Australian Tumbleweeds
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…
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?