Australian Tumbleweeds
Reasons to listen to the podcast of Triple M Melbourne’s The Hot Breakfast
If you saw the title of this post and expected it to consist of the following seven words – “There are none, sorry to trouble you” – then you’re wrong. Well, sorta wrong. Wednesday’s Hot Breakfast podcast contained one tiny little titbit guaranteed to interest the comedy nerd of a certain generation: Mick Molloy’s account of those infamous sketches from The Late Show where he gate-crashed TV shows in his Bart Simpson underpants. And because we know very well that there’s no good reason to listen to The Hot Breakfast on a daily basis, we’re going to share it with you now.
Download the episode here and fast forward three and a half minutes. There’s not a lot of detail, but the key fact is that the first underpants sketch, in which Mick Molloy jumped onto the set of Ernie & Denise during a live show from Myer, was born of desperation. Molloy and Tony Martin had turned up at Myer to film a door-buster sale sketch but had failed to get the footage. Luckily they spotted that Ernie & Denise were filming upstairs and they quickly came up with the underpants prank.
The result wasn’t exactly clever comedy, but as anyone who saw it at the time remembers it became an instant phenomenon. The following week, by popular demand, Mick gate-crashed Good Morning Australia, surprising Bert Newton. Then some shonky ABC special effects made it look like he’d also disrupted a discussion on media ownership on Lateline. But despite the popularity of these pranks this is where it ended. The following week’s Late Show began with a sketch in which Mick and Tone officially retired the Bart Simpson underpants, placing them under glass which was only to be broken in an emergency.
Viewing these sketches in today’s media climate, where simple, repeatable comic ideas like this are what comedians actively set out to create, Molloy and Martin’s decision to stop pulling the underpants prank after just a couple of weeks looks like a bad idea. But back in the 90’s this sort of restraint and good judgement were commonplace. Why would you do the same thing over and over, running an initially popular idea into the ground, when you can get out on a high and do something else?
It’s the kind of attitude we wish the makers of comparable recentish sketch shows like The Chaser’s War on Everything had. Or anyone trying to repeat their success. People remember The Late Show fondly because as a viewer you never knew what would happen next. Today’s TV comedy is usually fairly predictable, with characters turning up week in, week out – sometimes year in, year out – staying far beyond their welcome (we’re looking at you again, Chris Lilley). Repetition may be cheap, it may be easy, and your producer may claim it’s a good way to “build a brand” or some equally soul-destroying media wank, but as a viewer it’s a massive disappointment – and that surely can’t be good for TV comedy in the long term.
Things You Learn From Talking to Someone Who’s Seen Boytown Confidential
*It’s pretty darn funny.
*It’s about 90 minutes long, which probably means it would’ve only fitted on a 2-disc DVD release (considering there’s all that sing-along stuff taking up space on the current one-disc release)
*It’s mostly interviews with the (in character) cast. There aren’t a lot of visual gags, it’s not full of snappy editing or anything – Tony seems to have just sat down with each cast member and just improvised a whole lot of stuff.
*Tony Martin does his “rock DJ” voice throughout.
*The version seen by our nameless friend was basically finished – presumably some polishing would have been done, but everything else – opening titles, closing credits, heart-breaking “thank yous” listing amongst others Mick and his brother, and the Molloy Boy copyright tag – is present.
*There’s a lot of music references, some of which are kinda derogatory and might have caused legal problems (or just been bleeped out) if it had been released.
*While the “Meet Marty Boomstein” clip on the released Boytown DVD isn’t part of BTC, all the BTC easter eggs on the DVD do come from the full version of BTC. And if you had to pick five clips from BTC to keep, you’d probably pick the ones used on the released DVD.
*Once again, it’s pretty darn funny.
*What it isn’t, is a stand-alone film. It’s a really, really good DVD extra, but it doesn’t stand alone (nor is it meant to). It does reportedly make you want to watch the original BoyTown again though, and taken together the overall result is supposedly a lot funnier than they are separately. If you were a lunatic with too much time on your hands and a total disregard for copyright, you could probably edit the two together to create the best Australian comedy film of… well, the second half of the first decade of the 21st century. Hey, it’s still BoyTown.
*From everything we’ve heard, it’s not the best work of Tony Martin’s career – it’s not the best work of anyone involved’s career (apart from Gary Eck’s*) – but it’s still petty darn funny.
[for those arriving late, BoyTown Confidential was the DVD extra filmed by Tony Martin that was left off the released edition of Mick Molloy’s film BoyTown, resulting in a rift between the two long-time work partners. Legal action means it is extremely unlikely that it will ever be made available for public viewing in any form, though a lucky few have seen it over the last few years. No, we can’t help you see it.]
*(no, we didn’t like You Can’t Stop the Murders. Or, for that matter, his work on The Nation. His non tv / movie work remains largely outside our view)
Not Much Chop
In a world where comedy on commercial radio largely consists of prank calls and stand-up-esque chat, it’s refreshing to find a show where scripted comedy gets a look in. The Bunch, the top-rating breakfast show on Perth’s Mix 94.5, may not be the first place you’d look for that sort of thing but we can assure you it’s there, albeit not terribly often.
Each week The Bunch includes not only an amusingly snarky film review from Justin Hamilton, but “Ask Ethel”, in which Andrea Powell’s grotesque octogenarian Ethel Chop dispenses advice to the listeners. Both segments are worth downloading the weekly Bunch podcast to hear (although this does require you to fast forward through a lot of breakfast radio slop). The “Ask Ethel” segment in particular is savagely funny, and remarkably crude for the timeslot.
We’ve asked many times on this blog why Australian radio has so little scripted comedy – even basic comedy review or comedy advice segments are rarer hen’s teeth. Yet “Ask Ethel” and Justin Hamilton’s film reviews can’t be prohibitively expensive, and given that The Bunch website includes more than a hundred Ethel Chop segments Ethel, at least, must be quite popular.
So what’s the problem here? Are the purer types of comedy too divisive for some radio audiences? Do they not fit station’s brands in the way that pointless stunts and mindless phone-ins seem to? Has stand-up become so dominant in comedy that there’s no one out there capable of writing a half-decent radio script? Can producers just not be bothered? Or is it just that a show can make more money for a station by filling air time with pranks, stunts and chat that are actually a plug for some product, than they can from a comedian doing a character monologue?
Post your ill-advised theories or insider gossip here, and in the meantime get some Chop down you.
Based On Factual Events
Not everyone loves The Jesters. We understand that. After all, after a decade where most Australian sitcoms were filmed in odour-rama stuck on “shit” coupled with a solid push claiming that ye olde sitcom format – that is, people on cheap sets telling obvious (if funny) jokes – was clearly inferior to a show filmed like a high-end drama series only with everyone saying “outrageous” things that would bore most primary school students, a regular old-fashioned funny sitcom most likely comes as a shock to the system.
But one thing is a bit of a puzzle. Most of the press about The Jesters has taken the path of least resistance: The Jesters (the comedy group) are basically The Chaser, Dave Davies (Mick Molloy’s character) is Andrew Denton, etc. It’s understandable, if not strictly true: Davies is nothing at all like Denton, he just has a similar gig as a mentor to a bunch of up-and-coming comedians, while The Jesters all have distinct comedy characters, which is something The Chaser never managed to do (was there any real difference between the on-screen personas of Chris Taylor and Craig Reucassel?).
The thing is though, with all the “The Jesters are basically The Chaser” chat, no-one seems to have noticed that, on The Jesters the actual Jesters TV show is, well… meant to be shit. Of course it is: it’s a lot easier to make jokes about a crap show than a successful one, as everything from 30 Rock to the first few series of Frontline has shown. But it doesn’t work both ways. Either it’s a copy of the original – in which case maybe the fact that it’s saying that The Chaser’s War on Everything was kind of shoddy is worth pointing out – or it’s a show that uses real-life as a springboard for something new.
[yes, it’s obviously the second. But the reviews, even the positive ones, have focused so heavily on the “it’s just like the Chaser! Mick’s just like Denton!” angle that it’s worth pointing out that, if that’s really the case, then there’s an actual story out there they’re missing. And if it’s not, maybe they could find something else to say.]
This does go a long way towards defusing the other occasional criticism of the show, where it’s supposedly simply and mindlessly re-telling recent real-life comedy controversies (the Chaser’s Make a Realistic Wish Foundation outcry for one) using characters closely modeled on The Chaser. While a straight re-telling of that controversy would certainly be interesting (to us, if no-one else), The Jesters is a comedy. Events and characters are exaggerated for comedic effect. Even if you don’t think the end result is funny, how hard can this be to understand?
One of the bigger problems comedy faces when it comes to criticism is literalism: the inability to understand that some things are meant to be a joke. The Jesters, by having a basic set-up somewhat close (on a superficial level) to an existing group of people and a real-life situation, is an obvious target for this kind of thinking. It’s the flip side of the reality TV boom: some viewers can’t understand why you’d choose to make a show less real, even if by doing so you made it more funny.
As always around these parts, it’d be nice to blame Chris Lilley for all this, seeing as his career has largely been made on the back of audiences saying “I know someone just like that!!!” (only presumably an actual schoolgirl or Asian, making the entire joke nothing more than the fact Lilley is playing dress-ups). But he was just surfing a pre-existing wave, where reality – or barring that, holding up an purposely blunt and un-altered mirror to real life – was seen as television’s ultimate purpose.
It’s been a few years since that wave crested (which is why it’ll be extremely interesting to see how Angry Boys does when it starts), and the return (and relative success) of shows like The Jesters to the Australian comedy firmament is a sign that the wave may be receding or fading or heading off to Noosa or whatever it is that waves do after they break.
Clearly the tide hasn’t completely turned (that’s enough of the water bizzo – ed) – The Jesters is still loosely based on an actual real-life comedy team, after all. But it’s a start, and the fact that this season has increasingly moved towards more sitcom-y plots (such as last week’s dinner party episode) is, as far as we’re concerned here, a step in the right direction. Because comedy should always be free to do whatever it takes to get a laugh – even if that involves telling jokes.
The Sum Total of our Melbourne International Comedy Festival Coverage 2011
We don’t really cover stand-up / live comedy here all that much and so, while the spotlight shines brightly on the Melbourne International Comedy Festival for the next few weeks we’ll mostly be ranting away about Chris Lilley and trying to drum up support for Tony Martin’s nerd-friendly interview show A Quiet Word With… (starts this Saturday!).
But, in a moderately impressive segue, recently Mr Martin linked on twitter to the following in-depth article. It’s well worth checking out if you actually are interested in stand-up comedy in general, and MICF in particular. Because it’s not like we have anything interesting to say on the subject.
The News Team of Dorian Gray
For all the tough questions being asked on Hungry Beast, one seems to have been overlooked: why is it that, when producer Andrew Denton says “The whole point of this was to bring new people into the industry”, this third series sees the same faces back in the ring for yet another swing?
After all, by this time these guys are no longer “fresh young faces” – they’re just the Hungry Beast team. A team that, judging by the first episode at least, has pretty much given up on comedy in favour of relatively straightforward investigative journalism with some snark sprinkled on top.
This seems to be the fate of ‘news comedy’ in Australia: over the course of a year or so The 7pm Project went from a news-based comedy show to a news panel show with a few smart-arse comments thrown in. It’s hardly surprising considering scripted jokes cost money and require talent, while investigating news often requires little more than a google search or putting a call out on Twitter. And as a straight-up news show, it’s certainly at least as worthwhile an effort as anything on the commercial networks (not that that’s saying a whole lot). It does mean it’s slowly drifting out of our remit though, thus sparing Dan Ilic the dubious pleasure of our sniping.
Still, when one of the bigger selling points of your news show is that it’s giving fresh young faces and voices a shot (without that angle, why not just watch one of the many other in-depth news programs the ABC currently puts to air – they have trained professionals doing the same job without the distracting snark) it seems fair enough to ask why none of these fresh new faces have gone on to work on any of the ABCs many other in-depth news programs yet.
Yes, Marc Fennell is now reviewing movies on Ten’s morning show The Circle, and alumni Veronica Milsom went on to appear on the short-lived Live From Planet Earth. Otherwise, zip*. And after two series surely some of these big talents should have moved up to the big leagues – especially as with each series the team’s numbers are whittled down, like a internet pundit interview-heavy version of Musical Chairs.
In the Green Guide interview quoted at the start of this post, Denton says “This third series has been an evolution but it’s not like they’ve reached their peak now. They’ve got a lot of learning to do and a lot of possibilities to explore”. Really? After two series? At what stage does someone say “ok, playtime’s over”?
There’s nothing wrong with training – new talent has to come from somewhere. But if your show’s point is that it is all about training, at what stage does ‘the talent’ get kicked out of the nest? And if they’re here to stay – if they’re going to be judged as qualified television makers rather than eager newcomers – how long are we expected to wait for them to reach their peak?
*Oscar has since let us know that “Jessicah Mendes and Kieran Ricketts, from the first two seasons of HB, are now working at ABC News. Daniel Keogh has gone on to report for the ABC’s Science Show”. Which makes it five success stories (if you count Live From Planet Earth) out of HB’s original team of nineteen.
Vale Laid
Yes, Laid finished up a few days ago, but it seemed like a good idea to wait just in case the Fairfax papers – specifically The Age – tried to slip in some more good words for a show they love so much they should just bloody well marry it. During its final week it somehow scored not one but two glowing reviews in The Green Guide – and this for a show that, thanks to being based around a storyline that developed and continued week after week, was impossible to follow if you hadn’t already been watching. What’s next, glowing reviews of the final ten minutes of Chinatown?
No minor reviews these either. Lorelei Vashti devoted her entire 10/3/2011 column to Laid, kicking things off with the comedy highlight of 2011: “Being a friend of [Laid creator Marieke] Hardy’s it is tricky to write about this show but as it has been one of the most anticipated local comedies this year, it would be remiss not to cover it.” That’s right: Laid was more anticipated than John Clarke’s return to The Games. It was more anticipated than Chris Lilley’s new series Angry Boys. It was more anticipated than the return of 2/3rds of Get This to television, more anticipated than Adam Hills getting his own talk show, more anticipated than Ben Elton making an Australian series, more anticipated than Hamish & Andy moving to television, more anticipated than any show made by anyone with any kind of established reputation in Australian comedy. Oh wait, maybe the “being a friend of Hardy’s” line is the one to focus on here.
In one sense it’s nice to actually have confirmed the fact that the best way to get blanket coverage of your television show – let’s say it again, two separate reviews in the Green Guide during the show’s final week – isn’t to actually make a good show, but to be mates with the people writing the reviews. It means that the reviews can safely be ignored by those readers looking for a guide to a show’s actual entertainment value or quality, while keenly read by those wanting to know what Vashti’s pals are up to this week. This kind of favouritism isn’t exactly news, of course, but it’s rare to see it so insistently, offensively, disgustingly blatant.
[It does, on the other hand, go some way towards explaining why The Age seems to have been running a “the internet is full of mindless haters” campaign over the last month or so. We’ve covered most of it in the various Live From Planet Earth threads (though there was yet another story on the hurt anonymous internet posters can cause to media personalities on six figure salaries in the most recent Sunday Age), but where The Age’s stories have focused on the supposedly mindless hate of decent shows / people that the internet fosters, their blanket love of Laid is a display of how they plan to use the power they heap scorn on the internet for displaying. It’s a bit rich to claim that old media is a better source of information than blogs and twitter when your staff seem largely interested in uncritically talking up a former workmate’s projects.]
Without full access to the ratings it’s hard to know how well Laid did. The few figures we have seen suggest that it held steady at around half a million viewers nationwide, at least for the first few weeks. Which, based on wild guesswork, is good but not amazingly great for that timeslot – it’s safe to assume Summer Heights High did a lot better, for example. Still, turns out all this good press has paid off: the night of the final episode Hardy tweeted:
“The ABC are keen on another series and we have begun writing. See you in 2012.”
“We are currently writing a second series and the ABC are keen. If all goes well we will shoot in July/August.”
Here’s a question: Huh? Forgive us for being a little tardy, but didn’t the show end with the mystery of the dead boyfriends being solved? What is a second series going to be about, apart from letting us all know that the ABC wants to be in the Marieke Hardy business so badly they’ll throw cash at pretty much anything?
Personally, we say put money on a spin-off called YEAR ZERO about a woman who meets her dream guy then goes about exterminating all her previous lovers so she can erase her dodgy past and be The Perfect Woman for him, but that’s mostly because, well, that’s kind of the vibe that came off the show itself after a while. Actually, the one single solitary interesting thing that came out of The Age’s blanket Laid coverage was the way no-one seemed fully sure whether we were actually supposed to like Roo or not.
[this is the point where a crasser blog would mention the review that said Alison Bell as Roo was pretty much channelling Hardy. Yes, this is that blog]
“Frequently unlikable” and “shifting between various states of bewilderment, awkwardness and straight-out obnoxiousness” were a couple of the terms used to describe Roo in this final run of reviews. Which is a bit of a shift from “resourceful, smart and sometimes sure of her opinions, but also uncertain and a little daffy”, which is how she was described in Debi Enker’s initial review in the Green Guide’s 3/2/2011 issue. At least the all-over-the-shop nature of Roo’s personality remained a constant; whether this is down to inconsistent scripting is up to the viewer to decide.
While it’s possible that the general souring of opinion towards Roo may have been a result of the show’s dramatic progression, it’s only six episodes long: how much dramatic progression do you expect (sources say the ABC sent the first two episodes out to reviewers, so Enker was writing having seen a third of the show)? Considering the mate’s rates reviews Laid has been getting, it seems equally as likely that the shift in response to Roo’s character only came about when the reviewers saw the final episode and realised the whole story only really makes any kind of sense if Roo has been a bit of a bitch in her dating history. Which we guessed a few weeks back – not because we have the slightest idea what we’re talking about, but because it was screamingly obvious that there was no other way for the story to end.
Laid was an inconsistently scripted, frequently poorly acted, rarely funny sitcom designed to pander to a middle class audience that prides itself on its sophisticated sense of humour – one that involves plenty of saying “that’s hilarious” and very little actual laughing. All that’s fine: those people need television too, and tweeting about Q&A can’t fill up their entire week. But when it’s given a second series (despite the idea of a second series making about as much sense as a sequel to Titanic) seemingly on the back of glowing reviews almost entirely written by Marieke Hardy’s mates, then something has to be done. And thus, a snarky blog post is born.
The Audacity of Hype
We’ve heard a lot in the past week about how the BBC would screen exclusive footage from Chris Lilley’s Angry Boys as part of their biennial fundraiser Comic Relief. Appearing on Comic Relief is obviously a massive coup for any Australian comedian – Comic Relief is a long-established, high-rating spectacular featuring the cream of British comedy talent – but it’s notable that Lilley’s Angry Boys wasn’t considered one of the highlights in Britain.
Throughout the broadcast there were numerous plugs for comedians who would be on soon, but the first plug for Angry Boys didn’t come until around 12.20am. There was another plug for it 10 minutes later, and also mentioned as coming soon were Australia’s own Axis of Awesome, but anyone wanting to watch either would clearly have to force themselves to stay awake.
Finally, at some point after 1am, when a large chunk of the audience had probably gone to bed after a hard weeks work, about three and a half minutes of Angry Boys was shown. If you want to see it, it’s on YouTube. Then again, why bother? It’s just more of the same.
Axis of Awesome, who performed their 4 Chords Song, were on about 20 minutes after the Angry Boys preview. They performed live and went down really well with the studio audience. The Angry Boys clips, despite getting a big build-up from the quartet of celebrities who introduced it, didn’t get much of a reaction from the audience, who didn’t seem to have heard of Chris Lilley or find the clips funny.
It’s fascinating that no one in the Australian media has noted this, or questioned the fact that Lilley seems to be basically making the same programme over and over again.
Anger is an Energy
There’s a clip from Chris Lilley’s upcoming series Angry Boys currently doing the rounds (for example, here), and surprise surprise, it contains no surprises whatsoever. Well, maybe it does if you were expecting Lilley to do anything new or different now that he’s playing with the big boys (Angry Boys is co-funded by the BBC and HBO), because judging from this clip* we can look forward to six hours** of more of the same three characters*** Lilley’s been serving up (with minor variations) for the last decade****.
*yes, it’s a one-minute clip. Maybe the rest of the show is going to be wildly different. But c’mon: the Japanese mother is a mix of Ja’ime and Ricky Wong, and the twins are from We Can Be Heroes. It’s hardly a sign of an artist looking to stretch himself.
**you didn’t know? Initially announced as a 10 part series, Angry Boys seems to have grown to 12. It’s up to viewers to decide whether this is because Lilley’s work is so hysterical he couldn’t cut it any further, or so meandering and self-obsessed that once again we’ll have a series with a couple of plot-heavy eps at the start, a couple at the end, and a big stretch in the middle where Lilley seems to just be amusing himself.
***did anyone else think that with a title like “Angry Boys”, Lilley was actually going to head down the path blazed by Jonah in Summer Heights High and create some characters with at least a trace of depth? Prior to Jonah, Lilley’s “drama” consisted largely of smashing stereotypes together (Mr G versus “the system”, Ricky Wong versus his dad): if he’d taken a step forward with Jonah’s personal issues, this looks like a big step back.
****at the end of this series, Lilley will have made 26-half hour episodes of basically the same program. Considering that program is pretty much a one-man show focused entirely on him, is this some kind of record? And, considering how young Lilley still is, is there any chance of him doing anything seriously different in his career? Or in twenty years time will he still be frocking up and making fun of Asians?