Australian Tumbleweeds
Vale Live From Planet Earth
It was probably inevitable that we’d never find out how Girl Flat ended, nor indeed did many want to, but to axe a show that was improving (if not in ratings then certainly in quality) because it didn’t bring huge audiences after it was bumped at the last minute into a late-night slot to allow Nine to cover the Christchurch Earthquake seems a little unfair. What happened to all that “give it a chance” stuff Nine were pushing after that disastrous first episode?
Having said that, it’s hard to feel sorry for a show put together by experienced people which had as many flaws as Live From Planet Earth. Elton’s stand-up was good, there were some good guests, the Elaine Front character was promising, but the sketches…were they really by the guy who wrote Blackadder, The Young Ones and “Double seat, double seat, gotta get a double seat”? Elton’s failure to see their terribleness is surprising, even when you consider that he’s been responsible for a string of high-profile failures in his homeland over the past decade (the 2000 film Maybe Baby, the 2005 sitcom Blessed and the 2007 sketch show Get A Grip).
Even weirder was that while Elton was writing joke-free sketches about female bodybuilders, his topical stand-up was actually pretty good. While Live From Planet Earth was on air, Elton was one of the best local satirists on TV (second only to John Clarke), doing material a million times more cutting and incisive than the panellists on Good News Week were coming up with.
Perhaps if Live From Planet Earth had been more about Ben Elton and less about his supporting company of proven duds and wide-eyed newcomers then it would have been better, but a format change that big would have required a lot of guts…easier to give up and get out before ratings plummet below 100,000, perhaps? After all, that Hamish & Andy deal wasn’t cheap.
Speaking of which, remember how during their negotiations with Nine Hamish & Andy let it be known that they wanted to sign with a network which gave comedy a chance and didn’t axe things hastily? Could it be that Nine kept Live From Planet Earth going to make sure Hamish & Andy signed, then axed it once the deal was done? We can’t be the only ones wondering that today.
King of the Hill
It’s no real shock that we like The Jesters a lot. This behind-the-scenes sitcom about a group of Chaser-style comedians and their grumpy producer stars Mick Molloy and is packed with references to and plots based on Australian television comedy; the only way to make a sitcom more to our liking would be to announce that Tony Martin was going to be a regular on the upcoming series of The Games.
Even with that in mind, the second series of The Jesters is something special. Comedies often improve over time (unlike dramas, which usually start out as strong as they’re ever going to get), and this year The Jesters has taken a real leap forward. The characters are more sharply defined, the scripts are tighter, the performances… well, they’re still good (more on them later) and as a whole the show simply works better. If there wasn’t that new series of The Games due later this year, it’d be a cert for Aussie sitcom of the year… not that that’s traditionally much of an accolade.
So, our blind love for Mick Molloy aside, what makes The Jesters work when so many Australian sitcoms don’t? Well, for starters, maybe we were a bit hasty in putting our Mick love aside: We’ve said it before, but Mick Molloy is one of the finest comedy actors in this country. Before you swig down a cup of coffee for your spit-take at this news, that’s not the same as saying he’s a great actor (though he’s pretty good there too, as the three people who saw that all-Aussie version of Macbeth with Mick in it knows); a comedy actor has to project a certain warmth and likability above and beyond whatever the character requires, otherwise people aren’t going to warm to them and they ain’t gonna laugh.
[for example, take Natalie Portman in her current big screen rom-com No Strings Attached. No-one would seriously claim she’s not a good actress, but in a comedy she’s just not funny. You can admire her, you can sympathise with her character, you can think she’s a good person, but she just doesn’t give off the warmth required to make a comedy work.]
Like a lot of comedians, Mick has this quality; unlike a lot of comedians, Mick can also act. So while his character Dave Davies has a bit in common with the real-life Mick (the term “washed-up show-biz arsehole” is used a fair bit in Mick’s interviews for the show), he’s also believable as a character on television: it’s not like trying to get, say, Peter Helliar (who also has the likeability thing going for him) to play a character.
This kind of performance – being funny yet believable, being likable even when playing a tool – is the kind of thing a lot of critics dismiss or ignore, even though it’s clearly a lot harder to make happen than “straight” acting. So having Mick in the lead (and unlike the first series, which would occasionally push him to second or third banana, this time he’s firmly in the lead, with his own subplots and everything) is a good idea. As is teaming him with Deborah Kennedy as his agent Di. There’s real chemistry between them, and their scenes together lift the show as a whole; it’s safe to say that without this double act there’d be a lot less to like about The Jesters.
It’s not just their show though; The Jesters is an actual ensemble, which is increasingly rare for an Australian sitcom. One of the ways sitcoms get laughs is by the interactions between people, so logically a sitcom should have a fairly large cast of regular characters and those characters should be fairly well defined. Put the angry guy in a scene with the chilled-out girl and their differing responses to a situation should get a laugh or two.
The Jesters has eight (nine, if you count the old-school show-biz director chap) regular cast members, and at least half of them can be boiled down to a one-line description: the creepy musician, the conspiracy nut, the grumpy boss, the feisty smart-arse sidekick. It’s easy to dismiss simplistic characters as a bad thing, but in a comedy they get the job done. They’re not even that unrealistic (so long as they’re largely kept in the background): we all have acquaintances we only know loosely but still can have a laugh with. And having a large cast of well-defined characters means the writers can mix things up a little by putting different characters together, as happens a few times later on in this second series. It’s not a big thing – boosting Mick’s role plays a much bigger role in improving this series – but every little bit helps.
We could go on, and on, but there’s only so much to say about, say, the generally sparse set design (who knew that a sitcom didn’t need to have hyper-realistic sets to get laughs? Not anyone working on Laid) or the way that even the most stale cliché in 21st century Aussie comedy – the bitchy, sarcastic office manager – works here simply by making her half of a riff-heavy comedy double act with Mick’s character. And yes, there are still problems here too – not all the cameos work, and sometimes the plots can be a little too “inside-comedy” – but for the most part they’re minor ones.
Look, there are people out there who seem to think that the mark of a good sitcom is quality set-design and capital-A actors looking embarrassed after yet another social gaffe. They’re not going to like The Jesters, and it’s their loss. And to be honest, if you know Mick Molloy is not your cup of tea there’s not a whole lot else going on here to keep you watching. But if you happen to think that a good sitcom is one that values being funny over pretty much everything else – and works towards that goal on a regular basis – the chances are pretty high that you’re going to find that the second series of The Jesters is about as good as this particular kind of Australian-made comedy gets.
(and yes, we did spot in a later episode a reference or two to an Australian comedy website called the ‘Mumbleweeds”. Thanks guys… we think)
FYI: series one of The Jesters is out on DVD in early March. Series two starts on pay TV channel Movie Extra on Tuesday Feb 22nd at 8.30pm
You Have Been Remaking
The Comedy Channel’s first local production for the year premiered on Thursday, a remake of the British panel show You Have Been Watching. Like TV Burp before it, it was a disappointing view if you like the original.
The original is hosted by Charlie Brooker, a former TV critic for The Guardian who’s made a number of fairly sharp series about TV for the BBC. Developed by Brooker through his production company, You Have Been Watching is very much tailored towards his interests and his style. Somewhat inevitably, parachuting Peter Berner into the host’s role and barely changing the format doesn’t quite work.
Berner may share with Charlie Brooker a dryness of tone and an intelligentish wit, but he’s not a TV critic (or, as those who remember his satire series BackBerner know, a particularly good critic of anything else), and in this series he largely seems to be going through the hosting motions as he would on The Einstein Factor.
As for the rest of the show, it feels rushed. The panel (who in episode one were Meshel Laurie, John Wood and Aamer Rahman of Fear of a Brown Planet) were shown the briefest possible clips of a series of cop shows, including the ludicrous US series Poochinski, and asked to comment on them. They got in a few good lines, but there wasn’t much for them to work with. Where the British series got this right was by showing more clips from each series being discussed and allowing Brooker to comment on them before opening the discussion out to the panel. The fact that our version of the series has a much shorter running time than the original didn’t help here.
To be fair to You Have Been Watching, we’re judging this on the one episode that’s made it to air so far and it could improve over time as those involved get used to making it. On the other hand, it’s fairly clear that the makers haven’t put much effort into changing the format to suit the shorter timeslot or the talents of the host they’ve hired (he presumably has some), and worse, there’s been no attempt to adapt the show for this country, other than to take a look at shows like Prisoner and Underbelly.
Imported formats can work, but after the failure of TV Burp it’s surprising that no one in Australian television has worked out that when you’re buying a show designed by a comedian to suit their personal style, it may need some adapting to suit a new host.
Ben Elton vs The Twitterverse
So Live From Planet Earth returned last night, and while the changes made were for the best it wasn’t like there was a whole lot of them. More Elton stand-up and less shoddy sketches was a good move, but it still felt like tinkering around the edges of a now-proven dud. What, they thought last week’s show was a success?
[It does make you wonder what it takes to change a show over at Nine, considering the equally live Hey Hey it’s Saturday went an entire year sinking in the ratings without any real changes (apart from the timeslot) being made. Is there no-one over there who can say “this isn’t working – change it?” after all, isn’t the ability to rapidly change things pretty much the only benefit in the 21st century of going out live?]
Anyway, forget all that crock from the haterz about there being “no decent Australian sketch comedy since 1989”. There’s been loads of good stuff – The Late Show, The Micallef P(r)ogram(me) to name two excellent local examples – it’s just that networks seem trapped in a world where The Comedy Company is as good as we can ever hope for. Which wasn’t even true back in 1989.
That said, it’s a shame that LFPE is now headed directly for the scrapheap, if not immediately then in a few weeks when it finishes up its allotted run (of either four or six episodes, depending on what you’ve heard). There’s still potential for it to become at least watchable – maybe if it was only a half-hour, maybe if there was some actual variety going on, maybe if it was more obviously based around Elton’s stand-up – and maybe if Elton’s stand-up was fresher, though to be fair much of the used material he’s been doing isn’t exactly common knowledge out here.
But let’s be honest: it doesn’t really matter about potential when there’s no will (or ability, or time) to change. And having Elton take a swipe at the show’s Twitter-based critics made that pretty clear.
It might have seemed a little odd that Elton would, on the one hand, say that Twitter was basically “giving a moron a megaphone” and on the other wrap things up with a request to send out positive tweets if you liked the show. Good or bad, which one is it? But dipping his toe in the Twitter waters after the drubbing the show took there last week was a smart damage-control move whatever the result.
Now that he’s interacted directly with the Twitterverse, Elton can say (with some justification) that it’s impossible to take what happens there seriously. The hate posts can be written off as coming from people angry at what he said rather than real haters of the show (and hey, at least they were still watching, right?); the positive ones (and there were some) are only going to make him look good even if he had to ask for them directly.
It’s not going to save the show – only good ratings* or apathy at Nine can do that now – but after a week where Twitter comments were used to paint the show as a massive, stomach-churning failure, being able to dismiss at least one source of negative feedback has to be seen as a plus. For Elton, if not for audiences hoping for some half-decent comedy on our screens.
*last night’s figures: 384,000 viewers nash. Not good.
New comedy? Yes indeed.
Yesterday TV Tonight published an exclusive interview with Ben Elton, in which Elton defended the first episode of Live From Planet Earth:
Apparently the principal criticism is that it was too smutty, and to be honest I actually put my hand up to that. I do think we got the mix wrong.
Sadly, Elton had nothing to say about the quality of the material, which was the show’s real downfall – plenty of people will laugh at smutty material if it’s funny, it’s unfunny smutty material that gets their backs up – but if there’s a man used to defending his patch it’s Ben Elton, so that wasn’t much of a surprise.
Perhaps of more interest was this section of the interview:
If the show is given time to find an audience Elton says it could uncover new talent that will benefit all of the industry.
“If I find some good new people they’ll be on TEN and Seven next year, so that will be good for everybody. But apparently TEN and Seven program against Nine and Nine programs against Seven and TEN trying to kill new stuff. I think that’s incredible. This is such a small industry, so the idea that it’s not a good thing for anyone to have a success…they’ll be on the other channels next year and it will promote local writing and local acting. Otherwise it will just mean they get more American stuff,” he says.
And while the whole “we’re promoting local talent” thing is pretty much the standard defence for any lacklustre local comedy, there’s a grain of truth here: commercial radio and television networks in Australia almost never provide opportunities for new comic talent. Even providing opportunities for established comic talent is something networks haven’t been terribly good at over the years. If you’re wondering why Australian comedy’s default level of quality is “average”, lack of opportunities to gain experience or try out new ideas is a big part of it. Still, at least there’s the ABC.
Say what you will about the ABC’s recent history of comedy – one of increased ratings-chasing and making programmes that wouldn’t be out of place on a commercial network – but at least once in a while they do something a bit different. On Saturday night Radio National broadcast the first episode of The Lonely Hearts Club, a new improvised comedy staring Angus Sampson, Sam Pang, Tony Martin and Stephen Curry. If you haven’t heard about it that’s not surprising (we ourselves are indebted to reader Daniel G for pointing it out to us), because despite the relative fame of the cast the show doesn’t appear to have gotten any publicity, apart from a couple of tweets from Tony Martin. And that’s a shame because of this week’s comedy debuts it’s the one most worth your time (you can download episode 1 from the show’s website).
Sampson, Pang, Martin and Curry play a group of middle-aged men who have “tasted the highs and lows of life and love”, and are now hosting a radio chat show for men. Not surprisingly, Martin as Duncan Jardine (“one of Australia’s most frequently used second unit directors”) is the stand-out, but the rest of the cast do a good job too. And as the show and the characters develop, they’ll probably get better and better.
The Lonely Hearts Club is also a pretty good send-up of the kinds of programmes that litter Radio National and ABC Local, with their whispering hosts and their over-long and slightly dull discussions of “issues”. The show’s segment on coeliac disease didn’t quite work (because the guest expert seemed to be quite genuine) but the other “discussions” in the show were pretty funny.
So, kudos to whoever it was who got the show on air – as we’ve long argued on this blog there should be opportunities to make comedy on radio, whether it’s four mates improvising for a couple of hours, or something scripted like The Blow Parade. The ABC should be doing more of this and it’s time to establish a regular slot for it.
Right on Adam and Hannah
Daryl’s been Facebooking again…
There is a chance of something happening in the second half of the year but sadly nothing definitive. And if we did return it would probably not be on a Saturday as according to Nine the “economics” don’t stack up: not enough people watching TV generally on a weekend compared to mid week viewing, therefore revenue verses the cost of mounting a two hour variety show like ours does not work. They can make more profit with a cheaper program.
…and none of it’s exactly news. Clearly if Live From Planet Earth keeps sucking Nine will need a replacement, but as Daryl should be only too aware, that replacement may not be Hey Hey It’s Saturday (or any of those shows he’s got “in development”). Nor should it be. His Facebook fans might have been watching but everyone else turned-off in droves.
Meanwhile, a show not so dissimilar to Hey Hey made its debut a few nights ago and did pretty well. In Gordon Street Tonight combined all those magic ingredients that Daryl Somers said we all wanted to see on our screens: live music, international and local guests, comedy, stunts, audience interaction, and social media as part of the show. The main difference between IGST and Hey Hey is that the newcomer did it a million times better.
Adam Hills is a likeable, funny guy and a solid host. His sidekick, Hannah Gadsby, was allowed to be funny, not just cut to whenever they needed some live tweets read out (although she did a good job there too). The show’s use of social media was clever and worthwhile, and those who joined in, whether they were Ross Noble mucking around on Skype or Adam Hill’s Twitter followers sending-in TwitPics, came up with some funny stuff.
The In Gordon Street Tonight team also realised the fatal flaw with a lot of variety shows – that if the show’s too reliant on the mix of guests people won’t tune in if the guests don’t interest them – so they created a format and an atmosphere where the guests weren’t the focus of the show, they just had to join in the fun. And that idea of researching the studio audience and involving them in some lo-fi Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush-esque stuff was quite fun too.
What was most exciting about the show, though, was that it reworked a grab-bag of tried and tested TV and online elements and gave them a genuinely fresh spin. You also get the sense that there’s plenty more to come – the show’s so open that anything could happen (although hopefully they won’t introduce a serial about pop stars living together any time soon). This is the complete opposite to Daryl Somer’s approach to television, where everything follows a predictable formula and looks about a billion years old. Somers should keep that in mind as his production company slaves away on those ideas in development.
At Last, the Laid Review
Laid would probably work if it was a movie. You wouldn’t pay to go see it, of course, but when it works it works in roughly the same way as a reasonably competent Australian independent film does – think The Rage in Placid Lake or The Illustrated Family Doctor (not that anyone paid to see them either). Even the plot would work better as a movie: 29 year-old market researcher Roo (Allison Bell) discovers that all her ex-lovers are dying… and that’s pretty much it for episode one.
[obviously, SPOILERS FROM HERE ON]
In a movie, a quirky concept like that is good enough: once you’ve got the audience’s money, you can take your sweet time getting around to having something happen. On television though, you need to give the viewer a reason to come back: for a comedy that’s as plot-driven as this one (it’s not like anyone seriously watched Kath & Kim or The Librarians wanting to see how things turned out), the plot’s pretty thin. Episode two: more ex’s die, Roo thinks about a guy she likes. Episode three: even more ex’s die, Roo goes on a half-arsed date with that guy she likes. Oooo-kay.
The crawling plot wouldn’t matter in the slightest if there was anything funny going on in the meantime. But Laid is too cool to want to make you laugh. The trouble with this whole “realistic’ shit in comedy is that in the real world people actually know when they’re trying to be funny and they sell the joke in all manner of ways: when your cast just says everything in a deadpan fashion, it doesn’t make already weak dialogue “more realistic” – it just makes it less funny. And trust us, less funny is not what this show needs.
Part of the trouble is that the show is built around a concept that really needs serious work to make funny. Let’s say it again: our average gal lead discovers that her ex-lovers are dying one by one. In a crazy, over-the-top cartoony sitcom this could work. Laid though, is deadpan realism. So when one ex gets hit by a car in episode one, his body lands on a windshield with a sickening thud and a spray of blood. A similar accident in the most recent season of Curb Your Enthusiasm was hilarious, because that show is basically a cartoon about a grumpy old man. Laid is an underplayed story about a seemingly decent young woman; this shit isn’t funny at all.
But let’s get down to specifics here: for those looking for a definition of “ham-fisted” when it comes to comedy, look no further than the first episode’s funeral scene, where Roo – who’s been cracking wise about what a dud root the first dead ex was – turns up only to discover he was obsessed with her as “the one who got away”.
Presumably all this is meant to be one of those Curb Your Enthusiasm-style awkward moments – she’s been making fun of him, he really cared about her, ooh, you’d really feel out of place there, right? No. No, you’d feel awesome. You’re at the funeral of someone you barely remembered and everyone there is telling you how amazing you were and what a massive impact you had on the dead guy. Isn’t that what you’d go to a funeral like that to hear? More importantly, how is being told you’re great funny?
It’s not like they’re telling her “after you dumped him he went insane / became a nazi / turned into a hippie – so we hate you”. That would actually be awkward – instead it’s “you were so amazing, he never stopped talking about you, you’re the one who got away” awkward, which is basically a bunch of flattery. Flattery can be funny, when it’s a douchebag character being flattered. Whatever her many, many flaws tho, Roo ain’t a douchebag.
And then we meet the dead guy’s most recent ex. And a character actually has to say “you two really look alike”, because the joke – that the dead guy only dated girls who looked like Roo – doesn’t work because a): Roo just looks average and b): they cast someone who doesn’t really look much like Alison Bell anyway.
See, this is why we’ve been taking a swing at all the positive reviews Laid’s been getting. Sure, the show has some good points – it’s well directed and looks polished, not that any of that makes a comedy funny – but when it’s praised for somehow being above cheap humour what they really mean is that it tries for cheap humour and fails. This is a show that features both the clumsy answering machine message (a staple of comedy since answering machines were invented) and then plays mournful tinkling piano music over the news of another death. That’s not a show taking comedy to the next level: that’s a show that only vaguely knows what comedy is.
Even the character of Roo doesn’t work. Despite the Ricky Gervais vocal stylings, she’s meant to be this decent, slightly befuddled character (which does mean that if you based a drinking game on every time Bell pulls her ‘rear back / blink rapidly’ face you’ll be unconscious at the 20 minute mark), but her actual actions are kind of harsh. Pretty much all she does in episode one is make fun of a dead guy and try to pick up his mate at the funeral, which in most people’s eyes would kind of make you a douchebag.
So the show then has two scenes where people call her out on her shitty actions: her workmates aren’t impressed by her jokes about the dead guy, and the mate she’s trying to pick up tells her to back off. But wait – her workmates are unfunny tools, and the mate ends up calling her a “fucking slut”. So clearly only nasty idiots think that she’s been acting badly, right? And you don’t want to be one of those, do you?
Let’s spell it out for those thinking this is some kind of “next level” comedy: Roo’s meant to be a quiet, slightly awkward, smart hipster chick. Then she tries to pick up a guy at a funeral. You know who does that? The Charlie Sheen character on Two & A Half Men. Guess what she does in episode two? Gets drunk and sleeps with her best friend’s boyfriend – who’s camped out the front trying to win the best friend back. You know who does that? The Charlie Sheen character on Two & A Half Men.
Having her act like Charlie Sheen would actually make this into a better show if it would just own it and make her someone who consciously casually uses men for sex. Imagine, if you will, a gender-reversed version – let’s call it “Dead Root”, about a guy who discovers all his old girlfriends were dying. You wouldn’t make the guy a sweet, nerdy type because that’d be kind of lame and creepy in a comedy– you’d make him at least a little bit of a sexist jerk. That’s because then the story would have a point – at the end he’d have learnt to value his sexual relationships a little bit more. You’d even maybe say the whole thing was a metaphor for how, after he slept with a woman and got what he wanted, she was “dead to him”. It’d actually be a bit of a feminist tale really, showing a guy waking up to the fact that women are people too. And he could even try to get a root at a funeral.
So why not do it here? It’s not like women don’t like casual sex, or that they don’t hump’n dump people on occasion. And this is meant to be a comedy – the one genre in Australia where you can have an unlikable female lead (look at Kath & Kim and The Librarians). But we don’t get that. We get a woman who we’re supposed to like and identify with whose big dramatic problem only affects her ability to get a boyfriend – every other aspect of her life is completely unaffected (or even improved – a job as an untraceable hit-woman awaits!) .
You know the Bechdel test, where the gauge of an artistic works’ level of objectification of women is whether it features two women having a conversation with each other that isn’t about men? Every single scene in this show fails that test. The entire show is entirely about her ability to get a man. Sure, she says and does other things. But they’re secondary to the point of the show, which is about a woman who’s exes are dying one by one – and if she doesn’t figure out why, she’ll never be able to have a safe relationship again. Oh dear God no.
No doubt Laid will be praised by many – oh hang on, it already has been – largely on the basis that it’s not in your face about trying to be funny. Those people presumably think that random pop culture references, realistic art direction and a surreal central concept make a lightweight drama series “comedy”. For those who think a comedy should make you laugh, however, may we suggest… well, pretty much anything else.
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…
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?