Australian Tumbleweeds
Not Quite Comedy
It’s a sad fact, but in the current climate pretty much the last thing any of our television networks want their comedians to be doing is comedy. Hey, we don’t understand it either – presumably it comes down to producers finding themselves out of a job if they let the comedians put together their own shows, because it sure isn’t that audiences don’t like (good) comedy. The fact remains: in 2010 you’re going to see more of The Chaser’s Andrew Hansen on the astonishingly pointless Strictly Speaking than you will on The Chaser’s own TV series.
Just to add insult to grievous bodily harm, Strictly Speaking, while supposedly a kind of competition for up-and-coming public speakers – yeah, like that’s an employment niche crying out for new talent… guess they must be running out of people to ask those long-winded questions on Q&A – quickly proves itself to be little more than a training ground for crap stand-up comedians. Each week a bunch of stilted, relatively charisma-free types gather to judge a group of slightly more charming would-be public speakers. As always in Australian television, let the Aliens vs Predator catchphrase be your guide: whoever wins, we lose.
This is the kind of shoestring effort that should under no circumstances be shown outside of a Sunday afternoon timeslot, so I’m guessing the ABC programming department somehow thought Chris Lilley’s Angry Boys would require less than an entire calendar year in editing and slotted it in for early October – only to realise at the last minute that Lilley likes to take his time making sure he gets every single speaking role in his shows, so they had to throw on this below-broadcast quality effort to bridge the gap.
Seriously: it’s a televised public speaking competition that features (in the episode I watched) someone doing a fake sports call, someone cracking jokes about how “you can’t open the windows at the underwater observatory” and someone being forced to talk for two minutes about the game of rock paper scissors (though to be fair, judge Father Bob did get in a good joke about growing up too poor to be able to play rock paper scissors). It’s bad stand-up, filmed in a high school’s B drama center and judged by a panel whose advice seems roughly as useful as an inflatable safe.
And then there’s Andrew Hansen out the front hosting, trying his hardest to… well, that’s not really true, is it? He’s doing his usual semi-smarmy act, throwing the occasional limp joke out there to remind us that he used to be on a show classified as “comedy”, but otherwise this show could be hosted by a chair that was leaking stuffing and it wouldn’t really lose anything. Not that you can blame him – given the chance to be funny he usually takes a pretty decent swing at it (unlike, say, Chris Taylor, who’s hosting work has been both much slicker and much more successful at erasing any memory you might have of him being a comedian), so clearly the brief here was to turn the funny down. Because like it says at the top of this post, who wants to see comedians being funny these days?
The same question is dialed down to a niggling doubt watching the first episode of Tony Martin’s recent interview show A Quiet Word With… largely because Martin is a skilled interviewer talking to someone (Bill Bailey) whose career he’s clearly interested in. Honestly, simply seeing a lengthy interview conducted by someone who knows what they’re doing that doesn’t dissolve into shameless tear-jerking or blatant emotional manipulation is such a f**king relief that if this doesn’t win every single Logie available then the TV Week awards can no longer pretend to even the slightest vestige of credibility. Hang on a second…
That said, the harsh fact remains: it’s a show containing Tony Martin where Tony Martin isn’t constantly being funny. By definition, this is a little bit of a bad thing. It’s great that he’s getting to be on television, and it’s awesome that he’s doing smart and humorous interviews with interesting people. But there are other people in this country who could be doing that: to the best of our knowledge, there’s no-one else in the world who could have come up with, for example, Grant Spatchcock’s Gourmet Pizza.
No doubt the remaining five episodes of A Quiet Word With… (shown at irregular intervals over the next few months, so keep an eye on the TV listings) will be must-see television. After just one episode it’s already taken a somewhat large dump over roughly 90% of Enough Rope. Still, when next it returns to the screen it’ll be hard not to occasionally wish Tony Martin had a gig on television doing flat-out comedy, not simply dropping in the occasional pre-heated Andre Rieu gag during a pleasant chat. Because while television might not want to feature comedians doing comedy, there are still a few of us who feel otherwise.
WTF! off
Back in July we noted the announcement of WTF!, a send-up of fast-paced entertainment news shows created by ex-Chaser member Charles Firth. We were fairly sceptical about whether this show would be any good or not, and after two weeks of episodes on GO! (and the thecompleteandutter channel on YouTube) it seems were right to be so.
WTF! isn’t a “unlike anything seen on Australian television”, as TV website The Tube claimed it would be, more an attempt at parodying entertainment news shows which is so cack-handed and unfunny that you’re left wondering if it’s entertainment news fan fiction. Sure, the sketches get the look and feel of the kind of bullshit celebrity news stories they’re trying to send-up right, but when people like Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton are out there in the real world doing far sillier stuff than WTF! seems able to dream up, then the question is why bother?
There’s also pretty much no attempt to satirise the facile dreadfulness and all pervading influence of celebrity news culture, but given that any attempt to go down that path would probably be as painful as the rest of the show, that’s probably a good thing.
Occasionally there’ll be some bit of background business from one of the performers that raises a smile, but overall WTF! looks like the sketches from Hungry Beast without the earnest reports about military robotics technology surrounding them. And that isn’t a sign of quality – that’s a waste of time.
Some that glitters is gold
Eighteen or so months ago the news came through that a DVD of The Money or The Gun was in the works. It would feature compilations of six episodes and a commentary from host Andrew Denton, director Martin Coombes and producer Mark Fitzgerald. The DVD was supposed to be out in November 2009, was then delayed twice, and has still not appeared; EzyDVD currently list the release date as “unknown”. But when DVD companies don’t come through with the goods the internet eventually does, and recently a number of full episodes have been made available online – they’re a fascinating watch.
The Money or The Gun, which began in 1989 and ran for two series (plus occasional specials thereafter), was Andrew Denton’s first major TV success. It followed on from Denton’s first series, Blah Blah Blah, which according to Wikipedia was a late night comedy show featuring “adult humour” and “controversial” live performances. In a slightly earlier timeslot and with (presumably) a larger budget, The Money or The Gun also proved controversial, but seems to have been a more experimental and issues-based show.
Described by Denton at the time as “the highest mutation of a chat show, or the lowest mutation of a documentary”, each episode of The Money or the Gun explored a theme or issue through a mixture of sketches, expert interviews and vox pops. There was also a version of ‘Stairway to Heaven’, performed by a different act in a style relevant to the topic of the episode, in every show. Amongst the roll-call of well known acts who performed the song in the series was Rolf Harris, whose version later became a worldwide hit.
Well known episodes of the series include ‘Prostitution’ (famously, the vision from a sequence in which a prostitute demonstrated how to put a condom on with your mouth, by felating a microphone, was censored, although the sound was not); ‘The Year of the Patronising Bastard’, a look at disability which was inspired by an incident which occurred during the filming of series 1 when Denton mocked a member of the studio audience who he thought had fallen asleep – the woman turned out to be blind (this episode later won the United Nations Media Peace Prize); and ‘The Topic of Cancer’, in which Denton interviews young cancer sufferers at a camp run by the charity CanTeen. Amongst the episodes available online are shows covering topics such as anxiety, banking, depression, the police force, boxing, insects and the 80s/90s comedy boom, as well as the aforementioned ‘Prostitution’.
The early inklings of Denton’s self-titled Channel 7 tonight show, as well as more recent series like Enough Rope and Hungry Beast, can all be seen in The Money or The Gun – the mixing of serious topics with comedy, the trademark interview technique of asking unusual or confronting questions – but it quickly becomes clear why the planned DVD was to be a compilation, because the results are patchy.
An oft-repeated mistake in the series is that an entire sketch is built around a not particularly funny, one-joke premise. In the ‘Comedy Boom’ episode, a pun on the word “company” in The Comedy Company, and the plethora of Four Corners-type investigations into the dodgy dealings of bankrupt businessmen being broadcast at that time, inspire a sketch about the supposed financial backers of The Comedy Company, who operate through a series of shelf companies (with names like Uncle Arthur Holdings, Confruit and The Mole Trust) registered in tax havens. You can see what they’re trying to do, or what they think they’re trying to do – or what they hope they’re doing – but you wish they hadn’t. Straight-up interviews with Ian McFadyen or Mark Mitchell would have been better and said more than their cameos in this sketch.
Another major problem for the series is the length of each episode. In series one the shows last a whopping 57 minutes; in series two the episodes are shortened to around 43 minutes – and are much better for it. By series 2 it also becomes clear that the format, and Denton’s skillset, are better placed to cover issues effecting people rather than broader topics. The episode on depression is far better than the episode on insects – in the former Denton can draw on his own personal experiences or those of others; in the latter the episode barely moves beyond the idea that insects frighten some people.
Amongst the well known faces to appear in The Money or The Gun (who have not already been mentioned) are The Doug Anthony Allstars and Wendy Harmer in the ‘Comedy Boom’ episode (both are also parodied in a send-up of The Big Gig in the ‘Police’ episode, with Denton playing Harmer), and Julia Zemiro and Robyn Butler in ‘Anxiety’.
‘Anxiety’ looks at a day in the life of Julia (Zemiro), a typical young woman who lives in the city, works for an insurance company and is looking for Mr Right. Robyn Butler plays a guest at a party Julia attends. In one of a number of jokes throughout the series which reference the censorship of the “putting a condom on with your mouth” sequence in ‘Prostitution’, Zemiro can be seen felating a banana her character eats during a lunch break. This appears to be the earliest known television appearance by Zemiro – what a way to start her career.
Having watched around 10 episodes of The Money or The Gun, I would say that while there are parts in most episodes which don’t work, it deserves a proper DVD release. And by “proper” I mean “episodes in full”. We are not talking about a sketch show, where the previous scene has no relation to the current one, but a hybrid of comedy, drama, documentary and chat shows, where each section of the show is designed to build on the other. Remove a sketch that doesn’t quite work and you ruin the entire show. Perhaps this is why the promised DVD has not yet appeared. Either way, I’m grateful to the anonymous person who’s made episodes of The Money or The Gun available – in full.
Status Symbols
A preview disc of the first two episodes of the upcoming third season of The Librarians has fallen into our possession, and while a full-length review isn’t yet good to go – short version: it’s funny, you should watch it – we can talk about the first three scenes and what, taken together, they do extremely well: establish Fran’s status.
Status isn’t the kind of thing you usually notice in a comedy, but it’s vitally important. What’s funnier: seeing a rich snob make fun of homeless people, or seeing battlers take the upper class down a peg or two. The first gave us Bumfights, the second gave us Caddyshack and if you still prefer the former, well, get fucked.
[Or to put it a nicer way, Shaun Micallef says on one of the commentary tracks for the P(r)ogram(me) that he made sure he was given all the low status roles in the sketches to balance out him playing the high-status host in the interview segments. And if he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, no-one does.]
Meanwhile, back at the point: one of the reasons why the first series of The Librarians didn’t sit well with everyone was that head librarian Fran (Robyn Butler) was an annoying bossy prig. This isn’t usually a problem in sitcoms – think Basil Fawlty – but Basil gets laughs because for (roughly) every couple of scenes where he’s being an utter shit there’s a scene where he’s groveling to someone. It’s mixing the two (and a lot of excellent jokes, and great performances, and… well, you get the idea) that gives Basil depth, makes him relatable, and generally helps makes the whole thing work.
But in its early days The Librarians seemed to be labouring under the “advance” in comedy coughed up by The Office: you can get laughs just by having your lead be an annoying bossy prig. None of that weak toadying to superiors (though on the rare occasions when it did happen David Brent did suddenly seem a lot funnier), unearned self-confidence was where the laughs were at. Or not, depending on your taste.
So while in series one Fran did have her weaknesses (and a politician to suck up to as Book Week drew near), they were mostly internal, as symbolized by her breathing into a paper bag in the opening credits. Which is fine, but not really the easiest thing to get cheap laughs from – even her dealings with former BFF Christine (Roz Hammond) were as much about her own feelings and issues as anything external. Series two did bring in a wider range of external forces to play though, and by series three… well, there’s this:
The first episode (directed by Wayne Hope – the Tony Martin ones are still to come) opens with Francis and a group of other librarians in a politicians office. The two things to note are a): the politician soon turns out to be a nutter, and b): he’s played by Angus Sampson. So it’s a hilarious opening, but it also establishes Fran as someone who bows down before authority. She’s not a cool dude who gives the finger to the Man: she likes it when the powers that be pay attention to her… until they turn out to be germ-a-phobes who’re constantly smelling chicken.
The next scene has Fran back at the library, re-introduces most of the characters, sets up a few plotlines, and so on. Here Fran is “in charge” but no-one really respects her authority. Everyone is doing their own thing and only reluctantly paying attention to her. She’s the same character, making the same tasteless racist / sexist / un-PC comments she did in the first scene, but her status has shifted: she’s more confident in her position, and also more frustrated at their lack of respect for same.
Scene three has her at home discovering her husband (Wayne Hope) in her closet with no pants on making a phone call. Why? Watch and find out. The point to make here is that she’s clearly the boss, all confidence, contempt and action, while her husband is a pantsless sniveling tool. And in the first 10 minutes of the episode, Fran’s status – and how it affects her character – is established. She’s an annoying bossy prig who plays by (mostly) the rules, sucks up to authority, lords it over whoever she can, is stuck with a lot of co-workers who don’t think that much of her, and has a marriage that doesn’t seem to be working – yet clearly isn’t over either.
How this plays out across the series is yet to be seen. But from the series’ opening, it looks like they’ve staked out promising territory for Fran. And with Bob Franklin yet to be sighted outside of these promo clips… well, things can only get better from this already rock-solid start.
Dead Cat (The) Bounce
What’s that smell in the air? Why, it’s the AFL Finals – and yet, amazingly, when the public’s eyes drop disinterestedly to the TV listings, they find no trace of Peter Helliar and The Bounce. Which is really kind of strange, because when it got the chop back in April, Seven’s Head of Programming and Production Tim Worner said:
“We can’t defend the ratings – they are perfectly clear. But there are some great things happening in the show that we love.
“Anecdotally – from players, clubs and viewers alike – there is a great deal of warmth for the show.
“That’s why we’ve decided to take some time to rethink some aspects of the show and bring it back during the Finals Series.”
Clearly one of the aspects of the show that they rethought was the aspect that involved actually broadcasting it to the general public. Or maybe the “great things happening in the show that we love” were the commercial breaks. For whatever reason, we’re not even going to pretend to be in the tiniest bit surprised that The Bounce has fallen off the face of the earth. No-one was watching it: why would a network based almost entirely around the idea of broadcasting shows people want to watch bring a failure back?
And yet, over at Seven it seems that nothing ever gets officially axed any more. Take TV Burp: it rated poorly, it was stuck next to the rubbish Double Take, it shifted timeslot three times in a manner of weeks, and yet when it vanished from our screens we were expected to take seriously news reports like this one
Contrary to some rumours, the show has not been axed.
Sure it wasn’t. It just vanished from our screens after poor ratings and never came back. Just like The White Room did, and yet we still had stories like this.
The outcome for The White Room remains unclear, whether moved to a new timeslot or out of schedule entirely.
We’re not beating up on TVTonight (it’s a solid TV news site), but in future, when a show gets yanked after a handful of episodes due to rubbish ratings, can we take it as read that it won’t be back? Even this seems a little generous when it comes to Australia Versus:
Whether the show resurfaces in another timeslot or on 7TWO remains to be seen.
Really? Maybe if they had a warehouse full of already filmed episodes (which they may actually have) this would sound plausible. But in the real world, no-one cares that a show they never watched has a teeny-tiny chance of maybe returning in a timeslot where there’ll be even less of a chance that they’ll accidentally catch a glimpse of it. Worse, this kind of fence-sitting makes it sound like the real story here has to do with rescheduling and not the way that Seven has taken a massive dump in the comedy punchbowl so many times now that audiences aren’t even willing to give their new offerings even the slightest chance.
Of course the networks and the talent involved are – usually at least – not going to say a show’s been axed: it’s an admission of failure. “Rested” sounds so much better, and provides an automatic defense against accusations of screwing thing up (“It’s not dead – it’s just resting!”). But – and here’s the important bit – that doesn’t make it true.
If we’ve learnt anything from the various bullshit stories that circulated after the axed of Tony Martin’s radio show Get This, it’s that media companies will lie, lie, lie about basically everything when something goes wrong. There’s nothing wrong with quoting what they say on the subject: it just doesn’t hurt to also dig out the roughly seven billion examples where they’ve been proved to be lying through their bleached-white tombstone teeth to provide a bit of context for their “it’s on a break” crap.
And now that we’ve established all that… anyone want to take bets on whether Hey Hey it’s Saturday will really come back this year? Everyone involved says it will, but fingers crossed…
It Was Just Flat-Out The Worst Of Times
Ahh, Julia Morris – you might not crack a smile at anything she’s ever said or done, but you can’t deny that she keeps on saying and doing things. In fact, so good is she at saying and doing things – from purchasing a title so she can call herself “Lady Julia Morris” to pulling faces on any TV show that’ll have her on to trying to hijack our very own Tumbleweed Awards to promote her excretable book – that’d you’d be forgiven for thinking that that’s pretty much all she does. But you’d be wrong: she also does this:
COMEDIAN Julia Morris has joined the likes of Quentin Tarantino, Robert De Niro and Robert Redford in launching her own film festival.
But the Julia Morris Film Festival – or JMoFest for short – has a catch.
Every three-minute short film entered in the festival must feature a life size Julia Morris face mask.
So what, you might say: as far as entrants go, Australia isn’t exactly short of budding horror film makers. And we all know Morris has been the true face of Australian terror since her gurn-heavy days on the late 1990’s version of IMT. It’s the sheer pointlessness of this particular swipe at self-promotion that galls. This isn’t a publicity stunt to push a book, or a DVD, or a tour: the only thing being advertised here is Julia Morris’ face.
“I know it couldn’t be more bizarrely egocentric to ask people to make a film with my cut-out face in it but it’s not really about the mask it’s just about the laugh.
“There are so many insanely talented young people around, I thought this would be a wonderful way to showcase anyone who can be bothered to work,” she said.
Seriously? It’s a showcase? But does anyone think that when the “winner” of this exploitative nightmare is announced that it won’t be Morris’ name at the top of the article? Does anyone think it’s a big break for an actor to appear in a short film wearing a Julia Morris mask? Does anyone think that Morris is putting together a film festival based around her own face as a way to showcase anything else but her own face?
More importantly, can anyone else think of a way to show more contempt for your fans than by getting other people to make comedy films in which actors are forced to wear a mask of your face then show said films in a festival bearing your name while not actually having anything at all to do with the films yourself?
If, say, Tom Cruise said “I’m making a new Tom Cruise movie, only I won’t actually be in it, it’ll just be some guy wearing a mask of my face”, there’d be riots in the street: Morris is doing the same thing, only she’s expecting other people to spend their own time and money making “her” film. Based around, let’s not forget, her own face, so if the film – that she had nothing whatsoever to do with – turns out to be funny, she can soak up the laughs simply by association.
[And to take a leaf out of Morris’ book, any snide comments about how the results are bound to be funnier than anything the “real” Morris could come up with are entirely up to you.]
If you were an evil, soulless person concerned only with exploiting others, you couldn’t help but admire Morris’ latest scheme to get others to boost her career. Hell, you couldn’t stop yourself from admiring her entire career: while other, equally marginally talented people from the no-talent era of Full Frontal have no 21st century media careers to speak of, she’s still turning up all over the place, grabbing gossip column inches while rabbiting on about going to LA where she “has already captured the hearts and imaginations of many of LA’s top industry execs, appeared on NBC’s The Bonnie Hunt show and entered into discussions for television show development” (from her blog). Astute readers might spot that only the middle one of those “achievements” is a result that can be actually measured, but what the hey: it’s all part of the PR shitstorm.
The worst thing in this increasingly Human Centipede-esque long list of worst things is that it’s not even funny. Oh, the idea itself isn’t that bad; if we still had sketch comedy in this country it’d make a good four- or five- minute fake current affairs segment about some grotesquely self-obsessed monster. But to actually try to get wanna-be film-makers to make short films based around your face and then show them in self-financed film-festivals as a real-life celebration of yourself to the exclusion of all others because it can’t be said often enough that entry into this film festival involves obliterating your own identity by WEARING A JULIA MORRIS MASK – well, that stopped being funny right around the time everyone else realised you weren’t kidding and had actually made the masks available. Is it Halloween already?
Wherefore art thou, Full Frontal series 4?
It’s probably not the most anticipated comedy DVD of the year, but for those of us of a certain age – and a certain fondness for the work of Shaun Micallef – Shock’s announcement a few months back that they were finally going to be releasing series 4 of Full Frontal was very good news indeed.
Like all seasons of Full Frontal, “hit and miss” barely covers it, but series 4 was Micallef’s final one with the show before he went solo and became the comedy titan he is today when he’s not reading out questions on Talkin’ ’bout Your Generation. While much of his good work from that season is available on Shock’s earlier release The Incompleat Micallef, there’s still gold in them thar hills and a complete DVD collection would finally make it readily available.
So what happened? Well, the release of FF4 has been put back and put back throughout the announced release month of August until come September we’re in the odd situation where it’s supposedly been released but no-one’s actually seen it for sale anywhere. At least, no-one we know has.
So here’s the challenge: if you see a copy of Full Frontal series 4 for sale anywhere – as in, an actual physical copy in a bricks-and-mortar store – drop us a line. Conversely, if you know for sure that it’s not available, feel free to let us know that (and why it’s been given the run-around) too. At least with the recently delayed Kitty Flanagan DVD the distributor actually announced it was being delayed until 2011; the DVD of Full Frontal series 4 seems to have just fallen off the face of the earth.
Hangin’ Tough
So a hung parliament means there’s no clear nationwide winner, right? Usually yes, but in this case one group (no, not The Greens) is a clear winner: ABC comedy. Having a country where both major parties have an equal claim on the reigns of power is their dream situation, because for the last… oh, since at least whenever The Chaser became the only stand-alone political comedy on the ABC, the ABC’s approach to political comedy – it’s not even worth dignifying it with the term “satire” – has been dominated by one concept. Here’s a clue: it’s not “being funny”.
Balance is about as useless as cat-only monocles when it comes to comedy. For one thing, not everything is equally funny. More importantly, only one political party is in government: they’re the ones with the power, they’re ones actually doing things that affect our lives, and so they’re the ones that we should be making fun of. That’s not to say the opposition should be ignored, but they’re basically going to just be opposing a lot of stuff with the occasional inoffensive / stupid policy thrown in. They simply don’t have an equal impact on our daily lives.
And yet, for years now the ABC – across the board really, but let’s stick with comedy here – has been obsessed with one thing: balance. In all of The Chaser’s work there’s been a clear push to ensure that both sides of politics get a roughly equal serve. This idea is shithouse. Again, not everything is equally funny. Having a balanced comedy show means that hilarious topics either go begging or remain barely explored while dull or obvious jokes are shoe-horned in. You could possibly argue that all of Australian politics is equally hilarious and so a balanced view is both easy and natural. But the only way to sustain that view is to believe that every single policy expressed by every side of politics is equally good / bad / whatever. Perhaps if you’re independently wealthy and don’t think society exists or that you are in any way part of it this view is possible: out in the real world some ideas / policies / people are simply better than others.
Not to mention, who the hell wants to watch a comedy show where the makers don’t have – or aren’t allowed to express, as ‘balance’ seems to be an overall ABC policy – actual opinions? Without concrete views, good comedy is all but impossible; even slapstick says something about the human condition. For anyone committed solely to being funny and not pushing a party line, balance will come from the ebb and flow of politics anyway – just not in the course of one episode of one show on one night.
(Clarke & Dawe escape this trap by a): being filed away as part of “news”, and b): only doing one segment a week. If they had a whole show – or even a second segment in a week – it seems likely they’d feel the pressure for “balance” a lot more.)
But now, right now, right this second, the ABC’s policy has finally paid off. With both sides jockeying for power, “balanced” comedy has finally come into its own. So for one week only, Yes We Canberra! won’t feel like a wobbly grab-bang of decent jokes smooshed together with the results of a “Yeah, Gillard’s hilarious this week, but now we need 10 minutes on Abbott… fuck, we’ve got nothing” all-night writing session. Enjoy it while it lasts: once someone finally does get to sit in the big chair in Canberra, the ABC’ll be back to their balanced best. Even if that guarantees they’ll be giving equal time to unfunny comedy.