Australian Tumbleweeds
Yob Nobs Watch Widescreen Slobs pt 2: The Kings of Mykonos: Wog Boy 2
Australian comedy movies are like a busted watch: annoying and not even remotely funny, but if you time it just right you can suck a lot of people in with one. And no-one’s going to deny that the original Wog Boy timed it just right: after well over a decade of touring various “Wog” shows around the country (starting with Wogs out of Work in the late 1980s), Nick Giannopoulos had both primed the audience for his big screen version and road-tested the gags to a point where they couldn’t fail. Well, unless you expected them to be funny, but that wasn’t the point: this was comedy of recognition on a massive scale –“ha ha, wogs / skips / whoever are EXACTLY like that!” for ninety minutes – and Nick knew his market like the back of his woggy hand.
So the first Wog Boy made an absolute fortune, at least in local terms. Then came Nick G ‘s traditional follow-up dud The Wannabes, a film so crass, crap, boring and unpleasant a nation stood as one and, well, didn’t so much walk out of the cinema as avoid it altogether. For the unfortunate few who did see this, one thing was clear: finally we had our big-screen equivalent to Daryl Somers. They’re both natural entertainers with a rock-solid desire to win people over, and yet it’s impossible to shake the feeling that you wouldn’t want to cross them in any way. Plenty of comedians can give off the impression of being prickly: like Daryl, Nick G gives off the impression that there’s nothing behind his slick façade but a ruthless desire to succeed at all costs. Which might be great for a businessman, but isn’t really all that funny.
Nick G’s been quoted as saying Kings of Mykonos: Wog Boy 2 was originally going to be a stand-alone story, but then he decided this particular plot was a good way to bring back the original Wog Boy characters. Bad move for the film (as will be explained later), but a smart move publicity-wise. If this was a stand-alone movie it’d be fair to say it’s a massive and unwelcome return to the bad old days of Australian movie comedy, a film you laugh at more than with, a film that plays its jokes so broad it’s a wonder they fit even on a widescreen – in short, a film where, when one of the leads finally get the girl (though all he does is save her from drowning but here that’s as good a reason to pash as any), the donkey he was riding looks at the camera and winks.
But as a sequel to the original Wog Boy, well… it’s pretty much just more of the same. After all, it’s not like it’s possible to disgrace the proud legacy of the original, right? Even if it was, Nick G already managed that with the excreteable Wannabes. And let’s be honest: while Australian cinema occasionally manages to come up with a film that’s both funny and has wide appeal, you’re just as likely to hit it big with cinema audiences by serving up a steaming pile of Yahoo Serious press clippings. Much as it’d be nice to point out the numerous smart, witty big screen comedies that have turned out to be box office hits, the sad fact is that more often than not it’s moronic crap than wins the day.
This particular piece of moronic crap takes the two hold-overs from the first film – car-crazy Steve “Wog Boy” Karamitsis (Giannopoulos, who’s performance consists largely of pulling a squinty face) and girl-crazy Frank (Vince Colosimo) – out of Melbourne’s western suburbs and off to the Greek party island of Mykonos, where Steve may or may not have inherited a beach. While Frank starts out trying to break the Mykonos record of sleeping with 43 chicks in a month but ends up focussing on just one, Steve has to decide whether to sell to the sleazy property developer Mihali (Alex Dimitriades) or try to make a go of things himself against all the odds. Oh, and there’s a subplot about goat shit.
Pretty much the only interesting thing about this film – which is exactly what you would expect on every single level and so basically review-proof – is that back around the time of The Wannabes, Nick G was popping up in every newspaper and magazine that would have him saying “Australians want Australian stories”. He didn’t go so far as to suggest attending local films should be made compulsory, but he did seem to feel that a): Australia films were being too harshly judged by both critics and audiences, and b): people should support Australian stories simply because they were Australian.
So what does he go and make? A movie where, apart from the first five minutes, the action is set entirely on a Greek island and the story revolves around defending the island’s small businesses from an evil property developer. And this is an Australian story how?
You could argue that the subtext is about second-generation migrants returning to their homeland, but subtext? In a Wog Boy movie? Anyway, a few jokes about “Greek-a-nomics” aside, Steve’s story has nothing to do with a culture clash between his Aussie values and the culture of his forefathers. And Frank is Italian so it’s not even his family’s culture he’s returning to. No doubt Nick G’s out there talking up how we should support his film as a local product. But by dragging back characters from his only successful film and dropping them in a story set overseas (and largely funded with overseas money) that has nothing to do with them, he’s not only diluted whatever goodwill those characters might have retained, he’s made it obviously clear that as far as he’s concerned by “Australian stories” he means “me”.
You can’t have it both ways: either “Australians want Australian stories”, or you want to play with the big boys from overseas. If you want people to support you simply because you’re from around here, you’d better make films that only someone from around here would make. Loathsome they may be, but at least stars like Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett aren’t out there claiming that Robin Hood is an “Australian story” simply because they’re in it. Still, at least in one way the original Wog Boy hasn’t let Australia down: by making a crap sequel to a popular comedy, Nick Giannopoulos has proved he’s Aussie as.
Minor Midweek Musings
*Has anyone else noticed that the promos for The 7pm Project no longer seem to feature Dave Hughes? He’s still in the logo shot at the end, but otherwise it’s all Carrie and Charlie (who now has a much neater new haircut) with the nasally gurner nowhere in sight. The show’s slow march towards becoming a panel version of ACA continues…
*In case you needed confirmation that comedy is no longer seen as any kind of ratings winner, we recently realised that while this time of year (post-Easter) is traditionally the time when the commercial networks wheel out their big guns, none of this year’s big guns looks even remotely like local comedy. Well, apart from The Bounce, which goes some way towards explaining the current situation. And GNW, which just seems to fade in and out of the schedules at random.
*It’d be a lot easier to get excited about Wilfred being made into a pilot for the US market if we didn’t know just how many pilots the US market goes through. Rough estimate: a shitload. It’s good news, sure, but it’s a pilot; get back to us when the series order gets placed. And the occasional report trying to link this story to Rebel Wilson’s current US efforts is just plain sad.
* Remember when Daryl was talking about how the returned Hey Hey would be “fresh” and feature “all new segments”? Whatever you might say about Daryl, he can still make us laugh.
*Isn’t Shaun Micallef nice: “Asked if he can credit any one person for his success, Micallef said “My wife Leandra. She’s the one who, 15 years ago, told me to give up my job (as a lawyer) and do what I really wanted to do – which was writing comedy. I wouldn’t have done it without her encouragement. This week, Leandra and I are celebrating our 21st wedding anniversary. I’m a very lucky man” (from The Herald-Sun 19/5/10). All together now: awwww. That said, rumour has it that Shaun could be currently too flat-out with various projects to have time to record any commentary tracks for the long awaited DVD release of Welcher & Welcher. Al together now: awww…
Yob Nobs Watch Widescreen Slobs pt 1: I Love You Too
Australian comedy movies are like buses: you wait for ages for one and then two come along at once and they’re badly designed and clearly unroadworthy contraptions full of scary, crazy, smelly people you’d much rather have nothing to do with. Everyone knows the Australian film industry is in a mess, but it’s hard to appreciate exactly how much of a mess until you realise that The Kings of Mykonos: Wog Boy 2 managed to get made while Shaun Micallef’s film project Teacher Boy is nowhere to be found.
First things first though, and Peter Helliar’s film I Love You Too has been around long enough now to make two things obvious: most film critics in this country don’t know shit about shit, and Peter Helliar is a very smart man. He’s a very smart man because it doesn’t take long in watching this film – which he wrote and co-stars in – to realise that it’s not actually trying to be a comedy. Or if it is, it’s a romantic comedy that’s way, way down the romantic end of things. This counts as a smart move because while Helliar isn’t all that funny, he does seem (on the strength of this film) to be a fairly romantic kind of guy.
(in a gratuitous and unfair contrast, for all Tony Martin’s comedy strong points, it’s a little difficult imagining him making a film that was romantic in anything but an understated, ironic way. It’d be funnier, but it wouldn’t be able to do the “run for the airport to stop the love of your life leaving forever” run without putting a comedy spin on it.)
So while there’s not really a lot of quality laughs here (if you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen most of them), it doesn’t matter because the romance side of things is what’s moving the film forward. It’s hardly a great romance either, but director Daina Reid (who might remember from her performing days on Full Frontal, or her directing work on Very Small Business) does a great job of making this look like an actual movie (not a charge you could lay against most Australian film comedies) with a very warm and romantic feel to proceedings. And that makes a hell of a difference.
So rather than failing at one thing massively, I Love You Too fails slightly at a couple of things, which means that a lot of the time you don’t even notice it’s failing at all. This is where the other half of Helliar’s genius comes into play, as – hang on, here’s the plot: Jim (Brendan Cowell) loves his girlfriend but can’t say it to her so she dumps him. He then tries to win her back with the help of an American dwarf (Peter Dinklage) he met while breaking into his car. There’s also a miniature railroad, but it’s not really vital to the plot.
Anyway, having Jim’s love sidekick be a dwarf is both totally gratuitous – there is no reason whatsoever for the character to be a dwarf, though rumour has it a number of dwarf-joke heavy scenes (including one set in a dwarf-tossing bar) were cut from the script at Dinklage’s request – and totally brilliant. That’s because it means they were able to cast Dinklage, who is a first-rate American actor (as seen in The Station Agent and Death at a Funeral) who’s performance lifts the film greatly but who is a lot less likely to be being offered major roles compared to comparable actors of regular height. Basically, a five foot plus tall actor as good as Dinklage would be, say, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and chances are Hoffman wouldn’t come out to Australia to star next to Helliar… mostly because people would get them confused.
Where the bit about Australian film reviewers not knowing shit comes from is that pretty much all the major reviews I’ve read of this film have taken it to task almost entirely because it’s not that funny. This is true, but it’s besides the point: anyone who actually pays attention to what’s happening with this film – and doesn’t just go “if Peter Helliar wrote it, why isn’t it as gag-packed as PeteSpace was on Rove MOVIE FAIL” – should be able to spot that a lot of the time it’s not really trying to be funny. This isn’t full of jokes that flop (that’s Wog Boy 2), this is full of scenes where a couple of wry comments are thrown into a semi-serious chat. In failing to spot that basic difference a lot of reviewers have been writing / talking a lot of crap.
Basically, if there was a romantic version of “dramedy” this would be its Platonic ideal. The irony is that while Australian review culture is constantly falling all over itself to praise shithouse no-joke comedies because the label “dramedy” gives them a get-out-of-laughs-free card, this film – which again, has clearly been built to be a romantic film with some laughs, and succeeds at this limited goal fairly well – gets dissed and dismissed because it’s roughly as funny as everything else Helliar has ever done but tries hard to give you something else to enjoy alongside the limp gags.
The time to beat up on Helliar was / is when he’s out there flat-out trying to be funny: with this – where for once he’s realised his limitations in the comedy area, worked hard to work around them and create something that works despite his flaws – a cautious and limited thumbs up for once feels like the right response.
I Rawk
If you want to sink the boots into I Rock – and it’s an Australian show, so who doesn’t – it seems that attacking its credibility is the way to go. We’ve already had this review pointed out to us; Helen Razer takes a similar tack in the latest Australian Rolling Stone. Only problem is, last time I watched an episode of I Rock, the word “documentary” didn’t seem to appear anywhere. And if someone passed a law saying that all comedy dealing with a subculture had to accurately reflect that subculture… well, we’d better get those Hogan’s Heroes repeats off the air quick-smart.
Sure, you can get laughs and plenty of them from really going into a subject in depth. It sure worked for Frontline. But to pull an example out of nowhere, no-one sane attacked Fraiser for not accurately replicating the working conditions of a radio psychiatrist. I’m guessing most nuclear power plants aren’t like the one Homer Simpson works in, most party hire outfits aren’t like the one in Party Down, most community colleges aren’t like the one in Community, very few law firms resemble Welcher & Welcher in the slightest, and, well, hopefully you get the idea.
I Rock’s real problem is that the niche it so clearly should be occupying – the “yoof TV” drama slot – no longer exists. So, like pretty much every other show these days that isn’t a flat-out super-serious drama, it gets labeled “comedy”. Not “documentary”, mind you and not “re-enactment” either.
So if you’re going to sink the boots into I Rock, how about pointing out that the entire cast – with the possible exception of the feisty lesbian – can’t seem to act? Or that the last thing anyone needs is yet another show built entirely around an annoying, self-centered prick? Or that, for a show labeled comedy, there seems to be a remarkable lack of jokes past having the lead piss people off? Why is it so difficult to simply dismiss the show on the basis that, for all the effort that’s gone into making it, very little effort seems to have gone into trying to make it funny?
No doubt it’s annoying for people working in the music biz to see the reality of their situation misrepresented yet again. But it’s even more annoying for the rest of us to see yet another ABC “comedy” series that turns out to be little more than a vanity project for the writer / producer / star where said star simply acts like a dickhead and expects everyone else to laugh. It’s as if the entire spectrum of comedy has shrunk down to one tiny sub-Office point. And this is coming from someone who actually likes The Librarians.
I Rock is instantly forgettable, totally unconvincing, only marginally entertaining and packed to the ceiling with clichés and banal observations that bare little relation to reality. All of which comes a distant second to the fact that it’s simply not very funny. Around these parts, that’s all that counts.
Defending Deveny
“Catherine Deveny’s column will no longer appear in The Age.” Ahh, does it come any sweeter than this? Of course, there was a whole entire story behind that sentence in Wednesday’s Age, a story that began when Deveny fired off a bunch of her trademark “comedy” quips via twitter during the Logies, continued through the tabloid “outrage” over her comments (and Wil Anderson’s, but he had the advantage of being marginally funny and not currently in steady employment) the following Monday, and ended with her being shown the door at The Age when the “controversy” dragged on into Tuesday.
It only takes a moment’s thought to realise that Catherine Deveny should never have been sacked by The Age yesterday for her Twitter comments. She should have been sacked by The Age years ago for being shit. Anyone unfortunate enough to have been following her career with even one bleary eye knows full well that Twitter “gags” like “I do so hope Bindi Irwin gets laid” and “Rove and Tasma look so cute… hope she doesn’t die too” are pretty much what she does. IT’S ALL SHE DOES (in the voice of Kyle Reese from The Terminator).
Time for a quick history lesson: her newspaper career started out with a television column for The Age’s A2 supplement. Before that she’d been a writer for Rove and a string of forgettable duds like All Star Squares, Frankie J Holden’s IMT, Super Debate Series, Something Hot Before Bed, Unreal TV, Unreal Stuff Ups, and Unreal Ads. Somehow from that wealth of quality experience The Age figured she was qualified to talk television.
This column tottered along for a while, but by the final year it was little more than a weekly out-of-nowhere swipe at Channel Nine’s “bomber jacket-wearing” management. Which is fair enough except that they weren’t actually starring in their own television series, which is the kind of thing she was meant to be writing about at least some of the time. Eventually she walked away from the slot, telling us what had become screamingly obvious six months earlier: she no longer cared about television.
And why should she? While her career as a television writer had been c-list at best, working for The Age had pushed her into the spotlight with successful stand-up shows, appearances on the ABC’s Q&A, a series of book collections of her columns, and her photo all over the place. Plus she had a regular non-television Wednesday column in The Age, which again rapidly devolved into little more than swipes at organized religion, women who take their husband’s last names, people who drive four wheel drives, people who don’t firebomb private schools, and so on.
Again, fair enough, but they were nasty, bitter, shrill swipes that more often than not left this reader feeling sorry for the often deserving targets she was attacking. Which seems to be a trick she’s managed yet again, only this time she’s the target I feel sorry for.
See, if her comments had come out of the blue, then you could maybe make a case for The Age sacking her over them. Not a very good case, as it’s clear The Age was just bowing to the kind of tabloid pressure that threatens good comedians (remember The Herald-Sun’s attempts to whip up controversy over John Safran’s Race Relations) as well as bad. Unfortunately for that piss-poor case, Deveny’s been pulling this kind of shit all damn day.
As others have pointed out, as recently as Anzac day she was twittering “Refuse to celebrate a glorification of war that ignores the suffering and carnage of (mostly female) civilians” and “They didn’t die for us but because they were risk-taking, testosterone-fuelled men with a pack mentality”. Perfectly reasonable views, but saying them on Anzac Day is a little like visiting a funeral and calling the deceased a child-molesting drunk. It’s probably true and it might make you feel better, but – just at that moment – there are other people’s opinions to consider.
Because if you’re a comedian – and Deveny calls herself one at every opportunity, even claiming her Bindi comment was “satire” – you want to try and make people laugh. Clearly there are plenty of ways to make fun of Anzac Day, and even more to crack wise at the hack parade that is The Logies. Perhaps the slow kids would like to point out some of those ways to Deveny.
Again for the people up the back: THE AGE KNEW ALL THIS. In fact, you’d have to say they encouraged her humour-free style of “satire”. After all, when her A2 column veered away from television reviewing into routines left over from her failed stand-up act about making her kids play in traffic, they didn’t say “hey, back to TV please” – they gave her a whole ‘nother column. Why? Presumably because they figured her brand of “controversy” would attract readers.
So what the fuck? They have a columnist hired pretty much to stir up controversy who – deep breath everyone – STIRS UP CONTROVERSY, and then they fire her? What, is it suddenly a bad thing to have someone writing for you who is being talked about all over town? The Age were idiots for hiring her in the first place, and they’re even bigger idiots for giving her the boot: how they’d manage that trick?
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.