Australian Tumbleweeds

Australia's most opinionated blog about comedy.

Live From The End Of Days

Nobody seriously expected anything startlingly original from Nine’s first proper stab at prime time “all-new” comedy in almost a decade. Once the cast details for Live From Planet Earth eaked out – name after name from Comedy inc is never a good sign – expectations for anything fresher than the contents of Elvis’ colon evaporated. But it’s fair to say nobody expected the show they’d end up ripping off would be Let Loose Live.

In case you were one of the billions of people who missed Let Loose Live during its two week run on Seven back in 2005, it too was a live-to-air sketch show with a name host (only there, they had a different host each week). And while the idea of live sketches clearly has some hold over the fossils of all ages running commercial television in this country, it didn’t take long to realise that even in the 21st century “live sketches” are basically two people crapping onto each other without a decent punchline in sight. Maybe if you’re Shaun Micallef and Stephen Curry reviving Peter Cook and Dudley Moore sketches you can make it work: if you can’t bring that level of quality to the table, maybe it’s time to move into a world where Mr Show happened 15 years ago.

Oh, that’s right: Let Loose Live went for TWO WEEKS. Axed after its second outing. Which just maybe makes it a model to avoid when you’re hoping for a success. But don’t worry, Nine didn’t just rip off Let Loose Live; remember the original Hamish & Andy Show on Seven? Just like Live From Planet Earth, it featured (a) name-brand host(s), and teamed them up with a crack team of sketch comedy veterans. It too lasted two big weeks. Maybe because the “crack comedy veterans” were mostly tired sketch show hacks no-one found funny the first time.

And speaking of the cast of Live From Planet Earth, plucked fresh from the string of failed sketch shows that have littered the Australian television landscape throughout the first decade of this century, what more can we say? On the one hand, having Elton hosting a show full of young fresh faces would have made him look like an old fart, and clearly Nine wanted to go with safe hands for the live sketches. On the other hand, it’s a cast that’s been proven unfunny time and time and time again. And now, again.

On the plus side, Elton himself… ok, he made a lot of jokes about female genitalia. And when it wasn’t making jokes about poo and boobs, the show as a whole wasn’t afraid to stick it to those “bogans” we’ve been hearing so much about either. If you were wondering how “live comedy’ was going to fit in with Nine’s Footy Show corporate culture, your questions were answered by the second riff on pregnant teens. We get it, poor people are funny! You’ve got to look down on someone, amiright?

Anyway, back to the pluses. Elton himself was moderately polished, even if his material was largely playing to the cheap seats. That’s nowhere near enough to save a show like this – Hamish & Andy’s show on Seven suffered the same fate, dragged down by shit sketch after shit sketch – but it does suggest that if they ditched, say, 95% of the live comedy Elton might be able to survive on his “fuck you, I’m with AAMI” material. At least Arj Barker as the only other stand-up was funny, even if he was clearly giving old material (about last year’s Icelandic volcano) one last airing before retiring it for good.

Perhaps the saddest thing about tonight’s episode was the way Elton kept telling us that we’d be seeing more next week from each character and live sitcom-

[which was also largely arse but at least was cartoony enough to break up the otherwise uniform vibe of the show – say what you like about old-style sketch shows like Fast Forward or The Late Show, but they knew enough to break up the rhythm of the sketches. Some short, some long, some live in-studio, some filmed outside. This was all one-note – even the celebrity interview with Ruby Rose – making it increasingly difficult for any of the material to break through and get a laugh as it went along.]

– even though anyone with even a passing interest in Australian comedy (especially on commercial networks) knows that “next week” is never a sure (or even likely) thing. Chances are the ratings figures will be muddied by having Top Gear run a full 15 minutes late beforehand, which should give Nine enough cover to bring Live From Planet Earth back next week despite the caning it took on twitter.

As for the week after that? Maybe if a live sketch comedy show had lasted more than two weeks on Australian commercial television at any stage during the last decade, we’d be more confident…

The Biography Treatment

It’s hard to think of an Australian comedian more written about than Barry Humphries. If you’re a Humphries fan your bookshelves are already groaning with numerous biographies and studies of the great man, as well as Humphries’ two volumes of autobiography, an array of books by or about Dame Edna, Sir Les and Sandy Stone, the various Barry McKenzie collections, and Humphries’ other books, which include a collection of original poetry and the novel Women In The Background. Now there’s a new Humphries book to add to the shelf – one that could just about replace all the Humphries books ever written – the biography One Man Show: The Stage of Barry Humphries by University of New England academic Anne Pender.

Dr Pender lectures in English and Theatre Studies and has previously written biographies of Christina Stead and Nick Enright. Her study of Humphries is detailed and carefully researched. The text runs to almost 400 pages, and there are many more pages of notes and credits as well as a select bibliography and an incredibly thorough index, yet despite this the book never feels overly academic. In fact, if there’s one major fault with the book it’s that you feel that Pender could have stretched it out across a number of volumes, relishing in the details she uncovered and quoting more extensively from the numerous interviews she conducted with Humphries’ friends, family, collaborators and ex-wives, as well as Humphries himself.

But the quality of the research aside, what really makes this book work so well is that Pender has an in-depth understanding of satire and its motivations. Indeed, she spoke eloquently on that topic in relation to Barry Humphries at the Sydney Institute in November (the talk is available as a podcast), pointing out (perhaps provocatively given that Sydney Institute boss, and MC of the talk, Gerard Henderson seems to take the opposite view) that satirists target all sides, despite their political views.

Pender’s viewpoint on the politics of satirists is appropriate for a discussion of the life and work of Barry Humphries, for in this country Humphries’ work has often been viewed in political terms. Over the years media commentators have taken great pleasure in arguing that by leaving Australia to pursue a career overseas Humphries is a traitor, and that by performing satirical Australian characters overseas Humphries has made a career out of laughing at Australia and Australians.

There has also been a fair bit of disgust at Humphries’ presumed politics, principally from left-wing commentators, who will gleefully point out that Humphries went to Melbourne Grammar, came from a conservative family, and spent a number of years as a board member of Quadrant, as if either of those have ever prevented him from satirising the right. Others see Humphries’ background and assume that because of it he has created lower middle class or working class characters in order to attack those classes as a whole. What Humphries is actually doing is attacking a set of attitudes and values, attitudes and values which are not really specific to any social class.

Less discussed, but just as relevant to an understanding of Humphries and his work, is that he hated the conservative establishment his parents wanted him to be a part of. This led him to rebel at school, university and throughout his life, sometimes on political matters (in 1960 he joined a number of ex-patriot Australians on one of the famous marches from Aldermaston to London organised by the Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament [CND]), but more often by creating provocative comedy about situations which appalled him.

Few Australian commentators seemed to realise that when Humphries made it big in TV in the UK with shows like An Audience with Dame Edna and the series The Dame Edna Experience, a large part of his act was mocking Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The insults Edna handed out to celebrities with the punchline “I mean that in a caring way, I do” were a reference to Thatcher’s claim that she cared about the unemployed whilst all the time her government was slashing the public services which could have helped them. This parody of Thatcher built on the character that Humphries had spent several decades establishing, a character who brilliantly mocked small-minded Australian wowsers, and then became bloated with her own self-importance upon achieving a certain level of success.

As a satire of everything from petty snobbery to showbiz egotism Dame Edna is a brilliant character, but she is not a character all audiences seem to understand. In 2003 Humphries wrote an advice column as Dame Edna for Vanity Fair magazine. When a reader wrote in to ask if she should learn Spanish as so many people speak it, Dame Edna dismissed the idea as follows:

Forget Spanish. There’s nothing in that language worth reading except Don Quixote, and a quick listen to the CD Man of La Mancha will take care of that. There was a poet named Garcia Lorca, but I’d leave him on the intellectual back burner, if I were you. As for everyone’s speaking it, what twaddle! Who speaks it that you are really desperate to talk to? The help? Your leaf blower? Study French or German, where there are at least a few books worth reading, or, if you’re American, try English.

Reaction to this piece of advice was not quite what Humphries or Vanity Fair expected. Hispanic organisations and a number of commentators condemned the remarks with words like “ignorant” and “callous”. Vanity Fair cancelled the column and issued an apology, albeit pointing out the advice was meant to be read ironically and that:

Humphries practices a long comedic tradition of making statements that are tasteless, wrongheaded, or taboo, with an eye toward exposing hypocrisies or prejudices.

According to One Man Band, Humphries was:

…staggered by the reaction to his mockery of American bigotry, and by the fact that many who complained seemed to think the satire was directed at Latinos, when in fact it was directed at those who denigrate the group.

Pender argues in her book that Humphries is an anarchist at heart, someone who targets his comedic rage at anyone who deserves it; Humphries, meanwhile, prefers to describe himself as “apolitical”. But for Anne Pender it is Patrick White’s description of Humphries as a “a genuine fantastic, wild with fanciful ideas” that is most resonant. Perhaps Humphries’ “fanciful ideas” include a belief that the majority of people will understand the complexity of his satirical targeting, rather than take it as a face value statement of what he thinks. Or that they will forget his privileged background and his move to the UK, and simply judge his work on its merits.

Mature Comedy: Don’t Make Us Laugh

One of the more impressive contortion acts on offer at the moment is watching various Australian television columnists and reviewers trying to talk up Laid without using the word “funny”. That’s because, despite its good points – and it does have some – actually being funny is not one of them. By a long, long shot.

This lack of actual comedy in this particular comedy is so obvious that television writers across the land have been forced into basically re-defining the term “comedy” so as to exclude, well, comedy. Which brings us rapidly to Melinda Huston’s column in today’s Sunday Age M Magazine, where we’re asked to believe that being too “mature” to be funny is a sign that comedy in this country has “finally grown up”.

Holy stumbling Jesus, where to start attacking this giant mound of shit? Yeah, even we’re getting sick of banging on about Laid, but this particular column is a prime example of why we’re not going to stop any time soon: in their desperate attempts to stick up for a laugh-free local effort, the media in this country are trying to sell us all a bill of goods claiming that comedy really doesn’t have to be funny just so long as it’s artfully lit. Really? Comedy doesn’t have to be funny? Well, I guess they have been praising dramas that aren’t dramatic for years.

Fortunately, Huston’s latest effort here is so amazingly cak-handed that pointing out the flaws shouldn’t take long and we can all go back to looking for old Get Smart episodes on digital TV. Here’s her opening paragraph:

“In the 1980s comedy defined Australian TV. From The D Gen to Fast Forward, we couldn’t get enough of the stuff. Then it all went south. With the odd exception, ‘laffers’ – as entertainment bible Variety puts it – have been coolly received. But all that might be about to change”

Pointing out all the blunders there might seem like nit-picking (really? Australian TV comedy in the 80s stretched from one comedy team to a show made up largely of members from that same comedy team? No Big Gig or Comedy Company for you, hey?), but the assumption to remember here is that after the 80s – when “comedy” meant “sketch comedy” – things all went downhill.

But we’ll come back to that. Huston follows this up with a bunch of Laid praise, some spot-on, some a matter for discussion in a later post. This particular line did stand out though:

“There’s almost nothing in the way of gags. Just whip-smart dialogue delivered in the most casual manner possible”.

We’d almost agree – there’s almost nothing in the way of successful gags is a lot closer to the truth – but the real problem here is that in the context of all her other praise these lines end up claiming that a comedy with “almost nothing in the way of gags” is meant to be a good thing. Guess what: it’s not.

Good naturalistic comedy often seems to the untrained eye to be gag-free, but that’s because the jokes are folded into the dialogue; Modern Family and Married… with Children have pretty much the same amount of gags (actually, MF probably has more), they simply present them differently. Gags are a good thing in a show trying to be funny: without them all you get are lesser forms of laff getters like one-liners, catchphrases, and terms pulled off the internet. Which Laid features by the bucketload.

Huston goes on to outlines a lot of what’s coming up in 2011, but then she gets to work digging a big old grave to chuck all those old-fashioned “funny” comedy shows into:

“… [local dramas] success – and sophistication – may be precisely what underpins this comedy resurgence. Because it’s not like we haven’t been making comedies. We have. And they haven’t been awful (well, all right. Some have been awful). But the likes of The Librarians, Very small Business, Lowdown, even Seven’s Double Take were not disasters by any means. What they did, though, was what Australian dramas did for too many years, which was fail to move with the times.”

Bizarrely, part of this moving with the times seems to involve taking a long, long time to produce:

“This is a good thing. Once we started putting a bit more care into our dramas, audiences responded enthusiastically. And it finally seems we’re giving our comedies the same kind of love.”

Uh, Packed to the Rafters is the most popular drama series in Australia by a country mile. It’s churned out at an industrial rate. Offspring – which seems to be the sole free-to-air example of what she’s talking about, unless she means failed duds like Cops L.A.C. or Canal Road or Bed of Roses – follows a template set a decade ago by The Secret Life of Us. What the hell is she talking about?

Ah, fuck it. Back to comedy:

“and with Laid, it feels like our comedies have finally grown up. Other recent funnies have had moments of wonderful subtlety and understatement but they couldn’t seem to resist regular swipes that seemed more Alvin Purple than Modern Family. Wonderfully clever humour was undercut by dumb, obvious gags. Which meant they never quite graduated from good to great.

In Laid we’re seeing something with the courage of its convictions. It just does what it wants to do, and trusts in the audience to keep up. ‘Mature’ and ‘comedy’ might seem like an oxymoron but that’s exactly what local funnies have been lacking. Now, finally, we might be seeing some scripted comedy that dares to leave the bum jokes behind, and shift the focus to our brains instead.”

Wow. Quite a rallying call. Especially seeing as Laid – which, lets not forget “has almost nothing in the way of gags” and “dares to leave the bum jokes behind” – has a string of references in the first episode to the first dead ex’s “tiny, tiny testicles” (“he had a weird little ballbag” , “they were like precious little flesh marbles”) and features a scene where the heroine crashes her workplace’s computers due to her, as she later puts it, “surfing internet porn”. Did someone say something about “dumb, obvious gags”?

They’re not isolated incidents. Laid is full of sex jokes – the lead visits a new-age gyno in episode two called “G-Bomb”, for fucks sake – and the only possible reason anyone could call them subtle is because they’re just not very funny. Either Huston didn’t understand what she was watching, or she’s mixed up Alvin Purple with The Color Purple.

And just to point out what a massive crock of shit her whole “our comedies have finally grown up” thesis is, remember how, in claiming a new golden age is a-borning, her opening paragraph skipped over everything in Australian comedy from 1991 to today? That’s because if she hadn’t, she might have reminded her readers of the following: Frontline; The Games; Kath & Kim; Summer Heights High. All enormously successful local sitcoms, and all (with the possible exception of SHH) consistently laugh-out-loud funny – thanks in large part to a high volume of “gags”.

So let’s get this straight: for Laid to be as fantastic as it’s being advertised to be, not only does every decent Australian sitcom of the last 20 years have to have never existed but the very concept of comedy itself has to be redefined at least twice. And on top of that, you have to pretend the many sex jokes Laid contains never actually happened.

Wouldn’t it be a lot easier to just say Laid isn’t that good?

An Anonymous Commentator Speaks Out

Another post about Laid? Really? Surely we should be talking about Ben Elton’s new show – a live sketch show no less – on Nine and Adam Hill’s new comedy-friendly chat show on the ABC, both of which start next week? Hey, don’t blame us – we’re just following the editorial lead of The Age’s Green Guide.

That’s correct: in a move that surprised no-one (well, no-one we know), in a week featuring both Elton and Hill’s debuts, the Green Guide instead decided to give Laid the cover. Not the cast of Laid, mind you, but writers Kirsty Fisher and former Green Guide columnist Marieke Hardy, photographed through such a soft-focus haze of Vaseline you’d be forgiven for thinking Barbara Streisand was back on tour.

At least the Green Guide had an excuse: they just love Laid! Well, they love Hardy, whose “saucy, self-deprecating cheek seems as fresh as when she first sprang to public attention almost a decade ago as the award-winning writer of tween series Short Cuts”.

[Remember Short Cuts? No? Lasted one year on Seven? Launched the acting careers of Damien Bodie and Alex Tsitsopoulos? Hardy won an Australian Writers Guild Award (AWGIE) for it? More behind-the-scenes info here]

Oh well, at least by mentioning a show she did that was critically successful (unlike Last Man Standing, which even the Green Guide has to admit only “found a modest and devoted audience” and was “undervalued”) this two-page story tries to justify why Hardy keeps getting the kind of press most unknown – c’mon people, every single TV writer in this country who’s not also an actor is unknown – writers would kill for. It’s not successful – the correct answer is “She’s the grand-daughter of Frank Hardy, has the right connections thanks to her ABC / Fairfax work, and will probably end up with a high profile commentator gig / big-deal position at the ABC so we’d better be nice to her” – but thanks for trying.

Anyway the real fun in this article (and attached review) isn’t so much the usual chit-chat with she of the “smutty, schoolboy humour” (read: she’s a girl who talks dirty, but she’s not a bogan so it’s ok) , but the way the writers dance around various aspects of the show that seem – to our untrained eye and yes, there’s a proper review coming soon – to be less than successful.

For starters, nowhere on the page does the word “funny” appear. Instead, it’s a “gentle black comedy” and a “sharply observed comedy of manners”. Oh dear. An actually funny comedy show doesn’t ask “is it tasteless and slutty to consider picking up at the wake?”, because who in their right mind thinks “gee, I’ve got a funeral to go to – better watch Laid to see if it’s okay to try and pick up at the wake”. Comedy shows are “funny”, “hilarious” and “laugh out loud”, not “sly”, “winning” and *shudder* “amusing”.

In slightly better news, Hardy says she would “rail against people thinking it’s a feminist fightback show. It’s not.” Really? A show based entirely and completely around the question of whether the female heroine will ever have a loving sexual relationship with a man again isn’t a feminist fightback show? Gee, last time I read The Female Eunuch I must have been holding it upside down.

There is some truth to be gleaned here though: Hardy’s dialogue really is full of “articulate zeitgeist references” and “liberally sprinkled with pop culture references”: why, in the first two episodes alone “assclown”, “sucks to be him” and the (unattributed) “I’m in a glass case of emotion” line from Anchorman get a run (and later on, someone actually says “LOL” out loud! Don’t worry if you miss it, someone then reminds you it happened for double the laffs). Sure, if you’ve actually been on the internet in the last four years pretty much all the references here are old, old news, but we are talking about the ABC here.

There’s more to say, but it can wait for a proper review – sizzle! Not that Hardy and the rest of the Laid team care: as this article tells us, “she’s sanguine about the inevitable brickbats that will be directed her way by anonymous commentators”. Because, as this story – and Hardy’s promo push in The Age over the last few weeks in general – has taught us, getting your name up front and out there as often as possible is what really counts in this business.

Kharma Police

Hey, didn’t Matt Tilley get hit by a car a few days ago? Why, yes he did: he was out riding his bike along Melbourne’s St Kilda Road and BAM: a variety of somewhat serious sounding injuries (fractured vertebrae, bruised kidney) have him bailed up at home with bed rest for the foreseeable future. Ouch. He has our best wishes for a speedy recovery. Sure, rumour has it the person driving the car thought they saw him go for his phone to make a Gotcha call and yelled out “not on my watch!”, but – what, too soon? Too soon for a man who made a name for himself in the comedy world making prank calls notorious for their blunt cruelty and nastiness?

Seriously, it’s only a misdialled number that separates Tilley’s work from ‘vile’ Kyle Sandilands’s efforts in the phone stunt arena – unfortunate Tilley’s current personal plight might be, but he’s hardly a celebrity with “much-loved” in front of his name. And how much must that suck? When you work in the public eye for as long as Tilley has, chances are you’d like to think you’ve built up some level of goodwill out there – if only so that when it comes time to re-negotiate your contract your bosses don’t just laugh and go “sorry, everyone hates you”.

And yet, despite disliking Tilley’s work enough to actually follow this story in the newspapers and on the internet, I’m yet to find much in the way of actual public outpouring of sentiment. Well, that’s not strictly true, as the 48 comments on this story would seem to suggest… until you read them and discover they’re almost entirely about cyclists vs cars, not Tilley himself. And sure, I haven’t actually tuned into his breakfast show to hear the “we miss you Matt” callers there, but if you’re someone who believes those shows get the entirety of their callers from outside the office they broadcast from then I have an underwater tunnel to America you might like to invest in.

This relative silence is even more damming because Matt Tilley isn’t just (supposedly) a nice guy: he’s meant to be a comedian. No, this isn’t the set-up for a “he’s meant to be – but he ain’t!!” style gag: he works on radio as a comedian and while I find mysterious facial lumps more hilarious than his “work”, he does seem to be kind of popular amongst people who listen to breakfast radio. And making people laugh is a pretty likable thing to do when you think about it: you’re making people feel good, you’re not really asking anything from them for it (well, you do have to listen to a shitload of ads and promos, but you know what I mean), and it’s usually the kind of thing that makes people feel good about and towards you.

So the question here is: what kind of comedian are you when you get in a no-joke-serious accident that leaves you with broken bones and busted parts and the general public’s reaction is “meh”?

As a comedian, what kind of connection do you have with your audience when – and let’s not forget that Tilley is a top-rating radio jock, not some unknown comic – the general public (most of which have at the very least heard of you and your work) seemingly couldn’t give a shit about you after a major accident?

What must have gone wrong in your career if even making people laugh – ok, not me, and not anyone I know, but supposedly lots of breakfast radio listeners – on a daily basis isn’t enough to make them stop and care about you for a single second after the laughter stops?

You don’t have to be a comedy fan to think of a half-dozen Australian comics who seem to be nice guys you might say hi to on the street who you’d feel sad about if you heard they’d suffered a serious misfortune. Matt Tilley, on the other hand, made a career out of prank calls. Hey, how’s that working out?

Late Arrivals at the Comedy Boom

You probably saw the story in the Herald Sun the other day that Hamish & Andy are “close” to finalising a deal with Nine. This came as a bit of a surprise to those of us who expected them to sign with Ten (who screened their radio spin-off TV shows), but apparently what swung it was that Hamish & Andy “like that Nine is backing comedy”. And who can blame them? 2011 looks like being one hell of a year of comedy on Nine – Ben Elton’s chat show Live From Planet Earth starts next week, and later in the year there’ll be a new series of The Games from John Clarke, and Tony Martin and Ed Kavalee in the Zapruder’s Other Films-produced The Joy of Sets – who’d have guessed that just a few months ago?

Before the announcement that Hamish & Andy were coming on board you could have written these signings off as a struggling network finally catching-up with the late 80s/early 90s comedy boom (Seven, Ten and the ABC all did well out of the comedy boom – Nine made All Together Now and The Bob Morrison Show…instead of shows with John Clarke and The D-Generation, although to be fair to them Ben Elton turned-up on Ray Martin’s shows a fair bit), but now Nine’s interest in comedy is looking serious. Any network would have fallen over itself to get Hamish & Andy, and yet Nine, with several decades of comedy failures hanging around its neck, took the prize.

For Nine getting Hamish & Andy is great business because it completes a group of comedy signings that spans the key demographics – from the intelligent end of the Boomers and Gen X (The Games), through to Gen’s Y and Z (Hamish & Andy) – making their claim to be “The Home of Laughs” look pretty accurate. And for comedy fans it should hopefully be good too.

John Clarke, Tony Martin & Ed Kavalee, Ben Elton and Hamish & Andy are all solid, experienced, funny comedians. While some of them seem a little too “ABC” for Nine, they’ll hopefully get a chance to prove themselves. The days when Nine would axe new comedies after a few episodes (Rove, The Mick Molloy Show, Micallef Tonight) seem to be behind us. Mick Molloy’s The Nation struggled through its run in 2007, but made it to the end, as did Hey Hey It’s Saturday last year. Neither got renewed, but they were given a chance. Also, they genuinely deserved to be axed.

The worst network for comedy is now Seven (The White Room, The Bounce, Australia Versus), while a “source” close to Hamish & Andy is telling the world that Nine will give them “complete creative control”. And while there’s no doubt a certain element of bullshit to that quote, the solid facts of this story – that Nine has signed a large number of quality comedians in a short space of time, and is going to town to promote them – show us that they’re taking this comedy thing pretty seriously. So let’s be optimistic: it’ll be great!

2010 Awards Winners Announced!

The winners of the Australian Tumbleweeds 2010 have been announced. See who won at http://www.australiantumbleweeds.com/2010/.

If you’re of the Twitter persuasion, tweet your views on the results using the hashtag #tumblies.

Otherwise, just leave a comment here. We’ll approve it eventually. Unless you’re a spambot.

A message from Julian Assange

Julian says, "Now I'm not one to gossip, but...THE AUSTRALIAN TUMBLEWEEDS 2010 goes live on the 26th of January 2011. (But you didn't hear it from me though, okay?)

The official hashtag for the Australian Tumbleweeds is #tumblies. We don’t actually expect you to bother, though.

Power Without Glory 2: Check Out My Sweet Tatts!

The Tumbleweed awards might be right around the corner (we’re still aiming to have the results up Jan 26th, but don’t be worried if they’re a little late: 2010 was a big year in comedy and Hey Hey-hating, and it’s taking us longer than expected to tidy up the mess), but don’t think we’ve taken our eyes off the future of Australian comedy here at Tumbelweeds central – and, according to the Life magazine found in this Sunday’s Age and Sydney Morning Herald, the future of Australian comedy (until mid-March at least) is Marieke Hardy and her new dramedy Laid.

If you’ve ever wondered why we bother writing a blog like this, this three page cover story on Hardy and her work pretty much ticks all the boxes. And not just because for a mere two pages of text we get four photos of Hardy looking “sexy” (the cover, contents page, two page spread at the article’s start, one more pic on the second page – oh, forgot the Age’s cover where we learn Hardy’s “passion is drunk men”). Wow, if they’re focusing that much on her looks, her writing must be awesome!

For those not in the know, the premise of Laid is that a 20-something gal discovers that all the men she’s slept with are now mysteriously dying off. Let’s quote the article itself: it’s “a six part TV series whose central character, 29 year-old market researcher Roo McVie, might be somewhat unremarkable if she didn’t apparently have the power to inadvertently kill men by sleeping with them”. This premise, according to article author Alyssa McDonald, is “intrinsically funny”.

No it’s not.

Let’s go over that premise one more time: a young woman learns that all the men she’s ever slept with are dying off one by one. Maybe if you’re an emotionless psychopath this is hilarious. Perhaps if you’re a sex-hating ball-buster that set-up might bring the kaks. Could be the idea of sending a young woman into a spiral of self-doubt and loathing over the murderous intentions of her genitals makes you split your sides. But in the real world pretty much everyone actually feels at the very least a slight twinge of sadness and loss over the demise of a former lover; having this happen over and over and over again to someone is intrinsically shattering – the comedy is something you’re going to have to work at.

Yeah yeah, we know about “dark comedy”. We’re also fully aware that in the hands of a skilled practitioner just about anything can be spun into comedy gold. Which is where this article’s real problems begin. See, by assuming that Hardy and her once-mentioned writing partner Kate “Fisho” (that’s not us – the article actually calls her that) Fisher have come up with an “intrinsically hilarious” concept, McDonald feels no need or desire to actually explain to the reader why Hardy is a name they can trust in comedy. As pointed out above though, this concept is actually not spun comedy gold. In fact, it’s kind of a tricky one to make work (for one, what can Roo do about it? It’s not an idea that lends itself to action unless her ex’s are being killed by someone, and then it’s just a shit episode of Murder She Wrote). So where are the reassurances that Hardy is a writer of sufficient talent to bring it off?

Well, we’re told that Hardy “has worked, on and off, as a TV scriptwriter” since her teens. Oddly for an article about a television writer, no actual TV shows she’s worked on are listed (don’t worry, there’s two fat paragraphs about her quirky character-defining adoration for Bob Ellis), so let’s fill in that gap: Packed to the Rafters, anyone? Got yourself some cutting-edge comedy there. She did also quit her job writing for The Age –

[what’s that? You didn’t know she was a former Age TV columnist, because this article in The Age about how awesome this former Age writer is doesn’t mention that she worked for The Age’s Green Guide for years? How odd that they didn’t mention that in The Age…]

-to go work on the second series of :30 Seconds, only that never actually happened. And let’s not forget her real main achievement in Australian television: Last Man Standing, a justly forgotten Secret Life of Us knock-off for Seven notable largely for not being very notable at all. Though that episode that had the same plot as that episode of Andy Richter Controls the Universe where Andy dated a hot racist was pretty funny.

Slightly more interesting than the way this article glosses over her somewhat chequered TV writing career is the way that her teenage scriptwriting career is in no way linked to the revelation (carefully distanced over on the next page) that both her parents are writers and television producers. Ah. Okay.

So what this article really should have been about is how a skilled self-promoter (sexy photos? Don’t see Judith Lucy posing for a lot of those) and general media dogsbody (12 years on radio, you say? Columnist for the Age and ABC? Panellist on the ABC’s First Tuesday Book Club too?) overcame a limited resume, no actual comedy experience (she’s not a stand-up and she hasn’t worked on any of Australia’s purpose-built comedy shows) and a high-profile flop to get a six-part comedy series on the ABC.

That’s not even a negative story: surely overcoming the fizzle of Last Man Standing is a triumph? Especially when it involves working your way up through the ranks again on commercial television and making loads of important contacts all over the ABC (did we mention her big paid radio gig was on ABC youth station Triple J? No? Oddly, neither did this article).

Problem there is, then you might get the idea that Ms Hardy is someone who actually works for a living, getting ahead in the Australian media the way lots of people do: through contacts and networking. She worked for The Age: now she’s getting a profile in The Age. She worked for the ABC on radio, as a TV panelist and an internet columnist: now she’s got her own show on the ABC. Mystery solved.

And it’s hardly like this article paints a picture of her as a big league television talent anyway – as pointed out, it only mentions her previous efforts in the vaguest of terms. Her blog is named; none of the television shows she worked on are. But don’t worry: she’s still a vegan. Like anyone gives a shit.

In a perfect world, there’d only be two reasons for this kind of pointless puff piece: either Hardy is so amazing an individual she’s worth reading about simply because of who she is, or she’s a writer so excellent and exciting we need to know more about the person behind such fascinating work.

In the real world, where quirky hipster chicks aren’t exactly thin on the ground, skilled soapie writers have entire careers without a single name-check in the press and columnists who ignore the “thought” side of “thought-provoking” clog the internet, the only reason to read this article is to see how utterly irrelevant hard work and talent are when it comes to getting media attention in this country.

In Laid’s case, whether they’re equally as irrelevant when it comes to making television comedy remains to be seen.

Yet Another Thing to Thank Tony Martin For

Remember the “good old days” of Australian comedy DVD releases, where extra features were a joke instead of actually containing more jokes? But as everyone who scored a copy of series 3 of The Librarians for Christmas now knows, All That’s Changed: not only does this particular slice of Aussie comedy hilarity contain a descent chunk of extra features (inc all of the Sir Robert Franklin clips and a couple of table reads, which is really going above and beyond the call of duty), but there’s also an easily found and highly enjoyable selection of Easter Eggs as well. Hurrah! Especially as one of those EEs consists of Tony Martin singing “US Forces” in the style of the Federal Environment Minister.

The reason why Tony Martin’s getting all the thanks here – it’s a Gristmill production, after all – is down to a): his near-constant presence in those extras, and b): a scene where Robyn Butler and Wayne Hope basically say “is that going to be enough extras to keep Tony happy?” Yes, it seems that Tony’s love of DVD extras isn’t just part of his comedy persona, it’s reached out into the real world – and we’re all the better for it.

Of course, some may point to the amazing amount of extras available on Chris Lilley’s DVDs. And sure, hour upon hour of deleted scenes seems pretty impressive there. But let’s be honest: you’re not getting Lilley doing commentary on any of his shows, are you? All you’re getting are the plentiful offcuts from a filming process that generates deleted scenes at the same rate as a ACA “special report” on youth crime churns out cliches.

No, it’s Mr Martin who we (mostly) have to thank for the current golden age of DVD extras… or we do until we realise The Chaser aren’t too shabby with the DVD extras either. Ditto John Safran. And those Micallef P(r )ogram(me) DVDs… ah heck, just forget we said anything…

(The Librarians s3 DVD does have some excellent extras though)

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Australian Tumbleweeds is Australia's most opinionated blog about comedy.
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