Australian Tumbleweeds
Mad, bad and unfunny to know
As a sitcom, the original version of Wilfred never really quite worked. Chief amongst the problems was this: if you expect audiences to suspend their disbelief when it comes to such logic flaws as “Why is Adam the only one who can talk to Wilfred?” and “Why does Adam put up with both his bitch girlfriend and her pain in the arse mutt?” you should reward them with lots of laughs. It’s one of the principles of comedy: you can get away with anything, no matter how outrageous or ridiculous, if it’s funny; but if no one laughs you’re sunk.
Clearly the US remakers spotted this flaw with the original programme, so have introduced a little logic to the premise – protagonist Ryan, in his depressed and suicidal state, could be seeing things, or mentally ill, or something like that. In fact it’s all a bit Fight Club, with Wilfred playing a sort of psychopathic alter ego to Ryan, who both drives him crazy and allows him to live his dreams. You should be able to get some dark comedy out of that idea, right?
Well, no. We’ve only seen episode 1 so far (thanks, internet!), but Wilfred US seems like the same almost laugh-free zone that the Zwar/Gann original was. There’s only so dark you can make a sitcom before it becomes a psychological horror film, where you’re screaming at the protagonist to get the hell out of there before it gets too bad. We can only hope this somehow turns out to be funny, although it’s hard to image how.
Give A Dog A Bone
With Angry Boys turning out to be the stinker we’ve been predicting since 2009, the nation’s focus has started to shift to…
– sorry, you though this was another Angry Boys gripe-session? Don’t worry, we’ll let you know when we start our serious “hate to say I told you so” singalong for Lilley’s latest effort. In the meantime, why not enjoy the sight of The Age (which has been loving on Lilley since 2005 without pause or breath) being forced to consider the idea that Angry Boys just might not be any good. And even then, they have to provide “balance” by making sure to enclude “for” and “against” – clearly just running an “gee, maybe it’s not that good” story is beyond them. Especially as then they might have to explain why they thought it was going to be amazing in the first place.
Anyway, the focus has started to shift to the next big hope in Australian comedy: a US import. That’s right, things are so grim at the moment that the immanent arrival of the US remake of Wilfred – a SBS sitcom not exactly watched by millions – is news is a way that the US remakes of, say, Kath & Kim or Sit Down Shut Up never were.
We’re generally of the opinion that the more attention comedy gets the better, so this in itself isn’t a bad thing to us. It may be an increasingly funny thing to us if the show tanks in the US, as Australia is getting it at roughly the same time so there’s zero buffer for Ten (who is showing it here) if the US pulls the plug. But having it promoted? Fine with us. Especially as it largely involves Jason Gann yammering away about his big plans for making it big, which is always fun. Take this choice quote:
“Because I played two very identifiable characters in Australia, it was difficult for me to start anything new; I was almost a prisoner to my character,”
What, he was a guy in a dog suit in a show hardly anyone saw and a mumbling sportsman on two shows almost no-one watched? We’re not talking Garry McDonald trying to escape Norman Gunston here. We’re not even talking Garry McDonald trying to escape that guy he played in Love is a Four Letter Word. Oh, unless Gann means he was a prisoner to his actual, non-acting character. Guess he must mean his series of assault charges. Yeah, that could make it difficult for him to start something new.
Anyway, what is interesting in a non-tabloid way about this new Wilfred is the way it’s being promoted. If you remember the original, it was the product of a writing / creative team: Gann (who also played Wilfred the dog) and Adam Zwar (who also played the gormless victim of Wilfred’s surly, bong-smoking torments). Gann went to the US to further his career after his mockumentary Mark Loves Sharon fizzled, while Zwar stayed in Australia to write for everything under the sun including his own ABC series Lowdown. Gann took Wilfred with him to the US and is reprising his role for the remake. Zwar, as far as the remake is concerned, has been erased from the history books.
In pretty much all the articles we’ve seen, Zwar doesn’t get a look-in. We’re not talking about television interviews with Gann: even the print articles on the new version are blanking him. Worse, the official press release doesn’t mention him (even Renegade Films Australia, who produced the original series, get a listing as executive producers). In fact, Jason Gann’s complete credits are “[playing] Wilfred / created by / co-executive producer”.
It’s kind of obvious that Zwar and Gann aren’t working together and may never work together again: whether they just grew apart or this is another “funnyman feud” we don’t know. And we know absolutely nothing about the behind-the-scenes wheelings and dealings here, apart from reading a couple of articles where it’s said that Zwar gave Wilfred to Gann with his blessing – we don’t even know if money changed hands between the two, though you’d like to think so as there’d have to have been a bit of coin thrown around by the US production companies at some stage.
What we do know is that Wilfred was based on a short film made by Gann and Zwar, who’d been working together as team for a fair while. They made a feature length film together (Rats & Cats) and they were both hired to work on a sketch show (The Wedge) prior to Wilfred getting up on SBS. If the US version was completely brand new and its own unique creation, that’s one thing. But it’s not. It’s based on an Australian show made by two people working together, and – to us at least – it feels a little unfair that the other half of the team is being airbrushed out of the picture.
The Strauchanie That Broke The Camel’s Back
We all know how hard it is to make a living in comedy. We all know how much harder it is to make a living in comedy when you don’t actually make comedy. Even then, seeing Peter Helliar dust off pointless, annoying, Ricky Gervais-knock-off one-joke character Bryan “Strauchanie” Strauchan this week for a seemingly regular segment on digital channel One’s Game Plan (AFL) show was physically painful.
Not just because his chat with Hawthorn president (and former Victorian Premier) Jeff Kennett contained such gems as “you know people say the Hawthorn colours [brown and yellow] look like poo and wee?” – though yes, that played a large part (especially when Kennett pulled the old anti-heckler response of pretending not to hear / understand so Helliar had to keep repeating it over and over). But here was a man who little over a year ago had a big deal movie in cinemas that he’d written and co-starred in and a high-profile gig actually hosting his own AFL show. A show that, in the publicity material, featured this:
“He will not be doing his ‘Strauchanie’ character, instead looking to create new characters.”
Gee, how’d that work out? Oh, that’s right: The Bounce was axed after a few weeks. Actually, that’s not strictly true. We were actually told – in one of the more dubious announcements of 2010, that… well, this:
“We’ve decided to take some time to rethink some aspects of the show and bring it back during the Finals Series.”
Turned out the aspect they were re-thinking was the aspect that involved putting it to air (yes, we made the same joke last time we mentioned this). And while we’re here, just to milk the hilarity, that TV Tonight story also featured this line:
“The ratings tell one story. But looking at the show, and from what people tell you about the show, there’s another story.”
It seemed the other story was this one:
”Seven’s light entertainment is a disaster,” Fay says. ”They don’t think about what’s funny; they go, ‘What do we think this particular demographic will like?”’
Anyway, not to worry, because Helliar soon had a new sports comedy show lined up: The Trophy Room on the ABC. If you’ve ever wondered how a sports version of Spicks & Specks could possibly fail, presumably there’s YouTube clips out there somewhere (on YouTube perhaps – ed). Don’t expect us to find them for you.
We’ve asked this question before and we really shouldn’t keep on saying it because by all accounts Helliar himself is one of the Australian media’s authentically nice guys, but seriously – how many crash & burn duds can you have on your resume before people stop throwing work your way? Now we have an answer: After a failed drive-time radio show (with Judith Lucy), a failed breakfast radio show (with Myf Warhurst and Richard Marsland), a failed AFL light entertainment show (The Bounce), a failed sports quiz show (The Trophy Room), and a failed big budget romantic comedy (I Love You Too), you can still get un-publicised work on a digital channel doing a character that stopped being funny roughly five years ago.
What’s really painful about all this is that Helliar was right a year ago: Strauchanie was a tired, played out character and if he was to have any chance of becoming anything more than a one-joke performer he had to leave him behind. Unfortunately, it turns out he really didn’t have any chance.
It’s hard to feel bad for him. While most Australian comedians struggle to get one big break, Helliar’s had one after the other after the other (and we haven’t even mentioned his regular gig on BFF Rove McManus’ talk show) and never shown any sign of any serious talent beyond seeming like A Top Bloke. But Strauchanie is done. We got the joke. Pity isn’t really a good point to start from when you’re trying to get laughs, but reviving the carcass of Strauchanie yet again is a pitiable act. And when that’s the only act you’ve got, maybe it’s time to give it a rest.
In Search Of… Laughs
We all know television doesn’t work this way, but still: It’s tempting to think the decision to team the second half of Chris Lilley’s Angry Boys series with Lawrence Leung’s new series Unbelievable (ABC1, Wednesdays, 9.30pm) was guided by more than just the programmers grabbing whatever was next on the shelf after Hungry Beast finished.
While Lilley’s show is almost entirely populated by unpleasant, insulting morons (which doesn’t automatically mean they’re not good comedy characters, of course), Leung has rapidly built a reputation as the nice guy of Australian comedy. Yeah yeah, Australian comedy already has more than enough “nice guys”, from Adam Hills to Charlie Pickering to whoever else gets to host a show where they ask bland, inoffensive questions while pretending they could care less.
But with Leung’s first show Choose Your Own Adventure, he established himself as a guy who was nice to his parents, interested in things in a modest, nerdy way, and out to make people laugh by making a fool of himself instead of sinking the boot into others. Considering his television career started off the back of The Chaser – basically, The Chaser wanted to do less episodes in 2009 so stand-up Leung (who also wrote for them) was given a show partly to keep the crew in work and the timeslot filled – it’s refreshing just how different his approach was.
Choose Your Own Adventure was such a personal project for Leung – he mined his own childhood hopes and dreams for large parts of it – that it was difficult to see exactly how he was going to follow it up without spending a decade or so building up material. Mystery solved: like John Safran before him, Leung has chosen to take his personal approach to comedy and use it as a lens through which to examine an area ripe for mockery.
In his various television series Safran tackled music, religion and relationships: here Leung is looking at the supernatural with an eye to debunking pretty much all of it. Even if his approach isn’t exactly ground-breaking (talk to expert, use what expert said to construct comedy sketch; repeat) he gets a lot of laughs out of the material. Seeing Leung in episode one give psychic readings based on karaoke machine lyrics is as funny as anything shown on the ABC this year.
If all this feels a little familiar though, that’s because Leung’s show often feels like the kind of thing Safran would do – as in, pretty much exactly the same in format if not approach. Leung doesn’t quite have the edge Safran brings to his explorations, but he’s not as big a smart-arse either. Leung gets laughs from being surprised that psychics are all a con; with Safran you want to see what he’ll do with that information. Leung’s is a gentler approach, but underneath he’s just as ruthless a debunker as Safran – though less likely to make himself the butt of the joke.
It’s as likely the similarities come as much from ABC budget restrictions as from anything else. If Leung is just running around interviewing people Safran-style, that means the ABC doesn’t have to pay for a big cast. Plus it’s a good way to hedge bets content-wise: even if you’re not a comedy fan, you might be interested in whatever aspect of the supernatural he’s tackling this week. In the hands of a less assured performer, it could easily sink into the morass of stale, generic television. Fortunately for Leung – and us – he’s more on the ball.
Hating Angry Boys: A Beginner’s Guide
With Angry Boys debuting in the UK this week, the usual gushing waves of praise re: the genius of Chris Lilley have broken on a new shore. In Australia too, the fans have been fighting back against the dwindling ratings and general feel that this time out Lilley’s gone off the boil. Even the Melbourne Herald-Sun recently said “the jury’s still out” on Lilley’s latest series, which-
–hang on a second, how the hell can the “jury” still be out on a series that’s into its’ fifth week? Most Australian sitcoms only go for six weeks! This isn’t so much a case of the jury being out as eleven members calling for the death sentence while the twelfth sticks their fingers in their ears and shouts “not listening”.
Anyway, suffice to say that currently we’re in the best of all possible worlds when it comes to the world of Chris Lilley: there’s no clear-cut consensus as to how we’re all supposed to be thinking. Gone – for now at least – is the universal agreement in the press that he’s the second coming of a whole bunch of people who aren’t dead yet, including Barry Humphries and Ricky Gervais. Gone is the automatic assumption that simply by putting on a wig or a dress or a bunch of dark make-up he becomes a character with more intrinsic depth and substance than The Guru from the NRL Footy Show. Gone is… well, a whole bunch of things. Including, hopefully, the image of him as some kind of reclusive genius:
“I think the press have to have an angle on someone and the boring angle they have on me is that I’m this crazy, reclusive person who is media shy and makes these shows that are really shocking and controversial,” Lilley told Digital Spy.
(it’s true he’s not reclusive – we’ve seen him at a Shaun Micallef performance and at a preview of The Dark Knight!)
Unfortunately for Lilley, once you take away that media angle, all you’re left with is a show that isn’t all that funny. Which is why the media – who, by every possible objective reading of the situation, has gone out of their way to built Lilley up as the Great White Hope In Blackface of Australian Comedy – play up the “shocking and controversial” angle regarding his shows.
Lilley does have a point in that piece though: the media’s hyping of him as a controversial figure has next to no real substance behind it. If you’ve been here before, you know how the story goes. But it’s really the only angle the press can take as far as hyping up his shows. What else is there to say? He’s not all that insightful when it comes to wider social issues (unlike Kath & Kim, which at least sparked a “should we be laughing at the lower orders?” debate), he’s not mocking insitutions (like Frontline and The Games did), he’s not a funny guy outside of his characters (there go the panel show appearances) and he doesn’t provide any other obvious hooks to work with. He’s a theatre nerd who likes playing dress-ups and writing dubious parody songs: good luck marketing that.
That’s not to say people aren’t bravely trying to talk up Angry Boys the show rather than the controversy. Sadly for them, when you’re talking about a comedy, trying to claim this sort of crap as a positive just won’t wash:
It’s not pandering to the masses. No laugh track. No obvious gags
You know what? Obvious gags are good. Don’t believe us? Just watch, oh, every single classic comedy ever made. To be fair, the impression you might be left with after the fact is one of subtle character work and sly references, but at the time you’re watching it? The stuff that makes you laugh time and time again? That’d be what we call “jokes”. Name a comedy, we’ll point out the gags: a comedy without “obvious gags” isn’t a comedy at all, it’s a limp, aimless, not-quite-drama. Just like Angry Boys.
[laughs tracks are also perfectly fine, just not all the time in every show. If you’re a comedy reviewer and you suggest that laugh tracks are always bad – or that the lack of one is an automatic good – you’re not really much of a reviewer. C’mon, both Fawlty Towers and Seinfeld had a laugh track.]
Angry Boys is far from a disaster – at least by the standards of Australian television comedy in 2011 – but praising it constantly isn’t doing anyone a service. It’s this kind of relentless boosting that turned a once-promising young character comedian (yes, we’re talking about Lilley) back in his Big Bite days into a screen-hogging, self-obsessed, one-note bore.
If you want a reason to hate Angry Boys, don’t hate it because it’s “controversial” (it isn’t) or it’s “shocking” (it’s not) or it’s “pandering to the US market” (really? S.mouse seems pretty much on par with Ricky Wong race-wise, and his clear purpose isn’t to suck up to the States – it’s to allow Lilley to churn out more of his much-loved-by-him tasteless songs): hate it because it’s obvious that if Lilley actually had to stretch himself beyond the occasional dick joke and arsehole character, he could come up with something that was really worth all the hype.
Vale Hungry Beast?
The final episode – possibly ever – of Hungry Beast goes to air later tonight and, while we’ve sort of pointed this out before, we think it’s worth remembering that when it started out Hungry Beast was supposed to be at least as much about comedy as it was about current affairs. Which makes our number one question at this slightly pre-emptive wake for the programme: What happened?
The team exercised some quality control, perhaps? Kinda. Veronica Milsom’s appalling character Veronica Dynamite seems to have been retired, and while that’s definitely a victory for comedy, it was a victory which took at least two series of the show to achieve. And as the ever diminishing number of sketches which have appeared in the show haven’t exactly been funnier (a recent episode featured a series of parodies of board game ads where the games were existing board games reworked to reference something happening in the news, i.e. the kind of waste material which littered the poorer episodes of The Chaser’s War on Everything) it’s pretty much the worst kind of victory over bad comedy that there is: a victory for giving up rather than spending a little time working out why the bad sketches didn’t work and then NEVER MAKING THOSE MISTAKES AGAIN.
Which begs another question, why don’t the senior people in charge of shows like Hungry Beast (or for that matter Angry Boys, a show which on Chris Lilley’s past form was never going to be anything more than the same self-indulgent crap) ever take poorly-performing comedic talent aside and point out some home truths? Andrew Denton the co-creator and one of the executive producers of Hungry Beast has spent large parts of his career getting the mix between serious issues and comedy right, so where was he when If Lady Gaga Wasn’t A Popstar – a sketch literally anyone could have come up with – was being filmed? Or Liberals on Fire, which drags one not particularly interesting satirical observation out for more than 40 seconds. Any decent executive producer would have taken one look at sketches like these and demanded an instant re-write.
And indeed whatever happened to Hungry Beast‘s original intention of reviving the This Day Tonight concept, of a current affairs show which mixed serious stories with irreverence? Well, it tried, but Hungry Beast just never managed to do it smoothly, meaning that the comedic aspects of the show became almost entirely separated from the serious, and the serious has become far more dominant than the comedic. Given the quality of the comedy it’s probably better they started to focus less on that area, but the failure to effectively combine the two still counts as a failure.
It’s perhaps worth remembering that The 7PM Project went on a similar journey, which has seen it become an increasingly serious programme. Perhaps the news/comedy combo is one which is never going to work easily, unless you’re making a straight-out satire like the Clarke & Dawe sketches or The Chaser’s War on Everything. Even then good writing is the key to this, and Hungry Beast‘s satirical sketches could have been a lot better if they’d been as clever, fast and gag-packed as Clarke & Dawe.
But perhaps the central flaw in the whole Hungry Beast premise was that irreverence thing. It’s all very well when the presenter makes an off-the-cuff gags in a news or current affairs programme, but it’s an entirely different thing for it to be planned and deliberate. What you get are forced attempts at humour from someone who’s not a comedian. In the real world it’s like a Best Man speech where all the gags have been downloaded from the internet and awkwardly adapted, rather than been inspired by the context and crafted by a skilled professional comedian.
As people born after This Day Tonight ended, we can’t say for sure to what extent Hungry Beast managed to be a This Day Tonight for the 21st Century, or whether This Day Tonight was a decent enough concept to revive in the first place. What we can say is that Hungry Beast failed to produce decent news-based comedy, and that it’s right that the serious aspects of the programme came to dominate it. As a showcase for emerging production talent it’s been a success, but when the list of the show’s comedic highlights includes this Avatar parody, well, that’ a fail.
Are You Being Re-made?
If, like us, you’re often sceptical of Australian TV comedies then consider this: is it better to give comedy a try and not always succeed, or to give up entirely and just import it? All too often we get defeatist about it and chose the latter, but down that path dangers lies, for history tells us that when there isn’t much original, locally-made comedy on TV not only do we get lots of imported shows, but local re-makes of British shows – and is that actually what we want?
Even now when there are a number of original local comedies made each year we still make plenty of re-makes, none of which ever seem to set the world on fire. Recently there has been TV Burp and You Have Been Watching, whose producers failed to either understand why the original worked or to adapt to the show successfully for the local market (probably both); Good News Week, which has been adapted from the British original Have I Got News For You but lost its way by morphing into an over-long variety show; and Balls of Steel Australia, which is an automatic fail simply for giving the world more Balls of Steel.
But if you think those shows were kinda pointless imagine a world where there was even less in the way of original local comedies, but lots in the way of re-makes of crap British sitcoms. Shows like Love Thy Neighbour, Father Dear Father, the Doctor series and Are You Being Served? were all re-made by local broadcasters in the ’70s and early ’80s. The formula was that one or two of the stars of the original shows were brought over, the original scripts had all the obvious British references substituted for local ones, and the cameras started to roll.
Should you ever sit down to watch any of these shows, and almost all available on DVD, the big question is “Why did local broadcasters bother”? Are You Being Served?’s Australian incarnation (now available if you know where to look) is particularly, startlingly, pointless as a piece of television. The premise, such as it is, is that Mr Humphries (John Inman) of London’s Grace Brothers department store has moved to Melbourne to take up a position (oo’er!) in the menswear department of Bone Brothers (which is owned by Young Mr Bone, the Australian cousin of Young Mr Grace), where his new colleagues bear a striking resemblance to his old ones and he finds himself in some very familiar situations (the co-writer of the original series, Jeremy Lloyd, adapted some of the British scripts for this remake, “an experience he claims not to have enjoyed” according to the book Are You Being Served? The Inside Story).
If you think local re-makes of British panel shows failed to make themselves relevant to Australian audiences, then let us assure you this version of Are You Being Served? eclipses them all. And it’s not so much the British humour that is out of place in Australia (who amongst us can resist a pussy joke), but the gags based on the British class system, which are such a key part of the show (and indeed many British comedies of the era). Indeed, for gags about the British class system to work even slightly in an Australian context most of the cast have to adopt pseudo-British accents, so Reg Gillam as Captain Wagstaff (Frank Thornton as Captain Peacock in the original) sounds more like a graduate of Sandhurst than a graduate of Puckapunyal, and musical star June Bronhill virtually copies Mollie Sugden’s Mrs Slocombe in the role of Mrs Crawford. Only Shane Bourne as young sales assistant Mr Randel (Trevor Bannister as Mr Lucas in the original) uses his native accent, as do all of the lower-status characters (apart from maintenance man Mr Cocker, who is played with a Cockney accent by English migrant actor Reg Evans). To say this show portrays no Australian department store, or workplace, or social situation that has ever existed puts it mildly – this programme must surely have been the last bastion of the cultural cringe.
Having sat through such an obvious failure as the Australian version of Are You Being Served? (although to do it justice it ran for two series, so perhaps had some resonance 30 years ago), and the more recently re-made British shows previously mentioned, it’s hard to understand why any Australian broadcaster thinks that making a local version of an overseas comedy is a good idea. OK, it’s clearly much cheaper and easier to do a re-make of a successful overseas show than to come up with something original, but when the ultimate result of a re-make is always a show which doesn’t quite work then why wouldn’t you try and come up with something developed locally which might work? Why does there always seem to be an assumption than an overseas success will work better than an untried local idea? And if all you’re aiming for is something competent then Australian comedians have proved time and time again that they can do that.
Full Frontal in “Now Available In Stores” Shock
It’s a sign of just how grim things have become that the long-awaited release of series four and five of Full Frontal can seriously be described as “good news”. Hell, even “long-awaited” is pretty depressing. But yes, finally these two collections are out there waiting to be purchased / fast-forwarded to the Shaun Micallef bits. Of which there are plenty: series four is packed with highlights (Roger Explosion / David McGann / Milo Kerrigan) and series five contains a fair bit of him until the midway point. While a lot of this stuff was collected in The Compleat Micallef DVD collection, a fair bit wasn’t, which is really all you need to know.
Otherwise… well, it’s late-90s Australian sketch comedy. The golden age had well and truly passed by this point, and while the dark ages of Comedy Inc: The Late Shift hadn’t closed in, this was the show that firmly pointed the way down to a future of endless sketches about dole-bludging superheroes and “that baby’s a raper” gags. If you have strong nostalgic reasons for sitting through episode after episode of this, go right ahead; if you’re coming to it fresh, there’s not a lot here that’ll hold your attention unless you’re a fan of dodgy sets, overacting, endless restaurant scenes and references to shows and commercials you probably don’t remember.
Still, considering how many other moderately worthwhile / interesting sketch comedy series seem lost for good – BackBerner must be worth a look, and how about the “adult” second series of The Wedge? – having this available on DVD complete and uncut can only be seen as A Good Thing. Mind you, we’ll get back to you about Full Frontal‘s even shoddier follow-up Totally Full Frontal – that one’s due out on DVD around the end of the month…
Travelling North
It was announced the other day that Rove McManus has become the latest Australian to score a gig on American TV, and that’s all well and good but why him? There are lots of other far better Australian comedians having a crack in the US, why aren’t they getting gigs? One such example is Gristmill, AKA Wayne Hope and Robyn Butler, who we understand were (or are) planning to move to the US to pursue opportunities. And with quality work like The Librarians and Very Small Business behind them there must surely be plenty of opportunities for them to pursue…or are there? Because it’s all very well for a bland, solid everyman like Rove McManus to make it overseas, but Gristmill’s focus has always been on uniquely Australian characters – characters possibly too unique for the US market – so, despite their obvious talent, are they ever going to get anywhere?
Breaking the US market’s historically been a big challenge for Australian comedians, even now when hundreds of Australians in other parts of the entertainment industry are making it big there. Barry Humphries made a number of attempts over a 30 year period before he finally did it, and the progress of others has also been slow. Sure, Chris Lilley’s done extremely well to get HBO on board for Angry Boys, and FX are about to screen the US re-make of Adam Zwar and Jason Gann’s series Wilfred, but when an Australian comedy or comedian goes to America it always seems to be one which isn’t specifically Australian. Which kinda rules out Gristmill.
Gristmill’s brilliance in The Librarians and Very Small Business was their ability to highlight and parody elements of Australian society. Very Small Business was a subtle and clever attack on the attitudes and values of “The Howard Battlers”, and similar themes, mixed with a liberal dose of Catholic guilt, were explored in The Librarians. But while both were brilliantly funny series it’s hard to imagine them having quite the same resonance overseas. Particularly in the US, where a local version of Gristmill would be focusing on a rather different set of cultural attitudes and values.
In contrast, the characters in Angry Boys and Wilfred don’t necessarily need to be Australian, nor is the humour of Rove McManus, or indeed Rebel Wilson (such as it is), rooted in a specific Australianess. Kath & Kim, which like Gristmill’s work also focused on Australian suburban attitudes, did not travel well to the United States. Indeed those who remade it clearly didn’t understand why the show worked, and so failed to adapt it for local audiences (quite possibly the show was un-adaptable). And perhaps the same is true of Gristmill’s work: if your comedy comes from your observations of the immediate world around you, the same world you grew up in, then it’s unlikely to travel well.
The point of this article is not to have a go at Gristmill’s style or whatever plans they have to go overseas: they’re talented, there’s nothing wrong with having a go overseas, and comedians focusing their attention on who we Australians are and how our country works is a perfectly valid thing (in fact it wouldn’t hurt if more comedians did it). All we’re trying to work out here is why local talents like Gristmill haven’t (yet) made it overseas.
It’s also interesting to note that Gristmill’s most recent work is a series of videos featuring Robyn Butler as right-wing shock jock Arabella Twat, a character who despite being very much a comment on local pundits like Miranda Devine, Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones, could more easily be understood by overseas audiences than some of Butler and Hope’s other work. Either way, Twat (pronounced “Twart”, and very obviously both a twat and a tart) is another great creation and it will be fascinating to see how it develops. Gristmill’s website may list their US agent, and they may yet be heading to overseas, but Australian comedy would be all the poorer for losing them.