Australian Tumbleweeds
Tumblies 2010 nominations are go!
We are pleased to announce that nominations are now open for the 2010 Australian Tumbleweeds.
To make things easier – and because you demanded it – you can nominate through the Survey Monkey website at http://www.surveymonkey.net/tumbliesnoms
In a number of categories we’ve provided lists of possible or suggested nominees, but there is also the option to write-in your choice(s) if they aren’t listed. You can make up to four nominations in each of the 29 categories.
You have until late night (Melbourne time) on Friday 3rd December to complete your nominations. Voting opens on 6th December.
In the interests of neutrality, we will keep blog posts to a minimum during the nominations and voting period….although it’s difficult to restrain ourselves from commenting on this article which appeared on TV Tonight yesterday.
The ABC has now ruled that it will not commission used formats. The ban comes from Director of Television Kim Dalton.
…
“We’re the only broadcaster that won’t do second hand formats,” [Stuart Menzies, Controller for ABC2] said, describing his aim as making ABC2 “creatively and intellectually distinctive”.
If that actually happens we’ll be whooping for joy. If it doesn’t, that’s Tumblies 2011 done and dusted!
Don’t forget to fan us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. You can tweet your whatever about Tumblies 2010 using the hashtag #tumblies.
The Other WTF
Just as Charles Firth’s WTF was finishing on GO!, a new WTF started on Melbourne’s Channel 31 – With Tim Ferguson. Described on its website as “a reactionary Live TV show” and “shock-jock radio with pictures”, With Tim Ferguson is a part comic/part serious look at politics, current affairs and culture.
Much of the show is taken up by Ferguson giving his views on various issues, views which are often nuanced and unconventional. He’s neither on the left or the right, he’s somewhere in between. Or possibly on a different political spectrum entirely. Either way, he’s clearly got a bee in his bonnet about The Greens, sometimes giving them more of a drubbing than the politicians who are currently in office (or might soon to be depending on the results of the Victorian State Election).
With a stick of broccoli in one hand (Greens…geddit?), Ferguson makes gags about pretentious, pashmina-wearing, inner city, Prius-driving Greens voters, and follows them up with some more serious analysis of The Greens’ policies. Roughly summarised, his view is this: The Greens want to fundamentally change our way of life and we don’t want that. Whether you agree with his conclusions or not, he’s at least spent some time thinking them through – it’s more the cliched gags about pashminas that let him down.
Another feature of the show is the weekly theme, a theme which sometimes seems designed to annoy as many in the audience as possible. In episode one it was “satisfied Indian students”, although their presence seemed unlikely to rile the average Channel 31 viewer. A better bet was probably the “young monarchists” in episode two. And in particular one of their number, university student Timothy Maddocks, who Ferguson interviewed.
The intereview with Maddocks is on YouTube, should you wish to watch it, but the basic deal is that Maddocks claimed to have become a monarchist because a person he thought was “a berk” was a republican and he “just decided to be contrary”. (Oh, and he happened to have conservative political views already, so it probably wasn’t much of a stretch.) To be fair to Maddocks, he seems intelligent and probably has a serious basis for his view, but none of that really came across in the interview, which was riddled with muddled points and crap gags, which Ferguson over-indulged. Indeed, Ferguson ended the interview with…
Great to have you here Timothy, and good luck – and if you see him shake his hand because he is actually a rebel, not the spliff-rolling beanie wearers.
…so clearly anyone who’s going against the tide is going to float Fergo’s boat.
Also on the show are three regular “thinkers”, stand-up and journalist Fiona Scott-Norman, film producer Alan Finney, and Strictly Speaking judge and former Labor speech writer Michael Gurr. Fiona Scott-Norman’s contribution each week is a short, stand-up style monologue on various topical issues. Her jokes are OK but her delivery is pretty awkward, and after six shows she’s showing no signs of improvement. Alan Finney’s segment involves him reading out a synopsis for a possible new Australian film. The synopsis’ are usually a satire on something topical, and pretty wordy – too wordy to make a good monologue, really, particularly the way Finney delivers them. As for Michael Gurr, each week he plays a put-upon character in a two-hander with Ferguson. These sketches are weak – more odd than funny – and Gurr’s a bit of a ham actor (not in a good way, sadly).
All up, With Tim Ferguson is a kinda disappointing programme. As interesting as Tim Ferguson’s views are, he’s too preoccupied with a desire to shit-stir, and his attempt to create a hybrid of comedy, variety, current affairs and political discussion has just resulted in a messy half-hour of community television. Most disappointing is the comedy, especially when you consider Ferguson’s past success in this area. If as much thought went into the comedy as has gone into the politics, With Tim Ferguson would be a much better show.
Long Overdue
Right from its first episode, The Librarians (ABC1, Wednesdays, 8.30pm) has been surprisingly divisive, in that it was neither obvious rubbish or amazingly hysterical. More insightful critics than us might want to discuss whether being able to provide support for shows that aren’t either pandering crap or clear genius is a sign of maturity for the Australian television industry: we just like things that are funny.
That said, it’s been pretty obvious this year that season three of The Librarians has been taking a slightly different approach. Creators and stars Robyn Butler and Wayne Hope have said in interviews that this year they felt they’d established the characters enough and it was time to have some fun with them. Some might feel that establishing the characters in a sitcom should take the first five minutes of the first episode, thus paving the way for the “having fun” viewers have come to see a good six hours earlier into the run, but… well, let’s introduce the contrasting view first.
In this week’s Age Green Guide (dated Thursday November 11), reviewer Bridget McManus writes: “In a case not so much of jumping the shark as failing to live up to rather optimistic expectations, The Librarians seems to have lost sight of its original subtlety and is milking its set-ups dry”.
The problem here is obvious: McManus has confused “subtlety” with “not actually being funny”. And that’s speaking as a fan of the first two series. A sit-com should “milk its set-ups dry”: that’s the whole point. If there are laughs to be had, those laughs should be taken – no-one walks away from a good sitcom thinking “yeah, but if only they’d taken it a little further, that would have been really funny”.
In case you were worried we were going her a little hard, McManus goes on to prove our already low opinion of her judgment in comedy matters with this: “Whereas once we cringed at the non-PC snorts of head librarian Frances (co-creator Robyn Butler), now it feels as if we’re all supposed to be having a laugh at people in wheelchairs and ethnic minorities”.
Let’s start at the start: if you think the sign of a good comedy is cringing rather than laughing, you fail. At life. One more time for the late arrivals: good comedy makes you laugh – it doesn’t make you feel pain. That’s a rule you simply can’t get around, and the only people who support the idea of “cringe comedy” are people who do not or can not laugh but don’t want to be left out when people talk about comedy around the watercooler. Of course, you can laugh at awful things and situations – Christ knows we do around here – and obviously some jokes are cruel and offensive, but when you say that your idea of good comedy is one that makes you cringe rather than laugh, you’ve got your head up your arse.
Next point: after six hours often taken up with character-establishing “cringe comedy”, The Librarians has reached a point where jokes about people in wheelchairs and minorities are not the kind of offensive crap Ricky Gervais paraded out in the second series of The Office. There he tried to have it both ways: “Oh, David Brent’s horrible, see how badly he treats that girl in a wheelchair… of course, if you’re actually laughing at the girl in the wheelchair, we’ll take that too.”
By this third series of The Librarians, we’ve already had twelve half-hour episodes establishing the characters of Dawn, Nada and everyone else. They’ve been around long enough that jokes at their expense are now jokes about them as characters, not as stereotypes – unless McManus is saying that it’s never ever possible to make funny jokes about people in wheelchairs or homosexuals or people who belong to ethnic minorities. Which is true if the jokes are simply about them as stereotypes, but again, after six hours of television time we know them well enough as characters to see them as more than just “person in wheelchair” – and there doesn’t seem to have been a sudden spate of “all people in wheelchairs are like Dawn” gags just yet.
Just to make things abundantly clear, the third season of The Librarians has been the best yet, and that’s because it’s increasingly silly and willing to have a mess around with all the characters. As a character, Frances worked largely in the first two series because of Robyn Butler’s ability as an actress to make a painful, uptight, sneering character seem slightly watchable. As mentioned earlier, the more this series moves away from the old power structure where we were supposed to cringe at the awful way she treated her underlings, and towards a model where she’s under at least as much pressure herself as she can dole out to others, the funnier it gets. And, y’know, Bob Franklin is always funny in everything, so there’s that.
Everyone’s entitled to the right opinion, which fortunately isn’t McManus’ one. The Librarians is hardly perfect, but looked at from at least one perspective – the one where comedy should be funny – this third (and, if some rumours are to be believed, final) series is a distinct and obvious step up from what’s gone before. After all, what’s the point of comedy: to make you laugh, or to make you think “gee, that last comment about immigrants was kind of embarrassing”?
Painters & Dockers’ hits that never happened #34: We’re All Going to Comedy School
[in which a throwaway moment in a show about something else entirely is hijacked for our own purposes]
Early on the first episode of Comedy School (SBS, Saturday’s, 9.45) – a show that follows a group of would-be stand-up comedians at a East Sydney community college course – teacher Rob McHugh writes on the whiteboard that “Stand-up comedy is hard, lonely & vicious”. The students gasp when it’s revealed that the quote’s originator is Will Ferrell, and rightly so – just not for the reason the show gives.
They’re shocked because Ferrell seems to embody an easy-going, lets-have-fun approach to comedy. They should be shocked because Ferrell isn’t actually a stand-up comedian. He’s a comic actor. He doesn’t make his living touring America and the world appearing on stage telling jokes: he’s in movies playing characters. Before that he was on Saturday Night Live playing characters, and before that he was playing characters on stage. If these students want to do what Ferrell does, they’ve come to the wrong place.
Apart from casting doubt on the competence of McHugh, this is hardly a fatal flaw in his course. It’s just a quote used to point out that comedy – like everything else – isn’t all fun and games. And whether you can actually teach comedy is beside the point too. After all, we all know that there are two kinds of documentaries about “making it” in a creative / sporting endeavour: the realistic ones that say it’s a massive amount of work simply to get to a stage where you might have a tiny chance at being a d-grade star, and the feel-good ones that say you just need to do a course / appear in the right venue and it’ll just all fall into place.
Of the two – Hoop Dreams is a good example of the former, your average TV talent show of the latter – this falls firmly in the “feel-good” camp. In the real world the people who become successful in comedy, much like any other competitive field, have been obsessed with it since childhood, have studied it (often informally but passionately) for many years, and even then often fail to be anything more than some mildly annoying chump on a panel show. People who do a one-month course at community college while they’re in their 40s just have a bit of fun and learn something about themselves.
[When the voice-over starts saying stuff like: “Rose Lee’s road to comedy school began with breast cancer”, you know you’re not watching a show where the subjects are going to have their dreams crushed by the brutal reality of showbiz]
But the thing that’s annoying about the use of the Ferrell quote is that Australia doesn’t need courses teaching people to be stand-up comics: we need courses teaching people to be Will Ferrell. Our comedy clubs are already full of stand-ups, some of which are really good; meanwhile, Australian film and television is all but empty of comic actors who can be funny and interesting enough to keep you from putting your boot through the screen every time they pull a “hilarious” face.
Seriously, in 2010 the two major big-screen Australian comedies released in cinemas had as their leads Nick Giannopoulos and Brendan Cowell. For fuck’s sake. Whatever they might be like in real life, on screen they’re hardly guys overwhelming audiences with their charm and warmth. And yet, where are their replacements going to come from? We don’t even have sketch comedy in this country any more, so if you’re an actor who wants to be funny you can either focus on doing stand-up – which tends to encourage a brash, unsubtle style of performing that, let’s be honest, makes you look like a self-serving prick anywhere but on a stage – or focus on straight acting, which in Australia means rolling up your sleeves… and then shoving a needle in your arm to play yet another junkie in love. Yeah, that’ll get big laughs… at the box office.
So thanks, Comedy School. Not only are you training a bunch of likable low-talents in a career path that’s already over-populated, you’re holding up as an example someone who doesn’t even do what you’re teaching. And just in case you think we’re being a bit harsh on what is basically your typical “group of likable types go on a journey” doco series, there’s this line from McHugh early in the process: “To be a successful comedian, you’ve got to be funny”. Really? We’ll leave it up to you to point out the flaws in that argument…
And Never the Twain Shall Meet
Australian comedians doing ads: there must be a good example out there, but none currently leap to mind. Oh wait, Hoges advertising Winfield Cigarettes. And Norman Gunston doing those toilet paper ads (unless I just dreamed that one, in which case my subconscious deserves a job at McMahon & Tate). Anyway, they’re all thrust into the shade by the white-hot glare coming off this story helpfully titled “Chaser team moves into adland with Will O’Rourke”
It’s hard not to feel a little like a grumpy old fart as I wheel out the bog-standard Bill Hicks line about losing all your cred once you harness your talent to selling people crap they don’t need. But that doesn’t make it any less true. Sure, we’re all out to make as much cash as we can these days, and we expect everyone else to act likewise (there’s no weirder cinematic experience going at the moment than Made in Dagenham, a movie set in the late 1960s about workers who actually GO ON STRIKE despite their bosses loud protests that paying them one extra cent will result in their jobs going overseas. What, you mean there was a time when that line didn’t work?).
So no doubt as far as the cool kids are concerned, making a bit of spare change coming up with fun ads can’t really be a bad thing. As Julian Morrow said: “I’m looking forward to being a part of the creative collaborations that Will O’Rourke makes possible, and to taking the piss out of them at The Chaser.” Only that’s not really what’s going to happen, is it? After all, how’s it going to look to the folks at Will O’Rourke – the folks cutting Morrow, Craig Reucassel and Dominic Knight a pay check – if the guys they’re paying start making fun of the work they’re doing? Because everyone’s boss just loves being made fun of out there in public, right?
Some may say that, in hiring The Chaser, they know what they’re getting. And they’d be right. But there’s a big difference in knowing “we’re hiring a bunch of wacky pranksters who might bite the hand that feeds them” in the abstract, and turning on the ABC and seeing them mocking work they were paid to do. If you’ve ever had a boss, you know their sense of humour only ever stretches so far, and that’s usually just short of anyone making fun of anything they take seriously. Like, oh, their job making advertising. And the clients who pay them to do so.
[Here’s a tip for politicians worried about The Chaser (*pause for laughter*) – simply hire them to make an ad for you! That way, even if they do go the hack on you elsewhere, you can always make them look like ungrateful bastards by saying “they were happy to take my money earlier”. And if The Chaser really were the knife-edged satirists some would have us believe, this might actually happen)
But let’s be serious. No-one really expects The Chaser to ever make fun of a company that’s hired them. The Chaser might make fun of sick kids and ill-informed people wandering around shopping strips and politicians they then let on their show to demonstrate that it’s all been in good fun, but as “satirists” go they’ve never gone after anything too close to home. For example, the utter gutlessness of ABC management in failing to back them up in any way over the tabloid frenzy regarding their “Make a Realistic Wish” sketch might not be a topic worthy of extended comment, but a couple of pointed digs wouldn’t have gone astray.
So in the end – or in Australia in 2010, which is the same thing – this is really a non-story. Everyone already expects our comedians to be off making a buck with their talents any way they can, and if it destroys their artistic credibility… well, as long as they’re smart enough to get paid they’ll always get respect for that. And hey, maybe the ads’ll be funny! You know, like the ones on The Gruen Transfer…
Come join us in the ideas shower
The end of the year is fast approaching and it’s time to start thinking about the Australian Tumbleweeds, the accolade no one in comedy wants to win. As usual, we’d like your thoughts about categories.
Of course, we could just present awards in the same categories as last year – Australian comedy 2010 has contained pretty much the same mix of insultingly poor dross, gut-wrenching disappointments, comedic landfill and the odd success as Australian comedy 2009. But then, in a year when sketch shows were virtually non-existent, when more and more comedians were making comedy exclusively for the web, and when networks were dishing up a plethora of “event comedies” themed around the Federal Election or major sporting events, it’s probably worth refreshing our list of categories.
So for the next two weeks we’re asking for your thoughts on this year’s categories (see below for last year’s list). What stays? What goes? And what gets a slight name change and a hastily-applied lick of paint? You decide. Post your comments or e-mail us. The categories will be announced on 15th November, and then award nominations will begin.
Australian Tumbleweeds awards categories 2009
WORST NEWCOMER
WORST NEW COMEDY
WORST ACTOR
WORST ACTRESS
WORST ENTERTAINMENT PERSONALITY
WORST ENTERTAINMENT PROGRAMME
WORST SITCOM
WORST STAND-UP
WORST GAME OR PANEL SHOW
WORST FILM
WORST SKETCH SHOW
WORST OVERALL COMEDY
WORST OVERALL CHANNEL/NETWORK FOR COMEDY
WORST RADIO COMEDY
WORST RADIO PERSONALITY
WORST PODCAST OR CD
WORST BOOK OR ITEM OF SPIN-OFF MERCHANDISE
WORST DVD
WORST EXPORT
MOST USELESS PANEL / TALKSHOW GUEST
THE ROBERT FIDGEON MEMORIAL AWARD FOR WORST CRITIC
MOST OVER-RATED COMEDY
MOST UNNECESSARILY OVER-EXPOSED COMEDIAN(S)
LEAST HOPED-FOR RETURN
MOST DISAPPOINTING COMEDY
MOST DISAPPOINTING COMEDIAN
THE ‘PISSING ON THEIR LEGACY’ AWARD
MOST IRRITATING OR POINTLESS CAMEO
MOST BLATANT PLAGIARISM
THE ‘MORE EFFORT INTO THEIR HAIRSTYLES THAN THEIR COMEDY’ AWARD
THE LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD FOR CRAP COMEDY
BEST NEW COMEDY
BEST COMEDY
People Try to Put Us Down
As Talkin’ ‘bout Your Generation edges ever closer to an indoors 2010 version of It’s A Knockout, it’s hard not to sympathize a little with those who’re asking “what happened to Shaun Micallef?” He used to be a low-key master of the subtle and surreal; now he’s hosting a show where Leo Sayer puts on a suit made of gravy and gets attacked by starving dogs*
But while it’s perfectly natural to wish Micallef was still doing sketch comedy a la The P(r )ogram(me) – AKA the best darn sketch show made in this country ever – let’s go against our usual wild idealism and face facts: sketch shows are a tough sell in this country at the moment. Commercial networks aren’t interested (especially after Double Take shat in the pool) and rumour has it that the ABC funds them under the “light entertainment” scale – that is, at the same level as something like Spicks & Specks. Which doesn’t have a (proper, structured) script, more than one set, costume changes, an actual cast…
So that’s out. What else is there? A talk show? Maybe. Except that Ten didn’t seem to be keen to turn Micallef’s excellent New Year’s Rave into a regular event, so that door seems slightly less ajar than it might otherwise be. How about bringing Newstopia back? Ahh, now things get interesting: Micallef’s often said he’d like to a): have kept doing Newstopia when he started on TAYG but scheduling got in the way, b): return to it at some stage in the future, most recently raising the possibility of doing it as a nightly (four nights a week) show.
Unfortunately for Newstopia fans – and while we had problems with the show, we’re firmly in the fan camp – these comments often sound more like keeping a door ajar than concrete plans for a revival. Newstopia certainly felt like a show running out of puff towards the end (the Inspektor Herring episode, while very funny, was hardly the thing a news satire show would do in its’ prime), and SBS seem to have given up on the local comedy side of things (that second series of Swift & Shift must’ve been a stinker) unless there’s a sports angle.
So we’re stuck with TAYG. On the plus side, its way, way better than any other similar show, thanks almost entirely to Shaun’s work. And much as it may depress some of us, “this kind of show” is what a majority of Australians want to watch when they put their feet up after a long day. Why should they be denied some Shaun goodness – or the chance to realise he’s a funny guy and worth following to whatever he does next?
It’s not like Micallef’s changed his act to make TAYG work either. He’s still clearly doing the same kind of thing he’s always done, and while doing it surrounded by people who, to be charitable, are nowhere near as funny and are often downright painful isn’t the best of all possible worlds, it does hold out some hope that when Micallef does move on, comedywise he’ll still be the same Shaun Micallef he was going into this lightweight game show.
It’s also hard to deny that TAYG’s success has helped Micallef realise some worthwhile side projects. The New Year’s Rave obviously wouldn’t have happened without TAYG’s ratings success. Same with that character-based comedy CD he put out last year, or his new book Preincarnate that’s out in a week or two. So he’s hardly asleep at the wheel when it comes to doing his own thing outside of the game show format.
More importantly, Micallef’s always seemed to be a guy who wants to try as many things as he can get away with. Sure, if he’s still hosting TAYG five years from now, that’ll suck – well, it’ll suck if they’re doing 30 episodes a year, if he’s doing 13 (and word is they’ll be scaling back production next year) and has time to do other stuff around it… well, most of us should be able to live with that.
And if he goes on to do something else different in 2011 – rumour has it he might be part of a new “variety” show Ten is planning, though his exact role is unclear – well, he’ll just have shown that he can be an awesome game show host as well as talk show host, comedian, writer, character performer, face-puller, etc…
*actually cute little puppies! awww
Third Tuesday Book Club
In a new, and no doubt soon to be highly irregular, feature of this blog, Bean Is A Carrot trawls through her collection of books about Australian comedy.
What makes a good book about comedy? As someone who’s read many I used to think the key was thorough research and good writing, but then I got my hands on a book about comedy which blew that theory apart.
Wanted for Questioning: Interviews with Australian comic artists by Murray Bramwell and David Matthews, published by Allen & Unwin in 1992, is both thoroughly researched and well written, yet thoroughly researched prose isn’t the book’s main feature – it’s interviews, conducted by either Bramwell or Matthews, with around 30 comedians. Each interview transcript is preceded by a short biography of the interviewee, and details of where and when the interview took place – and apart from a three-page introduction to the book, that’s it. It may sound potentially boring (or even that the authors were too lazy to write a proper book) but that’s not the case. This is the best book about Australian comedy I’ve ever read, and that the book consists almost entirely of transcripts (albeit slightly edited ones) is its strength. It’s 30 or so comedians responding to a series of questions in their own words, with no misinterpretation of those words by the authors, and no surrounding paragraphs of waffle.
Another reason for this book’s greatness is that Bramwell and Matthews timed it right. They conducted their interviews in 1990 and 1991 – the height of the so-called “comedy boom” – when Australian television was awash with that generation of comedians who’d started out in Melbourne’s cabaret and comedy club scene in the 70s and 80s. As such, many of those interviewed, although no one knew this at the time, were at the peak of their fame. Memories of The Big Gig are fresh in Jean Kittson’s mind because she’s in the middle of making it. Ditto Marg Downey and Fast Forward, or Andrew Denton and The Money or the Gun.
Those interviewed are also refreshingly candid and open about television and the comedy industry. Rod Quantock seemingly had no qualms about confirming those rumours about how the concept for Steve Vizard’s Tonight Live was developed:
…I was asked to do the preliminary work on Tonight Live. What Tonight Live did was to get lots of tapes of the David Letterman Show with no beg-your pardons. The whole concept is a foreign concept and used no local grey matter at all. They went through the motions I suppose but they ended up saying: ‘There’s an original idea that someone else had and it works, that’ll be fine for us too’.
Satirist and cartoonist Patrick Cook is equally critical, although this time of Channel 9’s approach to comedy:
I can’t believe that Channel 9’s had Clarkie [John Clarke] sitting on his bum in the backroom for five years and the most they’ve got out of him is doing the interviews – I can understand why that’s all he wanted to do. Channel 9’s been notorious for years for playing a spoiler role anyway. They kept The D-Generation in a backroom too, for a year and a half.
Can you imagine today’s equivalents of Quantock or Cook biting the hand that feeds them?
Then there’s the fascinating revelation from Marg Downey, that her place in the cast of The D-Generation wasn’t a given, despite having been in the university revue it grew out of.
…I had to audition. All the boys were automatically accepted. There were two girls in the show and the other one didn’t make it. And the producer didn’t want me. He said “That girl’s not funny; we won’t have her”. I had to audition and luckily, I got through somehow, by the skin of my teeth.
And that’s just scratching the surface. There are plenty more fascinating gems amongst the interviews with Barry Humphries, John Clarke, Michael Leunig, Paul McDermott, Max Gillies, Billy Birmingham, Greg Pickhaver and John Doyle, Mary Coustas and Nick Giannopoulos, Wendy Harmer, and many others. But should this article have inspired you to seek out a copy of Wanted for Questioning…, I should warn you that it won’t be easy. It took me about a year of searching on ABE Books for a copy to turn up. And while a quick Google reveals that Amazon.com currently have two available, the cheapest costs $61.38. So good luck finding a copy, or indeed one at a reasonable price. Maybe check your local library.
This Man Is Telling You What To Think
There’s nothing we like more than taking potshots at critics who (unlike us) are actually being paid to waffle on about topics they barely understand. But today’s target – Ben Pobjie, who recently took over The Age’s ‘Couch Life’ column in the Saturday A2 supplement – provides a slightly more difficult target than the usual Hey Hey defenders and Chris Lilley worshippers. That’s because his column “How to kill a mockumentary” (16/10/10) starts off with a semi-reasonable point: if you’re making fun of something, you want to make sure you do an accurate job of it.
Actually, he doesn’t start off with that – he starts off talking about The Office and bam! There’s a shit joke about how he’s required “by law” to say all American sitcom remakes aren’t a patch on the British originals, which might have been funny if most television critics who actually watch television on a regular basis seem to agree that the US Office is / has been at least as good as the UK version, albeit in a different (funnier) fashion.
Then he digs an even bigger hole for himself by saying “the great thing about the British Office was that it really committed to the comedy doco concept”. Really? That was the great thing about the show – that it focused all twelve episodes and two specials first and foremost on sticking firmly to the idea of the television documentary? That “it was like a real documentary, only funny”? Which, by the way, is the kind of thing someone who’s never actually watched a documentary might think – and even then they’d probably be smart enough not to say it out loud in case, you know, the director of Anvil: The Story of Anvil or Metallica: Some Kind of Monster happened to be walking by.
And then, just after basically burying himself alive with the “joke” that The Office was “so good, while it was on, other channels went off air out of shame”, he keeps on digging by suggesting that a show like Arrested Development set about “destroying the concept” of the mockumentary. What, by being piss-funny? But wait: here’s where his semi-reasonable point comes in. It seems his problem with Arrested Development isn’t that it wasn’t funny, but that it “never committed” to being a comedy mockumentary. It didn’t look like a real documentary, therefore it’s not as good as The Office. Ooooookay.
But still, if you squint your eyes and hit yourself in the face with a hammer you can almost understand what he’s trying to say. If you’re going to parody something, you have to copy that thing as closely as possible for the joke to work. Shitty, half-arsed swipes at something simply aren’t as funny as the tightly-targeted stab that gets right to the core of the matter. That’s not really a matter up for debate. Unfortunately, Pobjie then goes on to reveal that this isn’t what he was trying to say at all.
“Latter-day mockumentarians don’t have the courage to sacrifice the bedroom scene for the one-camera tableau.” There’s more, but you get the idea: he’d rather have a spot-on replication of documentary style than jokes that might bend the rules to get laughs. Yes, we’re talking about comedy: while sitcom writers the world over have absorbed the lessons of the mockumentary style and adapted them to demands of an audience that wants to laugh-
or as Anil Gupta, executive producer of The Office and the director of the pilot, put it in the BFI’s book on The Office “There was lots of angsty hand-wringing about how authentic or not it was. You want to get it right but with hindsight, what a fucking waste of time a lot of it was. Who cares in the end?”
– the A2’s TV columnist would rather his mockumentaries focused their attention on getting the camerawork right.
It’s the kind of argument you sometimes get from people who don’t actually seem to have a sense of humour. They can’t rely on their own gut reaction to a show to tell them whether a show is funny or not, so they have to latch onto technical aspects and base their judgments on them. The Office is better than Arrested Development or Modern Family (the target of much of his complaining here) not because it’s funnier, but because it looks more like a “real” documentary. Dear God.
And then he says the problem is that people don’t want too much “realism” in their comedies. “Though we fall in love with The Office, we’ll always feel safer with Modern Family”. Huh? The Office was too “real” for audiences? David Brent singing about the “Free Love Freeway”, doing a crazy dance and getting sacked while wearing an ostrich costume was “real”? Jesus fucking wept.
The really painful thing is, even this kak-handed discussion of comedy is head-and-shoulders above the usual standard of TV writing about comedy in Australia. Yes, he seems to even have the basics wrong and he’ll most likely be calling Chris Lilley a “genius” the first chance he gets, but at least he’s trying – failing, but trying – to make a point beyond “it’s holding up a mirror to multicultural society”. So who knows? If he ever manages to write a column talking about how comedy should try to be funny, he might actually be onto something.
A Nitro-Burning Unfunny Car
How can you seriously hate Daryl Somers – yes, strap yourselves in, we’re off to Daryl-land again – when he says things like this: “I’d be happy playing drums in a jazz trio and doing a bit of singing. That would be terrific fun, but you can’t do that and a show like this, which is a 100 per cent commitment” (Switched On, The Herald Sun, 13/10/10). On the surface, fair enough: no doubt making Hey Hey is a full time job. But, uh… hang on, if Daryl would be happy drumming in a small-time band and the only thing stopping him from taking up the quiet life is his commitment to his show, what the hell was he doing with himself for the ten years Hey Hey wasn’t “a 100 per cent commitment”?
I don’t see “drummer in jazz trio” anywhere on his resume for the years 1999-2009 – you know, when he was actually free of the shackles of Hey Hey. What I do see is a man who took every chance he could get to spriuk for the return of his TV series, even going so far as to beg for its return on stage during the Logies one year and quitting a high-profile gig as Dancing With the Stars host because reportedly his then-employer Seven weren’t interested in bringing back Hey Hey.
[If I seriously thought that steady work in a jazz trio would keep Daryl off our screens I’d sell my house and yours to finance an indefinite tour of mining pits in Western Australia, but I have a sneaky suspicion that if Hey Hey doesn’t come back in 2011 Daryl’s spare time is mostly going to be spent complaining that Nine didn’t give the show a fair chance to develop an audience while trying to get another network to give him yet another chance to do the same old sh*t all over again.]
But that’s only the tip of the comedy iceberg in this must-read article on the return of Hey Hey, AKA yet another of Daryl’s trademark shotgun sprays at all those who oppose his vision of a unified comedy state under his benevolent Kim Jung-Ill style leadership. Seriously, even if you spent years hating on Somers you couldn’t make up a better quote than this: “You know there are some shows where the cast is trying to make out that it gets on. What is great about our show is that we have this wonderful chemistry.” So… Daryl runs a show where the cast isn’t trying to make out that they all get along? Sure, often this “great chemistry” he’s talking about seems to consist of everyone else looking scared as Daryl glares at someone who stepped on his punchline, or of everyone trying desperately to get a laugh out of Daryl so the show can lurch forward to the next segment, but… well, I guess you need great chemistry to create nitroglycerine.
If I was a bit more conscientious in my research I’m sure I’d be able to dig out an old comment from Daryl in the wake of the 2009 Hey Hey comeback specials where he talked about how those shows’ smash ratings were a great sign for the show’s future success – after all, why wouldn’t he say that? The show being a hit was the main reason why it got a full run this year. But as I don’t want to embarrass article author Darren Devlyn – who writes “Only those with waste product for brains would have expected Hey Hey to reach the same heights over an extended season in 2010” – let’s move on to the best part of any Daryl Somers interview: the bit where he takes a swing at his critics.
[yes, I do realise that by this stage every journo who interviews him must know that you’ll always get a good quote from Daryl about “his critics”, but that doesn’t mean those quotes aren’t worth having a chuckle over. ]
And this one’s a doozy: “There’s still an element who want to put the show in the ancient box,” he says. “Some critics said ‘it’s the same old bloody segments’ and I say that if you get rid of Red Faces, Plucka Duck, Celebrity Head, there will be an outcry and we are destroying the show. Stuff the critics. We’ll do the show we believe is right for the audience.”
Oh, where to begin? For starters, could there be a more disdainful way to refer to your critics than “an element”? I’m honestly surprise he didn’t stick “criminal” in front of “element” and front his own “the hoons who hate Hey Hey – tonight on A Current Affair” special. As for “the ancient box” – uh, Daryl? Hey Hey started in the late 1970s – as far as television goes, it’s not so much ancient as The Thing That Wouldn’t Die. It is kind of touching that Daryl believes there’ll be an outcry if he axed Celebrity Head though – after all, when Nine axed the entire f**king show back in 1999 there wasn’t so much an outcry as a barely perceptible shrug.
But the real gold is, as always, “Stuff the critics. We’ll do the show we believe is right for the audience”. It’s a familiar line from Daryl, but it does overlook one vital point: aren’t the critics part of the audience? If a regular viewer says “hey, maybe ditching some of the old segments might not be a bad idea to freshen things up – after all, for the first 20 years Hey Hey was constantly doing new things, and Plucka Duck and Celebrity Head only came in during the last decade or so of the show”, do they stop being “the audience” and become “the critics” in Daryl’s eyes? Is it as simple as a case of “you’re with us or against us”?
More importantly, is it actually possible to provide feedback to Daryl, or is he so committed to doing “the show we believe is right for the audience” – even when over half that audience stopped watching during its 2010 run to date, shedding a hundred thousand viewers a week for weeks at a time – that any suggested changes automatically get the thumbs down? I mean, it’s not like Daryl’s showing a firm grip of the state of television with comments like these: “We went out for 10 years and nothing replaced us. There have been ample opportunities for something to replace us and it never happened.”
Really? What the f**k was Rove hosting for the ten years Hey Hey was gone then? Live show, had celebrity guests, comedians, live music, pointless segments… oh wait, it didn’t have a guy in a duck suit running around dry-humping people. Totally different thing altogether then. Maybe Daryl is right then when he says without the slightest trace of irony or self-awareness “Hey Hey is still viable. I always thought it was viable and hence why we came back”. Sure, no-one else thought it was viable, but Daryl got it back on the air through sheer force of will. And if he can do that, who’s to say he can’t erase a nation’s memory of Rove’s entire career? No-one – not to Daryl’s face anyway.