Australian Tumbleweeds
Great Comedy Myths of Our Time #1 – Twitter is killing comedy
We’ve all heard them, people in the media droaning on about how awful it is that decent, honest, talented comedians and shows are being ruthlessly picked-on by bored, unidentifiable people on social media, tweeting and Facebooking their vindictive opinions with the express purpose of KILLING PEOPLE’S CAREERS. Victims of these faceless snarksters include Ben Elton’s Live From Planet Earth, a show which in the pre-Twitter era would unquestionably have been a massive and deserved ratings hit, feted throughout the land as a work of unparalleled genius. Or not.
In this post we’re going to run through the arguments on both sides of this ongoing debate, starting with those of the affirmative. This conversation about the recent sitcom Twentysomething, which took place between Charlie Pickering, Jess Harris and Jon Faine on ABC Victoria’s Conversation Hour on 28th September 2011, covers most of them.
CP: …I’ve been very impressed by the response to the show, which…you have a look at anything vaguely in the realm of comedy in Australia seems to get torn down…
JH: Yeah.
CP: …almost the moment it hits the screen, but you have been very warmly received by the audience. Was that a relief? Were you waiting for the Twitter backlash, for everyone to be really critical once you’d really put yourself out there on the ABC?
JH: Yeah a little bit, I mean I’m so nervous of Facebook and Twitter, anything like that sort of scares me, that whole world, because it’s so instant and can be really nasty, so we were definitely worried. Josh and I actually used to sit down and say to each other the worst possible comments that we could think of, that people might say about us. Like “They’re ageing hacks, who do they think they are?”, and all this stuff, so we were ready for it…
[FAINE LAUGHS]
CP: I like that “ageing” is the worst thing you could possibly say about yourself…
JH: No, but, you know…
JF: Yeah, they’re nearly 30, I mean reeeeaaaalllly…
JH: We were prepared for the worst, hoping for the best, and we were really lucky I think because it does have that sort of element of the underdog, you know, it was on Channel 31, people want to get behind it. It’s more when shows sort of, people are bigger names and there’s bigger hype around it, it gets cut down a lot more.
CP: Yeah.
JH: So, I think because we sort of floated under the radar, and ABC2 is such a great home for it, that really helped us, so we were worried by everyone’s really been positive.
CP: I think you have cracked the code of avoiding a Twitter backlash by saying worse things yourself…
JH: Yeah.
CP: …Tony Martin actually, when The Joy of Sets went to air, he was on Twitter criticising his own show…
JH: Really?
CP: …on Twitter…
JF: Against himself.
CP: …but saying the most offensive, horrible things about himself and about the show…
[FAINE LAUGHS]
CP: …but what I think is brilliant about it is once the faceless people in Twitter who think they can say anything anonymously, once they know that one of the people they’re talking about is in that space with them they all went quiet.
JF: Are they all “flaming trolls”, or something? Isn’t that the…come on, you…?
JH: I don’t know that one.
CP: Is that the terminology?
JF: Yeah, yeah, you burn yourself, you’re a flaming troll, you say the worst possible thing, and of you go from there…it’s insurance, it’s terribly clever if you can be your own worst critic then nothing else is going to hurt you.
JH: Exactly, if you know what the faults are about it… I knew that people were going to have reactions to my character, say quite nasty things, I’m quite emotionally manipulative and I’m not necessarily, I’m an instantly un-likeable person, and people aren’t used to seeing girls play those roles all the time…
JF: An emotionally manipulative person would say that about themselves.
JH: I’m manipulating you right now.
JF: You think you are, but…
JH: I’ve got you in a web.
JF: I’m up to that, I’m up to that!
Wow! Looks like the tweeps and the Facebookers have really got this country’s comedians rattled. Which would be all very well if they themselves weren’t all over social media, spruiking their wares at all hours of the day and night, and stinking up the place with sarky observations roughly akin to the ones they’re objecting to when they come from ordinary people and happen to be about shows they’ve involved in. Could it be that their real objection is to the fact that they are no longer the only ones standing on the stage, as it were?
On social media the power balance is rather different to that of the performer and their audience. Ordinary, everyday tweep @Johnny100Followers can get as many re-tweets as, say, @Wil_Anderson, if he manages to tweet the right thing at the right time. And when it comes to big issues and breaking news, it’s often not the comedians on Twitter who get in first or tweet the best gags. Within seconds of anything happening thousands of amateur gagsmiths are tweeting puns and satirical observations about it. In a lot of cases they’re funnier than anything the Good News World team can come up with, or The Chaser will put to air in The Hamster Wheel – you also don’t have to wait days to hear them. In this context, is it any wonder that social media is full of people picking apart comedy shows, and, essentially, demanding that professional comedians are funnier than the amateur ones? Is that really so unreasonable, or unfair?
It’s not exactly a new phenomenon either. In the pre-internet age whenever two or more were gathered in front of the telly it was on for young and old. Families, groups of friends, whoever…would dissect a show as it went to air, laughing at poor fashion choices, slagging-off lame comedians and dismissing hours of work by skilled professionals with the phrase “Well, that was a waste of time”. The only difference now is that there’s a way to express such views beyond the confines of your family or circle of friends, and, if your ideas have resonance with others, to see them spread like wildfire. No wonder people in the media are scared, this isn’t like the old days when members of the public objecting to their work were essentially confined to private correspondence or the odd letter to a newspaper, people’s views on your TV show or stand-up set are out there forever, and they can’t be dismissed.
So while it’s hardly news that people talk about how bad some shows are, and that this talk eventually filters its way back to the network, what Twitter does do is speed the whole process up. In earlier years general discussion or week-by-week ratings figures would eventually have an effect – in 1999 The Mick Molloy Show was taken off air after eight weeks, but the controversy that crippled it (“Mick’s pissing on his couch!”) was all around episode one. Now that the “get this shit off” response is all but instantaneous, these days The Mick Molloy Show would be lucky to see week two. That causes a bit of a problem when it comes to comedy, which often requires time to settle in. Time that, in the case of anything remotely high-profile, it now rarely gets before being shunted off to a graveyard slot (at best) or being axed (at worse).
The other problem is that if Twitter is accurate – and despite the comedian’s complaints, we reckon it’s at least as accurate as any other method of gauging audience response – the results might prove to be a little depressing. Australian comedy is often crap, but it’s crap because it aims (relatively) high and fails. By “high” we mean scripted sketch shows, panel shows, sitcoms, news round-ups and the like. What we’re not currently getting is a bunch of prank shows and people making jokes about YouTube clips, even though that kind of thing traditionally does fairly well.
It’ll only take one lowbrow prank show to get praise on Twitter for the flipside of the current situation to become clear. After all, shows like MasterChef and Australian Idol get a lot of positive Twitter buzz; it’s not much of a leap to suggest that a show as tired yet pandering as the second series of The Chaser’s War on Everything – which was a rating hit – would also have been a hit on Twitter. Throw more pies at politicians!
Or it could just be that people on Twitter really are just knee-jerk haters trying to get attention for themselves with their nasty comments. In which case that’ll become obvious the first time Twitter hates a show that rates well and is generally seen as a success. Oddly, that doesn’t seem to have happened yet. Meanwhile, back in the past, anyone remember 2005’s Let Loose Live? Live sketch show kinda like Live From Planet Earth, also generally seen as crap, also axed after a few weeks? All that played out before Twitter was a gleam in the internet’s eye.
There are signs that the days of “Twitter took my series away” are already over: both The Joy of Sets and Good News World are still screening (albeit in later timeslots), despite fairly rapid ratings drops. Twitter didn’t kill off Hamish & Andy’s Gap Year either, and it’s had no effect whatsoever on any show screening on the ABC. It seems that Twitter is mostly just a source of easy quotes for media reports on shows that didn’t do all that well. When a show fails, Twitter is to blame; when a show succeeds, Twitter is nowhere to be found.
And while we’re here, we think it’s worth putting into context the tweets Tony Martin posted as The Joy of Sets episode 1 was going to air. Here they all are:
Tweet 1 – This is already shit! I give it twenty-five seconds. #joyofsets
Tweet 2 – Oh, yeah, right, like I couldn’t see THAT coming, you Andrew Denton wannabe! #joyofsets
Tweet 3 – Obviously, the TV guides have mistakenly listed this as a comedy! #joyofsets
Tweet 4 – I’d like to laugh, but I can’t hear what they’re saying over the sound of the show SUCKING BALLS! #joyofsets
Tweet 5 – If this show were a lesser-known Ealing-based screenwriter, it’d be Angus McFAIL! #joyofsets
We disagree with Charlie Pickering’s assessment that they were “ the most offensive, horrible things about himself and about the show”, they were jokes sending-up a certain type of rabid tweep – and they sent them up rather well. They also failed to shut down online debate on The Joy of Sets, which rages to this day – as it has every right to do.
Back In The Ring To Take Another Swing
We’ve already explained where The Chaser got the name of their internet media award “The Schembri” – here, go take a look. Back? Okay, so in this week’s Age Green Guide Jim Schembri – who regularly reviews television there – handled the reviews for Wednesday October 26th. Wednesday, as we all know, is the day The Hamster Wheel airs, and sure enough, there was a review of The Hamster Wheel there. Only thing was, while every other show being reviewed for that Wednesday was reviewed by Schembri, The Hamster Wheel wasn’t. It was reviewed by Paul Kalina, and a nice warm positive review it was too. “More please”? Sure thing!
So what gives? Why didn’t Schembri get a chance to reply to The Chaser? Yeah, on the surface, it’s pretty obvious why: they didn’t want to stoop to playing The Chaser’s game. But who’s “they”? If you didn’t want Schembri to review The Hamster Wheel, why give him Wednesday as his review day? If you had to give him Wednesdays for whatever reason, why not just say “don’t review The Hamster Wheel” and let him do a full page of reviews as usual for The Green Guide? Why, in short, pointedly have him review shows on a Wednesday then get someone else in to review The Hamster Wheel unless you specifically wanted to highlight the fact that he’s not reviewing it?
[Perhaps he did write a review and it was edited out? Answers on the back of a postcard, please.]
This wouldn’t matter so much – though it must be a little awkward around the office for Schembri considering the supplement he works for gave a good review to a show that pointedly makes fun of him and his lack of credibility – if not for the fact that early in 2011 you couldn’t pick up The Age or The Green Guide without reading a glowing review of Laid, a show created and written by Marieke Hardy, former Green Guide columnist.
There’s no need to recap our seemingly endless whining on the topic – check out examples here, here and here. Suffice to say, it seems The Age and The Green Guide in particular have no problem whatsoever in taking a personal interest in a ABC show when it suits. Seriously, one column was written by someone saying “Being a friend of Hardy’s…” without finishing that sentence with “… completely disqualifies me from writing about the quality of her show here”. So why is it okay to use the power of the press to help out one (former) employee, but seemingly not okay to use that same power to defend a (current) one?
Well for one, the Hardy coverage was positive; they were constantly talking up Laid across the board. But why does that make a difference to us, the readers? The Green Guide’s review pages were hopelessly compromised when they constantly praised a series made by a former staffer – it’s difficult to see how they’d be any more biased if they now attacked someone who was taking a swing at a current staffer.
It could be that they don’t want to draw any more attention to it – not that a small review in the Green Guide is in anyway comparable to coverage in a high-rating national television program. It could be that they don’t want to give The Chaser any more ammunition, but what ammunition could they possibly give considering Schembri’s name is already a punchline to an (obscure) joke about shoddy on-line media? Who’s to say Schembri – who’s described himself as “a long time Chaser fan” in the past – wouldn’t have given The Hamster Wheel a positive review? Maybe he enjoys being in on the fun?
Or perhaps they just wish the whole thing would go away. It’s hardly as if the actual story behind Schembri’s on-line antics showers him or The Age in glory. And with The Schembri award quietly dropped from this weeks Hamster Wheel (our guess is that it was crowded out by royal gags – though legal pressure from Schembri can’t be completely ruled out) perhaps they’ll get their wish.
What all this does serve to do is highlight the intertwined nature of television and the people who write about it in this country, and how that makes getting solid, unbiased coverage of television increasingly difficult to find in the mainstream press (hey, don’t expect it here either). Oh, and it also highlights how tough it must be being Jim Schembri around The Age:
“The Hamster Wheel is one of [The Chasers] best outings yet” – The Green Guide.
“[The Chaser’s] satiric takedowns are excellent” – The Green Guide
The Schembri winner in episode 2 of The Hamster Wheel: a story about someone farting on live television.
The Better Project
We’re big fans of Tony Martin, Ed Kavalee and Get This ‘round here, so it pains us to admit that we’ve been a bit disappointed by The Joy of Sets. The first episode was a good start, but things have been patchy since then, and the ratings dip that led Channel 9 to bump the show to 10.30pm seems to indicate that we’re not the only ones who’ve been a little underwhelmed by the series. But hey, at least it’s still on air.
So, what went wrong? We pointed out in our review of episode one that the show had some pacing problems, specifically that Tony and Ed seemed to be trying to cram too much in to the 22 minutes or so they had available. A few episodes later and that’s sort of been fixed, but there’s still a lot of time taken up with exposition, chummy back ‘n’ forths and those almost pointless mystery guests. And that’s a bit of a shame because this format doesn’t really play to Martin and Kavelee’s strengths, which as we saw in Get This were sketches, piss-farting around, and long, slow build-ups to gags which will run and run. When we’ve seen this sort of thing in The Joy of Sets it’s generally been in the form of pre-recorded sequences or the in-studio sketches, such as the Masterchef/glass of water sketch in episode 2, the title sequence recreations in episode 1, Tony’s speech to the jury in last night’s show, or Warwick Capper’s various cameos. These have been the highlights of the show, perhaps there should be more of these?
A number of Get This fans who got studio audience tickets to The Joy of Sets have pointed out that the recordings were really good, and that lots of funny material was cut out. That’s a shame, obviously, but those of us watching at home have to judge the show on what makes it to air – and sometimes that’s been a bit meh.
So, while by no means a disaster, The Joy of Sets is a disappointment, particularly when you consider what it could have been like. The Bazura Project, which premiered a week after The Joy of Sets, is roughly the same sort of show (except its about film), but miles better. Hosts Shannon Marinko and Lee Zachariah set a fast pace, and have crammed their show with sketches, fun facts and gags – and the heart and soul they’ve put into making it simply oozes from the screen.
We’re not writing off The Joy of Sets – there are a few more episodes to go, it’s is definitely improving, and a second series would probably be amazing – but for getting it right straight-out-of-the-blocks, The Bazura Project is by far the better program.
Cutting Julia’s lunch 2: A meatier sandwich
Our most recent blog asked whether ABC publicity have deliberately courted controversy in order to promote their comedy programs. We have since been contacted by an insider who had a few things to say about this.
Amongst other things, our insider said they would be “flabbergasted” if the ABC tried to court controversy about anything. “They want everyone to like them. Really badly” they said, adding that ABC publicists tended to be “conservative” and to “dive under their desks” whenever anyone lays into them.
“You’re right about them [the ABC] being obsessed about ratings. They absolutely are”, our source continued, but, they concluded, “while your theory makes a lot of sense on a logical level, it seems extremely unlikely to me”.
Perhaps our source has a point? ABC publicity weren’t exactly noted for their bravery following The Chaser’s “Make A Realistic Wish Foundation” sketch, for instance, so why assume they’re ringing up Colin Vickery or Andrew Bolt and dropping wild hints about upcoming controversies they might wish to be OUTRAGED by?
That said, it’s not like television shows just make themselves and plenty of people know their contents outside of the publicity department. There could well be a “rogue agent” or two in the ABC, feeding News Limited tit-bits of information, Crikey certainly seems to think so. Even if it’s true, it seems unlikely it’s their publicists. After all, wouldn’t that just be making more work for themselves – and unpleasant work at that?
Cutting Julia’s lunch
We tend to bang on a bit here about the way the ABC seem to be keen to promote every comedy they can as the most shocking and controversial thing since… well, the last time The Chaser / Chris Lilley made fun of dead people. Partly that’s because we’re simply interested in the behind-the-scenes goings on with Australian comedy; partly that’s because this focus on being shocking and controversial may actually extend beyond the promotional side of things and into the offices where they actually decide what comedies they give the green light to.
Look at it this way: in an increasingly crowded entertainment market, a new television show needs all the publicity it can get if it’s to attract viewers. The ABC, having no money, needs to get other newspapers and magazines talking about its’ programming to get the word out. So with that in mind, and with all other things being equal, which comedy show do you think they’d commission – the funny but inoffensive one, or the funny one that’ll get a bunch of outraged stories in The Herald-Sun once word leaks out about the Pedophile Prime Minister (“don’t let him kiss your baby”) routine?
(yes, we know all things are rarely equal. That’s why we dislike this trend: “controversial” comedy is often shit comedy, relying on shock tactics rather than decent performances or solid scripts)
With that said, we move across to the most recent episode of the Boxcutters podcast, which features an interview with At Home with Julia Executive Producer Rick Kalowski. In a frank conversation with co-host Josh Kinnal, Kalowski expresses surprise at the amount of controversy the series generated, saying that before it was broadcast he’d assumed that any initial controversy about the show focusing on the life of a sitting Prime Minister would die away as it progressed.
He continued:
RK: The one thing that we thought probably would engender a bit of controversy was the flag issue, but we never imagined how that would play out, I’ve got to say.
JK: That felt to me, a little bit…because that happened…that’s episode 3 when the flag issue happens…
RK: Yes.
JK: And, I read the press leading up to it…to me that felt a little bit forced, controversy-wise. It felt like the sort of thing that nobody would be aware of unless the ABC leaked it out there.
RK: No, they didn’t. I’m glad we’re speaking because one of the things I’d like to clarify is that in fact the ABC had nothing to do with it. Our attitude was that it was a really sweet, fun scene, and to the extent that it was going to cause any controversy it’d be nice if nobody knew about it before it happened. The way that it happened was there were preview copies sent out, obviously, to TV critics, of the episodes; David Knox who is a lovely guy, he’s the editor of TV Tonight, reviewed the episode and he averted to it without giving it away, because he’s a decent guy, he reviewed the episode positively but averted to the fact that there’s something controversial in it. Someone from the Herald-Sun in Melbourne, I think it was Colin Vickery, which is a News Limited paper, smelled the possibility of a story and tried to find out from David Knox – this is what I understand to be the case – tried to find out from David Knox what the controversial thing was, and Knox wouldn’t tell him. He tried to get, then, he tried to find out from the ABC and the ABC wouldn’t tell him, so as I understand it he took from the TV critic at the Herald-Sun the copy of the episode, which apparently he wasn’t meant to do, it was meant to be seen by the TV critic and not by him, and he then, as I understand it, watched it and took a screen capture of the shot with the flag and put it in the newspaper, and that’s how the story got out.
JK: Right…
RK: The ABC had no intention of drumming-up controversy, and in fact you’ll notice that one of the things that’s aggravated, for example, Neil Mitchell on 3AW in Melbourne so much is that the ABC wouldn’t allow, didn’t want, anybody to speak to Neil Mitchell and drum up further controversy, and in fact the ABC’s attitude was the opposite, which was actually to say nothing.
JK: You know, you could have saved yourself about two minutes of explanation if you’d just said “Colin Vickery”.
RK: Yes, probably…
The conversation then moved on to a discussion about Colin Vickery’s role in “manufacturing outrage” about a number of ABC comedy programs, and how certain sections of the media (the implication here is those newspapers owned by News Limited) have set narratives for covering comedy in general. If a show is on a commercial network (i.e. The Joy of Sets) stories will generally concern ratings numbers and possible dips therein. If a show is on the public broadcaster (i.e. shows made by The Chaser) journalists will jump on anything potentially controversial (indeed, you can virtually hear them pacing around waiting for something to go to air on The Hamster Wheel that they can be OUTRAGED by).
The problem with Kalowski’s version of events is that Colin Vickery – loathe as we are to admit this – was right: the scene in At Home with Julia was news-worthy. Or at least, news-worthy by the dubious standards of the newspaper he works for. Nice as it would be to believe that the Herald-Sun‘s TV reviewer would look at such a scene and go “Oh no, I won’t mention that scene to anyone else here”, finding out about “controversial things” and reporting on them is what newspapers – and all the people who write for them – are supposed to do.
After all, it’s not like the Herald-Sun doesn’t report on television stories on its front pages when it sees fit; to claim that Vickery “wasn’t meant to” report on a news-worthy moment in an upcoming television show verges on bizarre. By the standards of his workplace, that’s exactly what he was supposed to do – if the ABC doesn’t want the Herald-Sun talking about their shows, they can simply stop providing previews.
With that in mind, and considering that the News Limited reaction to pretty much everything on the ABC that’s even remotely scandalous is well-known and firmly understood even by us, did the ABC or Rick Kalowski honestly think that a scene showing the PM post-coital in her office under an Australian flag would be seen as “a really sweet, fun scene”? Realistically, the most positive spin that can be put on the scene is that they were hoping it would spark controversy and get viewers in for the following episode, only to have Vickery rain on their parade by bringing it to light before it actually aired.
So, ultimately, it’s hard to buy much of Kalowski’s argument that the ABC never tried to drum up publicity for this. Indeed, there’s some suggestion (or possibly evidence) that they actually tried to do this. Here’s what Dennis Dugandzic, Simon Band and Dan Barrett had to say in episode 198 of the podcast Televised Revolution (released 20 September):
DD: …I’m sure they [the ABC] realised they were going to get a bit of backlash…
SB: Realised, or deliberately sought?
DB: Well, it’s interesting you mention this gentleman, because I’m not sure if you guys receive the same ABC press releases that I do, or maybe I just don’t forward them on to you…
SB: Oh, what, the “ABC courts controversy” kinda stuff?
DB: Well, none of that, ABC, when they’ve got a show to promote, or whatever, you get a press release…and so I saw a press release come through, I think it may have been on Monday morning [19th September], may have been over the weekend, I’m not quite sure, could have been Friday [16th September]. Anyway, it was saying episode 3 of At Home with Julia is online to watch and there’s, like, a special thing for the media to login to the ABC to be able to preview things, it’s environmentally friendly, they’re not mailing discs around the place and what not, but people are given a login and can check out their media website. And so they said that episode 3’s online on this site and you can go and check it out, and I thought to myself “That’s a bit unusual, I’m sure there’s probably something to this”. I haven’t watched the episode yet, but I’ll be firing it up later tonight and try to get a review up before it airs tomorrow, but it struck me as interesting that they did this when I haven’t seen a similar press release for the previous two episodes, and so I think they really wanted the media to see this episode and then to spark the discussion.
SB: Off the top of my head, it went from one and bit million to eight hundred and something thousand in between that and the second week, so I would dare suggest that there is the desire to create interest in an otherwise uninteresting show.
DB: I would also suggest that this episode two, of a show courted controversy, that was always going to do down, people will tune in for that curiosity factor, but it’s not likely they’ll stick around on those same levels. I would suggest that for a satirical comedy about politics, on the ABC, on Wednesday nights at 9.30pm, 890,000 is a pretty respectable figure, and I believe you’ll find that that figure will also trounce anything that was on Nine or Ten that night.
SB: You raise an excellent point.
Again, it’s hard to be sure how accurate the suggestions in this conversation are – there must surely have been a press release issued for episode 1 of At Home with Julia, for instance – but Simon Band’s point about the ratings dip between episodes one and two of the show is interesting, despite Dan Barrett’s very reasonable counter-argument that a second episode dip was predictable and that episode 2’s ratings were respectable.
Anyway, what can we conclude from all this? In recent years we’ve seen the ABC become increasingly focused on getting good ratings for and generating a buzz about their programs in a desperate bid to justify their existence. All the while they have continued to undergo a sustained and co-ordinated attack from News Limited newspapers, right-wing talkback hosts, and cynical politicians. People like us would argue that the ABC’s continued existence should be justified by its commitment to quality and niche programming, and its services to regional areas, but that is not the strategy the ABC themselves have plumped for. They’re most interested in ratings, and they’ve worked hard to get them. 15 years ago the ABC didn’t make many populist programs, or have as many people working hard to publicise them. Now look at them: you can’t get people to shut up about The Slap.
So, is it really that hard to believe that someone in ABC publicity decided to that if they couldn’t stop News Limited from busting out their pre-determined invective, then perhaps they could use it to their advantage? Because if there’s one thing that will get lots of people tuning in it’s the promise of a shocking or controversial scene. And who cares if they all complain about it later, because lots of them will tune in next week for more.
As for the ABC being under threat because it aired a sitcom showing a post-coital Prime Minister and First Bloke under the flag… no. No government would shut down the ABC or slash its budget for that, or for any of the ABC comedy OUTRAGES of recent years. The truth of the matter is that the ABC has a rusted-on audience who would fight for it if it were under serious threat, and as the ABC make increasingly populist programs that audience is getting bigger and bigger – too big for News Limited or even a Tony Abbott-led government to kill. Maybe that ratings-led strategy was a good idea?
Give a dog a bone
As we often point out ’round these parts, we Australians don’t make much sketch comedy. Particularly the sort of “pure” sketch comedy shows associated with British television, programs like That Mitchell and Webb Look or The Armstrong and Miller Show, or if you’re old enough to remember them, A Bit of Fry & Laurie, Smith & Jones and French and Saunders.
The ABC’s contribution to this genre in the past decade seems to begin and end with 2004’s Eagle & Evans. Before that you have to go back to The Micallef P(r)ogram(me) (1998-2001), or stretch the definition slightly to include BackBerner (1999-2002) and The Chaser’s various shows (2001-present). Commercial TV, meanwhile, has served up Comedy Inc. (2003-2007), skitHOUSE (2003-2004), Big Bite (2003-2004), The Wedge (2006-2007), Double Take (2009), and (again, stretching the definition a bit) Let Loose Live (2005), Live From Planet Earth (2011) and Good News World (unbelievably still on air). Judging by that list it’s not hard to see why pure sketch comedy in this country, if not entirely dead, resembles such a fetid, lurching, zombie-like corpse that networks have mostly steered clear.
On the one hand the move away from pure sketch has resulted in some interesting shows which incorporate sketches – The Joy of Sets and The Bazura Project being the most recent examples. Of these two The Bazura Project is the show which seems to hark back most to those old school ideas of “pure” sketch, perhaps because it comes from Melbourne’s Channel 31, a station whose many strengths include not being run by ratings-obsessed executives who hold views like “sketch comedy is divisive” or “sketch comedy is uncool”. They just seem to let people get on with making the shows they want to make, which is great news for anyone who likes watching interesting comedy with the stamp of its creators all over it.
One such program is Channel 31’s latest sketch show Lost Dog, which airs Saturday at 10pm (or catch up online). Lost Dog combines “six tiny comedy shows in one big kennel” and includes the twisted family antics of The Peep Jeep, deadpan duo Mach/Lap, dark sitcom The Broken Ones and the surreal Neil Adams is Stuck in a Box. Cutting the shows together initially seemed like an odd thing for the creators to do, but it works fairly well and results in a cohesive program. It’s also pretty funny, and looks remarkably good for something which probably had a tiny budget.
If we were a betting blog, we’d lay down money that ABC executives will take a serious look at this show – their best new comedies of this year have come from Channel 31 after all.
NOTE: This post has been amended slightly to correct the detail mentioned in mike’s comment.
Getting Laid In The Shade
The reason why television executives are generally held in such low regard is because their main job related skill involves treating their job as one big test then spending all their time looking over other peoples’ shoulders to try and find out the answers – or as they used to call it back at school, “cheating”.
Sometimes this involves stealing successful overseas formats outright while claiming that the format itself was so generic no actual theft took place. Other times – and don’t bother trying to figure out why some shows are bought while others are stolen, it usually just boils down to how lazy the offending producers are – they simply buy the rights to the original and away they go.
There are two main factors in what shows get picked up and if you thought one of them is quality you get an F and your homework is to watch every single episode of the original Australian version of Sit Down Shut Up. No, the two main factors are how well they did in their home setting, and how well similar shows are doing in their new setting.
If you’re a smash hit in your home country – like Kath & Kim was– the chances are reasonably good that eventually America will come a-calling. If a show much like yours* has become a hit in America – like Wilfred has – the chances become good that American television will come sniffing around looking for similar shows they can poach.
(yes, we know Wilfred wasn’t a hit here – thank Jason Gann’s US sales push for its success there. As for the US version of Sit Down Shut Up, it could almost be argued it was targeted for remakehood after the success of Summer Heights High. But not by us)
All of which is an extremely round-about way of preventing our heads from exploding at this bit of news:
Additionally, NBC is developing a U.S. version of the Australian black comedy series Laid, from BermanBraun. Ali Rushfield (Help Me Help You) will write the script for the project, which was brought to NBC and BermanBraun by Jeremy Fox and Kary Mchoul of Digital Rights Group. It centers on a woman whose ex-boyfriends/one-night stands start dying under suspicious circumstances, prompting her to launch an investigation with her roommate and try to stop the murder spree. UTA-repped Rushfield, Lloyd Braun, Gail Berman and Gene Stein are executive producing. The original series, created by Marieke Hardy and Kirsty Fisher, premiered on ABC1 in February. The format was repped by ICM.
“Murder spree”? This already sounds more interesting than the original. Then again, pretty much anything else you’d care to mention – up to and including “broccoli”, “staples” and “dust” – is more interesting than series one of Laid. Much like Wilfred, we look forward to seeing the US version turn out to be roughly a hundred times better than the original simply by focusing on the main concept rather than a whole bunch of pointless quirks and annoying stylistic tics.
Put another way, does anyone really think the US version will be built around a character remotely resembling Roo from the original? Thought not. Though what do we know? We thought the basic idea of Laid – a current problem forces someone to dredge up the past by revisiting their old lovers – was so generic they could’ve just as easily turned current rom-com What’s Your Number into a TV show. Or Neil LaBute’s play Some Girls into a TV show. Or pretty much everyone’s last high school reunion into a TV show.
You can see where we’re coming from, and it’s not fresh from a launch party for Laid creator Marieke Hardy’s inaccurately titled new book You’ll Be Sorry When I’m Dead. It’s interesting that the big sales factor for Laid in Australia was Hardy’s involvement (good luck finding a review that didn’t mention her name), while the big factor overseas seems to have been the idea itself – Hardy isn’t involved in the US version. Of course, it’s a two-edged sword: no-one Australian was involved in the US version of Kath & Kim either and look how well that turned out…
*edit: It’s been since pointed out that the current trend in US sitcoms is towards female-led shows. Which Laid is. This probably didn’t hurt any when it came to being picked up, though it may mean that if the current crop of female fronted shows tank Laid‘s US career will come to a rapid halt.
The Hamster Dance
The Chaser are back – as a proper team this time, not just various members hosting one-off arts specials and short-lived attempts to make public speaking thrilling – and it’s like they never went away. No, we don’t mean they’re such an important and vital part of our national consciousness that they never left our thoughts even when they weren’t on the air – we mean their latest show is basically the same thing as every other show they’ve ever done*.
In fact, if we had to compare it to one specific Chaser product, it’d probably be their first (and still to our eyes, best) series, CNNNN. Chris Taylor, Julian Morrow and Craig Reucassel might have loosened their ties and be sitting behind a desk shaped like a giant hamster, but the back-and-forth news joke banter between them (and the news scroll… uh, we mean, the fake tweets running across the bottom of the screen) harked back a good decade or more.
Like we said, no bad thing, even if a lot of the jokes were a): kinda old for a show that’s made hay of being recorded an hour before going to air (AFL Grand Final jokes?) and b): occasionally more like a random collection of “then this happened” references than actual jokes. Stephen Conroy is a shit singer, sure, but unless you have something more to add we’ve all seen the clip by now.
The bad things started with the various sketches that followed. The laughs for a show titled Go Back To Where Tony Abbot Came From were pretty much over once the title was mentioned (we tend to think of these gags as UnderKelly gags, after the only funny joke on Double Take – the entire joke is in the title) and a special episode of Q&A where everyone only asked about the carbon tax might have been funnier if the carbon tax hadn’t been a massive news item for the last year or so – of course people are going to be asking questions about it. A Q&A episode where everyone was demanding Peter Garrett re-form Midnight Oil… that might have been at least surprising.
Things picked up once Andrew Hansen and Chas Licciardello started doing their old “What Have We Learnt from Current Affairs” act, this time talking about how the political coverage of a supposed leadership challenge works when there’s absolutely no evidence for it whatsoever. This stuff is pretty much the high water mark of any Chaser project, and in good news there seems to be slightly more of it this time around: we also got a sketch about how surveys blatantly promoting some product or another become “news”, plus a look at the intrusive way that television news covers murder stories. Not exactly up there with the pouring water MasterChef parody on The Joy of Sets last week, but fun nonetheless.
They also trotted out that old favourite, the awards sketch – this time focusing on dodgy on-line journalism. This particular award is called “the Schembri”, which may be a puzzle for those unaware that Melbourne film critic and oft-time Tumbleweed Award nominee Jim Schembri last year wrote a review of Scream 4 for The Age website that gave away the ending. He then edited out the spoilers on-line after a wave of complaints, pretended it never happened, and eventually claimed that the whole thing was a set-up and by giving away the end of a mystery movie he’d somehow been “punking the twitter-verse”. Records leaked later seemed to reveal that a): his version of events may not have been 100% accurate, and b): someone at The Age really doesn’t like him very much.
Anyway, the Schembri’s are just an excuse for more snark directed at on-line news stories that talk about how bad Hooters is then link to 80 pictures of busty Hooters waitresses. Again, we heartily endorse this effort. At this stage it’s increasingly clear that the Chaser are never going to be grade-A comedy writers (“the running of the serial killers”? “The new internet craze of standing”? These are jokes high school students would toss away), but they do seem to be more than adequate when it comes to tracking down and making fun of the media’s many and various foibles.
Unfortunately, so are another half-dozen shows that keep on popping up on the ABC over the course of the year. Maybe the ABC should combine The Chaser with The Gruen Whatever, John Safran’s various ideas, Lawrence Leung, The Bazura Project, Judith Lucy, At Home With Julia, Hungry Beast and whoever else wants to do a comedy take on any aspect of public life and create an hour-long, 40 week a year series.
Then anyone who wants to go wander around a motor show laughing at cars or make a comedy sketch explaining how The National Electricity Grid works or humourously point out that a politician has said something stupid would have a place to do it without having to pad it out into a six-part series. That way this kind of comedy – let’s call it “satire” – would build up some kind of consistent identity and ratings presence while the ABC could actually point to it as something they did on a regular basis. As a selling point for the network, if you will.
But until then, The Chaser will no doubt keep on coming back to do what they do best, then combine it with a bunch of stuff they only do moderately well and hope everyone’s forgotten entirely about the various other projects they talked about doing between returning to do basically the same show yet again. We’re still waiting for that sitcom…
*what was missing: PRANKS. For this blessing alone, The Hamster Wheel goes up a full star in our non-existent rating system.
At Home with David
Yesterday we saw this story in The Age, largely based on this story from UK newspaper The Independent, indicating that At Home with Julia is being re-made by a British broadcaster. Or it did if you didn’t delve too deeply into either article, because both of them word things very carefully whilst hyping what there is of a story to high heaven.
The Independent piece says “The domestic dust-ups and amorous exploits of David and Samantha Cameron are set to be the subject of a sitcom…” and that “producers Quail Television are holding talks with UK producers and broadcasters”. That’s “holding talks with” not “have sold the format to”.
Yeah, yeah, we know, we’re pointing out the bleeding obvious here. And that’s not because we’ve got a problem with Julia being sold overseas – we don’t – it’s more that it reminds us of what happened when John Clarke and Ross Stevenson tried to sell The Games to the BBC, and the BBC turned around and made Twenty Twelve.
We argued when that story broke that despite the years of correspondence between Clarke, Stevenson and the BBC, it would be difficult for Clarke and Stevenson to establish that plagiarism had taken place – the idea of setting a sitcom in the office of the Olympics organisers isn’t one you can actually copyright. Nor, we’d have thought, is the idea of a sitcom set in the home of a serving political leader (and if you can copyright that concept then why haven’t the makers of That’s My Bush sued over At Home with Julia?).
What Quail Television need here is a copyrightable concept to sell, one no one can rip off without paying up. Here’s their creative director Rick Kalowski describing what they’ve got to offer:
The format is about the balancing of professional and personal life and that applies to different leaders and circumstances.
In the English version you have Cameron’s wife, Samantha, who comes from a very affluent background but has to live in this pokey accommodation. The comedy also comes from the tensions between Cameron and Clegg power-sharing in No 10.
Hmmm…maybe not. Seriously, they are just about the most obvious points of conflict you could come up with for David Cameron. Throw in some troublesome backbencher from the fringe of the Conservative Party, who really hates the European Union, or immigrants, or both, and you’re done. It’s not like Jason Gann taking Wilfred to the US, where there’s actually a pretty unique idea for sale – just about anyone who knows a bit about current UK politics could come up with this.
That said, we do wish Quail Television the best of luck. At Home with Julia was a good, if patchy, sitcom, and it deserves some sympathy for being yet another victim of pointless OUTRAGE. We just question the uniqueness of the idea Quail are trying to sell overseas, and suggest they hire some good lawyers to ensure they get any money they’re due.
Vale Hamish & Andy’s Gap Year
So… they didn’t get axed.
Lasted the full ten weeks.
Yep.
…
Okay, while that’s hardly the best thing that can be said about Hamish & Andy’s Gap Year, the fact remains that they’re the first new comedy series screened on a commercial network in a prime-time slot to go the distance in a long time. And while the number of qualifications in that previous sentence might seem to downplay the level of their achievement, it remains a fact that prime-time comedy on the commercial networks usually runs for two weeks before vanishing or being yanked off air in a cloud of “twitter snark kills another comedy series” – as if the fact the show was complete shit had nothing to do with it.
So again, the big deal here is that Hamish & Andy put on a show in prime time – on Nine no less, who’d be the least comedy friendly commercial network by far if not for the way Seven axes every comedy show they air after a fortnight – and made it work. Sure, it wasn’t the ratings juggernaut Nine probably hoped for (considering how much money they spent on it and on luring the boys over from Ten and radio), but it still wasn’t a flop. Sometimes that’s worth celebrating.
As for the show itself, while it’s easy to be disappointed that they boys didn’t try anything all that new, with so much riding on the success of the show (we did mention how hard it is for comedy to work on commercial networks at the moment, didn’t we?) this was never going to be anything more than more of the same light-hearted good-natured prankery that has propelled them to the top of the Australian comedy tree. And so it proved to be.
While there’s no overlooking the essential sameness of much of what they were up to week after week – silly competitions between each other, trips to explore odd parts of the USA, various (often sporting) events they could take part in / make fun of – they did a pretty good job of keeping it fresh considering they were shouldering an hour-long TV show each week solo (100 seconds of Ryan Shelton aside). Their desk banter was serviceable; their interviews were hit & miss, but after week one they only seemed to do them when they had someone handy worth talking to. As the line goes, a man’s got to know his limitations.
More importantly considering this is Hamish & Andy we’re talking about, they always seemed like they were having fun. Unlike most of the comedy professionals around at the moment (contrast the arrogant and often annoying pranks of The Chaser with H&A’s antics, where they always make sure they’re the real butt of the joke), H&A get by largely on personal charm. This gets them off the hook to some extent when the jokes are weak; they don’t exactly make a traditional joke about how weak their jokes are so much as they just laugh it off and move on, which is a move that can be alienating (rather than laughing at home, you’re watching people laughing on TV) if there’s the slightest hint that you’re not including the audience. H&A never shut the home viewer out though, and it’s this warm inclusion- rather than their often fairly average material – that explains much of their success.
So while the final episode really was just more of the same, with a basketball match in silly outfits and a “who can fall asleep the fastest” contest, it didn’t exactly feel tired and the series itself hardly felt like a failure. When and if they return to television they’re really going to have to come up with something new, but in the never-ending battle between comedy and ratings they’ve managed to pull off a draw. Maybe there’s hope for The Joy of Sets yet…