Australian Tumbleweeds
From podcast to broadcast
Unless you’re a bunch of mates having a laugh or foolish enough to think there’s serious money to be made from the world of podcasting (and maybe there will be in the future, but this seems unlikely for at least another decade), you’re probably making podcasts strategically. I.e. you’re “talent” trying to get a paid gig by proving your worth through a podcast, or you’re a broadcaster trying to build an audience for a team or concept through a podcast. The latter strategy appears to have paid off for the ABC with the podcast Is It Just Me?
Is It Just Me? (which I reviewed in March as part of this blog’s first look at online comedy) was made by ABC Local in 2008-2009 and featured Wendy Harmer and Angela Catterns having a bit of a light-hearted natter about life. The show was aimed squarely at middle-aged women, an audience largely uncatered for by online media, and seems to have achieved a certain popularity. Now Harmer and Catterns are back with It’s News To Me, a similar but more news-focused show, broadcast on ABC NewsRadio every Friday from 6pm and also available as a podcast.
ABC NewsRadio has a demographic which I’m guessing has historically been middle-aged and male but, with Q&A attracting a larger, wider and younger audience than the ABC’s traditional news and current affairs coverage, you can see why trying something a bit different looks like a good idea. There’s also the wider global trend of younger people rejecting traditional news sources for comedic alternatives, and broadcasters trying to respond to that.
But will bringing two middle-aged, semi-amusing woman who’ve done quite well with a podcast aimed at middle-aged women work well in the hard news environment of NewsRadio? Maybe. There’s a long tradition in news and current affairs of the “Friday Night Funny Man” (although I’m struggling to think of any Friday Night Funny Women), and ABC Sydney’s Friday evening panel show Thank God It’s Friday has been on air for almost five years – so clearly it’s doing something right.
Except Thank God It’s Friday (on which Harmer turns up every so often) suggests that if your brief is to be funny about current affairs on early evening ABC radio, it’s best to pitch things light, bland and only nominally satirical. It’s News To Me does all of those things – meaning that it’s not particularly funny and largely a waste of your time.
A better bet for vaguely current affairs chat, but with much more of a pop culture and personal anecdotes focus, is The Sweetest Plum podcast with Declan Fay and Nick Maxwell. You may remember Fay from Triple R’s The Pinch, but he and Maxwell are probably best known for writing the Kevin Rudd PM sketches for Rove Live. Fay contacted us recently about The Sweetest Plum and invited us to have a listen. So I did.
After a bit of a shakey start with episode 1 (in which whoever did the edit figured it would be best to cut most of the anecdote build-ups and just leave in the punchlines – it wasn’t, it was just confusing) this podcast is getting into a more relaxed stride. It’s not amazingly funny, but it’s funnier than a lot of chat-based podcasts out there. There’s also the odd sketch (a real rarity in the world of comedy podcasts, sadly), one of which is a special appearance from Kevin Rudd PM, in which he responds to the Leadership Spill.
While The Sweetest Plum is far from perfect, Fay and Maxwell show some promise. The sort of promise that could get them a radio gig – which I imagine is what they’re hoping for. Better people with promise than some of the others out there.
The Resistable Rise of Hamish & Andy
Over the last few weeks word has been filtering back from the UK division of 21st Century Daryl Worldwide about the massive – well, noticeable at least – impact Hamish & Andy’s recent visit has had over there. Supposedly they made a surprisingly good impression on The Graham Norton Show (shown recently on the ABC… not that they bothered to publicise H&A’s appearance), making the usual guff reported back here about them sounding out UK work seem slightly more plausible than usual.
[That’s not to say the rumours that they’re headed overseas are on-the-money, of course. Every single time Rove McManus opened a magazine containing a picture of an aircraft the media started talking up the massive career that awaited him the second he decided to fly to the US, and yet now that Rove has finally decided to take a chance in the big leagues all he seems to be getting over there are tiny guest roles and doomed pilots.]
The real issue here is, if you were Hamish and / or Andy, why the Hell wouldn’t you be looking overseas for the next step up? They’ve dominated the radio ratings here for years, and continue to do so in such a convincing manner (yes, that is 20% of Melbourne radios tuned into H&A) that there’s no competition left – in fact, all their competitors are putting to air remarkably similar teams. Remember just a few years back when guy/guy radio teams would have a woman shoe-horned in to provide some balance / dead air? Triple J’s Jay & The Doctor gained Myf Warhurst, Nova’s Merrick & Rosso were teamed with a series of soapie actresses… bad luck ladies, looks like that door’s closed shut once again.
Not only have H&A put their stamp on Australian radio so firmly that it’ll take, oh… at least six months from the point of their departure for every station to revert back to a drive time schedule based on bloky DJs playing 45 minutes of non-stop cock rock every hour, they’ve also ruled the school with their television specials. Okay, it’s not like they’re pulling in those figures every week, but it’s fair to assume that if they did turn their hand to television – as many expect them to – they’d be a powerhouse it’d be hard to defeat. And yet…
Let’s step back in time a decade or so to a radio duo known as Martin / Molloy. The Hamish & Andy of their day (only slightly less good looking and slightly more interested in making actual comedy sketches), Mick Molloy and Tony Martin helmed a drive-time radio ratings juggernaut that dominated the airwaves nationwide. When they went off-air at the end of 1998 it was a): their own decision, and b): generally seen an opportunity to take their skills to the next level. After all, they’d totally dominated Australian radio for close to four years; what couldn’t they do next?
Put together a successful television show, for one thing. Actually, that’s not fair: 1999’s The Mick Molloy Show had a very sloppy start but pulled itself together quickly, though even that wasn’t enough to save it from a tabloid hate campaign of rarely seen vitriol. Still, both Rove McManus and Shaun Micallef – hardly slouches when it comes to the Australian television scene – had their (far better received) shows on Nine axed from under them at around the same time, so there’s a good chance Mick’s show would have got the chop no matter how smooth its run.
After that Tony Martin made a movie that didn’t do well at the box office (Bad Eggs) , Mick Molloy made a movie that did do well (Crackerjack) so he got to make another one that didn’t (Boytown), they both returned to radio (separately) where they either fizzled out (Mick) or got the chop (Tony), and these days they’re either making appearances on sports-themed panel shows (Mick) or directing other people’s television shows (Tony). Hardly career trainwrecks there, but they never quite managed to hit it as big elsewhere as they did on radio – which is the lesson you’d have to assume Hamish & Andy would be taking away from the whole thing.
Even if H&A did decide to make the move to television in Australia, what kind of show would they be allowed to do? Television’s once-seemingly endless battle between format and personalities has been firmly won in recent years by formats: you don’t make a show about a chef (Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares) anymore, you make a show about cooking (Master Chef). And on the commercial networks at least, comedy formats are as appetising as used food: remember The White Room, The Bounce and Australia Versus? Neither do we, and the last one’s still going… just.
Making the leap to television has always been tricky for radio personalities, but the gap between the two in this country has never been bigger. Radio is largely personality-driven, while unless you’re Bert Newton “television personality” is about as thriving a career as “professional dragonslayer”. It’s the shows that make the stars in Australia, not the other way around, and even massive media personalities are lucky to get to rub shoulders with music industry nobodies as judges on talent shows in 2010. In that kind of environment, scoping out overseas opportunities is the smart thing for Hamish & Andy to do.
For the rest of us… well, having the biggest comedy team in the country basically say “there’s nothing for us here” and pull up stumps would be a huge wake-up call to the fact that something is severely wrong with comedy in this country. If you can call getting belted in the face with a shovel a “wake-up call”. Then again, considering the “intelligence” Australian commercial television brings to making comedy, a belt in the face with a shovel would most likely make no difference whatsoever…
Start Digging Some Nerd Holes
Hey Hey it’s Saturday isn’t dead yet, but it’s sure coughing up blood (from The Age)
Having already come back from the dead once, Hey Hey It’s Saturday will go into suspended animation in a fortnight fervently hoping that no one accidentally flicks the switch while it’s off air.
Nine today confirmed that the July 21 episode of the variety show hosted by Daryl Somers will be the last for the first half of the year. Kylie Minogue will be the special musical guest on that episode, and is slated to perform a couple of songs with the full array of costumes and back-up dancers.
In the understatement of the year, we then get this:
The news is not unexpected.
As we’ve been banging on about for weeks, Hey Hey‘s ratings are in a death dive. And watching tonight’s episode, it’s clear that Daryl continues to refuse to make even the smallest changes to his proven dud formula. Which is pretty bizarre, because – unlike just about every other comedy show in this country, which gets chopped off at the knees the second there’s a dud week in the ratings without being given even the slightest warning or time to change course – Hey Hey could easily make quite substantial changes if it wanted to stay on air. It’s a live show done on a weekly basis after all, not a pre-recorded series with a load of episodes already in the tank: once the ratings started to slip, they could change pretty much everything if they wanted to try and lure people back.
But they haven’t changed a thing. It’s exactly the same show with exactly the same guests every single week, even as the ratings fall through the floor. Rumour has it that, inbetween last year’s specials and now, at least some of Hey Hey‘s production staff moved on and the ones there now simply aren’t able to stand up to Daryl. As as I’ve said here before, Daryl has Hey Hey just the way he likes it and he doesn’t give a shit what anyone else thinks. Remember all those promises Daryl made about “If we do come back there’ll be new people, new media, new segments but with the same Hey Hey flavour” and “It’s one of those shows that is always changing and morphing into something else.” 10 episodes in and BULLSHIT. BULL-FUCKING-FLAMING-SQUIRRELS-SHIT.
Show me the new segments – not moments, not jokes, not retreads of old ideas: NEW SEGEMENTS. Show me the new regular, high-profile, allowed to say two sentences in a row castmembers. Show me one single moment that doesn’t seem to be exhumed from the glory days of 1996. I’ll be out the back starting up the hearse.
Hey Hey‘s been frozen in ice like a Captain America made entirely out of turds since the early 90s, and defrosting it in 2009 only proved that some smells don’t fade with time. Why won’t they make changes to keep it on air if that’s what they want? Why doesn’t someone tell Daryl that his holding the hand of the Chooklotto girl is the most amazingly creepy thing shown on Australian television this year – yes, even worse than all those smug sweaty fat tools on The Gruen Transfer? Why doesn’t someone just say STOP instead of giving us vague “it’ll be back after the Commonwealth Games” lines? This is car crash television at its finest: Nine really should hire the voice-over guy from NZ TV’s classic Police Ten-Seven to voice the promos.
Abuse News You Can Use
… or alternatively “Actor Best Known for Substance-Affected Violent Bogan Character May Be Substance-Affected Violent Bogan Character” (from The Age):
AUSTRALIA’S latest Hollywood hopeful, comedian Jason Gann, might be flying high in Los Angeles, but he’s facing trouble at home after revelations he drunkenly punched a shuttle bus driver on Derby Day in 2007.
Gann, in case you somehow missed his meteoric rise to “oh, that guy” status, is the one inside the dog suit on Wilfred. And he seems to have some form in playing an aggressive dick off camera as well as on:
The Sunday Age understands he also pleaded guilty to assault in a criminal case in 2008, but was not convicted.
Normally this kind of news would result in a rush to re-watch the actor’s comedy series in the hope that this real-life controversy would add both depth and humor to their on-screen work (a la Hey, Dad..!). But here… what’s the point? Gann may have been just playing, if not himself, than a fairly close version thereof as the annoying thug Wilfred.
Co-star Zwar, on the other hand, gets bonus points for his role: putting up with someone who may have been like Wilfred off-camera as well as on deserves some kind of TV Week-endorsed award.
*
Meanwhile, Hey Hey keeps on sliding in the ratings (from The Herald-Sun):
HEY Hey It’s Saturday is under renewed pressure after it posted dismal ratings figures on Wednesday night.
Hey Hey averaged 801,000 viewers nationally – just over half the figure it rated for its 2010 return and a mere third of the audience who watched last year’s reunion specials.
Hey Hey was smashed by MasterChef (2.012 million viewers). It was also soundly beaten by Highway Patrol (1.211 million), Police Under Fire (1.134 million), Spicks and Specks (1.318 million) and Lie to Me (1.11 million).
All together now: AWWWWWW. Sure, we’re rubbing it in here; it’s no secret that we all loathe Hey Hey here at Tumbleweeds central. But it’s just as important to highlight the show’s falling ratings as a counter to all that glowing press it got in the lead-up to its revival.
For weeks – months – there was a barrage of reports in the Australian media on how a): great it was that Hey Hey was coming back, b): how amazing it was that so many people loved the return of prime-time variety, c): what a great host and entertainer Daryl Somers clearly was / is, and d): how the nation was obviously clamouring for the return of good old-fashioned family television in a prime-time slot.
Well guess what? WRONG. So wrong a daily “we we wrong” apology wouldn’t start to scratch the surface. To The Herald-Sun‘s credit, while they were the first to jump on the Hey Hey revival bandwagon, they’ve also been the first to leap off:
Nine executives are said to be discussing the show’s future.
“I’d take it off air immediately and put something else on next week,” media analyst Steve Allen said.
The ratings slide has been particularly steep in recent weeks – from 1.101 million to 1.003 million to 995,000 to 908,000 to 801,000.
At the moment Nine is hanging tough – hoping the July 21 show featuring Kylie Minogue will give the show a ratings boost.
“Would they be happy with the figures – no,” a Nine spokesman said.
“There is not a lot of options (to move it to another time slot or night).”
“If it doesn’t hit a million, it is a big problem,” a Nine insider said.
It is believed Nine originally wanted to run a small number of Hey Hey It’s Saturday specials this year. Somers persuaded them to blow that out to 20 episodes.
“We’ve always said that Hey Hey doesn’t have 20 episodes in it,” Allen said.
“It’s a joke that can’t go 20 times. It was loopy to run it continuously.”
Allen said that going up against the MasterChef juggernaut has hurt Hey Hey but a bigger problem was that the show lacked new segments.
“It’s not fresh, they haven’t renovated the format, it’s not compelling viewing,” he said.
“People have abandoned a tired format that doesn’t have legs.”
All of which was pretty much obvious the second Daryl opened his mouth. There’s never been even the slightest suggestion that Daryl had anything new or different in mind for the return of Hey Hey, because even before the show was taken off the air Daryl was blaming everyone else but himself for the show’s falling ratings. In his mind, Hey Hey was perfect just the way it was, and only the evil execs who yanked it off the air prevented it from running unchanged forever. Guess what? Turns out that Daryl was wrong, audiences were over Hey Hey the first time, and by pushing his luck too far Daryl has basically thrown his television career off a cliff.
I can’t say he doesn’t deserve it. For all his “man of the people” act, the whole “return of Hey Hey” has been little more than an ego tussle between Daryl and Television itself: Daryl felt he got the shitty end of the stick when Hey Hey got axed after 28 years (he felt he deserved 30), and wanted to come back simply to prove the execs wrong via a wave of audience adulation (or at least, some Facebook friends and a few positive tweets). He didn’t want to return to make good television or entertain audiences – seriously, if he had he would have made at least some changes to the format wouldn’t he? – he was just a bully with something to prove.
Looks like he succeeded there.
Milsom making a play to be our Tina Fey?
It was inevitable that at least one of this country’s female comedians would attempt a Julia Gillard impersonation sooner or later. Sure, someone from Double Take did it last year, but with Gillard now running the country there’s a gap in the market – an opportunity to fill the shoes of Anthony Ackroyd, whose Kevin Rudd is no longer required. Step forward Veronica Milsom.
Milsom, latterly of Hungry Beast, appears as Prime Minister Gillard in a video uploaded to the YouTube channel of fellow Hungry Beast cast member Nick Hayden yesterday. After just hours online a user called carlitosm posted the comment:
Laaaaame! (voice ok but writing’s crap).
I agree with carlitosm’s assessment. Milsom may have got the look and the voice pretty much right, but her monologue was only superficially parodic, and it seemed more like a check-list of oft-laughed-at Gillard and Labor government cliches than anything else.
If you want satire with depth on this topic, go to Clarke & Dawe. Their take on Gillard’s first week in power, broadcast last night, captures the language, the speech rhythms and the attitude of Gillard perfectly and hilariously. It also gets plenty of mileage out of the factional dealings that got her the top job, which is far more to the point than references to Tim Mathieson’s hair-dressing skills.
To be fair to Veronica Milsom, this is her first stab at impersonating Gillard, and it may well develop over time. But then again, Milsom has a history of appearing in crap series of sketches that are all roughly the same, so development is not something I think we’ll see.
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…