Australian Tumbleweeds
Not Some Form Of Hovercraft
This week sees stage two of ABC2’s attempt to rebrand itself as the place where all the cool kids go to hang out and laugh with the arrival of The Bazura Project. Like the persistantly impressive Twentysomething, it’s another comedy series that started out as a DIY project on community station Channel 31… and that’s pretty much where the comparison ends.
The best way to describe Bazura is that it’s one of the seemingly endless ABC series where a comedian or team of comedians provides a wacky look at some kind of general interest subject. In this case it’s the history of cinema, divided into six parts focusing on the good stuff – sex, violence, and so on. Only this time, because you haven’t actually heard of hosts / writers / stars Lee Zachariah (has a beard) and Shannon Marinko (has a hat), they’ve had to put lots and lots of jokes in to keep you watching.
It’s actually a difficult show to describe in some ways. The c31 version also had reviews of current releases so it was (in one way) a review show with a bunch of sketches thrown in. The ABC2 version does lose a little by not having reviews (presumably Margaret & David have the reviewing turf all sown up, though David does make regular appearances here), but the quality of the sketches more than makes up for it. And did we mention lots and lots of jokes?
It’s easy to forget how rare scripted smart one-liners are on Australian television – unless you’re able to keep up with the ever-shifting timeslot for Talkin’ ‘bout Your Generation – so to see a steady stream of sharp lines and well-thought-out visual gags makes this show not so much a delight as a simple reminder that hey, jokes can be funny. Not all of them and not all the time, but more than enough to get a tick in our book.
Part of what makes this show so much fun to watch – oh, did we mention the star-studded support cast (well, there’s Kat Stewart, the voice of Shaun Micallef, and Tony Martin turns up in episode two) – is that it’s resolutely undergraduate when it comes to its many, many jokes. There are highbrow film references a plenty here: there’s also a robot with a milk crate for a head.
A lot of recent ABC1 comedy has seemingly held itself above the idea of actually making jokes; comedy should flow naturally from character, obvious one-liners will disrupt the reality of the performances, and so on and whatever. Problem is, sometimes you just want to laugh at funny stuff, and it’s a little disappointing that the ABC has decided that the kind of comedy that puts being funny first only belongs on the digital-only channel. In other words: why isn’t this on ABC1?
It’s not like Bazura isn’t informative as well; it’s packed with fun facts about the history of cinema, plus reviews of trends, fashions, strange old films and episode two features loads of strippers. With the erasure of the ABC’s traditional arts coverage now all but complete, Bazura could very well fill that niche as well. You’ll laugh and you’ll learn; if that isn’t value for your eight cents a day, it’s still a lot more than you’re getting out of the average episode of Crownies.
A Beached Az Thong, Stamping On A Human Face Forever
Today has seen a variety of submissions being made to the Senate committee inquiry into ABC television internal programming cuts that have… kinda… zzz… Wait, what? Did someone mention The Chaser?
Community and Public Sector Union ABC section secretary Graeme Thomson said on Monday there needed to be a full and open inquiry into the cutbacks of internal program at the broadcaster.
“It loses the ability for the new Chasers, the new Andrew Dentons to actually be found and actually be developed and I think that’s sad,” Mr Thomson said.
Cue snarky comment from us about exactly how sad it would be to lose a comedy team called “The New Chasers”. But while we’re here, lets hear a little from one of the old Chasers:
Most ABC television viewers cannot tell the difference between shows produced in-house and those made outside, the Chaser’s Julian Morrow says.
Morrow has told a parliamentary committee inquiring into ABC internal programming cuts that the use of independent production companies had not eroded the ABC as an institution.
Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he – after all, he is the executive producer of independent production company Giant Dwarf. In fact, he went on to say:
“In fact, working with external production companies is essential if the ABC is to remain a dynamic, creative, innovative public broadcaster of quality programming,” he said.
Wow, it’s like asking [generic sporting boss] whether [socially harmful activity that pours money into sporting codes coffers] is a bad thing. And you wonder why we never got a job offer from Good News World.
That’s not to say he’s actually wrong about any of this, mind you. When it comes to comedy, the ABC’s history of internal production has often been little more than a cavalcade of bizarre, willfully-obscure and audience-alienating productions combined with efforts that actually sounded good right up until the moment they were knocked back.
But our concern – and we do have one, thanks for asking – is that if the in-house production side of things is allowed to completely wither on the vine all the ABC will be left with is what production houses serve up to them. For all the reassuring talk like this-
Mr Morrow said external production did not undermine the ABC charter or ABC values, saying independent producers brought projects to the ABC because they believed in public broadcasting.
– you don’t have to be a math whiz to work out that if there’s three commercial networks to pitch to and one public broadcaster, you’re better off developing programs that will appeal to all four networks than to just one. And with three commercial networks versus one public broadcaster, the balance is always going to be tipped towards the more commercial end of the scale. Coming soon to the national broadcaster: a constant flood of bland panel chat shows! (this post (c) 2003).
The other worry is, if all that’s left at the ABC are business and programming executives rather than actual program makers, eventually you’ll end up with an organisation run by people focused on factors other than programming quality. Oh sure, they’ll still be interested in “quality”, but quality will be defined by factors such as ratings, revenue raised and “political balance”.
Put another way, if two comedy series seem to be of roughly equal value comedy-wise but one will bring in a whole bunch of merchandise while the other has limited marketing opportunities and there’s only one timeslot available, which one is going to get the green light? We’ve seen the future and it’s a Beached Az branded thong, stamping on a human face forever…
Good news, bad news
A few days ago TV Tonight reported the not terribly surprising news that Good News World has been bumped to 10.30pm. TV Tonight have since speculated that the show won’t be around for much longer, even in that timeslot, which seems a reasonable assumption when you take into account the program’s ratings, the cost of the production and Ten’s current cost-cutting.
Many critics and commentators have speculated on why Good News World has been shunned by audiences and consequently failed to rate. Depressingly for the state of the criticism in this country, a number of commentators have suggested that Australians just don’t like seeing Australians being funny, or that Australian audiences are too used to American comedy and don’t get Australian comedy, or that it’s tall poppy syndrome, or the cultural cringe, or that we just love to knock our own, or that Twitter’s to blame…or some variation on that theme. Almost no one has pointed out that it’s because the show’s crap.
While Good News World is capable of raising one or two laughs per episode, and even manages to skirt the shores of satire every so often, it’s not exactly chock-full of great scriptwriting or great performances. Sure signs that a comedy script needs help are when variations on the same sketch are wheeled out week after week, or when the cast are forced to shout punchlines in a loud voice whilst pulling a face in order to get laughs – you get a lot of both in Good News World. In fact you got a lot of that sort of thing in Good News Week, but perhaps audiences are more willing to tolerate weak material in a panel show?
Either way, the GNW team’s style certainly struck a chord with the AWGIE Awards 2011 judges, who gave Good News Week: Australia Decides 2010 their prize for “Comedy: Sketch or Light Entertainment” on Friday night. Which even when you take into account that all the other scripts nominated in that category were episodes of Good News Week is still jaw-dropping. Or indeed when you take into account this comment on TV Tonight’s AWGIE winners story, which states that writers submit their own scripts to the AWGIEs (which suggests that no one submitted a better sketch or light entertainment script than the three nominated episodes of Good News Week) or that the AWGIE Awards may withdraw a category from the Awards if no decent scripts are entered (which they didn’t in this case).
The AWGIE Awards website states that the awards are “judged solely by writers” and that all entrants must be “financial members” of the Australian Writers Guild (AWG). This perhaps gives some perspective on why all three scripts nominated for the sketch comedy/light entertainment writing award were from the same program. There is little call for comedy writers these days; the sketch comedy TV shows of yesteryear has made way for lightly-scripted or unscripted panel shows, or hybrid shows like The 7PM Project, where a small number of comedy writers are employed to deliver just one aspect of the program, and sketch comedy on radio is almost non-existent. In these circumstances it’s hard to imagine the average Australian comedy writer has the time or money or inclination to be a member of the AWG when they’re also having to juggle careers in stand-up, acting, radio or directing, or even temping in offices or waiting tables, in order to make ends meet.
We could be wrong about this, and perhaps there are heaps of paid-up AWG members writing sketch comedy out there, but if that’s the case, then why were all three nominees for this award from the same, not particularly well-scripted, program?
Flying the Flag
Ever get the feeling large swathes of Australian society aren’t actually alive? Oh sure, they walk and talk and seem human, but bring up one of any number of obvious hot-button issues and they spew out the same clockwork preprogrammed responses time and time again. Some might say this kind of dehumanising imagery is the kind of thing the forces of evil spout to make it easier to dispose of those who oppose their views; after reading this “news” story, we don’t really have a problem with that.
THE ABC’s controversial satire At Home With Julia has prompted Coalition calls for the broadcaster’s funding to be slashed.
Outraged Coalition MPs debated the show’s merits in a partyroom meeting yesterday, with Nationals MP John Forrest expressing nostalgia for “traditional” comedies such as the 1970s’ Are You Being Served?
He told colleagues the satirical take on Julia Gillard’s private life demeaned the office of prime minister, with tonight’s episode to feature Amanda Bishop as Ms Gillard and Phil Lloyd, playing her partner Tim Mathieson, in a compromising position under a flag. Mr Forrest said the ABC had crossed the line of good taste.
“It’s nothing to do with Julia Gillard . . . It’s the office of prime minister and it’s not even funny. The old English traditional shows like Are You Being Served? — they were funny, but this isn’t. And to desecrate the flag dishonours what my dad did.”
Less jokes about the flag, more jokes about pussy; got it.
In case you were busy having an actual life yesterday, it seems that tonight’s episode of At Home With Julia features a scene where Julia and Tim get it on under an Australian flag. Cue predictable outrage from people who don’t seem to realise that their predictable outrage is the entire point of the exercise. For fucks sake, even we’re sick of this stuff and comedy is all we write about. Last time we looked, the flag was a pattern on a piece of cloth; if you’re not going to spend your summer running around beaches ripping it off teenagers wearing it as a cape – when they’re not dropping it on the dirt and groping each other on it – having this level of outrage over a scene in a comedy show seems a trifle excessive.
Then there are those whose equally predictable complaints swing in from another direction entirely:
What is of political interest in At Home with Julia turns not on the politicians and public figures who appear as the characters on the show but, rather, on those who are ignored. The comedy is a co-production between the ABC and Quail TV. Debbie Lee is the public broadcaster’s executive producer and this role at Quail TV is filled by Rick Kalowski and Greg Quail. The writers are Kalowski, Amanda Bishop (who plays Gillard) and Phil Lloyd (who plays Mathieson).
It seems that the likes of Lee, Kalowski, Quail, Bishop and Lloyd do not regard the Greens as a laughing matter. Interviewed by Peter Van Onselen on The Showdown on Sky News last Tuesday, Kalowski defended himself against the criticism that At Home with Julia was either anti-Gillard or anti-Labor.
In case you haven’t been following Gerard Henderson’s career as a comedy critic, he runs a media watchdog website called The Sydney Institute. Get This fans’ ears are pricking up at the mention of the word “Institute” – yes, he’s that Gerard Henderson. Anyway, he’s a ruthless scourge of all forms of comedy that don’t make fun of the things he thinks are funny, which amazingly mostly seems to involve politicians and political parties he disagrees with. Cue a decade long one-man war against Clarke & Dawe that shows no signs of either abating or having any effect whatsoever.
We’ve got absolutely nothing against people criticising comedy – apart from them muscling in on our turf of course, but once we get our gang jackets back from the embroiderers we’ll be ready to sort them out West Side Story-style – but it does tend to help if you have something to say beyond “why aren’t you making fun of the Greens, they’re hilarious… and if you can’t see that, you’re a Labor dupe”. Not that he said that in so many words, and if you want to read the many, many, many words he used to not say that, feel free to read what he did say to the producer of At Home With Julia here. Henderson sums his views up thus:
In my view, people like Bob Brown – who believe that the end of the world is nigh due to carbon emissions and then see fit to emit carbon emissions while travelling from here to there warning about the end of the world – are potentially suitable targets for comedy. Alas, no such character appears in At Home With Julia.
You are asking me to believe that an Adam Bandt character was in Episode 1 during script stage – but was deleted.
And you are asking me to believe that the Greens were lampooned in Episodes 5 and 6 – which never made it into At Home With Julia, since the project was cut to four episodes at the insistence of the ABC.
Well, I accept what you are saying. Nevertheless, at some stage you and the Quail Television team made a conscious decision to exclude the Adam Bandt character from Episode 1. And you made a conscious decision not to have Bob Brown or Lee Rhiannon or any other of the Greens “turn up” in Episodes 1, 2, 3 and 4. There may not have been what you refer to as “a deliberate decision to go easy on the Greens” in At Home With Julia. However, this is exactly what happened.
This seems common practice within the ABC generally. John Clarke and Bryan Dawe regularly mock Labor and the Coalition on 7.30 each Thursday – but rarely, if ever, ridicule any member of the Greens.
It is a matter of record that no one at the ABC, which commissioned At Home With Julia for showing on ABC 1, recognised the potential problem involved in a taxpayer funded comedy which laughed at Labor, the Coalition and the Independents – but not the Greens.
Hang on, doesn’t that view kind of mean that only people who don’t believe in global warming should be allowed on planes without being branded complete moral hypocrites and driven out of public life? That seems a little unfair, especially when you stop to consider what would happen if Brown really did travel from his home state of Tasmania to Canberra by environmentally friendly bike or solar car. Wouldn’t Henderson and the rest of the right make fun of him then for his silly car? Doesn’t that mean Brown’s only two choices both end in him being mocked? Wow, someone give Henderson his own weekly satirical review stat!
This is the problem with overtly politically-driven humour, and why what we like most about At Home With Julia are the silly personal and relationship jokes. Trying to score points and trying to get laughs almost never go hand in hand: funny Australian comedy is hard enough to make without taking orders from anyone zany enough to think the number one goal of humour should be “balance” instead of laughs.
… all that said, if At Home With Julia actually had contained a joke where Bob Brown said “greenhouse gases are destroying the environment” then got on a GREENHOUSE GAS-SPEWING PLANE, obviously hilarity would have ensued. Yeah, we can totally see that. Actually, didn’t we see that on South Park six years ago?
The Ideas Shower overfloweth
The Joy of Sets was always going to be much anticipated by anyone interested in Australian comedy, and in its debut last night it did not disappoint. A lot of comedies these days seem to spend minutes surviving on one single idea or gag, in Joy of Sets the churn of ideas – and laughs – was constant.
This was both refreshing and a slight problem. If we have one criticism of The Joy of Sets it’s that the pace was a little too fast and the editing a little too quick. There were lots of gags being done and points being made, and to absorb and appreciate all of them we could have done with more time. If the show had been for the ABC or in a hour-long slot there would have been that time to breathe, but this was a Channel 9 half hour and 22 minutes was all they had.
On a positive note it was good to see that this fairly ABC-style show wasn’t obviously “Channel 9”. This raises concerns about the likelihood of such a cerebral program surviving on a network so dependent on the wit of Charlie Sheen, but then, who can fail to laugh at Tony Martin dressed as Esmee from A Country Practice?
Helpfully for its survival, perhaps, is that Joy of Sets is no Live From Planet Earth with its woeful sketches and Twitter backlash, and no Between the Lines with Eddie McGuire and friends serving up the most tedious sports panel show since that thing Peter Helliar did on the ABC last summer (are we alone in wondering if they were the same program?). So, with a bit of luck The Joy of Sets should stay on air. It would be a shame if it didn’t; this is the funniest and smartest commercial TV comedy in this country for years, and there’s a lot more to said – and laughed at – when it comes to TV than opening titles sequences.
Questions Without Notice
Here’s a question we’re yet to see answered: where exactly did the idea for At Home With Julia come from? Yes, Amanda Bishop was doing her Julia Gillard impersonation well before the surprisingly well-received ABC sitcom was announced, so chances are she had dreams of leveraging her performance into actual television work. But Veronica Milsom, Jackie Loeb and Lynne Cazaly were also peddling Gillard acts back during the 2010 election (as we discussed here and here) and no-one seems to have given them a sitcom. Did Bishop pitch the sitcom to the ABC (and if so, did any of the other Gillard impressionists do likewise), or did the ABC approach her to do a show? And if the ABC approached her, since when has the ABC been going around asking for shows directly aimed at taking a swing at the Prime Minister?
And while we’re throwing out the At Home with Julia questions, here’s a few more (don’t worry, we’ll answer most of them ourselves);
Maybe Bishop’s performance as Gillard was so strong the ABC simply had to reach out and give her a sitcom? Well, considering pretty much every review we’ve read – including our own – has described her impression as weak or worse, perhaps not. Especially considering Bishop is hardly alone in putting on a Gillard act.
Well then, was Gillard so uniquely ripe for impersonation that the ABC simply caved in under the weight of the obvious comedy potential to be mined from her private life? Considering even Rubbery Figures could get laughs out of John Howard and Rove did a semi-decent job of Rudd-baiting with their Kevin Rudd, P.M. short segments (while Anthony Ackroyd and Paul McCarthy both did Rudd impressions yet oddly weren’t given ABC sitcoms), it’s hard to see what makes Gillard so special she deserves her own solo sitcom.
Was the ABC so short of comedy material for 2011 they had to rush out a sitcom – filmed in July, airing in September – to plug an otherwise fatal gap? Considering the amount of material they have on the shelves (we’ve been told that Outland is done and in the queue for one) or are airing on ABC2 at the moment, perhaps not.
Was Gillard getting a sitcom while Rudd barely got a smirk just poor timing? Probably. Both The Glasshouse and The Chaser’s War on Everything – shows that made much hay from the Howard government – fizzled out around the end of Howard / the rise of Rudd, and the ABC showed little inclination to replace them with similar political-themed comedy (or “comedy”, depending on your opinions of said shows). If the ABC had kept a weekly satirical show going under Labor, a decent Gillard impression would have found both a natural home and a focus on her politics – which is kind of what counts in a PM – rather than wild swings at her fictional home life.
Is an entire sitcom slagging off the sitting Prime Minister overkill? Well, seeing how little effort the ABC has put into political satire since The Chaser lost interest in it, probably not. This is one single show balancing out the decade of non-stop Howard jokes the ABC served up during his reign (let’s not forget BackBerner, which was pretty much the last “satirical” sketch comedy show the ABC ran). Considering the traditional excuse for going after Howard during his reign was “there’s no point going after the opposition, they’re not the ones with the power to do anything”, it’s fairly well established that the point of political comedy is to attack those in power. Which Gillard currently is.
What about the increasingly shrill, desperate and nonsensical right-wing of Australian politics? Surely there’s just as many laughs to be had there? Well yes, but they’re not currently running the country. What most of us think of when we thing of “right-wing nutbags” are just as likely to be media commentators as actual politicians (quick, name a federal Liberal politician who isn’t Tony Abbott), so presumably The Chaser’s upcoming Gruen-like look at the world of television The Hamster Wheel (starting October 5th) will take a hammer to them. And there’s always the very funny Media Watch, which doesn’t let Alan Jones get away with much these days.
But at least At Home with Julia could make some jokes about how, say, the right-wing press makes a big deal out of her and Tim not being married (unmarried couples aren’t exactly shocking in the real world circa 2011) instead of simply taking and supporting that right-wing view? Sure. But remember that first paragraph about who gave this series the green light and why? It’s safe to assume that in giving the thumbs up to a show making fun of a Labor PM in an obvious attempt to balance out the attacks dished out on the previous Liberal PM, it’s a little unlikely that the brief would have been to support and endorse Julia Gillard.
So if all that’s the case then, why is it going so soft on Gillard? After all, she’s being shown as being basically well-meaning but busy while Tim is the bungling one being picked on by schoolkids. Well, presumably sinking the boots in hard into the PM would be a bit much to stomach even for the ABC – gone are the days when Wil Anderson could call then communications minister Richard Alston a “right-wing pig-rooter” on The Glasshouse. There’s little denying the show is largely mild and inoffensive; that’s both its biggest strength and its most serious weakness.
As satire, At Home with Julia is a pathetic waste of time. It has no thesis, no argument, no real point of view and nothing serious to say about politics, how this country is run or the people running it. But as a traditional wacky sitcom, it’s surprisingly funny (that is to say, it’s occasionally funny). By having the Gillard stuff as their hook, the creative team has been freed of the usual demands to try something new (read: make it more like a drama) with the sitcom format and been able to get laughs out of the kind of material we almost never see these days: running jokes, broad & silly characters, funny dialogue, obvious set-ups and visual gags.
It doesn’t hurt that Phil Lloyd’s Tim is both funny and (slightly) tragic, giving him one more side than most Australian comedy characters of recent years. But the show as a whole is shaping up to be one stinging rebuke to those who say we can’t make sitcoms here (Twentysomething being the other one); clearly Australians can make decent sitcoms when they’re allowed to make sitcoms that are meant to be funny, not quasi-dramas built around “will-they-or-won’t-they” sexual tension.
Congratulations, Australian Broadcasting Corporation: in trying to make one point about your editorial policies, you’ve inadvertently made another. And considering we take comedy a lot more seriously than we do politics, we’re a lot more concerned about the obstacles you put in the way of good comedy than we are about your attempts to be “fair and balanced”. Put making a decent comedy first and the laughs will follow; put political point-scoring first and you’ve got Andrew Bolt on Insiders.
… actually, considering how hilarious The Bolt Report has turned out to be, just forget we said anything…
Whooah, we’re halfway there
Back in the dark ages of 2008, when we were just an annual awards ceremony that only some of The Chaser had heard of, Swift & Shift Couriers had recently finished its first, disappointing series. Facing stiff competition from Rebel Wilson’s pre-Bridesmaids s(h)itcom Bogan Pride, Swift & Shift… series 1 was relegated to second place in the popular vote for the 2008 Australian Tumbleweeds Worst Sitcom award. Here’s how we summed-up the series:
Swift & Shift Couriers…was simply a retread of the sort of humour which had been more than covered by five series of Pizza; it was even set in a company which delivered things. With its cast of stereotypes and reliance on broad politically incorrect humour, it was very much an Acropolis Now for the noughties – and who asked for that?
Where it did differ from Pizza was that well known faces didn’t just turn up in cameos – they were the principle cast. The rest were a rag-tag bunch who were mostly there because they looked the part. If the skill of these lay comedy performers was a physical object, you’d need a microscope looking through the scope of another microscope to see it.
So what, five episodes in to its second series, has Swift & Shift Couriers presented us with? You’d like to think the show would have learnt some lessons from series one and matured in its approach, perhaps by introducing some performers who could act, or even some gags that weren’t variations on important, fragile objects being smashed to bits or blokes copping it hard in the nuts (two gags, you’ll note, which aren’t really that different).
Well, it turns out absolutely nothing has changed about the series at all; quelle surprise. Which is great news if you like your TV comedy broad, bawdy and chock full of slapstick and don’t have a DVD of Carry On Up the Khyber to hand, but bad news if you were hoping for, well, something worth watching.
As we’ve blogged previously, Swift & Shift Couriers almost didn’t make it to air after someone at SBS demanded it stay on the shelf. It’s not hard to see why. This is a show which makes the aforementioned Carry On films look intelligent and well-made – if only because the likes of Sid James and Kenneth Williams knew how to add value to a shit gag, instead of just trying to get laughs by yelling and flapping their arms about.
Somewhere within the script of your average episode of Swift and Shift Couriers are a couple of decent gags and a sort of a plot, but it’s lost amidst the shouting, the wooden performances and the set-pieces you can see coming a mile off. If you’re rollocking drunk or stoned off your nut, and looking for something undemanding to watch late at night with your friends Swift & Shift Couriers will probably do the job, but if you’re even remotely sober you’ll just wonder why the hell SBS spent money on this shit. And then gave Paul Fenech another series, the much hyped Housos, which features much of the Swift & Shift… cast and starts on 24 October.
Nice, at half the price
Just when we thought it wasn’t possible for the ABC to make any more of those “a personality explores…” shows, we get a media release in our inbox saying this:
Myf Warhurst, star of ABC TV’s Spicks and Specks, will return to ABC1 next year with her very own six-part documentary series – Myf Warhurst’s Nice.
Myf will take viewers on a cultural crusade exploring some of the favourite things from her youth.
So far, so Lawrence Leung’s Choose Your Own Adventure? Well, sort of…
It’s a show that embraces past cultural icons and takes a closer look at what surrounds us – the stuff you find in your own living room rather than in a gallery or museum. It’s a celebration of all the things that are just, well… ‘nice’.
The show will be a nostalgic journey to find out what our popular taste says about us as a nation. Along the way Myf will ask whether these ‘nice’ things tell us more about who we are than we are prepared to admit, and in order to fully appreciate what’s ‘great’, do we also need to embrace the ‘nice’?
It’s been a long road from Myf’s early years as an isolated country teenager, desperate for an ’80s spiral perm, to co-hosting one of Australia’s most popular entertainment programs. On the way, she realised that even though she was a little ashamed about some of her early life experiences, on closer inspection, ‘popular’ is not necessarily a dirty word.
Whether it’s the embarrassing family portrait, the humble dim sim, Copperart, or an unhealthy obsession with cheesy love duets, the fabric of Myf’s youth has gone on to influence her tastes today. And she’s not alone.
“I’m digging out the bedazzler, putting on my oversized koala wool knit jumper, and travelling the country to rediscover some of my favourite things, and meet some of my teenage heroes along the way,” says Myf. “Many hilarious (and occasionally dubious) things have shaped who I am, so it’s time to give them credit. And as far as life dreams go, I never got to marry Kenny Rogers so this is the next best thing.”
Because if there’s one thing we need more of on television it’s celebrities getting nostalgic about stuff we all happily abandoned decades ago. Yes, Myf Warhurst may knows her music, but do we really care what she (or anyone else) thinks about Tickle Me Elmos, hypercolour t-shirts, or any of the other 80s/90s crap she’s going to dig up for this show?
Reading the media release just made us feel depressed. Depressed that TV producers think we’d rather sit through what looks set to be a fatuous meander around a topic that’s basically irrelevant to everything, than watch a new scripted comedy that possibly has something to say. And then even more depressed when we realise they’re right.
You can’t win in this game. On the one hand there are people out there writing original comedies that only hit the mark with a small audience, if at all (and don’t get us wrong, many of those shows deserve to fail), and the other hand there are programs so bland and inoffensive that only the truly bitter and twisted (Hello!) could possibly object to them. Where’s the middle ground in this? The “personality looks at a topic” shows which are funny, well put-together and come to a worthwhile conclusion, or the original scripted programs that are well-written and interesting. Joy of Sets, perhaps? Here’s hoping.
Hump’n Dump & the One Pump Chump
More than just about any other form of television, comedy requires feedback. Stand-up comedians hone their act in front of live audiences; even shoddy no-budget Australian comedy films manage to fit in a bunch of test screenings to help guide the editing process. So why, we hope you’re asking yourselves otherwise this post is going to be a waste of your time and ours, is Australian scripted television comedy made in such a way that the whole thing’s done and dusted before the audience even gets a look in?
Thanks to being neither the UK or the USA, television production in Australia has traditionally taken whatever form the networks have been willing to pay for. The ABC has tended towards the UK model of short series runs, but even with today’s tight budgets that’s not always the case – see the currently running twenty part drama series Crownies for one. In the early 90s The Late Show had two twenty episode seasons; in 2006 The Chaser’s War On Everything ran for 28 episodes.
Back at the dawn of time when commercial television actually made sitcoms they’d follow the US model, which is how Kingswood Country wormed its way into the heart of a nation and Hey, Dad..! became the longest running sitcom ever. More recently, Comedy Inc – AKA Nine’s late night attempt to meet their local content requirements – ran for 95 episodes over five years. That wrapped in 2007: in contrast Nine’s next attempt at sketch comedy, 2011’s Live From Planet Earth, ran for just three episodes. Whoops.
The drawbacks of extended seasons are obvious – extremely obvious if you watched the second, 24 episode-long season of The Chaser’s War on Everything in 2007. Cast and crew are worn down, ideas run out, things start getting a little rough around the edges. But there’s a bit of an upside to them as well. With more time, sillier ideas – or just ones a little different from the series norm – get a go. More importantly, there’s room for audience feedback, especially if episodes are going to air while others are being filmed.
There’s little doubt that The Chaser’s drift towards pranks in The War on Everything was partly due to audience feedback (people loved them), and partly due to their massive workload (you don’t have to script a prank). And it worked; The Chaser’s War on Everything was one of the biggest, most culturally influential comedy hits this country had seen since the Fast Forward / Comedy Company days.
Despite all this, in the last few years (with the notable exception of the Hey Hey it’s Saturday revival) the model for making comedy in this country has become set: short series with an all but guaranteed follow-up run on the ABC, short series brought to a premature conclusion* on the commercial networks.
The advantages on the production side are, again, obvious: writers have more time to write, the production team aren’t working on a weekly turn-around, the short run means everyone is (relatively) less stressed and having a finished product means the network has a lot more flexibility as to when they will air it. Okay, perhaps that’s only an advantage for the network: looks like 2011 will be yet another year when the ABC’s gay SF fanclub sitcom Outland fails to find a timeslot.
What this means for viewers is that sitcoms and scripted comedy has drifted down a couple of fairly dubious – to us at least – pathways. The first is the dreaded reoccurring segment. When you only have to do six or eight episodes and you can plan them all out beforehand, it’s easy to say “okay, we’re going to do this hilarious idea every week – we just need to think of six variations on whatever ‘this’ is.” So you get scripted comedies where the first episode seems great and fresh, but then the next episode is basically the same segments with minor tweaks. The joke was funny the first time; by episode five, not so much.
(yes, we know long running shows had regular segments too. But under weekly deadline pressures, some week the segments wouldn’t appear, or they’d mutate as the cast found different directions to take them. Arguably the big problems with Hey Hey it’s Saturday started when they stopped mixing things up and just did the same segments every single week.)
As far as sitcoms go, doing a short batch all at once (and with a DVD release just days after the conclusion) seems to have encouraged at least some creative teams to see their efforts as more of a six-part movie than six separate episodes. First episodes are no longer a way to hook viewers in and keep them coming back; now they’re a way to “introduce the characters”. The show’s already filmed and it’s going to air until the end no matter how it rates (Angry Boys proved that), so why not take it easy starting out?
Here’s why: people watch comedy to laugh. If you spend your opening episode “setting the scene” and “establishing the tone” and “introducing the characters”, that’s a whole episode we’re not laughing at. Of course, those things are important in a sitcom: they should also take about five minutes tops, otherwise you’re making a drama. We’re looking at you Laid. Don’t think we want to make a habit of it either.
Actually, Laid‘s a good example of one possible cure for this problem, on the ABC at least. The only possible reason – as far as we’re concerned – to give Laid a second season (which it did get) is because with sitcoms having extremely short runs (and six episodes really is pretty short for a comedy, historically speaking) giving them a near-automatic second go is pretty much the only way you can hope to ever see any improvement in your comedy programming. Good, bad, whatever, it doesn’t matter – you get a second go (unless you’re the extremely funny Very Small Business) because your first go is pretty much a practice run. Just like the first few episodes used to be when sitcoms like Frontline and The Games would run thirteen weeks.
This isn’t an ideal solution either. After all, part of the charm of a good sitcom is getting to know the characters and the way that knowledge amplifies the comedy. Spending six episodes with them, then taking a year off before presenting another six might give the production team time to breathe; it also means when the characters return we have to get to know them all over again, especially if during that year-long break the writers decide to mix things up a little.
Things weren’t better in the good old days – we did mention Hey, Dad..!, right? – but at least there was more of a chance that things might turn out better. We wouldn’t say failure is built into today’s system, but when you combine short runs, ratings pressure, a lack of off-air training grounds (seen any good cabaret acts or live sketch comedy lately?) and worshiping at the unfunny “awkward pause” altar of Chris Lilley, pretty much the only good news today is that Australian comedy isn’t entirely based around the work of Eddie McGuire and the Beached Az team.
*Despite strong initial ratings, considering the general negativity surrounding its first episode the fate of Good New World remains a little shaky. It’d be nice to think it could take on board audience reaction and improve in coming weeks, but considering it’s made by a fifteen year-old team that’s done nothing different in fifteen years, it’s more likely it’ll go down the Hey Hey revival path and stick to its guns even when people are clearly tuning out.