Australian Tumbleweeds
Old News is Bad News
Earlier this month I argued that it’s quantity, not quality that seems to be the watchword at the offices of GNW TV Productions, makers of Good News Week. Now TV Tonight has brought us the news that over-extending each episode by an hour isn’t the only way GNW saves on production costs – they film two episodes in one session, saving them money on studio hire and staff fees – at the expense of topicality.
Good News (last) Week
Good News Week‘s habit of filming episodes well in advance bit them in the bum last night after the change in Prime Ministers.
The show was valiant in recording a new introduction with host Paul McDermott in front of a green screen, delivering an introduction with gags on the Rudd-Gillard switcheroo.
The polished host was even spot on with his eye line looking to an audience that really wasn’t there…
They laughed all the way from the edit suite.
But the edits never quite matched up. And a flat green screen is never really a substitute for truly dimensional sets.
Good News Week often films double episodes and plays them across two weeks, including at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. NCIS guest Pauley Perrette recently shot an episode on June 5, but it didn’t air until June 14.
Because that’s the way to make a panel show about the news, isn’t it? Film it days in advance and panic-record a new intro in front of a shonky green screen if something major happens.
Perhaps this explains why every single notable topical show around the world, from The Daily Show, which is written on the day and taped hours before transmission, to BBC shows like Have I Got News For You and The News Quiz, which are recorded the night before transmission, to Clarke & Dawe, which again, is filmed hours before broadcast, are kicking comedic and satirical goals, while Good News Week fills in time each week with a song from one of the panellists.
Now that this is out in the open, it’s time for Good News Week to stop masquerading as a news-based panel show and reveal its true identity – as a crap variety show. And who knows, without the vaguely current affairs-based gags, it might be an entertaining one.
A Major Pain
From The Herald-Sun‘s Confidential section:
Rotund Aussie comedian Rebel Wilson is hard at work in LA filming a major role in crass comedy Bridesmaids, directed by comic mastermind Judd Apatow and starring Little Britain comedian Matt Lucas
What’s wrong with this statement? Firstly Apatow, while producing, isn’t directing – Paul Feig of Freaks & Geeks fame is. And secondly, there’s that little word “major” describing Wilson’s role in Bridesmaids. Not having read the script, I have no idea how much screen time she’ll get, but as it’s a safe bet Confidential hasn’t either let’s just take a look at the rest of the cast (as taken from The Playlist):
The cast is an eclectic bunch that includes Wiig as the lead, Maya Rudolph, Rose Byrne, “Mad Men” star Jon Hamm, Oscar winner Dianne Wiest (known recently for great work on HBO’s “In Treatment”) Matthew Lucas (U.K. hit comedy show “Little Britain,” Tweedledee and Tweedledum in Tim Burton’s “Alice In Wonderland”), Chris O’Dowd (“The I.T. Crowd,” the upcoming “Gulliver’s Travels”), Ellie Kemper (Erin on “The Office”), Melissa McCarthy (“Gilmore Girls”), and Wendy McLendon-Covey (“Reno:911”) all joining the film’s ensemble
[“Wiig” is lead Kristen Wiig, as seen in Knocked Up, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and Saturday Night Live, amongst others]
With that kind of name cast and no script to hand, why would anyone seriously think – let alone print – that Wilson would have a “major” role? Sure, she might impress everyone with her improv skills – which based on her TGYH work, means “look, she’s acting like a fat dumb slut!” – but again, out in the real world where you have a cast of proven talents and a supporting actor cast largely because she looks like Matt Lucas’s sister… well, the use of the word “major” to describe her role seems ill-advised at best.
We’re all used to Australian actors and comedians heading over the America to try their luck. And we’re all used to actors using social media to talk up their careers. But Wilson seems to have become something of an expert at combining the two if the amount of legitimate press she’s been getting in Australia for what certainly looks like a minor film role is anything to go by.
So here’s a bit of balance: a few months back I spoke to someone who worked at Madman, the company that released Wilson’s TV series Bogan Pride on DVD. We were talking about promotions, and I mentioned how impressed I was by the amount of effort that had gone into pushing Bogan Pride (seriously, there was a book, websites, competitions – they went all out). “Yeah,” they said, “We tried everything. People just weren’t interested.”
Keep that in mind next time you read a story about yet another tweet from Wilson: no matter what she says, no matter how hard she tries to get your attention… in the real world, people just aren’t interested.
A comedy fan in The Lodge?
Last week was a surprising but significant week in Australian politics and we now have our first female Prime Minister. There have been plenty of articles and stories in recent days telling us about everything from Gillard’s early life as a Ten Pound Pom from Wales, to the background of her partner Tim Mathieson. Yet, on the subject of what tickles our new Prime Minister’s funny bone, the media have been totally silent.
But, does it matter what makes Prime Minister Gillard laugh when she’s got global warming and the GFC to fix? On the surface probably not a lot, but then again wouldn’t you rather have someone who likes a laugh in the top job? If only because having a sense of humour makes them that bit more human than the average politician?
Take a look at the lady in the orange stripey top in this screen-grab. Doesn’t she look kinda familiar?
She’s sitting in the audience of The Gillies Report (1984-1985), and seems to be enjoying herself. You can see her several times in the background of a sketch about then Australian Democrats Leader Don Chipp, and towards the end she joins the audience in shouting out a few things, in what seems to be a reasonably enthusiastic, if slightly embarrassed, manner.
As the sketch in question appears on The Gillies Report video compilation released in the 1980’s, and it’s a pretty hard tape to get hold of, we’ve put it on our YouTube channel. Why not watch it now.
Sure, this isn’t the greatest piece of comedy ever – and the style’s a little dated – but given the reaction of the audience it clearly had a fair bit of resonance at the time. It’s also the kind of detailed satire we rarely see outside of Clarke & Dawe, and given the popularity of shows like The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and (I suppose) The Chaser’s War on Everything, it’s one we clearly like.
We’ve argued before on this blog that The Gillies Report deserves a DVD release. It was enormously popular at the time, it won a Logie in 1986 for Best Light Entertainment Series, it’s fondly remembered by those who saw it, many of the sketches still stand up (there are plenty on YouTube), it’s a significant series in the history of Australian comedy, and now it seems a future Prime Minister once sat in its audience. What more could you want?
Holding Up a Mirror to Multicultural Society
Despite generally avoiding Australian literature like it was a pub trivia night hosted by Peter Costello, recently I started reading Christos Tsiolkas’s novel The Slap. It’s one of the most highly praised Australian novels of recent times, it’s crossed over to have (relatively) wide mainstream success – and it’s total crap. It’s not crap because it’s badly written or because its characters fail to convince; it’s crap because the whole time I was reading it all I could think of was “this is what a book written by Chris Lilley would be like”.
If you’re reading this blog you have at least a passing interest in Australian comedy, and – avoiding the various “comedy?” jokes that leap to mind – you know the work of Chris Lilley. He’s one of the most highly praised Australian comedians of recent times, he’s crossed over to have wide mainstream success – and his shows are total crap. They’re not crap because they’re badly written or the characters fail to convince: they’re crap because the only thing Lilley wants his audience to do is think “that’s so true!”
For example: when you hear people talking about how “hilarious” We Can Be Heroes or Summer Heights High is, do they repeat actual jokes or funny lines, or do they say “I know someone just like [insert character name here]”? Chances are it’s the latter, because that’s pretty much the whole point of the show: to impress you with what a great and insightful actor Chris Lilley is. Otherwise he wouldn’t be playing every major character and saying every single supposedly funny line.
[There’s a whole ‘nother post in how Lilley’s supposedly sharply observed characters are just the same old clichéd comedy characters, only treated slightly more realistically – Ja’ime is Kyle Mole, the policeman in WCBH is David Brent, the rolling Mum is Kath and / or Kim, and so on. Suffice to say, we’re all waiting for his take on Col’n Carpenter.]
Unfortunately for those of us who like comedy to be funny, Lilley has been a massive success here and a moderate success worldwide. Feel free to cut some cheese to go with this whine: WHHYYYY? After all, he does the same jokes again and again (“offensive” musical numbers, anyone?) and seems to specialise in stale stereotypes such as the brainy Asian (Ricky Wong) and the camp drama teacher (Mr G). But while reading The Slap (remember? I mentioned it a billion years ago?) I realised something: if Lilley’s shows were funnier, they wouldn’t be anywhere near as successful.
The Slap, for those not in the know, is about a bunch of middle-class inner city Melbournites from varying ethnic backgrounds whose circle of friends falls apart when one of them slaps someone else’s bratty child at a barbeque. It’s not exactly narrative driven: each chapter is basically a character study, with the slap and its repercussions ticking over in the background. So the appeal seems to be that Tsiolkas is painting a picture of various character types that the reader will recognise. In short: “that’s so true!”
Whether Tsiolkas is successful or not is up to others: personally, I found his plotting (one of the things I value most in a novel) to be so arse I just couldn’t get past it. For example, an early chapter has a single woman a): throwing up in the morning, b): having unprotected sex with her much younger boyfriend, then c): we got the shock revelation that SHE’S PREGNANT. Even a trashy Hollywood blockbuster would get laughed out of the cinema for trying that – not win the 2009 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Book of the Year.
Then in the same chapter the woman calls up her (sensible) friend to have lunch, knowing that said (sensible) friend will invite their mutual (but sentimental) friend along. As the woman wants to discuss having an abortion, she knows the sentimental friend will block any rational discussion, yet when the sensible friend – not knowing it’s an abortion talk – says “I’ll invite sentiment-girl” the woman’s reaction is “she didn’t know why she didn’t say no”. I know why she didn’t say no: because Tsiolkas couldn’t be arsed going back and coming up with a reason, despite it being totally out of character.
But you see, none of that matters so long as people can go “that’s so true!”. As a novel The Slap has massive flaws that in other genres would be greeted with cries of FAIL, but as a serious character study… well, in real life people do things all the time without knowing exactly why, right? If it was slickly plotted and packed with hilarious one-liners and surprising developments it wouldn’t seem as true-to-life, would it?
And so we return to Lilley. His shows work for a lot of people because those people seem to think every time he puts on a dress and says something bitchy that “that’s so true”. Lilley’s shows “work” because – just like The Slap – they’re supposedly holding up a mirror to the reality of Australia’s multicultural society. If they were more polished, if they were funnier or better plotted or more satisfying, they’d be less like real life. Real life is full of crap not-quite-jokes and embarrassing pauses and unconvincing dialogue and so on. Just like Summer Heights High.
Call me old-fashioned: I like my comedy to be funny and my novels to have a story and I honestly don’t see why a work can’t be “realistic” and still have those things. But clearly I’m in a tiny minority: for a lot of people out there – the people who just want to laugh at brainy Asians and violent Islanders all over again, and the people who think that the occasional dramatic moment makes a comedy cliché somehow realistic – this kind of crap deserves all the praise it can get. Because nothing’s more entertaining than looking in a mirror.
And the Living Shall Envy the Dead (yet again)
From Variety:
CBS is developing a new daytime talkshow starring Valerie Bertinelli and Australian TV host Rove McManus.
Rarely has news so expected managed to strike such a chill down the spine. But there’s no worse fear than fear of the unknown, so lets arm ourselves with knowledge:
“Say It Now,” hosted by Bertinelli and McManus, is being developed through sister syndicator CBS TV Distribution. Show reps the latest of the Eye’s pilots serving in a sort of bakeoff, as CBS looks to fill the void left by the soon-to-exit sudser “As the World Turns.”
Which, for those not tuned into Variety-speak, means that Rove’s pilot – though the article itself makes it very clear that he’s playing the sidekick here – is just one of a bunch of possible replacements US network CBS is looking for to replace a recently axed daytime soapie. And those other shows are…
CBS hopes to pick its “As the World Turns” replacement by July. In the running are a new version of “Pyramid,” hosted by Andy Richter; a mother-themed talkshow hosted by CBS’ Julie Chen, Sara Gilbert, Sharon Osbourne and Holly Robinson-Peete; and a food-centric gameshow starring Emeril Lagasse.
All of which sound at least as likely to get the job, so let’s not get too carried away just yet.
But either way, what tha? We had ten years of press telling us that Rove was secretly some kind of “dark” comedian, a man super-tuned into the world of comedy yet trapped in a talk-show straight-jacket (we really should post some excerpts from that The (Melbourne) Magazine article on Rove – they’d be even more hilarious now), and now it’s revealed that the one thing he really wanted in all the world was to co-host a daytime talk show in the US? Fingers crossed he does succeed – and takes Dave Hughes with him…
Four Lions, Five Wimps
British comedy legend Chris Morris was at the Sydney Film Festival last weekend attending the Australian premiere of his film Four Lions, a comedy about suicide bombers. And as part of the festival he was interviewed in front of an audience by The Chaser’s Julian Morrow.
There has been a bit of coverage about the great meeting between Morris and The Chaser at the pre-screening party given by Time Out, such as Mumbrella’s piece describing Morris as The Chaser’s “spiritual father”, and noting that Morrow “pounced the moment Morris walked into the Time Out party, and barely left his side until it was time to go and see the movie”.
An interview with Morris by The Doctor on Triple J also suggested some kind of love-in was in progress, with Morris saying that he’d been boning up on The Chaser and had become a fan.
But if you think the idea of Chris Morris liking The Chaser is weird (their best stuff is good, but hardly reaches Morris’ heights) don’t worry, he’s a discerning fan. In a video interview with The Sydney Morning Herald, Morris said “I’d like to ask [Morrow] why he apologised for the Make A Realistic Wish sketch. I wouldn’t apologise for that”, before grinning broadly.
Morrow’s response was less jokey: “Compared to Chris Morris [who made a show about paedophilia] we are soft cocks, and that probably includes the fact that we apologised…I hate him for saying that, but he’s got a point.”
At last! An admission from The Chaser that they were wrong to apologise after almost a year of cow-towing and we-got-it-wrong-ing. As we’ve been arguing on this blog from day one, the Make A Realistic Wish sketch was a joke, and not a bad one at that. Certainly nothing to apologise for.
So, let’s hope comedians all over the land take a lesson from the man who’s influenced so many of them. It’s very possible indeed to keep your career after a major media backlash against your latest comedy show – even if your jokes involve children.
Down Down, Deeper and Down
TV ratings for Wednesday June 9th, as taken from Throng:
Hey Hey falls below a million
Which you’d think would be good news – people seem to be figuring out that not only is Hey Hey it’s Saturday the exact same show week in week out, but it’s also the exact same show that was axed eight years ago – but seriously: almost a million people are still watching Hey Hey after two whole months. They’re probably still slamming their fingers in the car door wondering why it hurts too.
Of course, “watching” simply means the television is on, and it hardly seems possible that even the most devoted fan could watch an entire two hour episode of Hey Hey then return a week later to watch another two hours of Hey Hey. That’s why so many of the show’s fans wanted / still want it moved to Saturday nights: this is a show so lacking in viewing calories even its fans want it shifted to a night where it can better serve as nothing more than background viewing for people getting ready to go do something more fun. Like slamming their fingers in a car door.
Keep that in mind the next time someone says Hey Hey needs to go back to Saturdays (and with the ratings falling below the magic million mark, a timeslot shift or outright dumping would seem on the cards) – they’re actively calling for the show to be shunted to a timeslot where less people will watch it, and less of those people will be paying attention to it. And why stop there? Using that logic Hey Hey would work even better going out at 3am on a Monday morning. To one television set. Locked in the boot of a car at the bottom of a river. With a fan’s hand still trapped in the door.
The Best Australian Comedy of the Last Eight Years Has a Problem
Back in 2002 Shaun Micallef made a sitcom called Welcher & Welcher. And it’s hilarious. So why is it only now coming out on DVD with no fanfare whatsoever? Why isn’t it hailed as the comedy classic that it is instead of a minor footnote in the career of an increasingly popular game show host? What, in short, the fuck went wrong?
Rewatching the series now, there’s a shitload going on in Welcher & Welcher that is – there’s seriously no other word for it – astonishing. People who claim that Chris Lilley’s efforts are the pinnacle of scripted comedy in this country should be forced to watch an episode of this simply so they can be reminded that you can do more with comedy than just make bitchy comments and sing “offensive” parody songs.
For example, Welcher & Welcher has visual jokes. When there’s a car crash, a VW Beetle is left slowly spinning on its roof. When Micallef and Francis Greenslade both stand on a wheelie bin to peer in a window (and therefore see one of the strangest sights shown on Australian television, as acknowledged by Micallef’s perfect double-take), they break the lid and end up wedged in the bin face-to-face. They’re throw-away gags – but what other Australian sitcom would even try to make people laugh with an image?
There are so many classic moments in this series that it’s hard to believe they all fit into just eight episodes. Micallef eating a boot in the ABC canteen. Robyn Butler’s sweatshop dress falling apart on stage. Greenslade lurching around the office wearing a Frankenstein mask. Guest star Tony Martin running a porn store. What other sitcom would fill in a minute when its running time came up short with an impromptu but note-perfect rendition of “When I’m Cleaning Windows”? The best damn sitcom in the land, that’s what.
And yet, the big problem with Welcher & Welcher is that it’s a sitcom. That’s because all those tools who claim that “Australia can’t make a funny sitcom” – ignoring everything from Frontline to The Games to Kath & Kim to yes, Welcher & Welcher – do have a point… just not the one they thought they were making.
Since Frontline, all the decent Australian scripted comedies have been, if not out-and-out mockumentaries, at the very least filmed like gritty low budget dramas. Frontline: hand-held camerawork for the behind-the-scenes stuff. The Games: mockumentary. Kath & Kim: started out as a mockumentary. Chris Lilley’s shows: mockumentaries. For fifteen years now, Australian audiences have been trained to expect scripted comedies will be filmed with hand-held cameras and characters wandering in and out of frame at will while speaking supposedly naturalistic dialogue.
Welcher & Welcher though, is a sitcom. It’s largely filmed on a set, the dialogue isn’t remotely naturalistic – it has jokes! Lots of them! One after the other! – and the characters pause after their lines to allow space for laughs. That last one makes it especially odd to watch if you’re not used to it: a laugh track would have been a big help in establishing a viewing rhythm, but laugh tracks were too far out of style for even Micallef to add one. And the show features too much location footage (which may have been filmed before or after the studio sequences) to presumably make filming in front of a live audience possible.
As a result, watching it is a slightly jarring experience. Dialogue doesn’t flow like you expect it to: Micallef says something funny, then there’s a tiny pause before things go on. If you’re not used to it – or can’t see your way past it – it’s just distracting enough to drain the life out of the show. To be honest, it took me a second viewing before I really got the hang of things. But once I did I never looked back. Welcher & Welcher has been shamefully neglected for far, far too long: in the seven-odd years since it went to air no-one in this country has made a funnier show.
Non-brevity is the arsehole of wit
Australian TV’s not exactly crying out for more panel shows, but the recently launched Santo, Sam and Ed’s Cup Fever is a welcome addition to the schedules. It’s a fun mix of chat, sketches and enjoyably bad jokes (only Santo Cilauro could sell a gag as bad as “Diego Maradonut”), which even a non soccer fan like myself can enjoy. And at less than half an hour per episode, it’s the exact right length.
Length is something Australian broadcasters always seem to misjudge when it comes to panel shows. Probably because they’re so focused on how cheap panel show are to make – and how much more money could be saved if they made ones with really long episodes. Perhaps this is why you get a show like Good News Week, which is based on a 30 minute show (the British satirical news quiz Have I Got News For You), and started out on the ABC in 1996 as a 30 minute show, gradually evolving into the bloated mess that it is today. For when it comes to Good News Week, quantity, not quality, has always been the focus of the people behind it.
Good News Week started to get popular in 1997. This led to a rash of spin-offs, starting with the hour-long Good News Weekend (1998), which was the same show, but with pop culture-focused questions. When the Good News Week moved to Channel 10 in 1999, the show’s length was increased by a third to fill a 1 hour timeslot. The following year it was extended again, to fill a 90 minute timeslot. At the same time, the team were making the 90 minute long GNW Nite Lite (similar in format to Good News Weekend), which would air on Thursdays, while Good News Week aired on Sundays. There’d also be occasional the debate involving the Good News Week cast, which would air as a special. To say that there was too much Good News Week on, and that everyone was suffering, was an understatement, and Channel 10 mercifully axed the series at the end of 2000.
In the current incarnation of Good News Week, those involved seemed to have learnt their lesson as far as over-stretching themselves with spin-offs goes, but the 90 minute timeslot remains. This is a huge mistake for a show that wasn’t really never that funny when it ran for just 30 minutes. Good News Week has never had the wit and bite of the British original, and derives most of its humour from sub-par panellists making crap jokes about news stories rather than actually satirising them. Thus, it’s worthless as both a topical satire and a comedy quiz, and this is compounded by the over-long timeslot, where the show is padded out with gags which shouldn’t make the edit, rounds which last about 5 minutes longer than necessary, and barely-relevant musical interludes.
Increasingly, Good News Week seems to be evolving again, from over-extended topical news quiz into a mash-up of the original concept and it’s variety-style 90’s spin-offs. The show has lost its original focus (which was a good concept, at least) and become yet another show which can take people who have something to plug. If it goes on for much longer it’ll evolve into the try-hard hipster cousin of Hey Hey It’s Saturday. Claire Hooper’s certainly got the air-head co-host role covered.
Going out on a meh
Lowdown has now finished and while it wasn’t an amazingly great show by any stretch of the imagination it has been the Australian comedy TV highlight of the year so far. Why? Because unlike anything else on offer – panel shows, dramedies, Hey Hey It’s Saturday – it was a reasonably well-written show with some decent laughs in it. And with dramedies and panel/variety shows the dominant formats in entertainment right now, a scripted show which gets laughs is something to be happy about. So, what the hell was going on with that final scene?
Having delivered the lucky scoop of their lives Alex and Bob return to Melbourne to find the Sunday Sun has closed down anyway. Cue the final scene where the pair walk off down Flinders Street carrying boxes of their belongings.
This kind of ending would be fine, or at least acceptable, if Lowdown had been a dramedy, but it wasn’t – it was sitcom. And if you’re making a sitcom (or any type of comedy), isn’t your primary aim to get laughs? So, shouldn’t you be ending on a gag, rather than a moment which is trying to be, well, my best guess is poignant, but as it failed to be that, who actually knows?
I’m all for comedy writers experimenting with the form and trying to take it into new areas, but when the vast majority of the recent experiments into drama have resulted in comedy which is less funny and less interesting, isn’t it time to declare these experiments worthy, but failed?
The job of a comedy writer is to be funny. If you don’t want to be funny, go write for a drama. And take that box of belongings with you!