Australian Tumbleweeds
Words and Pictures: Hamish & Andy’s Gap Year
So after all the mystery around Hamish & Andy’s Gap Year… it’s a talk show. Not that that’s automatically a bad thing, especially when you’re bringing out wacky diagrams drawn on cue cards. Still, it turned out that the cue cards were pretty much the only way that H&A – best known for radio success, not so well known for their television fizzles – actually put in the effort to broaden out their act. Not that we’re complaining: it might seem a little obvious, but considering how much of Australian television these days consists of people behind a desk talking, having the people behind the desk also pulling out the occasional visual gag (bobbleheads! photos of their mums! a robot!) is a definite plus.
That said, if you’ve seen any half-way decent Australian talk show of the last decade – Rove, Micallef Tonight, er… – you pretty much know the score here. Yes, there are a bunch of filmed inserts to break things up, and there’s a segment that resembles – Hell, is exactly the same as – their Caravan of Courage specials for Ten, but at its core Gap Year is a Talk Show, complete with desk and couch and guests and band and segments that don’t quite work.
The question then is, does the talk show format struggle time and time again in Australia (while going gangbusters in the US and ticking over okay in the UK) because of some deep-seated aversion to the format, or simply because we haven’t found the right host(s)? If anyone can make it work it’s Hamish & Andy, even if they do seem a lot more comfortable (and funnier) in the filmed segments than the show proper.
Part of that could be down to the New York audience (supposedly packed with expats), who, while clearly rev’d up, aren’t always fully on board with all the jokes. It did give the early segments a slight Micallef Tonight feel, where the jokes worked for those at home (well, at our homes) but didn’t quite work in the studio. Fortunately (not that we didn’t like Micallef Tonight), Hamish & Andy are much, much better interviewers than Shaun Micallef circa 2003, and their muck-around song with Taylor Swift was – for a nation used to the painfully embarrassing suck-up interviews seen on Rove – both a relief and pretty fun (the Neil Patrick Harris interview later on, not so much).
In a recent interview a comparison was drawn between Gap Year and Nine’s last high profile stab at letting a big name radio comedian run his own show, The Mick Molloy Show. It’s a reasonable comparison in more ways than one: much like The Mick Molloy Show would eventually figure out, Gap Year sees the guys sticking close to what they’ve been doing on radio for years: loads of filmed segments being wacky and interacting with strange customs, short but fun interviews, likable banter. And they’ve learned from Mick’s mistakes: there’s absolutely no playing a comedy drunk, being a slob, running old footage of Bert Newton hosting a drinking competition or doing anything else the tabloids could misconstrue.
By sticking very, very close to their successful radio show format (much as we enjoyed The Mick Molloy Show, one thing it wasn’t was a television version of his radio show Martin / Molloy, mostly because Tony Martin was only around for half the episodes), Hamish & Andy have failure-proofed Gap Year about as much as anyone could expect. That doesn’t mean it’ll be a success – even sure-fire formulas tank weekly on Australian television these days – and the fairly similar talk / comedy show Rove was struggling in its’ last few years. But with only ten weeks to run, Australian audiences would have to prove themselves more fickle than a gaggle of teenage girls to turn what is basically business as usual for the guys into a flop.
One question though: where was Ryan Shelton?
Autopsy Ambulance: Vale Angry Boys
Angry Boys probably isn’t the biggest comedy flop of 2011 – Live From Planet Earth still retains that crown – but the term “massive debacle” isn’t exactly overstating the case. Let’s be blunt: in television it’s ratings that count, and the ratings for Angry Boys have been utterly shithouse. Worse, there’s no way to spin it as “an undiscovered masterpiece” or any of the other comforting phrases trotted out when a show fizzles out. The first episode pulled in 1.3 million viewers; by week eleven, that was down to 465,000. Roughly what the first episode of the much-reviled Life From Planet Earth pulled in.
[interestingly, there’s already a counter-narrative being put out there claiming that the show still pulled in viewers, only they were watching on iTunes and other digital platforms. Trouble there is, that doesn’t explain why they tuned in initially on their old-fashioned television sets – it’s not like iTunes suddenly came on-line during week 6]
While the ratings have been poor, it’s the reason behind these crap ratings that’s of real interest. This wasn’t a show people never checked out, or a show they never had a decent chance to see: it was well advertised, on in an easy-to-find timeslot, given plenty of media coverage and well supported (with ads, repeat showings, a consistent timeslot and so on) throughout its run. The only serious, plausible explanation for why the show failed to hold an audience is that, for the majority of viewers, it simply wasn’t any damn good.
The odd thing there is, Angry Boys isn’t all that different from writer / director / musician / star Chris Lilley’s previous (and extremely successful) series Summer Heights High and We Can Be Heroes. Just go read any of the reviews that ran in The Age’s Green Guide – actually don’t bother, we’ll do it for you.
“Now we’re getting somewhere. It took a while to gain momentum but episode four of Chris Lilley’s Angry Boys is traction city with the introduction of Lilley’s latest incarnation, ruthless Japanese skateboard mum Jen Okazaki… Angry Boys is emerging as a beautifully realised series that might rival Summer Heights High. This episode has instant classic written all over it. If you’re not hooked already you don’t stand a chance” – Larissa Dubecki, May 26
“There’s no doubting Lilley’s skills – S.mouse’s newly penned song is brilliantly painful” – Paul Kalina, June 2
“For this viewer, Gran is the standout creation of Lilley’s much-discussed show which, like Offspring, is slowly but surely heading towards what promises to be a memorable finale” – Paul Kalina, July 7
(that “memorable finale”, by the way, was the most obviously tacked-on piece of garbage seen on television since the ending to ALF where the alien-hunting taskforce finally grabbed ALF and took him away to be dissected [not a made-up ending]. In defiance of every single scene that had come before, erasing any actual drama or emotion created by the series simply for the sake of a totally unearned feel-good moment, Nathan suddenly regains his hearing just in time to see the rest of the cast turn up for his farewell party. How did they get the invitations? Why would they even bother? Couldn’t Lilley have figured out a way to get his happy ending by actually building up to it? STOP ASKING QUESTIONS AND CRY)
Ahem. So what’s missing from these reviews? Phrases like “Lilley has lost his way”, “A marked departure from his earlier work”, “bound to disappoint long-time fans” and so on. These people (and plenty others – these were just the reviews handy at the time of writing) clearly didn’t see Angry Boys as being all that different from Lilley’s other shows. Which somewhat blunts the increasingly common argument that somehow with Angry Boys the wheels suddenly fell off.
Yes, Angry Boys was extremely slow-paced, with next to no story development for most of its 12 episode run, but Summer Heights High was just as plodding during its’ middle stretch – out of eight episodes, there’s at least two that add nothing to the overarching storylines. That’s hardly surprising, as the show expanded from six episodes to eight during filming – presumably Lilley’s fondness for improvising scenes in front of the camera meant they had enough material to extend the series’ run (and still have hours and hours of deleted scenes left over for the DVD – which is also the case with Angry Boys).
Yes, Angry Boys verged on the racist and the homophobic; so did his earlier series. Islander teen Jonah was a racist cartoon until Lilley started getting serious towards the end of SHH; Ricky Wong was a stereotypical nerdy Asian who had no problem getting around on stage in blackface. Daniel & Nathan’s constant use of the term “fag” was a staple of their appearances back in We Can Be Heroes too; nice to see Lilley being consistent in their characterisation… such as it was.
Yes, Angry Boys was told in the same mockumentary style that meant he didn’t have to write storylines, and Angry Boys had Lilley doing all the characters and barely giving anyone else a line, and Angry Boys had Lilley writing a bunch of “offensive” songs, and Angry Boys shoe-horned in supposedly touching moments and a mawkish ending, and Angry Boys had the same boys choir opening music (written by Lilley again), and… you get the idea.
[While we’re here, normally Lilley’s use of racist language is brushed off as either “just a joke” or a reflection of the way teens actually talk. As jokes go, it stopped being funny a long time ago. Gran’s use of racist language early in the series worked because clearly the joke was that she was saying the (now) unsayable; what are we supposed to think now that the series is over and racist Gran turned out to be the character shown in the most loving and sympathetic light?
The kind of “joke” Lilley is supposedly going for, where we’re meant to laugh at the person making the racist / homophobic comments, only works if you don’t then try to make us feel sympathy for your racist / homophobic characters. Daniel constantly uses the word “fag” as an insult; by series end we’re supposed to see Daniel as a troubled, sensitive teen unable to articulate what he wants to say. He doesn’t grow from one state to the other though; rather, our view of him is meant to deepen. It turns out it’s okay for him to say “fag” all the time – the same way it was fine for Jonah to call red-haired kids “rangas”, the same way it’s okay for Gran to call black kids “Coco Pops” – because they’re really good people at heart. Or at least, Lilley thinks they’re good at heart, hence all the sad music and touching “dramatic” scenes and trips out to the tree where Daniel & Nathan’s dad died so Daniel can say “we’re not like men yet, we’re still like kids”. Aww. And then Nathan pisses on the tree, just to make sure we don’t take the super-serious scene he just showed us seriously. Make up your mind already.]
So – to get back on track here – why did audiences turn their backs on Angry Boys if it was basically just more of the same… oh wait, now we get it.
Time for a history lesson. We Can Be Heroes screened in July 2005, after a relatively long period of next to no Australian comedy on our televisions. Let Loose Live had tanked after two episodes barely a month earlier, Kath & Kim were on a break (that’s where the money for We Can Be Heroes came from), The Panel was six years old and worn out, Spicks & Specks was brand new and the idea of a regular Wednesday night comedy timeslot on the ABC was in its infancy. To some extent, Chris Lilley was the only game in town.
That’s not to say audiences were desperate for local laughs – clearly they weren’t desperate enough for Let Loose Live. But with Kath & Kim on the downwards slope and no-one else around, Lilley was in the right place at the right time. He’d been doing “cringe comedy” with his Mr G character on sketch show Big Bite, and with The (UK) Office at the height of its fame here a local version was a pretty safe bet – especially once (as rumour has it) the ABC asked Lilley to incorporate a David Brent-esque character into the mix.
Come 2008 and Summer Heights High had a secret weapon on its side: it was set entirely at a high school. In Australian society, you’re either about to go to high school, are at high school, have just left high school or – after a few years – have kids that fall into one of those categories. It’s a massive audience, and when one of the things you’re really good at is capturing the voices, mannerisms, and social nuances of people… well, it’s hardly surprising that the realism of SHH (in contrast to the comedy, which on one occasion involved Mr G putting excrement in a classroom in the hope a disabled student would be blamed) was often cited as its main draw.
Come 2011, and Lilley was back with a show without a clear connection to the audience. It was about “angry boys”, but that was so vague it didn’t work as a hook. He didn’t have the realism card to play either: S.mouse was a cartoon, surfer Blake wasn’t relevant to anyone in a city or inland, Jen Okazaki wasn’t human. All they had to offer were jokes, and that had never been Lilley’s strong suit.
Worse, come 2011 Lilley was a man out of time. In recent years comedy has swung away from the Ricky Gervais / Office style of “cringe comedy” and back towards, well, making people laugh. Hamish & Andy are the current kings of Australian comedy; awkward pauses and racist comments aren’t exactly staples of their work. Comedy has moved on, and it’s moved away from what Lilley does.
This won’t kill his career. The Angry Boys DVD is reportedly selling well, and the show is rating okay in the UK. But you’d have to think this kind of audience-shedding failure would give him pause before his next series. As well it should.
For 26 episodes over three series Chris Lilley has churned out the exact same show. He writes it, he produces it, he plays all the main roles in it, he writes the music for it. And that show is built around the exact same joke: his characters are arrogant morons who think they’re great and treat everyone around them like dirt. Then somewhere along the line, Lilley decides to show their sensitive side to wring some pathos out of the bad situation they’ve put themselves in through (to one extent or another) the same blatant stupidity we were supposed to be laughing at. We get it. We’ve heard it all before. We’ve stopped laughing. Come back with something new, or don’t come back at all.
The Gospel According to Lucy
Within minutes of her first appearance on The Late Show (and quite possibly within seconds of her first appearance on TV, on The Big Gig a year or so earlier) audiences were divided on whether Judith Lucy was hilariously funny or a caustic, sarky harridan. Lucy’s long-awaited solo TV series Spiritual Journeyseems just as likely to divide audiences, for that reason and others.
Spiritual Journey is another of those documentary/sketch show hybrids that the ABC seems to make nothing but these days. Here at Tumblies Central we’re not the greatest fans of this type of program – it’s never going to deliver the laughs like a really good sitcom or sketch show could – but we enjoyed what we saw.
In episode one Judith Lucy reflects on her staunchly Catholic upbringing; she interviews priests and nuns, and recreates her childhood in series of hyper-real sketches directed by Tony Martin. Judging from the preview of episode two the rest of the series will see Lucy exploring a range of religions and belief systems, interviewing more people, getting involved in rituals and reliving more of her life through more sketches, which should be fun.
But while Spiritual Journey is definitely one of those documentary/sketch show hybrids, the approach is slightly different to that in Lawrence Leung’s Unbelievable or John Safran’s Race Relations. In those programs documentary and sketch elements were brought together seamlessly through a prank or stunt; in Spiritual Journey the show seems to lurch from a serious interview to a sketch with barely a line of narration to link them; if you prefer a smoother change of tone you may prefer something else.
As for us, we were more interested in whether the sketches were funny and the interviews were interesting, and the good news is that they are. Judith Lucy’s stand-up over the past two decades, and her excellent autobiography The Lucy Family Alphabet, have covered religion, spirituality and the wacky beliefs of her family many times, so while much of the material is new she put it across like she’d been doing it for years.
However, if you’re one of those people who thought that Judith Lucy ruined The Late Show then we suggest you don’t bother with this series. Spiritual Journey is 100% pure Judith Lucy, and if you don’t like you can go to hell.
Mind the Gap
Here’s what we know: Hamish & Andy’s new show for Nine, Hamish & Andy’s Gap Year, starts this Thursday. It’s filmed in New York. Ryan Shelton is involved. And… that’s about it for now. Presumably when the TV listing supplements turn up in Wednesday or Thursday’s papers (depending on which one you buy) there’ll be a little more coverage, but otherwise for a big-deal program with the fate of the network riding on it there’s been remarkably little information as to what it actually will be like.
Partly that’s because hey, it’s Hamish & Andy! You know ’em, you love ’em and you’ll tune into ’em no matter what they’re up to. And partly it’s because, after doing a bunch of fairly successful specials on Ten, everyone pretty much assumes they’ll be doing more of the same this time around: roaming New York, pointing out funny stuff, having mildly amusing conversations, being Hamish (impersonating Ricky Gervais) & Andy (straight-man who pulled Megan Gale).
And partly that’s because Nine doesn’t want to spook the horses too much after a string of comedy duds. People like Hamish & Andy, so they’re promoting Hamish & Andy: people don’t seem to like watching comedy on Nine, so they’re not actually mentioning what kind of show it is that they’re doing for Nine (SPOILER ALERT: it’s a comedy). Judging by most of the promos, Gap Year could easily turn out to be Hamish & Andy renovating a New York apartment so they can turn it into a venue for their dream restaurant. Or it could just be their radio show with pictures. Nine isn’t telling.
One thing that is a little interesting though is the suggestion – judging by one of the promo ads that show them having an actual set and not just roaming the streets – that Gap Year will have a talk show aspect to it. Again, no big surprise there; one-off specials can survive by roaming the streets looking for fun but after a while you run out of random strangers and need to turn to people who want to talk to you. Hamish & Andy aren’t exactly known for their hard-hitting interviews – they’re not known for their hard-hitting anything – but after a billion years on radio they’re competent enough to make a short chat segment work (cue the show turning out to be a thinly disguised Parkinson rip-off).
Hang on a second though – didn’t Hamish & Andy’s former boss Rove also just announce his own US-based talk show? Why yes he did: Rove LA is lined up for September on pay channel Fox8, and promises to be, well, basically the old Rove show only with loads more overseas guests and way less Peter Helliar. Though we could be wrong on the second part. Fingers crossed.
There’s only so far you can go doing comedy on Australian television, and for the most part that’s not very far at all. But while the path to overseas success for Australian comedians traditionally involves the UK (Adam Hills, Tim Minchin, etc) and / or abandoning Australia to go hell-for-leather offshore (Rebel Wilson), this approach of filming in the US for the Australian market is something different. Other terms you can choose from to replace “something different” in the previous sentence include “dipping a toe in the water without committing to swim” “half-baked” “sure to expose the lack of talk-show subjects in this country”, “bound to seem like a severe case of hedging your bets” and “not really going to matter much if the show itself turns out to be good.”
The real problem with this kind of approach is that it can only ever be a stop-gap measure. You can only play the outsider in America card once: either you come back and make television shows in Australia for Australians, or you leave for good and make television shows in the USA for the world. Hamish & Andy seem to be aware of this (why else call your show Gap Year?), while Rove McManus seems to be using his show more as a way to keep himself busy while he tries to crack the US market. Either way, it’s hard not to be a little saddened over this: if Rebel Wilson – Rebel Wilson – can be a (quasi-)movie star in the US but Shaun Micallef can’t get a non game-show hosting gig in Australia then something’s seriously wrong. With both countries.
If you can’t say something nice…
As a result of our minor reputation for reviewing Australian online comedy we get the odd e-mail from Australian online comedy makers asking us to review their shows. The latest e-mail we received along these lines concerned Lost Dog, an upcoming Channel 31 series comprising of “six tiny comedy shows”. The Lost Dog website has preview videos for each of the shows, which look to be an experimental mix of sitcoms and sketches. Those involved include the makers of Morningshines, a Channel 31 series we disliked, and the makers of Free Internet, a series of online sketches we liked. As the preview videos don’t give much away we’ll reserve judgement on Lost Dogfor the moment, but we’ll be watching when it airs in September.
Worth a look right now is a low budget sitcom we were contacted about many months back called Retreat (which can be viewed on the Glastonbury TV channel on YouTube). It’s main writer and star is Australian Rani Cameron, but the show is shot in Somerset, England and features a local cast. Set in a New Age retreat, the show follows the trials of Rachel (Cameron) as she tries to manage both the retreat and its staff and customers, who are largely a bunch of feckless, unhinged hippies.
Interestingly, the character of Rachel doesn’t spend much time coming out with the sort of pithy, smart-arse insults you’d expect of a sitcom character like her, she just lets the crazies that surround her do their thing while she gets on with her job. This allows the supporting cast plenty of opportunities to get laughs, and is an admirably subtle way of dealing with the culture clash between sane Rachel and the nutbag hippies. There are also some good gags involving amusing signs, and messages turning up in odd places, such as people’s food.
If you’ve ever worked in the UK you may also recognise elements of some of your British colleagues amongst the characters, and pick up on some of the culture clash at play for Australians in a British workplace, although this is a very minor element of the show, and Rachel’s nationality has not, so far, been explored in the series.
After just three episodes of Retreat it’s hard to tell exactly where the show is going – the episodes are kind of meandering, and some of the scenes are joke-free or seem pointless – but there’s clearly some potential here. With a bit more focus this could be pretty good.
In review: Totally Full Frontal – Series One
It’s crap.
And with the obvious out of the way, let’s get down to business. 1998’s Totally Full Frontal was the third version of the by-now-a-full-decade-old Fast Forward franchise, where television and ad parodies mingled with single gag snippets and traditional comedy sketches to create an hour of, at the very least, television.
When most of the original former D-Generation cast members (along with Steve Vizard) drifted away from Fast Forward at the end of series four, a bunch of newcomers (including Eric Bana, Kitty Flanagan and Shaun Micallef) were brought in and the show was renamed Full Frontal. After a few more years and with ratings falling, Bana gone (in series four) and Micallef off doing his own thing (halfway through series five), Seven finally gave the series the heave-ho.
In swooped Ten (yes, at least one article compared it to Ten grabbing the also discarded Neighbours from Seven) and the franchise was once again re-titled and given a shot of new talent. Unfortunately, this time the new talent was Julia Zemiro, Vic Plume and Paul McCarthy.
It’s no surprise that television executives like to rely on formats rather than talent, but sketch comedy – and comedy in general – can’t really be boiled down to a sure-fire structure. Without A-grade talent, Totally Full Frontal had nothing to offer but joke-free parodies, segment concepts that might have sounded funny but sure didn’t look it and character sketches that lacked character. How close to the bottom of the barrel were they scraping? Chubby funster Dave “I wrote Takeaway” O’Neil was the head writer, which doesn’t exactly inspire… well, much of anything. Maybe hunger?
In earlier incarnations the show had been just as formula-bound – for example, the idea of a central fake news report carried over from Full Frontal to Totally Full Frontal basically unchanged. But Fast Forward had been put together by a crew of highly experienced sketch performers who’d honed their skills on stage and earlier shows; Full Frontal gave talented individual performers like Bana and Micallef room to do their own offbeat thing between the more traditional material. Whether due to lack of cast talent (no-one on Totally Full Frontal has gone on to display any real flair for scripted comedy) or an edict from upstairs to stick to the basics, Totally Full Frontal was generic front to back.
Despite its total blandness, it is notable for one thing (thank God): it was the first 21st century Australian sketch show. Put another way, if you go from Fast Forward to Full Frontal to Totally Full Frontal (as we’ve been doing at Tumbleweed HQ), the decline in quality is painfully obvious; if you work backwards in time from Double Take to The Wedge to Big Bite to Comedy Inc to Skithouse (and they’re all available on DVD if you want to try this at home, though we don’t really advise it) to Totally Full Frontal, it’s pretty much the same note all the way through.
While at the time Totally Full Frontal was only a moderate success (it lasted two, mostly reviled series), it seems to have been amazingly influential. Previous sketch shows were built around a talented core that had a history together, or failing that, would give talented newcomers free reign (as Big Bite would later do with Chris Lilley): Totally Full Frontal showed that you could lump together a bunch of only moderately talented people, hire a range of largely forgettable writers, and have the whole thing directed by uninspired professionals with one eye on the clock and still have a show that people would watch.
It’s this approach that, after a decade or so, has totally and utterly killed sketch comedy in this country. The fact that it took a solid decade of shit show after shit show after utterly shit show (that would be Let Loose Live) to achieve this will give you an idea of just how loved this kind of comedy once was in this country.
So thanks, Totally Full Frontal. Thanks for giving us Vic Plume gurning like a lunatic every time the camera pointed even remotely in his direction. Thanks for giving Ross Williams a few more years to try and perfect his seemingly palsy-afflicted newsreader character. Thanks for kick-starting Paul McCarthy’s career as Australia’s most “meh” master of disguise. And most of all, thanks for establishing a level of mediocrity that would eventually infect and destroy a form of Australian television comedy that had been thriving since the 1960s. For that, we salute you. We probably won’t be using all our fingers though.
It’s all just so meh
Australian comedy, particularly Australian comedy television, seem to be in one of its many “meh” phases. Angry Boys drags on and on, and newcomer Can of Worms (putting aside all the justly deserved criticism it received for the vast difference between what it promised and what it delivered) is equally dull television. Even Lawrence Leung’s Unbelievable, an entertaining and amusing comedy/documentary series looking at magic and the supernatural, is somewhat tainted by being yet another example of an over-used genre which dates back to at least the first half of the ’90s and Michael Moore’s TV Nation.
Unbelievable will be replaced in a couple of weeks by a show with roughly the same format, Judith Lucy’s Spiritual Journey, and while we understand that series is pretty good it’s kind of a shame that that style of show accounts for such a large proportion of the Australian scripted comedy TV made in recent times (the rest are mostly sitcoms). Where are the sketch shows, you might ask? Indeed, where are the shows which mess around with established genres, or aren’t simply one comedian’s personal take on an established genre.
In terms of the ABC we understand the problem is partly to do with budget. ABC comedy budgets these days don’t seem to be able to fund something as expensive as, say, a straight-out sketch show, so comedians are somewhat forced into doing stunts or documentary-style “investigations” – anything to keep sketches and scripted material to a minimum. Shows like Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle or the Louis CK sitcom Louie, which both combine stand-up with scripted material, might provide an alternative to the endless documentary-style shows, but even then an Australian version of either concept is bound to draw criticism simply for being unoriginal (and we’re equally guilty of that, we bagged the Peter Moon series Whatever Happened To That Guy? for being a Curb Your Enthusiasm rip-off, but grew to love it).
But of course, the ABC’s always been plagued by low budgets, so at least we have the commercial networks to serve up the kind of big budget scripted comedy we’d all like to see. Oh, yeah… As to the reasons why, here’s what Network Ten’s Chief Programming Officer David Mott had to say to the TV Central podcast on that subject a year ago:
Interviewer: One, kind of, one area where there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of movement on the, I guess, the commercial networks is, ah, scripted comedy, is that something that Ten’s been looking in to?
Mott: Ah, I’d say all networks continue to look at narrative, er, scripted comedy, um, hard to get good writers, to be honest, um, that’s always been a big issue. And, um, you know, I would say that certainly when we look at the trends going forward you could say that maybe comedy can, sort of, come back. Sketch has always been a bit hard, everyone’s tried sketch, that can become quite subjective. Um, and again, it’s so dependent on the writing. So, we’d never say no to narrative, er, comedy, ah, it just depends on the form it takes. Certainly with the success of Modern Family, it says that, and certainly the sort of sentiment of, of, of people now, seems that they, they want to laugh, and they want comedy, so, um, you know, maybe in the next 18 months or so you might see something come up.
And as we continue to wait for that something (surely he didn’t mean Offspring?), let’s look at the key points in detail:
“…certainly when we look at the trends going forward you could say that maybe comedy can, sort of, come back…”
Comedy is a “trend”? In the same way that wearing the sorts of clothes your grandparents wore when they were your age is right now? This is a ridiculous statement. Comedy is an ever-present genre of entertainment in the same way that drama is. Would anyone seriously claim that drama is unfashionable?
“Certainly with the success of Modern Family, it says that, and certainly the sort of sentiment of, of, of people now, seems that they, they want to laugh, and they want comedy…”
So, comedy’s not unfashionable after all? And because some people are enjoying an American sitcom therefore a similar group of people might also enjoy an Australian comedy? Yep, that makes heaps of sense.
“…hard to get good writers, to be honest…”
This is actually fair enough. Australian TV comedy could really do with some stronger writers. Having said that, with the lack of opportunities to gain experience as a comedy writer these days it seems unlikely that enough decent ones will be developed. And this is something broadcasters seem not to be willing to accept as being potentially damaging to their industry in the long term: if you don’t invest in developing comedy writers through, say, a late night sketch show, you won’t have the opportunity to hire them to make prime time scripted comedy programmes when they’re sufficiently good.
“Sketch has always been a bit hard, everyone’s tried sketch, that can become quite subjective.”
This is interesting, and something we’ve been pondering for a while: are certain genres or styles of comedy too risky for ratings-hungry networks to dabble in these days? Why bother spending loads of money on scripted comedy that might not attract the mass audience when you can make a middle-of-the-road panel show that will? The fact that a decent scripted comedy could do an equally job doesn’t enter into it, presumably, but we’re back to the earlier point about good writing again.
Anyway, perhaps this explains why in recent years it’s only been the ABC, and to a lesser extent SBS, who have had any ongoing commitment to scripted comedy: ratings matter less there. And why in commercial radio any shows with a comedy focus (as opposed to a mindless yammer focus) have been either axed (Get This), shunted off to a late-night slot (The Sweetest Plum) or not commissioned at all (countless). Amongst programmers and executives it seems that comedy is seen as something which stopped being fashionable or desirable at some point, and something they have no interest in making it involves even the slightest risk or investment. Which means heaps more panel shows – and that’s the bad news!
It’s Political Correctness Gone Mad!!
It’s been a grim few days for comedy in Australia. Okay, it’s been a grim few years. But this last week has been especially bad for those who think that comedy is an area best left up to comedians. First there was the long-awaited verdict in the Mick Molloy / Before the Game trial, in which a one-time political candidate sued Channel Ten over a comment – we’d call it a joke, but clearly the court didn’t agree – that Molloy made on the show. Short version: the plaintiff won, comedy lost.
Whatever you think of the content of the comment (Mick unsurprisingly seems somewhat contrite), it’s hard to put a positive spin on the result if you’re on the side of comedy. Having a politician sue and win over a joke can’t help but have a cooling effect on the kind of jokes that get made, and if you think our politicians (as the AAP report said, “she told the court she still had political ambitions”) should be made less fun of, well, move along folks, nothing to see here.
At the other end of the scale this week came a story on The Vine.com where a writer showed clips of Chris Lilley’s S.mouse character to various US-based hip hop artists for their opinion. News flash: they weren’t impressed.
This story’s been getting some fairly serious coverage in the last few days – it was on the cover of Melbourne’s free commuter newspaper MX, and The Age (owned by Fairfax, who also own The Vine) gave it a run in their print edition. While the story itself is certainly interesting reading, the wider coverage has tended to be focused more on the fact that the artists who responded weren’t impressed. To which all we can say is “Duh”.
Is anyone impressed with S.mouse? Do we really need hip hop artists to tell us S.mouse is a two dimensional, superficial character taking broad and inaccurate swipes at a form of music generally dismissed by mainstream culture – in short, a dull character taking swings at an easy target?
If the targets of Lilley’s kak-handed efforts are to be the new judges of his work, why not speak to Japanese single mothers and ask them if Jen Okasaki is accurate? Or call up a few Bra Boys and see what they think of Blake Oldfield? Lilley’s attempted “satire” is no less pointed in their direction. What about We Can Be Heroes’ Ricky Wong? Surely it wouldn’t have been too hard to find some Asians offended by him? Oh wait, he was funny, so it was okay.
This isn’t a defense of S.mouse. He’s probably the weakest character of a fairly weak bunch. But he’s not a racist blackface caricature either. He’s a specific individual that happens to be black, in the same way that Okasaki is a character, not a generic “Asian”. Of course, you could argue that ‘shit & clueless black rapper’ is itself a racist stereotype (surely if Lilley only wanted to make fun of hip-hop there’s been plenty of lame white rappers), but that’s what Lilley does. He works with stereotypes: whether you think he goes beyond that to find the truth in them is a matter of personal taste (we don’t).
The fact that The Vine has to go to the US to find someone offended by Lilley’s act pretty much says it all. While this whole thing seems the kind of development that once again closes off options to comedians (you can’t make fun of this particular group – look how offended they get!), the actual story shows that their offense is at least as much about how lazy and unfunny it is as it is about any offense caused.
More importantly, any publicity is good publicity when you’re sinking in the ratings. It seems doubtful that anyone at the ABC would be unhappy with this coverage – it’s getting Angry Boys in the papers and making it sound edgy and controversial on top of it. Which, come to think of it, may be a bad result for comedy after all…