Australian Tumbleweeds
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.
The Biggest Story in Australian Comedy This Year…
… seems to have been that “twitter killed Live From Planet Earth“. We’ve read a couple of year-in-review stories now and it has somehow become accepted fact even though it’s complete and utter bullshit. And you know we wouldn’t break out the italics unless we really meant it.
For those not in the know, here’s the Sydney Morning Herald‘s 2011-in-review take on what happened:
The post-birth struggle of new programs is never pretty but few endure the kind of savaging that was given to Channel Nine’s live sketch comedy from the co-writer of The Young Ones and Blackadder. It was barely out of the gate when the popular press knifed it, kicking it on to Twitter where the court of public opinion put it on trial, judged it and sentenced it to death. Elton tried to respond to the Twiticism the following week but by then the damage was done.
Seems fair enough… if you come from a planet where all television shows are created equal and it’s only media attention – or lack thereof – that creates fluctuations in viewing numbers. Hang on a second – could it be that all the media snark aimed at twitter’s supposed role in the demise of LFPE boils down to hostility towards a form of media ye olde journalists don’t control? Is all this is as simple as “we’ll tell you what’s good and what’s not, none of this getting together and making up your own minds, thanks very much”? Well duh.
The reason why we keep bringing this crap up – and just be grateful we’re not going on about how supposedly Angry Boys‘ ratings flop was because it was “too controversial” while we’re at it – is because it’s an attempt to impose a narrative on events that isn’t born out by the facts. Here’s what these stories want you to come away thinking:
A): Live From Planet Earth was destroyed by internet haters and (to a lesser extent) the tabloid press.
B): Without those haters, it would have been a success.
Therefore C): Twitter and the tabloid press are violent, out-of-control forces denying YOU good television.
Meanwhile, over in the sane corner, we have this:
A): Live From Planet Earth was arse.
B): Blind Freddy could have seen that.
Therefore C): After a second and third episodes that were only slightly better than the terrible first but rated much worse, it got the chop LIKE DOZENS OF TELEVISION SHOWS BEFORE IT.
Or put another way, remember Let Loose Live? It was the previous attempt at live sketch comedy on Australian commercial television. It screened back in the pre-twitter days of 2005 and – we hope you’re sitting down because we don’t want to blow your mind or anything – it was axed after two episodes. One less than LFPE got. Cue dramatic sting.
To be fair, it’s easy to see why the media keep running with this “twitter killed LFPE” story: it’s an actual story, while “dud show gets axed” most certainly isn’t. And these days, when the career of Fairfax-sponsored tools like Jim Schembri seem to be based entirely on talking shit so enraged readers will leave a comment on their blog, any vaguely controversial viewpoint is going to be hammered home over and over whatever its dubious relation to the facts.
But that’s where our charity ends: this is, by any reasonable measure, a massive distortion of the facts and the way it just keeps on being trotted out over and over is, quite frankly, giving us the shits. If anything, all the twitter chat around LFPE helped it by promoting discussion and getting awareness of the show out there. According to, oh, the last two hundred and seventy years of promoting entertainment – handily summarized as ANY PUBLICITY IS GOOD PUBLICITY – twitter did LFPE nothing but a big fat favour.
Well, unless you view making people aware of a show as a bad thing, which presumably the Fairfax press does. And maybe they have a point. After all, we are talking about a show featuring a cast largely culled from the aforementioned flop Let Loose Live and the dumping ground that was Comedy Inc. Why, if twitter hadn’t attacked LFPE so relentlessly, it’s obvious it would have simply plodded along week after week doing no harm to anyone. Apart from twitter, what could have possibly driven it off the air? It’s not like the people running Nine have any other way of measuring the numbers of people actually watching it per week… HANG ON A SECOND!!
We could go on and on. Obviously the number of comedy flops that didn’t get axed in the wake of LFPE – Good News World comes to mind, though The Joy of Sets might qualify too – tends to suggest that the commercial networks have learnt that a high profile axing is at least as damaging as letting a dud slowly fizzle out. Sadly, they also seem to have learnt that axing a show before it airs is even less damaging, if the fate of The Games 2012 is any guide.
Our real point here will come as no surprise: there are a lot of vested interests out there who like to paint flops as hits and shift the blame for duds onto viewers rather than producers. That’s kind of the reason why we do the Tumbleweed Awards every year: to make it clear that some shows just weren’t any damn good. So hey, if you haven’t voted, get on board here. While there are no doubt many better ways to express your disapproval, this is the one right in front of you at this very moment. That has to count for something, right?
Just Your Typical Act Of Commercial Bastardry
For those of you wondering why you haven’t been hearing much about the much-anticipated (by us) revival of John Clarke’s The Games, wonder no more:
The Nine Network has scrapped plans for a sequel to the Olympic-themed mockumentary The Games.
Nine announced plans at the end of 2010 for The Games: London Calling, a follow-up to the series which aired on the ABC in the lead up to the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games.
It starred comedians John Clarke, Bryan Dawe and Gina Riley as the Olympic Organising Committee.
After a number of delays, a network insider has confirmed to The Sun-Herald that the series will no longer proceed.
Instead, Nine has given Hamish Blake and Andy Lee a second series, which will see the comedy duo travel to London prior to the Games.
It’s unclear whether The Games: London Calling will have a future back on the ABC or another broadcaster.
While it’s tempting – oh so very, very tempting – to suggest that Hamish & Andy’s drive for a London-based series is what’s scuppered a show that, let’s be honest, would have been roughly a billion times funnier than yet another batch of re-heated feel-good stunts, let’s not forget where the real villainy lies: the Channel Nine boardroom. They’re the ones who’ve axed The Games, and any attempt to paint it as anyone else’s fault is utter bollocks.
C’mon, do you think Nine is only going to have one show providing serious coverage of the Olympics? They couldn’t put on two, obviously very different, sports-themed comedies in the one year? Hamish & Andy’s London drive probably didn’t help – in fact, it probably made the Nine bosses decision a lot easier – but in the end it remains the bosses’ decision no matter how many times news reports say we’re getting Hamish & Andy “instead” of The Games.
They’re the ones who don’t think you can cope with two comedy shows about sport in the one year, but feel confident you can handle The Celebrity Apprentice five fucking times a week. They’re the ones who axed or shunted to the graveyard just about every comedy show they aired in 2011, but just couldn’t shovel out enough episodes of The Block. Shit, we should just be grateful they didn’t get John Clarke to host a cooking show. Or a revival of Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush. Or a topless bar fight on Underbelly.
Australian Tumbleweeds 2011 – voting now open
Voting is 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 voting form can be found here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/tumblies2011votes
You have until midnight on Sunday 1st January 2012 to vote. Please only vote once. Full rules and instructions can be found with the voting form.
The winners will be announced on or about Australia Day.
As always, the official Twitter hashtag is #tumblies.
Do They Know It’s Christmas Time At All?
Well, they sure do over at the ABC: as a couple of our readers have already pointed out, the ABC just plum forgot to nominate Chris Lilley’s Angry Boys for any of those highly regarded Logie Awards for 2011. All together now:
Ahhahahahahahahahahaha *deep breath* hahahahahahah *heavy sigh* heh.
This story alone is funnier than anything that happened across the twelve big weeks that Angry Boys steadfastly refused to develop into anything more than Lilley wacking off in the face of Australia, especially when you consider it’s basically the same as that “look – he’s pissing on stuff!” running gag except this time the ABC has pissed on Lilley’s dreams of scoring even more Logie-related acclaim.
Of course, outside of Lilley’s House of Sulking, does anyone actually think this is a bad thing for him? Could this not, in fact, be read as the ABC (accidentally or not) doing him a favour by sparing him the serious embarrassment of failing to scoop the pool this time out? After all, with his previous shows the Logies have basically run at him with their pants around their ankles ready to douse him with their love, but with Angry Boys doing an excellent job of shedding viewers week after week and a bunch of semi-decent comedy shows also coming out in 2011 it’s not exactly crazy to imagine that he wouldn’t have won a damn thing this time around.*
Not to mention that if he’d actually been nominated and failed to win, it wouldn’t just be a large reminder that Angry Boys was, how you say… shithouse? – it’d also be a direct rebuff to the narrative the ABC and Lilley’s fans have been creating about the series where, while ye olde ratings were down, viewers on the internet and on DVD more than made up for it. Those mystery viewers have all had plenty of time to get caught up and they all can fill out a Logies form: if the show had failed to do as well as his previous efforts at the Logies, dodging the “big fat flop” tag would become that much harder.
In short: Lilley probably is complaining more for show than for real. This way he can simply blame it all on the ABC, claim “I totally would have won, you guys” in the Ja’ime voice while wearing the wig for no reason whatsoever, and move on to planning an eighteen part series based entirely on the time he heard some kid at a bus stop say “totes”.
*hands up anyone who hasn’t heard the rumours that the Logies are largely decided by network publicists buying up copies of TV Week and sending in voting forms for the shows they want to win? Okay, now hands up anyone who thinks that this kind of “whoops, sorry, we forgot to put your name in” event may have started out as “whoops, sorry, we’re not going to throw our weight behind your Logies push this year”. That many? For shame, you cynical sods. Good luck to Adam Hills, by the way.
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.