Australian Tumbleweeds
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.
Good News Weak – Geddit? See what we did there? Ha!
Ten’s experiment turning the tried and tested and tired Good News Week into the shiny new sketch-tastic Good News World worked out pretty much as well as you would expect. If you think you’re detecting a little sarcasm there, well done: Good News Week was stale, worn out hackery when Ten bought it back as a stop-gap program in 2008 when the US writers strike looked like it was going to cut off supplies of cheap US shows, and while it was initially greeted as the return of a long-lost friend ratings-wise, viewers soon started drifting away.
[sidebar: If television networks had the slightest clue as to what they’re supposed to be doing, the initial ratings success of both the GNW and Hey Hey it’s Saturday revivals would be a massive blaring signal that there’s a market out there that wants to see live or semi-live comedy built around people just messing about – and their rapid ratings decline would be just as big a signal that people want to see fresh faces doing the messing around. Funnier faces wouldn’t hurt either]
And so we get Good News World, which is basically the exact same GNW / Glasshouse / Sideshow / GNW again jokes we’ve been yawning through since 1998, only now some of them are told in sketch form! Still, the format is a good one – it should be, considering it’s pretty much the same one used by every show of this stripe in this country since at least The Late Show in the early 1990s (if not the 70s and Saturday Night Live) : opening monologue, news desk parody, fake interview, sketches, a musical number or two, rinse and repeat until the end credits come up.
Unlike Hamish & Andy’s Gap Year, which often feels like it features five or six segments all doing roughly the same thing, this format breaks things up enough so that even when the jokes are pretty much all the same at least the setting is different enough to make them feel kind of fresh. Fresh turds in this case, because in case your eyes glazed over back at paragraph two, THEY ARE THE EXACT SAME JOKES GNW HAS BEEN DOING SINCE IT STARTED. And we’re using the term “joke” advisedly here, considering they’re almost entirely stale political references combined with the word “knob”.
Don’t worry though, because the three GNW regulars are back and if anyone knows how to sell this tired hackwork passed off as fresh material… they abandoned this ship a long time ago. Claire Hooper still looks like a rabbit stuck in headlights – if she and Dave Hughes had a baby together they’d have to keep it in a lead-lined box because its gaze would turn men to stone – Mikey Robbins is a jolly fat man who’s no longer fat or jolly or able to do anything that falls into the category of “comedy” and Paul McDermott is a decent musical comedian promoted way above his abilities.
Let’s be generous here: as a host, McDermott can deliver a monologue well and his musical numbers are… okay, they’re all the same but he has a nice voice. He’s just not a generous performer by any stretch: when he’s on stage he wants the laughs and he works with the audience (eye roll? check. knowing smirk? check), not the other performers. So doing sketches and fake interviews as the new format requires him to do results in a bunch of scenes that only serve to remind us that gee, Paul McDermott is really smug for a man with not that much to be smug about.
As for the new cast members, Cal Wilson is rapidly using up the goodwill she earned by being funny once upon a time on Get This, Tom Gleeson provides the same level of pointless “I’m here everybody – surely that counts for something” he does in everything, and Akmal Saleh must have fans somewhere but we’ve never met them. Or anyone who has met them. Or anyone who doesn’t visibly sag upon being reminded that he exists.
At least – a very, very least – Sammy J and his puppet sidekick Randy work well together and present material that goes (a little) beyond the GNW tradition of tired political dick jokes. They can’t save GNW, but they do provide a slight uptick in quality when they’re on-screen together.
But who cares? GNW and its variations have been stinking up Australian television for well over fifteen years now and if this version fails another one will pop up on the ABC within a year or so and feature the exact same tired faces gurgling out the exact same shithouse jokes ripped off from all and sundry. It’s not that the audience actually wants to watch these shows – they all fizzle and die in the ratings soon enough – more that television executives seem to think that a): Australians want political comedy, and b): political comedy involves people putting on shit wigs and telling crap “children’s stories” about whatever the current scandal / crisis is. Satire!
So let’s set the record straight. Australians don’t want political comedy. They just want comedy FULL FREAKING STOP. Telling a shit joke but changing “an irishman” to “Tony Abbott” doesn’t make it funnier, it just makes you look lazier. Good News Week / World / Whatever uses its topicality as a crutch – “of course our jokes aren’t that great, we’ve had to rush them out to keep them topical”. Right. Because Tony Abbott’s speedos and Osama Bin Laden are topical.
There’s no reason why a topical weekly political sketch show shouldn’t work on Ten. Simply sack every single person involved with Good News Week and start from scratch. Unless you’re willing to do that – unless you’re willing to say “we actually want to make a show that isn’t just the same old crap served up in a slightly different bowl” – then all you’re doing is taking the piss. And shouldn’t that be the show’s job?
Bad news, world
Crikey’s Laugh Track blog reported the other day that a promo video for the upcoming sketch show Good News World has been released on Facebook. Good News World, in case you’ve been trying to block out its existence (and this is something we do advise), is the revamped version of Good News Week, which promises to be “somewhere between The Daily Show, Saturday Night Live, and a hostage situation”.
“Judging by the trailer that they posted on Facebook, I’m gathering the television audience is the latter” writes Laugh Track’s Matt Smith. Quite.
But how can we convey the true horror of what’s in the promo video? Let’s start with these five words: Akmal Saleh as Colonel Gaddafi. Now here’s some more words, or more accurately a question: Is that a Masterchef parody written in the style of the Class Sketch? We can only hope that when the show’s actually broadcast the references will be slightly more up to date, as in not references to people who may be dead by the time the show airs, or not parodies of shows which finished up weeks ago. You know, like the program’s inspirations The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live might do.
As for the material being funny, well, that’s pretty unlikely. Perhaps the show’s fatalist of flaws is that the cast is almost entirely made up of people with virtually no decent sketch comedy credits to their name (Skithouse, The Comedy Sale, The Wedge, The Sideshow) – we haven’t seen this many hacks on the one show since the Hey Hey reunions.
Which is pretty sad for us here at Tumblies HQ, because if there’s one thing we’d like to see more of on television it’s locally-made topical sketch comedy – the kind of comedy that really nails it when it comes to politics, popular culture and everything in between. If we see any of that kind of comedy on Good News World we’ll be the first to laugh and applaud. More likely, this will be Live From Planet Earth awful, with not even Ben Elton’s topical stand-up or the one joke in Girl Flat to make up for it.