Australian Tumbleweeds
Vale: The Joy of Sets
Hard as it might be to believe after his twenty-odd years in the spotlight, The Joy of Sets was Tony Martin’s first lead role in a television show. In fact, every other cast member of The Late Show (where Martin first made a serious TV splash) has more up-front television experience than Tony Martin has. The Working Dog guys have made hundreds of hours of television by now; Jason Stephens is a high-level production executive with Freemantle media; Judith Lucy’s Spiritual Journey involved international travel, loads of interviews, sketches and so forth; Mick Molloy made eight episodes of The Mick Molloy Show and another thirteen of The Nation.
Before you start penning aggrieved letters to the editor, let’s also point out that Martin has written and directed a feature-length film, as well as directing a swathe of episodes of The Librarians and parts of Judith Lucy’s Spiritual Journey. We’re not saying he’s a newcomer to this television business by any means. We’re just pointing out that, even after twenty years of seeing him on other people’s shows and doing a ball-tearer of a job on radio not once but twice, it might have been wise to keep expectations somewhere around the middle of the range. Because that’s largely what The Joy of Sets delivered.
In the various interviews given pre-Joy of Sets Martin said once he was hired for the show (the format having been pre-sold to Nine before he came on board) he was left to his own devices as far as writing / choosing an on-air partner went. You could probably guess that Nine and / or production company Zapruder’s (makers of The Gruen Transfer) imposed the half-hour format instead of a two-hour one, but otherwise pretty much everything about the show past the basic “make fun of television” idea seems to be Tony’s work. Presumably the basic pitch to Nine would have been “an in-depth look at television… did we mention we already make a show that looks at advertising that does quite well?” and considering how far Joy of Sets is from any of the Gruen shows, it’s safe to say Martin was making his own show here, not an assembly-line Zapruder’s product. If there are problems with the end product, for once corporate’s off the hook.
One of the frustrating things about the early episodes of The Joy of Sets – it got better as it went along, about which more later – is that there was always glimpses to be had of the quality comedy Martin is known for delivering. While merely the sight of an oiled-up Warrick Capper didn’t exactly count as a laugh for us – and the law of diminishing returns kicked in hard with every subsequent appearance – My Monkey Baby more than made up for it. The jokes were often strong, the sketches even better (the send-up of The Block with Scott Cam was both hilarious and a reminder that almost every other sketch show on TV this year has been running on autopilot) while Martin and co-host Kavalee had decent chemistry out the gate despite the occasional clumsy moment.
And yet overall the early episodes felt stilted, as if a much funnier show had been edited down until all the oxygen was gone.
[numerous reports from tapings said the show was much, much funnier to watch in person. Great. Unfortunately, taping is merely part of the process to create a finished product, not an end in itself. While it’s nice that those who made it to the tapings had a fun time, for those watching at home hearing that all the good stuff was cut out was cold comfort]
Much as many Get This fans hoped and wished for “Get This TV” after that radio show was taken off the air, The Joy of Sets suggests they may have been lucky their wishes weren’t granted. The show’s two biggest weaknesses in the early weeks were the two most obvious hold-overs from Martin’s Get This days: co-host Ed Kavalee and the weekly guest.
Kavalee is a decent television host (see TV Burp) and he can be great radio talent, but for the first few episodes of The Joy of Sets he often came across as stiff and forced. We’re not blaming him, mind you. The format itself was basically “radio with pictures” – when Tony was talking there was nothing for him to do but look attentive. Tony, no doubt due to years of panel work on countless TV shows, came off a lot better when it was Ed’s turn to speak. Still, two guys sitting on brown chairs yammering away doesn’t make for thrilling entertainment visually no matter how attentive you look.
The guests, on the other hand, never really worked. Sure, some had funny stories, some had loads of energy, and Pete Smith as always had both. But on a 22 minute show giving over the final third to an in-studio guest drained all the energy out of the room. The first 13-odd minutes would fire through joke after joke and clip after clip at a rapid-fire pace… and then suddenly everything stopped while someone new sat down and told a story. It was often a good story; it just slowed the show right down, and with only 22 minutes in the first place that proved fatal.
So why’d the interviews work so well on Get This? Our best guess is that on radio a guest just means the same chat-based show continues, only with an extra person chatting away. On television a guest means the clips go out the window and the third person turns a clip show into a chat show. Interestingly, the longer Joy of Sets ran, the more they squeezed in clips during the interviews in an attempt to keep the pace up. Not to mention the generic TV star guests got the boot in favour of comedians better able to keep up with Martin and Kavalee.
As you might have guessed from all the “in the early weeks” references, we thought the show improved a lot as it went along. Martin and Kavalee’s banter seemed more natural, the pace picked up, the moments where the show broke out of the format were always good but they got a lot better – Martin’s out-of-nowhere plea to the jury and his line-up with Denton and the “For Dummies” guy during the police TV show, for example – and even the Capper moments tipped over the edge into outright absurdity.
Unfortunately, it was too late. Much as ratings are no guide whatsoever to the quality of a show – we have no idea what The Bazura Project rated on ABC2, but we’re guessing “bugger all” might be a good starting point – we’d be fools to ignore the fact that, unlike 90% of the comedy we talk about here, The Joy of Sets screened on a commercial network where commercial considerations apply. Fortunately Nine let it run out the clock in a later timeslot and all eight episodes aired, but it looked a little iffy there for a while.
On the one hand, airing at 9pm on a Tuesday (traditionally Nine’s worst night) after Two and a Half Men was never going to make things easy for The Joy of Sets; on the other, they had over a million people check out the first episode. To be fair, most likely many of those viewers just stuck around after seeing the first Sheen-free episode of Men and were never going to become regular viewers of The Joy of Sets. The fact remains: over a million people saw the first episode; less than half that number were watching when it was bumped back to 10.30pm.
[More ratings fun facts in the comments here]
Again, let us stress: we’re not saying ratings are in any way a guide to the quality of any program, let alone one as quirky as The Joy of Sets. What we are saying is that we thought the show got better as it went along and in its final weeks had moments as funny as anything that’s aired this year, only to have its potential – that is to say, a second series – snuffed out because of the bad ratings gathered in those first few weeks. We’re glass half empty people around here, in case you didn’t guess: rather than just being happy the show made it to the end of series one, we’re disappointed that a show with so much promise seems certain not to get a series two.
What we’re left with then is a bunch of what ifs. What if the show had screened on the ABC, where it could have stretched out in a full half-hour timeslot? What if the show had run for an hour on Nine (or more likely, Nine’s digital channel Go!)? What if they’d been given an initial order for thirteen episodes instead of eight and really had a chance to hit their stride? What if Australia as a whole had found Warrick Capper in gold jocks hilarious instead of pointless and mildly confusing?
Tony Martin’s style of comedy works amazingly well on radio. On television, given the freedom to stretch out and do what he likes over an extended period, there’s no reason to think he couldn’t do just as well. But while Get This thrived on minutes of improv and rambling away to stumble across classic running gags, on television these days there just isn’t the time for any of that. If Martin and Kavalee ever get to do another show – and no-one would’ve thought we’d see Kavalee back on TV after TV Burp fizzled so there’s always hope – maybe one day The Joy of Sets will be seen as the show where Martin learned how to adapt his style to television’s requirements; as that would require him to actually get another shot at putting together his own show, here’s hoping.
Vale: The Bazura Project
One of the biggest problems to stem from the collapse of sketch comedy in this country – and wow, how pretentious a sentence is this one shaping up to be – is the way that it’s downgraded the idea of actual jokes in comedy. With a thriving – or even just barely existing – sketch comedy field it’s impossible to ignore the fact that a lot of what makes people laugh is jokes. That’s because that’s pretty much all sketch comedy has to offer: jokes and plenty of them.
When “comedy” comes to mean “lightweight drama and panel chat”, as it currently does in Australia, then jokes take a backseat. Comedy becomes more about tone and attitude, and the methods of judging comedy drift close to those used to judge drama: that is to say, trying to make people laugh becomes less important than character arcs, quality camerawork, sassy back-and-forth chat, and so on. A “comedy” show becomes one where people merely say smart-arse things, not funny things. Trying to make people actually laugh gets dropped in the too-hard-basket.
All of which is why, for the moment at least, when you ask us what kind of comedy we have enjoyed in 2011 The Bazura Project is the show we’ll be pointing to. You can argue about whether you found it funny (we did), but what you can’t argue is that it was a show – a movie-themed sketch show even – that set out to actually be funny. There wasn’t just the occasional quip or wry one-liner: every scene contained joke after joke of every stripe, from broad face-pulling to obscure film references to wordplay to parody to character comedy to pretty much anything you care to name. Again, you can argue about whether the jokes worked (we thought they did), but you can’t argue that the jokes weren’t there.
What makes this even more impressive is that The Bazura Project is a show about film. If ever there was a subject ripe for the kind of “comedy” that was too cool and hip to bother trying to do something as obvious as work towards actual laughs, film would be second only to whatever the fuck Laid was supposed to be about. And yet stars / writers Shannon and Lee went out of their way time and time again to make a show that was accessible to pretty much everyone – yes, it’s time for that stat showing that more Australians go to the movies than watch sport, just in case anyone wants to pretend that movies are somehow more elitist than The Footy Show.
Bazura referenced obscure films, but they also straight-up introduced the viewer to obscure films, and then they made jokes about films everyone at least knows about, and then they made jokes that weren’t really about films at all (remember “staple gangster”? Still chuckling over that one). In contrast to a heck of a lot of ABC output, The Bazura Project was inclusive: rather than providing a pandering guidebook for clueless wannabe hipsters – something that pretty much sums up the Gruen approach to everything – Bazura‘s motto seemed to be “hey, come check out this cool stuff!”
(It didn’t hurt that there was a robot: we’d forgive pretty much everything we hate about Gruen if Wil Anderson was replaced by a robot. A killer robot swinging a chainsaw around wildly.)
We’ve heard more than a few arguments against The Bazura Project, and guess what? They’re all wrong. Being cheap and occasionally shoddy looking and having hosts who aren’t the most polished marbles in the sack are not drawbacks when it comes to comedy: they’re actually advantages. As stated in the opening, this trend of trying to judge comedy like it was a drama – that is, to judge it by polish and performance instead of by laughs – is rubbish. A crappy looking robot with a storage crate for a head is much, much funnier than a polished, art-designed, hundred-thousand dollar animatronic model: just go watch the movie of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy if you don’t believe us.
Lee and Shannon and everyone involved with The Bazura Project set out to make a fun show, and to an extent largely unheard of on Australian television, they succeeded. In a sea of shows where comedians explored whatever subject wasn’t already taken, Lee and Shannon pulled off the rare trick of actually seeming to like the topic they were banging on about. Reportedly the numerous movie clips used means there’ll be no DVD release, which is a damn shame (though it will be repeated over summer, so set your VCRs). This is the kind of show that really does demand a permanent record: it’s definitely been one of the comedy highlights of this year.
3 Things
We were recently contacted by Joel Slack-Smith, who along with Heidi Regan, has written and produced a parody of inane tourist guide videos called London Wow. Joel and Heidi are Australians in London and their videos set in UK capital are well made and quite funny. Find them at www.youtube.com/londonwowtourism.
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Also available online is the new weekly podcast 5 Things with Nath Valvo, Stacey June and Sean Lynch (you may remember Nath and Sean from The Shambles). The episodes are short and pithy, and Nath and Sean are thick and fast with the cornball gags, but this is clearly an audition for a shift on Nova so if that sort of thing’s not your bag don’t bother.
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The Australian reported the other day that the remake rights to the 2001 Australian comedy film The Man Who Sued God (which starred Billy Connolly and Judy Davis) have been sold to a US company. The Man Who Sued God, as far as we can remember, wasn’t exactly a great piece of cinema. The idea of suing God sounds hilarious in theory but the script struggled to be both believable and funny, and the only decent lines seemed to have come from John Clarke, who wrote the original screenplay. We suspect the future for this project may be less Wilfred more Sit Down Shut Up.
Interview: The Bazura Project’s Lee Zachariah
You might have noticed that we don’t usually run interviews here, but when the chance to speak to The Bazura Project’s Lee Zachariah came along, how could we say no? Especially when by saying yes we could waffle on about all manner of obscure comedy topics and only occasionally remember to ask a proper question. Fortunately Lee was willing to put up with our crap – at least to our face – and so, after a lot of heavy editing to get rid of the many sections that were just conversational chit-chat, this is the result.
Being a critical website, we have to ask: how do you go about dealing with criticism? Seeing as we’re conducting this interview before the ABC version airs, it’d be criticism of the Channel 31 show…
“The only criticism we really got when was someone said how cheap it looked, and we already knew that. We knew that in our first season when we had blue curtains we couldn’t afford the colour red – people would say ‘that’s a crappy curtain’, and we’d say ‘well, we know’. We escaped most criticism back then because everyone loves an underdog, but that’ll change.”
Is it a concern that critics – people you’ve never met – now to some extent have your fate in their hands?
“Not really – I wrote for Ain’t It Cool News for eight and a half years, and I think that really thickened my skin. At first I was like ‘I can’t believe what these talkbackers are saying’, the really negative comments were getting me down, and then I just found it hilarious, and then I just stopped caring. I think if somebody has a legitimate criticism about the show I’d take that as constructive and try to work on that, whereas if they just want to throw personal insults at us I’m not going to care much about what they have to say anyway. So yeah, I’m pretty happy with what we’ve made, I’m very happy with what we’ve made, so I’m pretty confident about putting it out there.”
So how did Channel 31 help you develop?
“31 is a great starting point for people who are in no way ready – and I don’t mean that in a bad way. There is no better training ground that will teach you what you need to know than 31 does. And it helped doing a show week by week rather than filming them all in advance and asking ‘what worked and what didn’t?’, because we were able to improve week by week rather than season by season. We’d be trying to plan a long way in advance – certainly with the second season, where we figured out we wanted to do that Back to the Future ending, we had to film that over 13 weeks with us constantly changing into our BTTF costumes every time we did a different opening. For season three we shaved out heads for a Full Metal Jacket sketch, let our hair grow back, and then filmed season three. We put that opening, featuring our heads being shaved, way towards the end of the season after our hair had well and truly grown back – but by and large it was done week-to-week.”
What do you think about your timeslot? You’re up against some fairly big-deal shows…
“We’re very happy with the timeslot, I think it’s a great time to be on. We haven’t really looked at what else is on at the same time yet, we’ve had our heads down making the show for so long we haven’t really had time to check what we’re up against.”
It’s Hamish & Andy for the first week, The Slap is on the ABC…
“I don’t think we’ll really have the same audience as Hamish & Andy, Hamish & Andy have the audience that likes funny people who are good-looking and we have an audience that likes funny people with questionable appearances. We can be a little homely, we can be a little battle-scarred.”
Okay, so what are your comedy influences? Please don’t say “we just like to piss-fart about” like every other Australian comedian ever.
“I’ve never been asked my comedy influences before, it’s really weird – I didn’t come from stand-up comedy so I’ve never really thought of myself as a comedian. I think Shannon and I have always approached Bazura as an interesting film show first and foremost, but because we like telling jokes we made it funny. I guess my influences are The Marx Brothers, Looney Tunes. In Australia John Clarke and Shaun Micallef. Douglas Adams, a lot of British comedy, The Goon Show, Monty Python and all that.”
There’s a lot of big names and comedy professionals appearing in Bazura – Shaun Micallef, Tony Martin, Kat Stewart, Julia Zemiro – how’d you go about getting them all?
“The moment Micallef said yes it was like the heavens parting. It was pretty much a wish-list – once we realised we were in a position to get people we liked in our show, we got out our wish list and they all said yes, which is something we did not see coming. That was really insane, everyone was totally into it and we don’t know why, there was totally no reason for them to trust us, but then they did. With most of the larger cameos, the producer handles all that stuff, I think she takes the script and sends it over to their agent. We just handed our wish list over then she takes over. There was certainly a lot of improv – everyone stuck to the script, but there was some improv and a lot of ideas being thrown around.”
Enough serious questioning – that teen movie parody in episode two was hilarious! Just so you know.
“That was Shannon’s idea and I read it and said ‘that is really really funny – there is no way that’s making it into the final draft of the script’. Just from a production standpoint, but draft after draft it kept staying in the script and no-one said anything and I thought ‘are we actually doing to do this? Devote an entire day to this?’. And we actually got it done. That was one of the more fun days, too. And that’s me in the Bee costume, by the way. That was so much fun though, the kids were hilarious.”
So rumour has it that while you were waiting to hear back from the ABC about Bazura, you almost got a different show up on Ten? What happened there?
“We did a pilot for Ten, a completely different show, then we got the green light from the ABC for our show. It was definitely a case of it never rains but it pours after hearing nothing for two years. The pilot for Ten was more issues of the day than movies.”
The Channel 31 Bazura was big on reviews, but the ABC2 version is review-free. Why?
“Part of it was because the ABC already has a review show, and part of it was that they wanted a six-part themed show where we filmed everything beforehand, which was really useful in doing themed segments – if we wanted Shaun Micallef for six segments we’d only need him for a day. No reviews this time around, and I don’t know if there will be in the future.”
It’s a cliché to say that film reviewers are frustrated film-makers – the whole “those who can’t, teach” thing – but in your case… well, you are a film reviewer, and you’ve made television shows, so perhaps ‘frustrated’ isn’t the right word?
“There’s something quite unappealing when you hear about a film critic or someone making a show about film who says they’re a frustrated film maker. On the other hand, that’s my story, I can’t really run from that. Everyone assumes you’re doing that because you can don’t the real thing. But when I got into film criticism it actually had nothing to do with wanting to make films, they actually come from two very different sides – it’s like somebody who likes two completely different things, they just happened to be film criticism and making films. I’d consider it quite separate from my film-making ambitions. But yeah, Bazura, that certainly comes from the film criticism part than the film making part.”
The Bazura path to television success – actually going out and making the show rather than toiling away in writer’s rooms for years – seems to becoming more popular, what with you and Twentysomething being picked up from Channel 31. Did you ever think about going off to write for Neighbours?
“It’s weird that the path to get into television writing is through Home & Away and Neighbours, that’s the path you have to go on. I know one of the Neighbours writers quite well and I wouldn’t want to write for Neighbours not because I think it’s beneath me but it’s really structured and intense and I don’t think I have those particular skills. And also I would have to watch those shows and I’m not sure I could watch them and stay sane. And that sounds really snobby, I know, but I’m just not wired for soaps and reality TV. I know most people aren’t wired for the crap I watch. Or Bazura, for that matter.”
So what is the trademarked Bazura path to success?
“You make the show you want to make and say ‘that’s the show we want to make’. I always get concerned when I hear success stories when – there was a great one about ten years ago of Elijah Wood recording himself as Frodo on his home video and sending the tape to Peter Jackson and getting the part that way, through that method, and I can just imagine a generation of young actors filming themselves reading the parts and sending them to directors thinking ‘it worked for him, why can’t it work for me?’. So whenever you hear a success story you think that’s the way to go – Ridley Scott came from advertising and because I wanted to work in film I tried for advertising courses at Uni. Whenever you hear a success story you think you’ve got to model yourself on that, whereas everyone has come up a different path. ‘You should never ever make a film using credit cards – on the other hand, Kevin Smith did pretty well out of it’. There are ways to work your way up, you start off writing Neighbours and you end up writing Underbelly, whereas for us it was making the show we wanted and putting it on community TV, but there are probably fifteen other paths to getting to where we are now.”
The Bazura Project is on ABC Thursdays – this week’s the final ep in the current series – at 9pm
The Home of Variety
Channel 9’s push to become the “Home of Comedy” this year hasn’t really worked out for them; Live From Planet Earth, the bumping of The Joy of Sets…even Hamish & Andy’s Gap Year. Sure, Gap Year made it to the end and managed decent enough ratings, but it wasn’t the greatest piece of television ever. What Gap Year did do, perhaps, is remind us of what works on Channel 9: light-hearted, inoffensive, variety programs. And in Hamish & Andy Channel 9 even had presenters who could make this kind of show for the 21st Century.
Since the first demise of Hey Hey it’s Saturday in 1999, Channel 9 have struggled when its come to light entertainment. For a network which had a strong history of success in this genre, with shows like In Melbourne Tonight and The Don Lane Show, this struggle has been painful. They sort of noticed that the comedy culture had changed (thanks largely to the 1980s cabaret scene), but couldn’t manage to find a way to make use of that new culture’s stars.
Should you happen to pick up a copy of either The Best of the Don Lane Show or The Best of the Don Lane Show 2, both of which feature classic episodes from the early 1980s, you’ll be struck by how quickly this cultural change must have happened. The Don Lane Show with its club comics, international guests, middle-of-the-road musical numbers and endless promotions for household products, wouldn’t have been out of place on TV in the 50s, 60s or 70s. And yet, despite sounding like the daggiest show ever made, it’s charming, delightful and often very funny.
It was also a variety show in the truest sense of the word, because apart from the ads and the entertainment, there were serious discussions of current affairs (with members of the 60 Minutes team and counter-culture “hero” Richard Neville), science demonstrations from actual professors, a live cross to the National Museum of Victoria to look at old artefacts, an entire show with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, performances from ballet dancers and opera singers, and an interview with a heavily-bearded and rather strange public servant about cryogenics. This wasn’t so much middle of the road, as all over it!
The Don Lane Show was also a program that had serious money thrown at it, meaning they could – and often did – do anything. From motorcycle stunts in the GTV-9 car park, to a live cross to Dame Edna at Madame Tussauds in London, to an entire program from Elvis Presley’s old home Gracelands, in Memphis, The Don Lane Show pushed early-80s TV technology to the limit, and the results are still exciting today. No one would, or would be able to, make The Don Lane Show today, of course, and it’s unlikely that today’s audiences would watch a contemporary equivalent, but there are still some lessons to learned from it.
Amongst these are that good, experienced performers, when given decent material and a bit of time, can turn something as banal as a prize draw into comedy gold. Watch one of Don and Bert’s classic wheel segments and you’ll wonder how much funnier Talkin’ ‘Bout Your Generation would be if Shaun Micallef was really allowed to let loose. Also worth noting is that mainstream audiences will sit down to watch “intellectual” things like current affairs, science and orchestras if they’re presented entertainingly – all you need is Bert Newton taking the piss out of the conductor of the latter, and you’re away.
So, in the truest tradition of Channel 9 variety, here comes the plug: this weekend, why not treat yourself to a Don Lane Show boxset? It’s worth it for the wheel segment which follows the cryogenics interview alone.
Girl I’ll Houso You
Paul Fenech is, for whatever reason, SBS’s premiere contribution to Australian comedy. For over a decade now he’s made basically the same show for them under three different names: Pizza, Swift & Shift and now Housos. That show consists of extremely broad stereotypes played by non-professional actors shouting loudly while the camera tilts and swings around wildly. We’d call it “cartoony”, but we actually like cartoons.
So what’s the depth of comic invention on offer here? Let’s quote some sample dialogue from Shazza, Dazza, Franky and the rest.
“Just for a change he got to buy a car instead of stealing one”.
“What’re you grinning about, cockhead?”
“I think I pulled a muscle in my fucking arse!” “You’re fucking soft Shazza”
“I can see her fucking undies”
“Look, it’s penisaurus on his spastic scooter”
We could go on.
The real comedy here has come from the various serious media outlets wondering if the “politically incorrect” series will cause all manner of social upheaval.
“I get offended by people who get offended. I think there’s some sort of Nazi political correctness happening in Australia. The principals of political correctness are good but we have the top ten per cent of Australia wanting to nanny state everything we do. We’re not responsible for ourselves. We can’t decide what’s funny. What’s insulting is you can’t have a joke in Australia. Housos is the most ango-friendly show I’ve done. I’m copping it for having a go at bogans – are you serious?”
He has a point. Then again, he also wrote this:
“You’re fucked in the face Daz”
So, having watched the first episode of Housos free of the heavy hand of political correctness, let’s treat it with the respect it treats the home viewer: get fucked.
Fenech’s slapstick style is, well, energetic, and he’s not afraid to pile on the jokes. But the jokes are all the same joke: a dickhead swears a lot and does something stupid. Then another dickhead does something slightly different while swearing. Then someone swears. Then someone does something stupid. Then there’s a close up of some boobs. Then maybe there’s a midget.
The big difference with Housos is that some of the characters are bogans instead of wogs. Don’t worry tho, there’s still loads of racial stereotypes, and they all swear while doing stupid things.
“Some people don’t fucking deserve kids!”
“Bring it ya dumb fucking bitch”
“If you ever see Sunnyvale girls punching on, fuck off quick”
So who cares if the “plot” – the whole cast tries to figure out a way to qualify for the disabled pension so they can slack off (well, slack even more off) – might offend some easily offended tools. What’s offending us is that he’s been doing the same thing again and again and again in moderately different settings since 2000. Back then Pizza was a mildly amusing sitcom (and the Pizza movie was stupid but fun too); these days it’s just the same old shit reheated so many times even the stink doesn’t get a reaction any more.
“Fuck off Frankie, now ya cashed up ya can pay child support ya cockhead”
Not that the Australian media’s worked that out, even if Fenech is simply using the same method of stirring up attention as everyone else these days: get Australia’s increasingly rabid tabloid press to pay attention to you and free coverage is yours for the taking. As Fenech told marketing site Mumbrella,
“SBS only does a certain number of marketing recourses. So I have put my own money and heart into this.”
Here’s a tip: next time, put some of the money and heart into coming up with some new jokes. Having every single character be a shouting fuckhead kinda gets old after a while no matter how many burn outs and arse shots you throw in there. And by “kinda old”, we mean “fucking dull, ya cockhead”.
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?