Australian Tumbleweeds
Australian Tumbleweed Awards 2011 – Worst Film Comedy
Snowtown is what Australian film does best: a grim tale of bogans murdering each other. Well, okay, it’s not what Australian film does best – it’s more that it’s what the people who make Australian film like to think they do best. Go on, go enrol at a film school and tell everyone you want to make light-hearted romantic comedies. We’ll wait here.
Big Mamma’s Boy was a return to the classic wog comedy that… wait, wasn’t there a wog comedy just last year? And wasn’t that the only real candidate for this award then? Surely it’s the Vietnamese’s turn by now?
Here’s a test: have you ever heard anyone tell a “little Johnny” joke? Do you even know what a “little Johnny” joke is? Because we don’t and we’re supposed to be experts in this kind of Ocker down home Aussie comedy thing. And by “experts”, we mean we’ve listened to our fair share of King Billy Cokebottle.
In yet another dire year for Australian big screen comedy, Big Mamma’s Boy basically wins here by default. That’s not to say it didn’t have problems: in 2011 a romantic comedy where the lead rushes to get married largely to prove he isn’t gay isn’t so much hilarious as offensive. But it least it tried. Mostly it tried to see how many times it could get away with the old “It looks like he’s getting a blow job – BUT HE’S NOT!!” joke, but when it comes to getting laughs from Australian film that’s still a big step up from the usual pile of dismembered bogans.
THE RESULTS OF THE NEXT CATEGORY, WORST OVERALL COMEDY, WILL BE ANNOUNCED AT 2:00PM EDT.
Australian Tumbleweed Awards 2011 – Worst Sketches
Sketch comedy, like radio comedy, is a writer’s medium. Performers are important too, but unless the writing is sharp a sketch show is sunk.
Balls of Steel Australia, being a pranks show, didn’t really have writers, just some obscure attention-seekers who’d been assigned an annoying character or quirk. On one level it was better than Good News World – the level where it didn’t have aspirations to be anything other than a pointless time-filler, and can therefore be said to have not failed.
The now axed Hungry Beast focused a bit more on the serious side of its remit in 2011. Much of their comedy output seemed to be sub-Chaser street interviews or sketches which assumed hilarity would ensue if serious topics were expressed through hip hop. See “I’m A Climate Scientist“ if you want an example of the latter.
Many of us would like to see a revival of good, topical sketch comedy on Australian television, but this year’s winner did little other than prove once again that this will not be possible without a Year Zero approach. Good News World had a very experienced cast and writing team, many of whom have written for some decent and notable shows, so…what went wrong? Did an entire world of news not provide enough scope for them? Given the number of times Akmal turned up as Colonel Gaddafi that is a distinct possibility. Or was it more that those involved just aren’t very good at their jobs?
THE RESULTS OF THE NEXT CATEGORY, WORST FILM COMEDY, WILL BE ANNOUNCED AT 1:30PM EDT.
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.