Australian Tumbleweeds
Australia's most opinionated blog about comedy.
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.
A year or so ago, when the iPad was released, there was a brief period in which a small number of well known local comedy groups, well, two local comedy groups – Working Dog and The Chaser – released their own apps. Now with smart phones and tablet computers to be found in every second person’s bag, including our own, we assumed there must be stacks more Australian comedy apps to download. Well, we’ve looked high and low, but the answer seems to be: not really. Maybe it’s the cost of development versus low returns, or just that it’s easier to make comedy for other media? Post your wild and crazy theories below. Meanwhile, here’s our (half-arsed) comprehensive guide to the mobile laughs we found for our iPhone 4:
Radio Stations: A number of Australian radio stations can by accessed via their own apps which allow you to listen live and access material pulled-in from their websites (such as videos, photos, news, podcasts). The ones most relevant to comedy are the apps from Barry digital radio, the Triple M network and the ABC. All are free and worked just fine when we tried them out.
Ethel Chop: This low-fi soundboard-style app allows you listen to short excerpts from Ethel Chop’s rantings…and that’s it. A little pointless, but free.
A-List Comedy: A-List Entertainment manage and/or produce acts like Tripod, Akmal Saleh and Kitty Flanagan. This free app allows you to see bios of all their artists and get listings of their upcoming gigs. There’s also an interactive element where you can leave comments about the artists and gigs, sign-in with your Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare account, and make friends with other users of the app. Users get points for doing various things, although it’s hard to tell what, if any, rewards you get for accruing them. In terms of making use of the possibilities of the mobile web, such as combining social media and location-based elements, this app gets points for actually bothering.
Adelaide Comedy: The team at Adelaide Comedy aren’t content with running a number of rooms in Adelaide, they’ve got a website, podcast, vodcast, YouTube channel and now this free app which aggregates all their online content in a mobile-friendly way. It’s nowhere near as advanced as the A-List Comedy app, but if you’re in Adelaide and want information about comedy gigs when you’re out and about it’s no doubt quite handy.
The Chaser: With this app (which costs $0.99) The Chaser kinda go back to their origins with the old The Chaser newspaper, by serving up heaps of spoof news stories and padding things out with some videos, photos, and other bits and bobs. Surprisingly, for an app which has the potential to be a local rival to The Onion or The Daily Mash, there doesn’t seem to have been any new content added for months, which is a bit of a missed opportunity.
Jetlag Travel: Available in Lite (free) or paid-for ($1.99) this app builds on Working Dog’s spoof travel guides Molvania, Phaic Tan and San Sombrero by bringing other fake holiday destinations to life. The Lite version offers guides to Gastronesia and Boguslavia; an upgrade gives you another 10 or so more. The guide to each country is fairly basic compared to the book versions, but they’re fun to browse through. Also, it seems there will be more Jetlag travel guides added to the app at some point – it will be interesting to see if you have to pay a further upgrade for these.
Beached Az: The inevitable app of the cult series will set you back $0.99. It allows you to download and watch all the episodes, DVD extras and trailers, and there are also character profiles to browse, a soundboard, wallpapers and a game where you have to flick crabs off the beach with your fingers. We didn’t mind the game, and if you’re a fan of the show the other stuff probably has some appeal, but as we’ve noted before, Beached Az isn’t really our thing.
Also firmly in the “for the fans” category are apps based on Angry Boys and Spicks & Specks. These cost $1.99 and we drew the line at paying for them, but the iTunes Store descriptions indicate that the Angry Boys app is quite similar in structure to the Beached Az app (i.e. there’s a game where you have to save Blake’s balls from getting shot), and the Spicks & Specks app allows you to play Spicks & Specks on your very own phone. They both got good ratings, so if like either show they may be worth spending $1.99 for.
In these days of a thousand digital channel flowers blooming, repeating your programs as often as possible during the week of release is a sign of commitment. “This is a show we’re standing behind,” a repeat says, “this is a show we want to be seen by as many people as possible”. Whether it’s a Sunday night repeat of Hamish & Andy’s Gap Year, Ten’s short-lived late night repeats of The 7pm Project and 6.30 With George Negus or pretty much the entire ABC1 Wednesday night comedy line-up being repeated Thursdays on ABC2, coming back for more shows that a network really cares.
Which is probably why A Home With Julia isn’t being repeated. At all. One and its done.
At Home with Julia has been a bit of a rush job from the start, and while the stated reason is obvious – Julia Gillard might not be PM next week! We’ve got to get this on the air NOWWW!! – once you stop listening to the various political pundits doing their best impressions of a late 80s hip-hop act’s hype man, the likelihood of Julia getting the arse any time soon is fairly low. Ten’s running promos for Pre-Teen Masterchef (or whatever it’s called) featuring Gillard – they seem to be confident that she’ll be around for a few weeks yet.
So on the realistic side of the street, the ABC is probably rushing this “satire” to air now to cover a problem not in Parliament House, but in their own back yard: while a decade of Howard rule saw Auntie giving the Liberals a flogging with a wet lettuce leaf via The Glasshouse and The Chaser’s War on Everything, four years of Labor rule has seen… perhaps Laid was a savage indictment of left-wing sexual politics? Okay, perhaps not.
Having done bugger-all in terms of actual political “comedy” since Labor came to power, and with Labor power looking extremely shaky in the medium term, the ABC’s dilemma is obvious: the Liberals are going to be mighty pissed when they move back into the Lodge en masse to discover the ABC hasn’t spent the last 5-odd years throwing shit at the windows like they did when Howard was swanning around.
Enter At Home with Julia, AKA the second ABC series to debut this week about a feisty female redhead. And if the surprising – to us at least – level of vitriol aimed at Jess (Jess Harris) from Twentysomething is any guide to community attitudes, Julia Gillard’s struggle in the polls makes a lot more sense. Okay, sure, Jess is pushy and annoying and painful and insensitive, but isn’t that par for the course with comedy characters these days? She’s hardly breaking new ground considering Hamish Blake’s entire comedy persona is basically a slightly less pushy version of the same character, only with David Brent’s vocal stylings.
Could it be that doing “that voice” is the secret to making this kind of jerk funny? That without sounding like the star of The Office (UK) people actually take bitchy comments and blunt orders seriously? Answers on the back of a postcard…
[SIDEBAR: If only Australian television had created a sitcom with a arsehole male lead in the last few years we could compare Jess to. Hello Angry Boys. But while we’ve had three series of The Librarians, Laid, Twentysomething and now At Home With Julia – and before that, Kath & Kim – where women were rude & bossy and meant to be laughed at for it, Angry Boys so nakedly wanted you to love its cast of idiots its’ not a fair comparison.
So while we can point out the fairly obvious dislike out there directed towards aggressive female comedy characters, without recent equally aggro male counterparts gathering a similar (or wildly different) audience response for our scientific survey, all we’re left with is “hey, people sure don’t seem to like Julia Gillard… or Jess from Twentysomething.” Or red-haired people in comedy in general, considering Chris Lilley’s “ranga” jokes, Tim Minchin’s “Ginger” song, and the work of one-time redhead Tom “Ginger Ninja” Gleeson.]
As far as At Home with Julia goes – because we might as well get around to something like an proper review here eventually – it’s a little telling that while the political satire is simultaneously limp and heavy-handed (Wayne Swan needs help with his math! Rob Oakeshott goes on and on and on!), the actual relationship humour as Julia’s partner Tim (Phil Lloyd from Review with Myles Barlow) struggled with dodgy meat and schoolkids calling him a derro wasn’t all that bad. A lot of the jokes were cheap and obvious, but at least they were jokes, and Lloyd is rapidly becoming one of this country’s more impressive comedy actors.
[if you though we were drawing a long bow with our Twentysomething comparisons before, let’s point out that this is a sitcom where the only real chuckles came from seeing a nice guy being emasculated by his powerful redhead partner. Again.]
The big problem is that Amanda Bishop’s Gillard impersonation is not much chop – the voice, which you’d think would be the easiest part, only occasionally overlaps with the real Gillard – resulting in a show where seeing less of the nominal lead could only be an improvement. In a perfect comedy world this would almost entirely be about a man overshadowed by his powerful off-camera wife. Of course, if it did that it wouldn’t be sinking the boot into Labor…
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?
Over the years we’ve developed something of a reputation as people who love to hate. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth: we’re so full of hate we even hate hating, which is why we try to be fair and balanced with our critical responses to the wide world of Australian comedy. But occasionally, along comes some news that deserves nothing but a good kicking:
JMOFEST IS BACK!
2011 hails the return of the Julia Morris Film Festival
After nearly 200 entries in 2010 from all over the world, The Julia Morris Film Festival (or ‘JMoFest’ for short) returns bigger and better in 2011 for its first birthday!
In case you’ve been smacking yourself in the face with a shovel over the last year to try and erase the memory of this disgrace, the “Julia Morris Film Festival” involves dupes making short films to help promote the struggling would-be celebrity as she desperately tries to keep people interested in her despite her failure to do anything even remotely funny or interesting in living memory. Said promotion involves the appearance of a Julia Morris mask somewhere in the film: our idea of putting the mask on a pumpkin and then hacking it to bits with an axe was deemed “too much effort”, especially as merely holding up a copy of her shoddy autobiography would be just as horrifying.
Yeah yeah, raise money for charity, blah blah worthwhile exposure for upcoming film-makers. Are you serious? Both these things can be achieved in ways that don’t involve promoting a tired comedian who hasn’t been involved in a worthwhile project since that episode of QI she was on a decade ago. And while there are prizes on offer, let’s be clear: you are going to be making a film to promote Julia Morris. What does it benefit a man to gain the world, if in the process he loses his soul by helping out Julia Morris?
[also, these prizes are much less than you would be paid to create a promotional video for someone. And when you enter your short film, Morris claims all rights associated with it: if it turns out that your short contains a brilliant idea for a feature film, comedy sketch or commercial, you’ve just kissed it goodbye. A fate you actually fully deserve, because you made a short film PROMOTING JULIA MORRIS.]
And while we’re a-hatin’, the 2011 Awgie (Australian Writers Guild) award nominations were announced recently, and… oh, just take a look at the comedy categories:
COMEDY: SKETCH OR LIGHT ENTERTAINMENT
Good News Week: Australia Decides 2010 – Dave Bloustien, Simon Dodd, Bruce Griffiths, Warwick Holt, Paul Livingston and Ian Simmons
Good News Week: Episode 3.30 – Dave Bloustien, Simon Dodd, Bruce Griffiths, Warwick Holt, Paul Livingston and Ian Simmons
Good News Week: The First Cut – Dave Bloustien, Simon Dodd, Bruce Griffiths, Warwick Holt, Paul Livingston and Ian Simmons
COMEDY: SITUATION OR NARRATIVE
Laid: Episode 4 – Marieke Hardy
Housos: Pregnant – Paul Fenech
Review With Myles Barlow: Series 2 Episode 1 – Phil Lloyd with Trent O’Donnell
What, if we may be so crude, the fuck? Even accepting that, as their website says “They are awards which are given for the script alone, recognising that it all starts with the written word’ – which, we’re assuming, means you have to submit your script to the AWG to get nominated, which might explain some of the more jaw-dropping omissions – this is a debacle of epic scale.
Put another way: Judith Lucy’s Spiritual Journey contained sketches. Good News Week barely contains jokes. Maybe the writers were nominated for not committing suicide once Mikey Robbins stopped being fat, thus eliminating 60% of their material?
As for the sitcom category, while it’s kind of hard to tell exactly what time period’s being covered here – Housos is yet to air, while Review was the middle of 2010 – series two of The Jesters was a): scripted and b): almost certainly a billion times better than the latest load of incoherent shouting from the pen of Paul “Pizza” Fenech. What about The Librarians series 3? We’re not saying these shows are great, just that Housos had better be pretty fucking fantastic – thus reversing a full decade of drivel from Paul “time for another no-name special guest appearance” Fenech – if this category is to scrape through with any kind of credibility at all.
And the sketch comedy category… okay, sure, GNW is light entertainment. So is wacking yourself in the crotch with a meat tenderiser. And the meat tenderiser has more on-air personality and comedy timing than Paul McDermott puts out there on GNW these days.
We could go on – does every single comedy show out of the ABC these days have to be “join us as [comedian / comedy troupe] takes a wacky look at the world of [something already covered by a ‘serious’ ABC program]” and if so that still doesn’t explain how the Chaser found a crack between The Gruen Colostomy and Media Watch to insert The Hamster Wheel – but instead, let’s end on a positive. No, not that the “revamped” Good News World will be lucky to last three weeks.
Starting next Tuesday night is ABC2’s newish (an earlier version aired on Channel 31) sitcom Twentysomething. It’s actually pretty good. If you want to check out the first episode (and you’re in Australia – stupid geoblocking), you can do so here. We recommend you do so; lord knows pretty much everything else that’s coming up soon (bar ABC2’s other c31 theft, The Bazura Project) looks like more of the kind of disposable, forgettable material that has enabled Paul “more shouting – over the top of each other this time” Fenech to call himself ‘award-nominated’ without being laughed out of town. That’s a real shame; it’d be the first laugh he’d given us in years.
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.
Tonight sees the final episode of Judith Lucy’s Spiritual Journey, and what have we learnt? For starters, it’s now impossible to put a show on television that doesn’t start off with a reminder about previous episodes. What was all that about? Sure, it’s a journey, but it’s not like each step built on the previous one, so… oh wait, the show didn’t actually have an opening credits sequence (just a title card), so these “previously, on…” moments clearly took their place. Move along folks, nothing to see here.
Tonight’s episode sees Lucy off to India in search of enlightenment, cheap plastic surgery (not really) and a footpath where she won’t be blocking some guy on a scooter. As with the series as a whole, the episode is split between Judith’s gag-heavy, somewhat distant voice-over and her actual experiences on the ground, which are much more immediate and affecting. She’s still a great interviewer, willing to listen to her subjects’ answers and then build on them: if nothing else, ABC radio should snatch her up for a regular gig pronto.
Lucy’s best-selling autobiography from a few years back The Lucy Family Alphabet either created or revealed a solid fanbase of people interested in Lucy’s quest for personal growth, so it’s hardly surprising that this series has pretty firmly gone down that path. It does mean though that those of us more interested in her comedy have been slightly… disappointed isn’t the right word, as the series as a whole has been far from disappointing. But there’s a lot of totally straight travelogue material in this episode as Lucy tours India and much of it, while interesting, isn’t funny.
Nor is it meant to be, of course, and much of the strength of this series has come from seeing someone whose first response to pretty much anything is to crack a gag push past that impulse and take things seriously. Seeing her authentically moved by giving an offering to the Ganges river isn’t exactly thigh-slapping stuff, but it is part of what makes Spiritual Journey worthwhile television.
Not that we care about any of that mystical touchy feely crap here. No, we’re all about the laffs. Which is why it’s only fair to point out that, unlike the fairly even balance of the preceding episodes, this one’s mostly on the serious side. Even Judith’s final summing-up (as she returns to the breakaway Catholic Church seen in episode one to deliver the homily) leans a little more on what all this exploring has meant to her and a little less on busting out the gags. She does get one “Zing!” (and accompanying trademark fist-pump) in there, so it’s hardly a dead loss though.
While Lucy never quite manages to integrate the comedy with her spiritual explorations – largely because she treats the spiritual side of things with actual respect, which makes her a much more likable person (by virtue of not going around making fun of people) but does cut off most of the obvious comedy angles – that’s not to say the series has been all sturm und drang. The funny stuff has, for the most part, been very funny (that commercial radio support group sketch is probably going to be the comedy highlight of Australian television in 2011) while the serious stuff has mostly only been serious in comparison to the sanitary pad gags.
While it’s part of the seemingly unending trend towards “let’s get comedians to explore issues” programming, Spiritual Journey has been a show that only Lucy* could have made. She’s interested enough in spirituality to have actual questions she wanted answered, and she’s level-headed enough to get in a bunch of jokes around the edges. If it’s turned out to be heavier on the spiritual side of things, it’s not like Lucy isn’t funny or endearing or intelligent enough to bring it all together into an interesting whole. Hell, she was pole-dancing in a nun’s costume; you’re not going to get that on Hamish & Andy’s Gap Year.
*Ok, and John Safran. Though Safran would have made it just as much about his ex-girlfriends as spirituality and had his exes on and then gone in a couple of mildly unsettling directions. Lucy may have slept with a prostitute and made it part of her act, but she’s always kept her personal relationships (aside from the one with her deceased step-parents) off-limits.
We’re now halfway through the current series of Hamish & Andy’s Gap Year, and it’s hard not to be a little disappointed in the way the show’s developed. Not because it’s a let-down, but because it’s been exactly what we expected going in: week after week of minor variations on their series of specials on Ten, which themselves were basically their radio show with pictures. Even the celebrity interviews of the first two episodes are long gone, leaving behind what is basically “Hamish & Andy’s New York Caravan of Courage Up On Blocks.”
If you’ve paid even the slightest attention to H&A’s work over the last few years, you don’t need us to tell you what business as usual for the boys means: a combination of segments that involve going somewhere to investigate some mildly odd local custom, combined with other segments based on some kind of wacky made-up sport / prank. And it generally works for them pretty well. They’ve got a knack for making silly antics seem light-hearted rather than mean or annoying – they bring the people around them in on the joke rather than make fun of them – and they’ve been at this long enough to find the comedy in pretty much anything served up to them.
They’ve also managed to come up with a couple of running gags that they’re working hard: Hamish has stacked on the pounds thanks to a weakness for American fast food, and the now-single Andy is, well, single. This weeks episode saw the button-bursting Hamish enrolled in a bodybuilding contest before revealing the creation of a fake dating show to try and find Andy a date. It’s hardly compelling or hilarious, but at least it’s a hook: much of the rest of the show consists of “we went and looked at some stuff”.
We’ve been fans of Ryan Shelton’s work for a while here, and his “100 Seconds” segment is… okay, it’s also just a truncated slice of what he used to do on Rove. But what it does do – apart from deliver some much-needed variety in a fairly one-note show – is provide an opportunity for Hamish & Andy to do some actual sketch work. We’d like to see them do more of it, (and give Shelton an extended segment – at 100 seconds, it feels like they aren’t confident he can run longer despite his Rove segments going four minutes easily) but considering we’re also the only people alive who liked Hamish & Andy & Shelton’s fake current affairs / sketch show Real Stories, there’s a good chance every single person advising them on Gap Year is advising them against it. Loudly.
As many, many reviewers have pointed out before us, Hamish & Andy are in a bit of a tricky position with Gap Year. Much of their much-vaunted charm relies on them being good-natured slackers wandering into offbeat situations. That’s fine for the occasional special: over ten weeks it’s going to wear thin, even when you’re on an entirely different continent. So far though they’ve made a reasonable fist of it. The aforementioned running gags provide a new way for them to justify at least some of their usual antics, and when it comes to comedy even a small change in setting can breathe some life into old rope.
That’s the good news. The bad news is, there’s no more good news. The interviews might have been a little dodgy, but at least they provided some variety between the stunts and travel segments. Sadly, it seems that after mixed reviews and slightly soft ratings during the first couple of weeks, they’ve-
[while we’re here, feel free to check out The Herald-Sun‘s resident grumpy old man reviewer Colin Vickery’s two stories on Gap Year that he filed on July 29 – one covering their ratings success, the other proclaiming it a dud. Sadly for those sick of his “stop making TV for the young people” stance, history has proved him to be roughly on the money: the current ratings are below a million viewers nationally, which no-one at Nine would be happy about]
– been scared off trying anything that isn’t tried-and-tested, which is pretty much always a mistake. Even massive fans of a comedy team want the same thing in slightly new and different ways, and tweaking the same old same old with a few new set-ups and Hamish’s greased-up gut isn’t going to keep things fresh. The individual segments are pretty much always still strong, but they’re too much alike.
Despite the clear and obvious effort H&A have put into making their television show an actual television show – for all the snark some reviewers have dumped on them, at least it’s not a static panel chat show like so much local comedy has turned out to be – it’s still much too close to their radio work. On radio you can churn over throw-away gags and if a show doesn’t work there’s always tomorrow: on television having your show feel like the raw material for a “best-of” DVD is not exactly the tone you want to be striving for.
More importantly, on radio you don’t have to provide variety. The format does it for you: you do your thing, then there’s a song or two, then there’s the ads, then it’s back to you. Even if all you do is the exact same thing over and over, it’s broken up enough simply by the format to ensure that the listeners – if they like what you’re doing – won’t get too tired of it. On television though, it’s just you. People will turn over during the ads (or record it and edit them out), so they end up getting a much more concentrated dose of your work. If you don’t vary what you do a lot, it’s going to get stale. And Hamish & Andy don’t seem to have worked that out.
You can’t tell from the highly edited version available on DVD, but The Late Show is a prime example of a comedy (fresh from radio as well) knowing that you can’t expect people to keep laughing at the same kinds of jokes over and over again. As it originally aired, The Late Show was extremely varied: live sketches, in studio sketches, monologues, fake news, vox pops, making fun of commercials, sports jokes, musical numbers – they threw everything out there to fill a fifty minute show. Gap Year runs 45-odd minutes, and usually only features four or five segments, some stretching close to ten minutes. We’re not saying the segments themselves aren’t good, but they’re just not different enough from each other to keep the laughs coming.
Sadly, even in our fantasy dream world of perfect comedy it’s more than a little unlikely that Hamish & Andy’s first proper television series after becoming massive successes on radio would have seen them make a serious effort to change up their act. Being big radio stars is what got them the gig, and with the amount of money Nine reportedly put into this show they’d be wanting that radio magic and plenty of it. Be careful what you wish for: being a repeat of their radio show is exactly why Gap Year is faltering.
What does and doesn’t get released on DVD in this country is often a bit of a mystery when you look at archive TV – that many people want to buy E Street? Really? – but things seem pretty cut and dry when you look at new shows: if it’s an ABC comedy it gets a DVD release. The as yet un-aired twentysomething, for example, is due out on DVD towards the end of its run. And to wind things back a year or several, everything from Double The Fist to Sleuth 101 to Sam Simmons’ The Urban Monkey is yours to own right now for the standard purchase price.
So, bearing that in mind, we’re currently wondering why there’s been no word about a DVD release of Lawrence Leung’s recent series Unbelievable. It’s not like it rated poorly, or was a particularly awful series; and it was on ABC1, in a good timeslot – not things you can say about some of the shows we’ve listed above.
Well, here’s our theory (a theory for which we have none of that evidence Lawrence Leung’s Unbelievable told us to look out for): the second series of Review with Myles Barlow didn’t come out immediately because a Christmas special was scheduled and the ABC wanted to include it on the DVD release…so, we’re wondering, could there possibly be more Unbelievable to come? Perhaps a Christmas special, where Leung goes and debunks Santa Claus in one of those nutty Christmas villages they have in Scandinavia or North America? We don’t know, we have no idea, no inside information – it’s just a guess – but you’re welcome to e-mail us if you’ve got any inside goss. Or just leave your thoughts on why some shows have or haven’t got DVD releases below, in your usual rabid and abusive manner. Bonus points will be awarded to the first person to tell us this blog is shit.
After the unflushable turd that was Bogan Pride Rebel Wilson might never be Australia’s sweetheart again, but over in the US her star turn (okay, three scenes) in Bridesmaids is opening doors left, right and center:
Rebel Wilson is seeing her career go into overdrive since appearing in Bridesmaids.
The actress, who played Kristen Wiig’s roommate in the hit comedy, just got the plum role to replace Casey Wilson in the all-star indie comedy Bachelorette, being produced by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay’s Gary Sanchez Prods. shingle.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, that’s not the only feature role she’s snagged:
At the same time, Rebel Wilson is the first person to be cast in Pitch Perfect, the Gold Circle romantic comedy set in the world of collegiate a cappella groups.
Nice work if you can get it. Or is it? The real comedy comes from reading on to see exactly what kind of roles the glorious new post-Bridesmaids age of gal-friendly comedies is giving to Australia’s greatest female comedy export. In Bachelorette:
Isla Fisher, Kirsten Dunst, Lizzy Caplan and Adam Scott are cast in the movie, which follows three best friends (Fisher, Caplan and Dunst) who are invited to act as bridesmaids at the wedding of a girl they called Pigface in high school.
Pigface. Ooh, sounds classy. But wait, there’s more: In Pitch Perfect–
She’ll play a character called Fat Amy who is a member of the female a cappella group Divisi and goes head to head against a counterpart from the male group known as the Treblemakers.
Pigface and Fat Amy. Typecast much?
Fingers crossed these roles turn out to be big hits for our Rebel, so she has a long and productive career in Hollywood, making, oh, we don’t know… maybe a wacky stoner comedy called FAT BLUNT? A movie where she plays a wealthy bank executive trying to buy her way to love titled PIGGY BANK? A poor girl from the wrong side of the tracks turns to beatboxing to make her way out of the gutter in PHAT BEATS? Or perhaps a good old-fashioned disaster movie called FLABBERLANCHE?
(snark aside, does anyone seriously think that if she’d gone to Hollywood two years earlier – or for that matter, two years from now – Wilson would have any kind of career there? She’s been amazingly lucky to bring her “hey, I’m a fat slut” act to Hollywood just when Hollywood has decided it’s ok to put non-model-standard women in comedies.
That’s not to say she shouldn’t take full advantage of the offers that come her way, mostly because we figure the more exposure she gets, the quicker the limits of her abilities – and the massive extent to which she overstates them – will become clear. For fuck’s sake, she’s telling Americans that Bogan Pride was like Glee only “ahead of its time”; eventually someone’s going to notice this clown car only has one gear.)
