Australian Tumbleweeds
Our alright of nights
Ah, yes, the Logies…Australian television’s night of nights, where the show itself is often as good as the programmes it’s awarding. But despite that, there’s always one good reason to tune in: when you bring together a large number of this country’s most high profile ego manics and show-offs, and allow them to get as pissed as they like, there’s a strong probability that at least one of them will make an idiot of themselves. On live television.
Admittedly, this doesn’t happen that often, especially these days. The Logies, when you think about it, is actually one of Australia’s most boring and depressing annual spectacles. Mediocre programmes and personalities receive kudos they don’t deserve, and most of the people in the room are so worried about how well they’ll come across when the camera switches to them, that they don’t let their hair down until well after the telecast is over. Add in to that mix some pretty awful choices of host in recent time, and what was once a reliably entertaining evening of local showbiz glitz and glamour, has been reduced to hour after tortuous hour of dull, over-reverent, back-slapping. No wonder most people switched over to Masterchef this year.
Some would argue, probably correctly, that the Logies has always been like this, and that the idea that there were once “golden years” has come about purely because of endless repeats of all those “classic Logies moments”. If truth be told, those raucous Bert-hosted ceremonies of the 70’s probably weren’t the non-stop cack-fests we’ve been led to believe they were – even if they did feature a lot more drunken acceptance speeches, stoned American guests, near-libellous bitching and punch-ups – but they sure looked more entertaining than Sunday’s Logies.
Still, with Bert providing quite a few of the best Logies laughs in recent years, you can see why they wanted him to host again. Famed for his off-the-cuff one-liners, he looked like the perfect person to have on hand if someone got something wrong…except, that the someone getting things wrong this year was Bert himself. He forgot to mention Brian Naylor’s wife, he said that k.d. lang had sung at the Montreal Olympics rather than the Calgary Olympics – these weren’t errors on the scale of “I like the boy”, but time did need to be wasted correcting them. And unlike Bert’s furious, sweaty-faced, hilarious back-peddling after “I like the boy”, when there was a strong possibility that the Heavyweight Boxing Champion of the world would put a dent in his Moonface, neither the late Mrs Naylor nor the citizens of Calgary posed much of a threat to Bert on Sunday night, and the whole thing just made you wonder if perhaps he was a bit old to be doing this these days.
When Bert was on form – or on stage – there were just about enough moments to keep the average viewer interested, but this wasn’t a particularly innovative or exciting Logies, just the usual awards ceremony cliches trotted out again and again. It was all chemistry-free duos reading poor scripts woodenly and musical acts you wished you could fast forward through, with neither the “roast” atmosphere of the 70s or the surprises of the Denton and Micallef years to take the edge off it – even The Chaser couldn’t be arsed to do a prank.
The best entertainment to be had this Logies was if you followed the ceremony on Twitter. Whether it was reading snark from other viewers or downright bitchiness from the attendees (how did Jonathan Holmes’ tweet describing P.J. Lane’s tribute to his father as “Don Lame” fail to whip the Murdoch press into a frenzy of OUTRAGE?), it made the show worth bothering with. Even the fact that Australian TV’s finest had to tweet under the table to avoid getting kicked out made the whole thing excitingly rebellious.
So next year, expect some bright spark at Channel 9 to try and bring whatever the hell Daryl Somers thinks he’s doing on Twitter, into the Logies. Or for the whole thing to become a cooking competition. Masterchef did out-rate it, and Matt Preston is the next Graham Kennedy, after all.
Blundering Around in the Dark
Being a film reviewer for The Age must be a thankless task (apart from all the free movies). Either you’re long-time reviewer Jim Schembri and have to live with the burden of being Jim Schembri, or you’re stuck being mentioned in the same breath as Jim Schembri. This week’s poor unfortunate: Jake Wilson, who somehow has managed to wrest the job of reviewing Australian comedy I Love You Too (The Age, 1/5/10) out of Jim’s hands – Jim being something of a self-confessed comedy expert, having written for Totally Full Frontal and performed stand-up under the name ‘Jimbo’ – and managed to do a fairly poor job of it.
Let’s start at the start of Wilson’s effort: “Quick, who was the last Australian comedian to forge a viable career on the big screen? Nick Giannopoulos? Yahoo Serious? For a truly iconic success story you would have to go back to Paul Hogan – and that doesn’t look likely to change with the screenwriting debut of Peter Helliar, most recognizable as the burly sidekick from Rove”
To be fair to Wilson, he’s right about Hogan being an iconic comedy success in this county. Almost everything else: well… Firstly, “the last Australian comedian to forge a viable career on the big screen” was Mick Molloy with Crackerjack. It was a box office hit, it’s much more recent than the other examples mentioned and while Molloy’s follow-up Boytown tanked, so did both the follow-up efforts from Giannopoulos (The Wannabes) and Serious (Reckless Kelly).
In fact, the only real difference between the trio of Molloy, Giannopoulos & Serious and comedy icon Paul Hogan is that Hogan’s first movie hit was so big a hit that he managed to get two crap sequels out of it; if you were to chart the drop-off between his first and second films, there’s a good chance his downwards career path would be exactly the same as the others’, only from a higher starting point.
And what about Kenny? That pretty much counts as a box office hit, even if star Shane Jacobson didn’t have a comedy career beforehand. Yeah yeah, ok, Wilson clearly just threw together a couple of quick examples to come up with an introduction to his review, but that doesn’t alter the fact that he got things wrong (ish). And the number one thing you want from a reviewer of any kind is a sense that they know what they’re talking about. Otherwise, who gives a shit what they have to say?
[Yes, no-one gives a shit what Schembri has to say either. But that’s because these days he’s fallen into the habit of ending his reviews with blatant attempts to bait those who disagree with him such as “not for wowsers” (American Dad review, Green Guide, April 29th) or “detractors be damned” (Hey Hey it’s Saturday review, Green Guide, April 22nd ). Fingers crossed the haters get riled up enough to attack you on your blog Schembri – after all, every hit counts]
Aaand we’re back. Most of Wilson’s largely negative review is fair enough: he explains what he wants from the film and then points out the many ways in which it fails to deliver. You could argue that not everyone would go into a Peter Helliar comedy expecting “fresh insights into the alleged inarticulacy of Australian men”, but he’s perfectly within his rights to say it doesn’t deliver them.
So the reason for this extended and barely coherent attack on Wilson’s credentials as a comedy reviewer doesn’t come until this magic paragraph towards the end: “As the socially awkward Blake, Helliar might be trying to emulate Ricky Gervais’ comedy of embarrassment. But Gervais would rather die than beg for audience approval as nakedly as Helliar does in a toe-curling speech about waiting for a woman to recognize his ‘spark’.” Oh Good Fucking Lord, where to start.
Let’s assume for a second that Wilson – a film reviewer for the “quality” broadsheet in a city that likes to call itself Australia’s cultural capital – simply didn’t bother going to see Ricky Gervais’ film The Invention of Lying, in which the chubby funster shamelessly begs for audience approval throughout with seemingly endless speeches about how someone like him could never attract someone like love interest Jennifer Garner. Seriously, the entire film is full of naked pleas by Gervais – basically playing himself – for love and understanding. But maybe Wilson missed that one.
Considering Wilson knows how to spell Gervais name though, there’s a reasonable chance that he’s at least slightly familiar with a little TV series called The Office. And maybe he just might have heard about the final episode in the second series of that show – you know, the highly praised but desperately unfunny scene where David Brent gets the sack and literally begs for his job back. The only way that scene could have been a more naked beg for audience approval is if the words “BEG FOR AUDIENCE APPROVAL” had been lazer-printed across his forehead every time his eyes welled up with “oh God look at me I’m acting” tears:
Helliar might have been ripping off Gervais’ act (it sure looks like it in the trailers), but to claim that Gervais’ would never stoop to begging for audience approval is a display of bare-faced ignorance that’s both staggering and jaw-dropping. Plus it’s an example of the seemingly automatic and thoughtless holding up of Gervais as some kind of comedy genius that’s rife in this country despite the string of second rate duds churned out by Gervais since The Office. Or was Extras really better than The Office? And The Invention of Lying better than Extras? Nah, didn’t think so.
Next time you want to mention “comedy of embarrassment”, why not mention Larry David? Or Steve Coogan as Alan Partridge? Considering Curb Your Enthusiasm pre-dates The Office and does it all better, “Larry David’s comedy of embarrassment” is something that exists in the real world, not just the minds of various publicists pushing Gervais’ latest train-wreck.
Ok, after a minute’s thought it’s possible Wilson actually meant to write that Helliar was ripping off Gervais’ performance style. So why not just say that? Why use the term “comedy of embarrassment” to describe a kind of line delivery when it suggests a whole school of / approach to comedy – mostly because it is a school of comedy, done first and better by people (David, Coogan) who Age readers have certainly heard about? It’s not like Gervais is known as a subtle and varied actor, for fuck’s sake: once you mention his name, people know the kind of thing you mean.
Wilson is completely and totally within his rights as a reviewer to hate on a film that he hates. But his job isn’t just to grunt “good” or “bad” after the title is mentioned (that’s At The Movies’ job): he’s supposed to be able to convincingly explain what kind of film it is and how it does or doesn’t get its particular job done. These are minor quibbles raked over at excessive and somewhat creepy length here, sure, but get the little things wrong and it’s only fair to wonder if the big things (such as Wilson’s description of the film as “conspicuously short on narrative drive and tonally all over the place”) might be coming from a reviewer who doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about.
Well, Blow me!
Can you remember the last time anyone produced a full length scripted comedy show for a mainstream radio station? Apart from ABC Local’s lacklustre 2008 new talent scheme The Comedy Hour? You probably have to go back as far as the late 70s or early 80’s. To around the time when FM radio was coming in, and the ABC was winding up its radio comedy unit due to the latest round of budget cuts it was having to endure.
Since then, Australian radio’s enthusiasm for scripted comedy has been fairly minimal, indeed the whole genre seemed a bit daggy. One way to get around that was to make it ironically bad, like in the serials How Green Was My Cactus (broadcast nationally on various Austereo stations), Return to Blue Hills (produced during the early days of Shaun Micallef’s stint on the Vega Melbourne breakfast show, when he seemed to have free reign to produce all kinds of weird and wonderful sketches and segments), and Funky Squad, Johnny Swank and Implausible Rescue (all made by The D-Generation, again for Austereo). Sure, plenty of breakfast or drive time shows produced comedy sketches (most notably the ones involving Tony Martin), but on commercial radio, at least, you were lucky to get anything more elaborate than a few segments of loosely-scripted banter.
As for the ABC, their scripted comedy output has been equally sporadic. Bryan Dawe, who started his comedy career on Melbourne’s community station RRR (which has never stopped making scripted comedy, incidentally), attempted to change that in 1987 with the sketch show Don’t Get Off Your Bike. It didn’t last long, but it is notable for starting the Clarke & Dawe partnership. Afterwards, Dawe went on write and perform four series of comic monologues as pensioner Roly Parks on ABC radio, and later developed rabid right-winger Sir Murray Rivers QC, probably the funniest Australian comedy character hardly anyone’s heard of. (Is Sir Murray still giving his thoughts on current events on ABC radio every week? And if he is, why is there no information about when he can be heard on the ABC website? Or a podcast?)
Even Triple J, a station you might expect a bit more comedy from, hasn’t done a lot of scripted comedy in the past 30 years. Certainly nothing more substantial than the odd serial (remember that dire serial The Sandman made for the breakfast show?) or series of sketches (like Sam Simmons’ The Precise History of Things, check them out here), which is why the new series, The Blow Parade is such a welcome surprise.
The Blow Parade is a series of spoof rockumentaries, written and performed by Andrew Hansen and Chris Taylor of The Chaser, and music historian and Triple J producer Craig Schuftan. Episode 1, focusing on prog rock band Lake Deuteronomy, is intelligent, ambitious, lovingly-crafted, detailed, funny, and stuffed full of elaborate musical parodies.
If there’s a problem with it, it’s that this series is a one-off when it comes to radio comedy in this country, and probably the main reason that it is exists at all is because of the enthusiasm of two high profile comedians. It’s unlikely that anyone at the ABC gives two hoots about scripted radio comedy, and that’s a pity because there should be a slot on radio for new and developing comedy writers to hone their skills and try out new ideas. An ongoing slot for radio comedy wouldn’t necessarily give us the next Clarke & Dawe, but it would definitely result in better comedy writers. It has to; on radio there’s only one way to get laughs – with a funny script.
Dog Training
The final episode – you’d have to guess forever – of Wilfred aired earlier this week and hard as it is to admit, I’ll be sad to see it go. Not all that sad mind you, because that first series was pretty much a textbook example of how to put together a comedy that contains no actual comedy. But the second series actually managed to cough out a couple of mildly funny episodes, and in today’s comedy climate that’s got to count as a win.
Unfortunately, the few decent episodes I saw – especially the one where Wilfred (Jason Gann) decided he wanted to be a TV star and got himself into a dog food commercial – came at the end of what was, for Australian television, a very long run. On the one hand, that’s good: at least Wilfred finally found a way to get laughs out of a premise that sounded like it should have been funny but turned out to mostly be fairly grim. Which was clearly the intention (check out the lighting; Kath & Kim it was not): when did we get to a place where trying to make people laugh in a comedy was a bad thing?
On the other hand, it’s not like anyone else in Australian comedy is getting 16 episodes of their own half-hour show to figure out what works. Not to mention the six episodes of that Mark Loves Sharon mockumentary Jason Gann did on Ten, and Zwar’s got Lowdown (written with others, mind you) currently running on Two. That’s at least 50% of the Australian sitcom output over the last two or three years (more if you don’t count pay TV): if you don’t like the Zwar / Gann school of faux-realism, you’re kinda out of luck.
So who picked them to be the future of the Australian sitcom? Well, they did: they worked hard, they made short films (including the original Wilfred) and a feature (the, uh, feature-length Rats & Cats), and slaved away on both series of The Wedge. They’re one of the few members of the current crop of comedians who have focused on performances rather than panel show appearances and / or radio, and guess what? It’s paid off with actual television careers (even if Gann is over in the US “pursuing opportunities”). Just like it used to back in the old days.
Unfortunately, at the moment they’re the only ones who seem to be doing it. Maybe because it’s hard work, maybe because it involves actually working on comedy that isn’t just cracking jokes about today’s news, and maybe because even after all that hard work you still end up making a sitcom on SBS that hardly anyone gets to see. And when they did, what they saw was a grim, enclosed share-house comedy where (in the first series much more than the second), the fairly harmless Adam was constantly picked on and abused by the other two cast members.
Wilfred could have been the best sitcom made in this country in the last 10 years and it almost certainly wouldn’t have been a smash hit. SBS just doesn’t get enough viewers. But the first series was so committed to making no concessions to an audience – especially an audience who might have been expecting a laugh – that the fact there even was a second series took a lot of people by surprise.
It’s probably fair to say that only the committed few would have kept on watching series two long enough to realise that they’d fixed some of the show’s bigger problems: episodes began to have plots that were as over the top as the idea of Wilfred himself, Adam’s character stood up to the other two more… look, it still wasn’t a classic, but it was getting better. Much like The Hollowmen, it wasn’t until the end was in sight that it was possible to wish there was more to come.
So while it’s clearly good news that this particular path to fame hasn’t been totally cut off, it’s a sign that something isn’t quite right that we seem to be seeing more than a few sitcoms that only hit their stride when they’re all but over. Especially considering that they’re coming from people who’ve been making comedy for a long, long time – Zwar and Gann aren’t Working Dog, but they’d made two series of their own, worked on two series of The Wedge, made short films and a movie. That’s equivalent to Shaun Micallef’s career when he was making The Micallef P(r)ogram(me), and Wilfred ain’t no P(r)ogram(me).
Perhaps they’re burnt out on the idea of making people laugh before they get the chance to do it right; perhaps they’re rushing into production on a concept before they’ve figured out exactly what’s supposed to be funny about it. Either way, it’s not a good thing: you can hardly have a TV comedy industry based on telling people “don’t bother watching until the last couple of weeks – that’s when it’ll get really good”. Not that it stopped Seven from trying that approach twice this year with The Bounce and The White Room. And look how well it worked there…
B-B-Bounced
In a result so unsurprising even we predicted it weeks ago, Channel Seven’s Peter Helliar-hosted AFL footy show The Bounce has been axed. Well, not exactly axed – the technical term is “rested” as supposedly it’ll be back during the finals. It’s a move that makes no sense – how is a dud show now going to magically become worth watching during the finals? – and so it makes perfect sense for Seven, who seem to have lost all touch or clue when it comes to live and live-ish programming over the last decade.
There’s plenty of reasons why The Bounce tanked. Having most of the writing staff walk out after the first week is rarely a good sign after all, and while Peter Helliar is supposedly the nice guy of Australian comedy, maybe hiring the funny guy of Australia comedy might be the way to go next time. And pranks? Really? Prank TV hasn’t worked in Australia (unless you’re The Chaser) for a decade or more, and having (for example) a footballer facing off against a fan brandishing mildly creepy collages isn’t going to change that.
Even the idea of a big budget “family friendly” football show seems a little suspect: Nine’s footy show rates in part because it’s one of the few shows on Australian television that’s indisputably male (though its version of masculinity is, er, somewhat limited). Meanwhile, Before the Game has the comedy and family friendly angles sown up: despite what sports fans might think, could it be possible that the footy market on Australian television is saturated?
Whatever the reason, shed no tears for Helliar just yet. His romantic comedy I Love You Too hits cinemas in a week or so, and by all accounts it’s not half bad. Interestingly, those same accounts suggest that, as romantic comedies go, this one’s firmly down the sappy end of the scale, with not a dry eye in the cinema at some stages. So, in an example of the wild speculation we love to indulge in here, here’s a question: could Seven have axed The Bounce when they did because they realised its host had written and starred in a movie that was just too girly for (stereotypical) footy fans?
Seriously, it’s one thing to make your footy show “family friendly”; it’s another entirely to have the host tearing up on the big screen because his mate’s lost his girlfriend or whatever. Australian television is notoriously blokey, after all, and to date Helliar’s on-air persona has been about as blokey as you can get this side of Mick Molloy (who never cried in either of his movies).
Okay, sure, in the real world it’s hardly likely to have been the main reason why The Bounce got axed – at the end its ratings were worse than The White Room was doing in the same timeslot when it was axed, after all – but if The Bounce had lasted a few more weeks (as its’ NRL counterpart on Seven seems likely to), we would have had the unusual event of watching a blokey footy show hosted by a man who wrote and was currently starring in something of a tissue-heavy tear-jerker. That’s not likely to happen now until Sam Newman puts out a romantic comedy of his own, and chances are those tears will be of a very different variety.
The low down
With Wilfred drawing to a close on SBS, and Lowdown just started on the ABC, Adam Zwar seems to be the dominant force in sitcoms right now. But at least with Lowdown he’s produced something which isn’t too bad; this is not like Wilfred – all atmosphere, no laughs – but a more conventional sitcom, with running jokes, over-the-top performances and farcical situations.
None of these features sound like positives, particularly in the current climate, but they are. A sitcom’s main purpose is to make you laugh, it can also satirise, make you cry, or be entertaining in other ways, but making you laugh should be its main purpose. So it’s kinda interesting to see a more traditional, gags-based, approach in Lowdown.
Not that there aren’t plenty of problems with the show. Judging by episode 2, which was slipped my way recently, every episode will be kinda the same: Alex has to interview an arrogant celeb who won’t talk about any of the topics that would make really great copy, meanwhile, he thinks he’s developed a medical condition and needs to see Dr James, and he’s just walked in on his girlfriend rooting someone famous (although, to be fair, there’s a bit of a twist on this in episode 2) – so any hope you had of Lowdown satirising lots of different aspects of tabloid celebrity journalism, in the way that Frontline did with TV current affairs, you can forget.
But then again, are there really that many aspects of tabloid celebrity journalism apart from interviews and appearances heavily stage-managed by publicists, pants-down gotchas, and ex-lovers or prostitutes telling “their story”? And aren’t people pretty cynical about them anyway? In that context, those comparing this to Frontline weren’t really being fair. Lowdown isn’t a satire, it’s not trying to be and the all the marketing stated very clearly that it wasn’t. “Our goal has always been to make this show very sympathetic towards journalists, instead of a cliche. We’re on their side”, Zwar told TV Tonight recently. This is not like tuning in to the The Hollowmen and sitting stony-faced in front of half an hour of observations you’d already observed, or tuning in to the The Jesters expecting that it really would be a “satire about satirists”. Lowdown is a depiction, not a satire. (It’s also not a “celebration”, for which we can also be extremely grateful.)
Also coming in for much criticism was the use of a narrator. As in Arrested Development, the narration in Lowdown acts as both a framing device and a way of driving the plot forward; it’s used fairly sparingly throughout the show, and is an efficient way of cramming in more set-ups and gags. What was the problem with it, again?
Don’t get me wrong, Lowdown isn’t a great sitcom and I’m only prepared to defend it up to a point. In an ideal world, a show at this level of competence would be one of the worst you’d get in an Australian sitcom. It’s a bit limited in terms of the subjects it can cover and for a gags-based show there weren’t enough gags, but on the plus side Lowdown wasn’t one of those shows that was trying desperately to be trendy or edgy or arty, and there were enough laughs and good performances to make this an entertaining and watchable show. So, I’m going to keep watching.
Lilley of the Valley
Because who doesn’t love Chris Lilley news (from The Herald-Sun‘s Confidential section, 21/4/10):
Comedian Chris Lilley has pushed himself to the limit for his highly anticipated TV series Angry Boys, according to director Laura Waters.
Production wraps in Melbourne next week on the mockumentary-style ABC series, which will explore what it means to be a 21st century boy
“I wouldn’t even compare Chris’s shows to each other,” Waters said.
“All I can say is that we’re pushing ourselves – including, and especially Chris – way beyond where we pushed ourselves before”
More than 200 locals will play extras and small roles in the series filmed around Melbourne and on Torquay’s beaches.
It’s a short news item, sure, but there’s a lot packed in there. For one, “I wouldn’t even compare Chris’s shows to each other” – really? Even though two of them feature Ja’ime? And they all, without fail, feature bad taste high school / amateur musicals? Then there’s the hilarity of “200 locals will play extras and small roles” – like there are any other roles in a Chris Lilley production unless you’re named Chris Lilley.
What’s really interesting though, is the news that Lilley has “pushed himself to the limit”. Well, not interesting, just something to keep in mind when we finally get to see Angry Boys sometime in 2011. Because if we get yet another set of cliches and stereotypes and crap “offensive” musical numbers like we have with every Lilley project since Big Bite… well, at least we’ll know what his limits are.
Thinking About Bargains? (or, how the mighty have fallen)
Don’t you hate the way those Book Warehouse places always have two supposedly separate but in reality impossible to divide sections – one where all the books are $5 or less, and one (with all the interesting books) where the prices vary and aren’t really that cheap? Anyway, while lured inside one of their stores by the promise of “new stock!!!” earlier this week, I spotted a couple of items worth checking out.
1): Rebel Wilson’s Bogan Pride book going for $1. That’s cheaper than, well, a lot of very humiliating items. But seeing it at that price is a lot funnier than the show itself, especially as Ms Wilson keeps on going on to whoever will listen in the media about how she’s doing sooo well over in Hollywood. And maybe she is. But in Australia, her book is selling for less than a pack of cough lollies.
2): Chris Lilley’s We Can Be Heroes book. No price marked, but it was firmly in the el cheapo section. This one is actually worth getting ahold of. It’s not a great book, but (I think) Lilley himself put a lot of effort into it and it does seem to have been put together with a lot of care and attention to detail. Which you’d expect from his shows (it’s also not very funny, which you’d also expect from his shows).
They all seemed to be first printings too (making them a few years old), so while Wilson’s book was pulled from shelves in fairly short order, Lilley’s book was kicking around for a few years before the stores gave up on getting any more full price customers and sent them back. The piles of both books were roughly the same size though. Make of that what you will.
A Pus-Filled Boil on the Face of Australian Entertainment
There’s two ways to look at the 20-episode return of Hey Hey it’s Saturday: either it’s a soul-crushing reminder of just how low television can sink in this country, or it’s a great opportunity to kick Daryl Somers in the balls (you could also see it as an easily avoidable hunk of forgettable lowest common denominator entertainment, but where’s the fun in that?). Remember how angry and sulky and petulant Daryl was when Hey Hey was axed eight years ago? Imagine how pissed off he’ll be if, after all these years of striving, his dream comes true – only for shit ratings to snatch it away again? Hope someone remembers to film that meeting.
There’s no doubt whatsoever that axing Hey Hey a second time would kill Daryl: these days Daryl doesn’t seem to know where he ends and the show begins. Take a recent article on Hey Hey in The Age‘s Green Guide: “Everyone’s entitled to their opinions,” sez Daryl, “you can’t hope that everyone is going to like what you do. But I think I’ve been targeted quite a bit. Over the years I’ve copped quite a bit of stuff and sometimes I do wonder what I’ve done to upset these people so much.”
Daryl wonders why people don’t like his show. Golly gosh. Was he watching during the blackface sketch? Doesn’t he look around occasionally and go “gee, why is the only woman on this show a glorified barrel girl?”. Does he ever stop to think that a show that stops to talk about how popular the show currently is on the internet might be, you know, just a little self-indulgent?
But hang on a second – Daryl isn’t actually talking about Hey Hey it’s Saturday there, is he? “I’ve been targeted quite a bit… I’ve copped quite a bit of stuff… I wonder what I’ve done…” Which is a little bit of a puzzle because I’ve been, well, pretty much the opposite of a Daryl Somers fan over the years and yet I really honestly can’t remember Daryl personally copping much of a serve at all over the years.
Certainly when Hey Hey was first axed we were living in a land where old fart TV reviewers were the norm and pretty much all of them felt that, at worst, it was maybe just slightly possible that Hey Hey could have conceivably run its course. Perhaps. In contrast, The Mick Molloy Show – one of the shows Nine trialled as a possible Hey Hey replacement – got headlines like “Get This Rubbish Off the Air”. And once Hey Hey dropped below the horizon Daryl kept a fairly low profile, so there wasn’t really much of a chance for people to take shots at him. Dammit.
Then when he came back to host Dancing with the Stars most reviewers thought he was doing a decent job in a role that suited him, when he left it was seen as a bad thing for the show, blah blah blah – the point is, for him to have a whinge about “being targeted” is pretty funny when you compare the gentle stoking with a damp cloth he’s received to the constant attacks the Australian media’s capable of dishing out. Lara Bingle: being targeted. Kyle Sandilands: being targeted. Daryl Somers: would you like a glass of warm milk before we tuck you into bed, sir?
The important point here is that as far as Daryl’s concerned, he and Hey Hey are one and the same. Take the start of the first instalment for 2010: while it’s traditional on a talk show for the host to monologue when he comes out at the start, Daryl came out, thanked the audience for all their support in bringing the show back – oddly, he didn’t thank the executives at Nine who actually did bring the show back – then started talking about how you could send emails to the show and follow it on twitter. This is how you introduce the show? I don’t recall the old Hey Hey starting off with the GTV Nine mailing address being held up on a card for the first five minutes.
It’s not like he hasn’t seen and addressed at least some of the show’s other glaring flaws. There seems to be a lot more live music in Hey Hey – The Second Coming (though having a couple of guys playing acoustic guitar is the kind of thing you’d expect to see at 11.30pm on ABC2), and the wacky comments from the old-favourites are kept to a mildly tolerable minimum. The “comedy” segments often seem to have a script – or at least, an actual idea – even if they do go on way, way too long (did we need five minutes on Daryl’s new phone app that detects deodorant and turns people into cartoons? Only unless you’re Apple lapping up the product placement). Even having Jet as the opening band has to count as an improvement from John Farnham.
Make no mistake, it’s still a pus-filled boil on the face of Australian entertainment. But at least now if you squint your eyes and smack yourself in the head with a hammer a few dozen times you can almost maybe sorta kinda see how it could, after some massive and radical alterations, be turned into something actual living human beings might want to watch without having to be strapped to some kind of hi-tech bondage stool.
Problem is, every imaginable watchable version of Hey Hey would be Hey Hey with all traces of Daryl removed. Good luck with that. Remember the strange way Daryl keeps talking on and on about how “the fans” and “the public” brought the show back? Out in the real world it’s a combination of Daryl’s persistence and Nine’s desperate need for local content that brought Hey Hey back – take either of them out of the equation and it wouldn’t matter how big the “bring back Hey Hey” Facebook group was, they couldn’t buy enough shovels to dig open that grave. Shit, even Good News Week admitted they were brought back because they were cheap and Ten needed content.
Daryl keeps thanking the public for the same reason that he opened the show with a plea to the public to get in touch with him over the internet: for Daryl Hey Hey is a venue for you, the public, to show him your love. This need to connect with the audience should make him a great entertainer… well, a better entertainer than the thousands of tools out there who seemingly don’t give a shit what anyone else thinks. Problem is, Daryl doesn’t give a shit what anyone else thinks either.
For all his comments about thanking the public for bringing him back, the large segment of the public who were rightfully disturbed and angered by the blackface skit on last year’s specials are dismissed as “targeting” Daryl while he’s left “wonder[ing] what I’ve done to upset these people so much”. When you love him, you’re “the public”; when you don’t, you’re “these people”.
Hey Hey is Daryl Somers, and Hey Hey is only interested in three things: music, Daryl Somers, and toadying lackies (on screen and at home) sucking up to Daryl Somers. And the music’s only there because he’s an ex-muso who likes to think of himself as someone helping up and coming bands – so long as they don’t cross him (remember that late 90’s controversy when Reef played the “wrong” song live and Daryl banned live music from the show forever?). So forget music: Hey Hey is a showcase for Daryl and the worship of Daryl.
Which is fair enough I guess – it’s his show and no-one’s making anyone watch – but it does leave one question: if the band plays music, Livinia is attractive, and Russell Gilbert and John Blackman make the jokes, what exactly are we supposed to be worshipping Daryl for?