentage of Foxtel’s original comedy output for this year (the rest of it was local remakes of Balls of Steel and You Have Been Watching– way to go, Pay TV!) we felt it was worth noting.
Rove LA wasn’t a terrible chat show. It had decent guests, the host was pleasant to them, they participated in some segments and there were some laughs – look and learn, A Night With The Stars – it’s more that McManus failed to bring anything genuinely interesting out of any of the people on his sofa, or to get big laughs from any of his comedic schtick.
The wacky segments seemed influenced by British shows like The Graham Norton Show (and it’s possibly worth noting that Rove LA was produced by UK company Avalon Television), but the show didn’t seem to have any of the “out there” daring you get from the Poms. At least when Hamish and Andy’s Gap Year went to meet some crazy dog owners one of them pretended to be a dog, in Rove LA all Rove could manage was some mugging to camera as the obsessed owner showed him a wardrobe full of canine dress-up clothes.
Rove LA was slicker than Rove Live, but the same basic problem with Rove as a personality was still there: he’s just dull. And by transporting him to a town where it’s controversial to say anything that’s even slightly negative about another star, you basically compound the problem.
But what does it matter? Rove McManus’ ambitions lie in the US, and Rove LA is basically him killing time and fluffing up his showreel until Hollywood gives him a show. There will be another series next year, apparently.
Not Gruen out
The purpose of comedy, it is often said, is to speak truth to power. But comedy’s fatal flaw is that it needs to speak truths whilst also being funny, and once people are laughing they’re probably less inclined to overthrow the powerful. Those who argue that comedy is a conservative artform have a point – comedy may point out some truths about the powerful, but it also makes you feel a lot better about them existing (if only for a few minutes).
Comedy can still make the powerful quake in their boots, of course. Dictators aren’t big fans of dissident comedians and tend to imprison then for sedition, but censorship is a rather crude way of silencing comedy and one which will ultimately win you fewer friends. A much better tactic is to join in the fun – everyone will love you for having the gumption to take the piss out of yourself, and a surprising number of people won’t notice the difference between your officially-sanctioned comedy and a genuinely hard-hitting one by a satirist who hates your guts.
Which brings us to the various Gruen programs (no, really). Lots of people love them, yet ask those same people what they think of advertising executives and they’ll use phrases like “lying sleaze-bags” and “rip-off merchants”. Along with tabloid journalists, real estate agents, lawyers and anonymous bloggers, advertising executives are some of the most hated people out there. But present the public with a panel full of the cheery-faced fuckers, and make it look like they’re having a jolly wheeze of a time revealing a few trade secrets in between Wil Anderson’s gags, and it’s hello audience adoration, howdy-do ratings success!
The fact that large numbers of otherwise sane and rational people have come to love the advertising industry isn’t much of a surprise, perhaps – advertising executives don’t make it unless they know how to rebrand a turd – but the public’s four-year love affair with the show is quite something. Gruen may have undergone some format changes, but it’s still exactly the same show with the same host and the same panellists talking about the same sorts of subjects, often using the same observations and gags as part of some strikingly similar segments. Perhaps the show’s many fans have learnt nothing about the techniques of advertising – we refer you to our earlier point about how Gruen has merely made it look like it’s revealing trade secrets.
There was talk yesterday on a couple of websites, such as TV Tonight, that this evening’s episode of Gruen Planet could be the last Gruen ever. Don’t believe it – Gruen is not ending. It cannot be killed, and there’s no way in hell they’ve run out of slightly different versions of the original concept. Next year we’ll probably be invited to watch The Gruen Games live from London. Or there’ll be a Gruen look at reality TV, or gardening, or the rural economy. Too many people like it too much for this to be the end. This is merely adieu.
Numbers In Action
We’ve got nothing against The Chaser.
(and let’s just pause to reflect that, by saying we have nothing against them, we’ve made certain the rest of this post will prove the opposite)
In fact, while their current series The Hamster Wheel might be somewhat hit-and-miss, when it hits it’s probably the best thing they’ve done yet. But it’s worth nothing that this week (or maybe last week, our maths is a little shoddy) is the 10 year anniversary of The Chaser’s first appearance on the ABC.
Yep, (roughly) ten years ago, in October and November of 2001, The Election Chaser screened on the ABC, featuring a bunch of fresh-faced young comedians huddling under Andrew Denton’s wing as they took swings at both sides of politics in what would soon become their trademark style. And thus, with a few bumps along the way – reportedly they were pretty much sacked when the ABC didn’t renew CNNNN (hence Charles Firth heading off to the US), with The Chaser’s War On Everything basically being their comeback show – a legend was born.
Oddly, not much has been made of this anniversary by The Chaser themselves. Presumably it doesn’t mean much to them; they were doing their newspaper long before the TV show, and were working on the television show long before it aired. Still, The Hamster Wheel did start airing roughly on the tenth anniversary of their first appearance on the ABC: so where’s the party?
Perhaps pointing out that this is their tenth year on the ABC is something they’d rather avoid, considering they’re still occasionally described as “The Chaser Boys”. That’s not a cheap shot (okay, it’s not entirely a cheap shot): before The Chaser settled in for the long stretch, satirical comedy teams on the ABC had a life span of a few years at best. Australia You’re Standing In It had two series, in 1983 and 1984; BackBerner went four years, from 1999 to 2002. Perhaps the longest run prior to The Chaser’s was Max Gillies. The Gillies Report ran one series in 1984-85; follow-up The Gillies Republic had one series in 1986 and then nothing until Gillies and Company in 1992.
In contrast, The Chaser have made the following over the last decade : The Election Chaser (6 episodes, 2001), CNNNN (19 episodes, 2002-2003), The Chaser Decides Mk 1 (4 episodes, 2004), The Chaser’s War On Everything (60 episodes, 2006-2009), The Chaser Decides Mk 2 (2 episodes, 2007), Yes We Canberra (5 episodes, 2010), The Hamster Wheel (8 episodes, 2011). Pretty impressive stuff.
You can take this somewhat staggering amount of output two ways: either they’re impressive comedy technicians and the only people able to create material at the rapid and demanding rate required by the national broadcaster’s ceaseless desire for topical humour, or they’re hogging all the seats on the topical comedy bus and not giving anyone else a go.
Again, for a large part of their career we think they’ve done good work (and for the rest they were making The Chaser’s War on Everything under what seems to have been fairly stressful circumstances), but does anyone really think that for a full decade they’ve been the only comedians working in Australia who could make sketches about politics?
[we won’t mention The GlassHouse if you don’t. And anyway, that was a panel show]
It’s not like they’ve really changed up their material over the decade either. CNNNN cloaked their mix of topical references and media swipes in the guise of a fake news channel; after that it’s just been various members sitting at a desk talking about topical references and media swipes before throwing to segments about topical references and media swipes (and the occasional musical number). They used to do pranks; thankfully now, not so much. They used to do vox pops; again, thankfully not so much.
That said, good luck naming any comedian who radically changes their work over their career. Sure, there have been some, but not many, and not any in this country: Barry Humphries and Shaun Micallef, Max Gillies and Tony Martin are still basically making the same kinds of jokes they always have. Our problem – such as it is – isn’t with The Chaser making the same show over and over again…
[though actually, what happened to that sitcom they’d occasionally talk about? Why don’t they try something different, at least format wise? Having a giant hamster as a desk doesn’t count, and changing up the format might make the actual jokes seem fresh…ish]
… as it is with there being no other “satirical” comedy voices getting a go at the ABC for a full decade. What, The Chaser have set standards so high no-one else could possibly reach them so hey, don’t even bother? At this point we’d usually reel off a list of contenders for The Chaser’s job, but how can we? The whole point is that, by staying put for a full decade, no competing voices (and traditionally the ABC is the ground floor for TV satire, even if all the floors above have now been demolished) have been given a chance. Though the Restoring the Balance team on TripleJ have done a pretty decent job with political satire over the last few years – perhaps giving them a television special isn’t the worst idea ever?
Until The Chaser arrived a decade ago the satire slot on the ABC was relatively open with fresh faces cycling through on a semi-regular basis; now it’s a closed shop, no other applicants need apply. That’s not to say The Chaser isn’t worthy of the work, or that they haven’t been doing as good a job as any. But isn’t it time the ABC at least started to consider bringing some other voices on board before The Chaser Boys start getting around on walking frames?
It Hardy seems fair
When Marieke Hardy – writer / creator of ABC comedy series Laid and former breakfast presenter on ABC radio station TripleJ, amongst many other strings to her media bow – updated her blog on Tuesday, she promoted it via Twitter with these words…
I name and shame my ‘anonymous’ internet bully. Liberating business! Join me!
This tweet was then re-tweeted more than 100 times, which caused her blog site to be throttled to such an extent that anyone visiting on Wednesday night got only a “site quota exceeded” message. Then there was a new blog from Hardy Thursday entitled “Too much traffic equals blog meltdown equals…”. It’s contents were simply…
Enough oxygen. It’s a sign from the baby Jebus.
In Hardy’s site-crashingly-popular – and now pulled – blog she named and posted a photograph of a man she says has “had a bee in his bonnet about me for over five years”. She went on to describe how this man posted anonymous comments on her old blog, and then started up his own blog “seemingly with the singular purpose of letting people know what a tedious harpy I was”.
Upon reading the blog in question, we couldn’t help but agree with Hardy that the posts featured there are “rambling” and “poisonous”. They also seem to us to be written by someone with A LOT of problems, mainly about women expressing their sexuality. He may have some valid points in there somewhere about cronyism in the media, but it’s unlikely you’d want to wade through all the bile to find them.
Hardy says she was prompted to name and shame this man by the #mencallmethings campaign, which has been a much-discussed online in recent days and originated from two articles published in New Statesman and The Guardian last week. As these articles rightly point out, female writers, bloggers and opinion-givers receive an unjustifiable amount of personally abusive and sexually threatening comments from men online. A number of women writers have come out with shocking stories and spoken of how comments of this nature have made them want to give up writing. Clearly this is not a good situation, whatever you think of the work of the likes of Marieke Hardy.
What we question, though, is Hardy’s decision to name and shame this particular man. If she was at the point where she had evidence that it was him – and she says she’s known for months – could she not have gone to the police or lawyers? Did the #mencallmethings campaign just make her snap after years of anger, and then pull the piece when sense (or possibly wise counsel)* caught up with her? And what of this from her original blog:
Since discovering his identity I think any real potency behind [his] hate blogs has dissipated completely. He just seems like a fairly sad man who should probably find another hobby.
If that’s what she really thinks then why write the piece at all?
This is a difficult, complex topic. You have a well-connected but lacklustre writer who writes largely about herself and her sex life, whose work has attracted years of unjustifiable, sexist abuse from an anonymous man. The man in question has a couple of decent points to make, but seems only to be able to make them via the aforementioned unjustifiable, sexist abuse. And finally, there’s the legal system, which has proven time and time again to be incapable of dealing with sexual abuse of women without making those women victims suffer again and again for it. You can see why a victim might take the law into their own hands, but enlisting your online followers in this fight hardly seems fair.
As for why we in particular care… well, Hardy – in her guise as television writer – seems to have found a niche as a comedy writer with Laid. And as we’ve mentioned in the past, at the moment there’s a bit of a pushback from the comedy community against social media in general. This is an extreme and very personal example of it, but it’s an example nonetheless: someone’s gone online to rail against a comedian they don’t like, and the comedian’s swung back.
While we’d be the first to suggest Hardy’s writing isn’t all that funny – look up our posts on Laid and you’ll see we already have – in one way it’s easy to see why she’s been lumped in with actual comedians: like many of the best comedians, her work is intensely personal. For one, you can’t imagine anyone else writing much of her column work, though that’s mostly because pretty much all of it is about herself and her somewhat cultivated quirks (she loves Bob Ellis! she doesn’t mind getting her gear off!).
More than just about anyone working in Australian comedy at the moment, the focus of Marieke Hardy’s work is Marieke Hardy. She’s put a lot of time and effort into cultivating and promoting her “sexy / quirky / smart” image (there aren’t a lot of other comedians in this country putting out topless promotional photos of themselves), and we’re hardly the first or the only critics to suggest that lead character Roo in Laid was a very thinly disguised version of Hardy’s public persona. And as is often the case, when someone – in this case, someone who’s writing takes a deeply unpleasant tone – wants to take a swing at a comedian who talks about their personal life, their personal life is what they attack.
None of this in any way excuses anyone making a personal attack on her. We do think it’s worth pointing out that if someone’s entire act is based around “LOOK AT ME!!” right down to publishing a collection of stories about their relationships with a drawing of them on the cover (as shown here), then it’s even more important than usual to keep the focus on the work, not the person who created it. Those who dislike Hardy’s work should bear that in mind. She does have over 50,000 twitter followers she can sic on you, for one.
*Or perhaps the author of the Hardy-hating blog was telling the truth when he claimed (the day after Hardy’s post) that he in fact wasn’t the person Hardy named. Supposedly he’d used his top-level I.T. skills to shift blame / her attention onto an innocent third party, who he then suggested could cash in big by suing Hardy over her post.
Coda: It seems that Hardy’s brief attack worked: the blogger she targeted has announced he’ll be closing his blog down in a few weeks. He still claims to not be the person Hardy named & shamed though.