Australian Tumbleweeds
The Buddy System
So, as a token gesture towards the idea of live entertainment, I went to see The Shambles – Live in a Ballroom a few nights back. I’ve haven’t bothered with much at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival this year, just The Shambles plus Micallef and Curry’s Good Evening, but I’d seen The Shambles last year and liked what I saw so I figured it was worth a second shot. Turns out I was right: the show was smart, well-structured, hilarious from start to finish and varied enough to leave you wanting more. Five stars! If I gave out stars, which I don’t.
But after I’d had a good old chuckle at the way Lynchie’s dad looked exactly like Robert Hughes on Hey Dad..! and giggled at seeing Sos in a devil costume riding around in a shopping trolley, my thoughts wandered as usual to television. Specifically, to the way that part of what had made The Shambles so much fun to watch on stage has been totally banished from our screens: the fun of seeing friends piss-farting around together.
I’m not talking about theatresports, or the bastardised version we saw on Thank God You’re Here. The thrill of theatresports is seeing how the performers pick up and expand on what each other is doing second by second; the point of Thank God You’re Here is… well, I’m guessing it’s to make Working Dog rich. I’m talking here about the fun of seeing a bunch of friends playing dress-ups and then laughing at how stupid it all is.
This kind of thing used to be mainstream comedy. Everyone’s sick of hearing how The Late Show was the best comedy show ever made in this country, so let’s just point out that many of the show’s best-loved moments involved friends cracking up or cracking wise in the middle of a crumbling sketch. The Doug Anthony All Stars, the biggest act to come out of The Big Gig: three friends messing about.
And how is it that in four years of Fast Forward – arguably the biggest hit comedy television show of the last thirty years – the only bit anyone remembers is the scene where Steve Vizard and Peter Moon struggle to stop laughing during one of their rug salesmen sketches? That’s right: this kind of comedy is so infectious and fun it can make even Steve Vizard seem like a decent bloke.
Now it’s vanished, gone so completely that it took the fluke event that is me seeing comedy live on stage to remind me that I hadn’t seen it on Australian television in a long, long time. It doesn’t happen on panel shows: hearing someone say something crazy –as if you’d even get that on an Australian panel show – simply isn’t the same as hearing them say something crazy while wearing a bad wig. And it doesn’t happen on comedy games shows like Talkin’ ‘bout Your Generation or Good News Week: when a bunch of relative strangers are forced to act silly together, there’s not the trust between them that allows them to really let loose and have fun.
It’s undeniable that a huge part of the Australian television comedy boom in the late 1980s came from the fact that we were seeing friends working together. Even when the jokes were crap or didn’t work, we could see that the people involved were having fun, and watching people genuinely having fun messing about is about as good as entertainment gets (unless the messing about involves home renovations). But for whatever reason – I’m guessing all television producers are heartless robots who have no friends and so hate and fear the very idea of friendship – seeing people who actually like each other on television is almost impossible these days.
We all know the real reasons why we don’t see this kind of comedy any more – producers like to put together their own comedy teams (even back in the 1980s, when Vizard gutted the D-Generation to cast Fast Forward), sketch comedy is dead (thanks Double Take), as is live television (outside footy shows, which sometimes still manage to capture a little of this kind of thing, only involving AFL haircuts) and the old-fashioned idea that sometimes unpolished television is better value than something that’s had the life scrubbed out of it.
[At this point someone’s certain to mention Hey Hey It’s Saturday. Remember how I used the word “friends” earlier? Get back to me when you see the slightest example of any genuine human warmth radiating from Daryl towards anyone else who gets between him and the camera. I’ll be over here doing my tax return.]
So I guess the question is, why is it that while we’re constantly being told that television is a source of human connection for people – usually to justify some long running and utterly soul-less soapie or US sitcom – television that shows pretty much the closest clothed human connection there is – people who are trying to do something together laughing over how it’s gone wrong – has been wiped from our screens? We don’t need an entire one-hour weekly show devoted to sketches going wrong. Just a little bit of what I saw from The Shambles – you know, what you humans call “chemistry” – would do nicely, thanks very much.
Movin’ On Up
It’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival time again, and that means the streets of Melbourne are filled with… well, the smell of sweaty types desperately shoving flyers at you in the forlorn hope that you’ll attend the unknowns-packed show they’re pushing. That’s entertainment!
Away from the bright lights and overpriced beer though, there’s a slightly different conversation taking place, thanks to something Rod Quantock said in a feature on MICF that ran in the April edition of The Age’s (Melbourne) Magazine. Sure, The (Melbourne) Magazine might be the most graspingly aspirational catalogue of hipster tripe either side of the Yarra, but they do love their comedians (especially if they’re managed by Token, as pretty much everyone in this article is*), so they can’t be all bad. At least, not every issue.
Anyway, in this article Quantock puts forward the idea that MICF isn’t good for comedy in Melbourne: “It’s almost impossible to get any live work now, there are no venues any more… The festival, for all it’s wonder and glory (has) destroyed live comedy in Melbourne to a great degree.” The story is that audiences gorge on live comedy during the festival and then ignore it for the rest of the year, and who’s going to argue with that? Well…
Nobody sane is going to seriously disagree with Quantock. After all, he knows the Melbourne live scene better than anyone (and a lot better than us). Plus, his thesis has been taken up by others – notably Matthew Quartermaine over at The Scrivener’s Fancy – who’re also not exactly short of knowledge about how the live scene works. So the following’s more of a supplement to the “MICF Killed Comedy” thesis than an argument against.
See, here’s a probably stupid question: if the idea that festivals kill off local venues is an iron-clad rule, why hasn’t The Melbourne International Film Festival killed off the local cinema industry? MIFF is a massive event in it’s own right, packed with local and international films, yet your local multiplex is ticking along just fine.
Okay, it’s not exactly a fair comparison: MIFF is much smaller compared to the film biz in general than MICF is to Melbourne comedy. But still, MIFF (and the other capital city film festivals) have been going for decades and getting bigger each year without strangling the rest of the industry: what are they doing differently to comedy?
The obvious point – and the only one we’re going to go into here, because we’re just chucking ideas about – is that good stuff is on at the movies all year ‘round. And by “good stuff”, we mean stuff that people actually want to go and see, starring people you’ve heard of and featuring things you want to see happening. That just doesn’t happen with comedy.
Sure, you can say there aren’t enough (or any) venues and you’d be right, but if you’re Dave Hughes or Wil Anderson or Dave O’Neill or Charlie Pickering (this year) you could probably find someone to open a room for you to do your thing during, say, the lead-up to Christmas. But you don’t. Often if you’re a big name (read: have a regular gig on the telly) in Australian stand-up, you wait until the Comedy Fest and then you do a “best-of” set like you’re doing us all a fucking favour. After all, you’re on the telly – what do you need to work at stand-up for? (But more on that in a moment.)
That’s part of why live comedy is dead year-round: the big names – the comedy version of the Hollywood blockbuster – are almost never on outside of the festival. If it feels like live comedy is dead in Melbourne, that’s because unless you’re a massive comedy fan – the comedy version of the people who go see arthouse films about goat herders or mournful teens in those ground-floor cinemas at The Nova – there’s nothing out there you want to see eleven months of the year. If the cinemas stored up a years worth of blockbusters and then showed them all in a mad rush for three weeks, they’d be closing down like crazy too.
The other reason why live comedy is pretty much dead is because back in the late 1980s when MICF (or as it was then, the plain old Melbourne Comedy Festival) started up, live comedy had already started to shift from being an end in itself like theatre still kind of is (even big name movie actors often return to the stage) to a one-way stepping stone to a bigger and better world. Unfortunately for comedy, that bigger and better world was television.
Television doesn’t really want performers who’ve spent years honing their comedy skills. It doesn’t want people who’ve developed a quality act, or figured out how to write a funny joke, or worked out how to do anything that people in a live setting would actually want to see. Television wants presenters. Television wants people it can stick up the front of a concept that they bought from overseas or was thought up by some nameless guys out the back. Television wants people who are “real people” – or who can seem that way – not stylised comedy performers. Dave Hughes’ television career took off the second he hit the airwaves; Shaun Micallef was a “cult favourite” until he started hosting a game show.
Yes, for a while comedians could get on television doing the kinds of comedy that also worked live. The Big Gig, The Late Show, even parts of Fast Forward and Full Frontal. But by the time panel shows became the comedy norm on television, live comedy was well and truly absorbed into the television process. Sketch comedy was (mostly) out, heavily written shows were (mostly) out, radio-style confessions and panel-friendly anecdotes were in. And remain in to this day.
So what? That stuff’s still funny, right? Sure it is. But why pay money to see live the kind of material you can get for free on television? We’re not talking a five minute sample of hilarious stand-up that makes you want to go see someone’s live act, and we’re not talking about the thrill of a live performance over something pre-recorded; we’re talking about comedians whose entire careers have been aimed at getting on television, and then they put on a live show that’s just like what you’ve seen them do on television. Only, you know, you have to leave the house to see it. And pay money for it. Which is fine if you want to see Talkin’ ‘bout Your Generation’s Josh Thomas live ‘cause you love him on TV. But then you’re just paying to see someone off the telly.
Because television hasn’t valued scripted or well-honed comedy for well over a decade now, and because performing stand-up is mostly seen as a stepping stone to television, stand-up now is often – not always, of course, but often -simply a “look-at-me!” showcase to attract casting agents. Again, this is fine, but what’s in it for the rest of us? Listening to some mildly good-looking person talking about their weird life is fine at a party where there’s a chance you might get to root them, but at a comedy show… well, there’s still a chance you might get to root them. But it’s more likely you’ll just feel like you got screwed.
To sum up: the big names who could re-introduce the general public to the idea of seeing comedy outside of the festival’s three weeks are too busy on TV and radio to do so, and with live comedy basically being a try-out for television – a medium that values glib one-liners and a pretty face over anything more lasting – MICF has to bunch everyone together for a three week burst to get people interested in it at all. But at least they’re interested that long: if anyone cared for even a day about the comedy that’s shown on our televisions Hey Hey it’s Saturday wouldn’t be coming back. Ever.
*thanks to menagers over at Champagne Comedy for pointing this out
The Secret Ingredient is Sport
There’s one word to explain why Peter Helliar keeps on getting work: footy. What, you thought it was going to be comedy? Seriously, Helliar might be mildly funny, but unless you’re his biggest fan alive you’d have to admit there are many comedians out there who are at least as funny as he is. Many, many, many comedians. Pretty much all of them, in fact.
Make no mistake, Helliar can get laughs – as Rove’s jolly sidekick. And if you need a bunch of generic news gags, he’s up there with the middle of the pack. But otherwise, while he lacks the aggressively crap approach of Dave Hughes or the smug arrogance of a Charlie Pickering or a Wil Anderson, he makes up for it by being, you know… sorta bland. He’s the comedian you love to struggle to remember the second he’s off-air: chances are even he’s hoping he dies in a bizarre and gory sex accident, because otherwise even his parents will have forgotten he existed before the last spadeful of dirt hits his beige coffin.
And yet, despite all this, he somehow managed to go from being Rove’s rusted-on sidekick to scoring the high-profile Melbourne MMM breakfast radio slot, despite his last radio gig ending in ratings failure so extreme it killed the radio career of the far funnier Judith Lucy stone dead. When that turned out to be a massive dud that was axed after barely a year and the suicide of its producer, suddenly here he is hosting one of Seven’s biggest shows of the year, the AFL footy-tainment show The Bounce (Thursdays, 7.30pm in the southern states). Talk about failing upwards in your career: if The Bounce gets axed he’ll probably be hosting A Current Affair by the end of the week.
How can this be? He’s not an unknown quantity or an up-and-comer that’s shown promise: he’s provably, consistently shit (or at least, he is when it comes to drawing ratings as a host; his upcoming film I Love You Too will be a better gauge of his other abilities) At best, he’s like Magda Szubanski, a performer much-loved by the public just so long as she’s appearing in a show that would be really good even if she wasn’t in it. At least with Magda her various disastrous efforts at solo hosting are spread out over a number of years: Helliar goes directly from one flaming ratings turd to the next before the smoke’s even had a chance to clear.
The reason why is simple: he seems to like making jokes about footy. Other comedians like footy – Helliar’s former stomping ground on Ten Before the Game is full of them – but most comedians take football too seriously to make a lot of jokes about it (check out the sour faces on Dave Hughes or Mick Molloy when their teams lose). Helliar, on the other hand, seems to like footy without being super-committed to any one team. So logically he’s the guy to turn to when you need a host for your high-profile sports comedy show – you can’t have a host that loves one team above all others or you’ll piss off 13/14ths of your audience. As for the fact that he’s never successfully hosted anything in his long career… well, there’s a first time for everything.
It’s probably too soon to write The Bounce off as yet another Helliar-hosted flop – but let’s do it anyway. Well, at the very least it’s off to a rocky start, which at Seven usually involves being axed within three weeks. And speaking of The White Room, it seems that most of the writing staff of that ill-fated stinker travelled directly from that sinking ship to the decks of The Bounce, where – depending on which edition of The Herald-Sun you read- they were either “booted” or “quit” after the first episode.
Normally the first question here would be “why would you hire a bunch of proven losers to put together perhaps your most high-profile show of the year?”, but as that question’s already been asked about Peter Helliar let’s keep the repetition to a minimum. Plus there’s an actual proper answer to that question: as no-one at Seven has any experience in putting together any kind of live entertainment program over the last decade or so (the Herald-Sun reported that executive producer Rick McKenna’s qualifications included Kath & Kim, the Fox Footy channel and Tonight Live with Steve Vizard. What, no Done Lane Show producers handy?), so grabbing people from Rove makes sense. Or it does if you ignore the failure of The White Room – but in hiring Helliar as front man they’ve shown that a few duds on the resume don’t really matter.
To wander off-topic a little: in the two stories the Herald-Sun has run to date on the departures from The Bounce, the first – on March 31st – said that line producer Rachel Miller and four writers were “dumped” by McKenna because “the former Rove people were critical of McKenna’s decision-making”, despite his aforementioned extensive live talk show experience from the black & white era. The story also said they were dumped because they “had trouble adapting to the more family-friendly comedy content of The Bounce compared to Rove and The White Room”. So presumably by “family-friendly” they meant “funny”.
Anyway, in the second story – on April 4 – writer Jason Marion responded, saying the writers had quit because their position on the show had become untenable after Miller was “driven out” by management. It seems that they had “no confidence” in new boss and “close friend” of McKenna, Pip Mushin and so left in dribs and drabs over the next few days. Interestingly, Marion says “we all worked really well with Pete” – just not so well that they felt they could stick around to continue working “really well” with Helliar once Miller left.
These aren’t set designers or camera operators: these are the people who write – wrote – Helliar’s jokes for him. Just how much input or control does he have over what goes to air when his writing staff walk out on the show (according to the Herald-Sun, “Seven spokeswoman Susan Wood confirmed no staff had been sacked”) while he stays behind? How much did they bring to his on-air persona? Did he ask any of them to stay?
Behind those questions lies the real answer to why Helliar was hired for this gig in the first place. As far as the bigwigs at Seven are concerned, it doesn’t matter that Helliar’s stunk up the place with every high-profile hosting gig he’s ever had: like everyone else without the title “executive producer” in front of their name, he’s just a very small cog in a very big machine.
As far as they’re concerned, Helliar brings nothing to the job apart from a bland, mildly likable, vaguely footy-related persona. Whatever went wrong in the past doesn’t matter, because everything else is provided by the boys in the backroom. If they get it wrong one week there’ll be a new team out the back the next. And the next. Until they get it right. Footy is a team sport after all, and while Seven has proven time and time and time again over the last decade that they don’t know shit about comedy, they do seem to know a little bit about footy. It’s the one with the oval ball, right?
The wonderful world of Australian comedy online – Part 2
Since I last blogged on the topic of Australian comedy podcasts I’ve subscribed to every single one I could find, in total around 25. The majority have a “sitting around having a chat” format, and almost all of them shit. Listening to these shows is a bit like having no choice but to overhear an increasingly obnoxious pub conversation in which a small group of blokes in their early 20s are loudly making each other laugh with their stupid, and not really that jokey, views on politics, society, sex and women. If you’re part of the group it’s probably funny, but to everyone else it sounds like what the adolescent Eddie McGuire would sound like if he was putting together a podcast with some mates from uni. Except 15 times worse.
Not that the one or two podcasts I found in which a couple of women yammer on are any better, in fact they’re just as bad, as is the one podcast featuring anyone openly gay (Josh Thomas & Friend, as covered several times on this blog). Sure, there’s less sexism, racism and homophobia in these shows, but being from a historically downtrodden sector of society doesn’t help much if you’re as unentertaining as everyone else.
The key problem with chat-based podcasts is that those involved think that all you need to do is sit in front of a microphone and talk, and if any of your colleagues have laughed at what anyone’s said at any point, that you’ve produced a comedy. Fair enough if you’re just recording something to share with a few friends, but if you’re making the show public and hoping strangers will subscribe, you need to step up. Considering whether anyone other than one or two of your mates would sit through more than an hour of you crapping on would be the first thing to do. Finding someone to be on your show who is capable of making strangers laugh would be another.
The shows that get this even slightly right are few and far between (as well as a blessed relief for anyone who’s volunteered to listen to them), and so I might as well name the best ones here:
Nonstopical: In 2006 and 2007 comedians Andrew McClelland, Courtney Hocking and Lawrence Leung made 25 shows in which they had a natter about matters topical. Their chats are punctuated by short scripted elements, and there’s a ropey How Green Was My Cactus-esque serial at the end of each episode for, well, the hell of it, presumably. Despite the (relative) age of the shows, the majority are still available. Whilst not brilliant, they’re funny and interesting enough to keep you listening, and if you enjoyed Lawrence Leung’s series Choose Your Own Adventure, it’s fun to hear what he did beforehand.
Chris and Maxie Fight Global Depression: Last year Chris Leben and his friend Maxie made three podcasts in which they chatted about life, love and lots more. Again, it’s not hugely hilarious, but the show’s got an unpredictable energy to it (often a good sign in a comedy) and the pair are witty and entertaining enough to suggest they have some kind of future in comedy. Maybe.
The Vinyl Lounge: Those of you with keen memories might recall this story on Media Watch a few years back concerning Net FM’s show The Vinyl Lounge. The first extract from the show quoted in the Media Watch story happened to be in one of the first podcasts of The Vinyl Lounge that I listened to. In the Media Watch transcript it seemed tasteless; in context I found it funny. On the surface The Vinyl Lounge team seemed like the sort of people whose work I wouldn’t enjoy: blokey blokes expressing their politically incorrect views. But while kinda extreme, they’re more Derek & Clive than Andrew Dice Clay, and if you don’t mind that kind of humour, you may be pleased to hear that their podcast features four years of highlights from their Net FM show – enough to keep you laughing, and possibly a little outraged, for ages.
Next time in “The wonderful world of Australian comedy online”: scripted podcasts (yes, there actually are some).
There’s nothing funny about Hey Dad..!
Go on, admit it: you’ve been making jokes about the Hey Dad..! sex abuse scandal – AKA the “Hey Dad Predator” or “the Hey Dad House of Horrors”, depending on which episode of A Current Affair you saw – ever since you first heard about it. Don’t look so scared: we’ve all been doing it. Even by Australian sitcom standards Hey Dad..! was such a bland, flavourless pile of remorseless unending crap that the juxtaposition of it with something as awful as child sexual abuse can’t help but get a nervous laugh. Hell, one of the main characters was called Nudge: this stuff writes itself.
Problem is, we all know that there’s nothing at all even remotely funny about child abuse. It’s a ghastly, appalling crime that rightly shocks and disgusts us all. So there’s really no other response for a right-thinking person to have than to applaud A Current Affair’s decision to once again highlight its horrors. Night after night. For an entire week. In lurid, lingering detail. Drawing the story out using every trick in the tabloid TV handbook. Making sure the victims signed exclusivity contracts to ensure they didn’t talk to anyone else. Hang on a second!
The question about all this that sticks in my mind isn’t “why, if A Current Affair is so concerned about the sexual abuse that may have happened on the set of Hey Dad..!, did they not only show cast members telling their stories together on-air – thus making any prosecution based on those stories much more difficult – but held off on handing over their evidence to police until after they’d ran the story on-air for over a week” – though that one does seem to come up a fair bit.
No, it’s “why did everyone from Hey Dad..! say that they were too afraid for their careers in Australian television to come forward even after years had passed, when everyone knows that the second Hey Dad..! finished their Australian television careers were well and truly over?” If the entire cast kept quiet in the hope that the sinister forces behind Hey Dad..! wouldn’t crush their careers, then the string of commercial and critical success enjoyed on-air by Julie McGregor (Betty), Christopher Trustwell (Nudge), Chris Mayer (Simon), Simone Buchanan (Debbie) and Sarah Monahan (Jenny) since Hey Dad..! is proof enough that they made the right choice in staying silent. Uh, maybe not.
In fact, looking at the amount of prime air-time Ben Oxenbould – AKA “the replacement Nudge” was given on ACA for his one actual story (he saw something once, he talked to executive producer Gary Reilly, who told him to keep quiet and that he should “consider this a lesson in professionalism”), you’d have to think coming forward would have been a massive boost to their profiles.
Well, at least abuse victim Monahan is getting something out of it now. The exact amount that ACA and Woman’s Day paid her for her story isn’t clear: rival current affairs show Today Tonight has claimed six figure sums were involved, while The Age reported that Sarah Monahan was paid $15,00 for an exclusivity contract with Woman’s Day, on top of a payment from ACA of $40,000.
Really, it doesn’t matter: the fact is that ACA paid someone to talk about their childhood sexual abuse. Isn’t there a law against profiting from sex crime? And if not, isn’t there a law against showing a clearly unsettled Oxenbould talking about how he’d gone onto ACA to help his abused cast-mates because he “felt that, as a man, they needed some male support”? Or that “this is a purge for me”? Or that what he’d seen had “destroyed his faith in humanity”. Which does explain why he could go onto make Comedy Inc with a clear conscience.
Yeah yeah, cheap shot. But why else did A Current Affair run the story non-stop in episode-filling length for over a week, if not to get people talking about it and yes, making jokes? What, you seriously thought they spent night after night on reports of child sexual abuse on Australia’s most wholesome family sitcom because they wanted to warn parents? Of what? Don’t let your kids appear on Australian sitcoms? Sorry, the television industry’s already cleared up that particular hotbed of sex crime all on its own.
[Though it is fun to think that the real reason we don’t make sitcoms anymore has nothing to do with economics or a lack of talent and everything to do with stamping out a wave of sex crime. Somehow, if you’re a fan of comedy, it’s a slightly less depressing explanation than “we just can’t be bothered”.]
With this story, ACA and Woman’s Day whipped up a perfect storm of moral outrage and rubber-necking curiosity. They want people to think up “Hey Dad… stop touching my arse” jokes – c’mon, you know they were making them around the office – but they’ll attack anyone for saying them out loud. Comedy is about telling the truth, about saying what we’re all thinking: these creepy, pandering shows are about pointing at something and saying “don’t even think it”.
[though speaking of pointing at things, here’s a quote from the Murdoch press about the latest round of abuse allegations: “One allegation is that stated Hughes would ask to be woken from a daily “nap” by a female crew member, only to be found in the nude on each occasion, his penis erect.”]
Still, it’s not all bad news. The memory of Hey Dad..! is now so completely tainted that… well, it’s just completely tainted. Which is really how it should be, because even by Australian standards it was total rubbish without merit or virtue. Apart from those “little fat kid” jokes they used to make on The Late Show, of course.
But don’t take my word for it; how’s this for a gripping episode (taken from the sleeve of The Best of Hey Dad..! volume 1 DVD): “Generation Scrap: Dad and Debbie just don’t seem to get along. Meanwhile, Betty has become addicted to an electric pencil sharpener”. Actually, that might be describing the deleted scenes. You know, with “the footage they couldn’t show on television”…
Never Can Say Goodbye
There’s been a slight twist in the open question of The 7pm Project‘s eventual fate – you seriously didn’t think it’d continue at 7pm with the ratings it’s been getting, did you? It seems that tonight’s footy-related bumping back to 11pm, while not the first time it’s happened, has people wondering if the show will make a permanent move to a later timeslot once Master Chef returns. After all, Master Chef is Ten’s biggest big gun: having a lead-in that people are avoiding like the plague would do a lot more harm than good.
We’ve mentioned on more than one occasion that the 7pm timeslot is pretty much the worst one possible for a show of this kind. Too early to do anything really funny, up against actual news shows on other channels – the list goes on. But if a shift to a late-night slot is on the cards (and a few official mentions of it as “The Project” suggest the 7pm part is up for grabs), someone might want to mention it to the people putting the show together. Rather than the comedy take on the news that was initially promised, these days The 7pm Project looks a lot more like a half-arsed version of ACA without the Hey Dad..! clips. “Australia’s got a gambling problem” said the promos for Monday night’s show; if the problem really is as serious as the serious music and serious faces make it out to be, what the hell is Dave Hughes doing anywhere near it?
[while on the subject of Hughes, in a recent interview in The Herald Sun Hughes modestly suggested “anyone who doesn’t think I’m funny, I think they just don’t get it”. What’s not to get? Whether it’s him talking about wanting to “kill” people who give him bad reviews or the fact that his idea of a fun afternoon is bidding up the price at a house auction when he has no intention of buying the place – and going on to complain on radio when he accidentally wins the auction, so better luck next time you serious bidders – Hughes is a charming and lovable fellow who’s a consistent source of quality laughs. Ahem]
If The 7pm Project were to go late night, it’d be a great opportunity to really crank it up comedy wise. Supposedly the Martin / Molloy radio show was originally pitched as an el cheapo late-night news comedy show (basically, the radio show with pictures), and Mick Molloy’s original idea for The Nation was something a lot similar. Pickering and the 7pm Posse aren’t Martin / Molloy funny, but outside the family-friendly timeslot and with the freedom that comes from being out of the spotlight there’s little doubt they could do a lot better than they’re doing now on the comedy front.
But as it stands, The 7pm Project is mostly just watered-down current affairs. No-one’s going to want to watch that after dark – hell, no-one wants to watch it now. Pushing the current version of the show (what is it now, mark 5?) into a late night slot is just a slightly less embarrassing way of saying goodbye. And while no-one’s going to be all that sad to see The 7pm Project go, if Ten is serious about it there’s still a chance to turn this lost opportunity into something actually worth a look. As usual, don’t hold your breath.
False Economies
ADbc is back on SBS, and can’t you just feel the excitement in the air? Ok, maybe not: as merely the latest in a long, long, long line of failed comedy panel shows, the return of ADbc means only one thing: SBS ordered an entire series before the show started airing, so after it was pulled the first time due to crap ratings they still had a bunch of episodes left over.
Let’s just contemplate that for a moment: ADbc rated so badly that SBS took it off air. This isn’t The White Room going down the gurgler on the top-rating network during prime time. On the lowest-rating network, in a relatively non-competitive timeslot, ADbc did so badly it was pulled with episodes still in the tank. There’s a message there somewhere, but as it’s the same message the networks have been ignoring for the last decade let’s spell it out one more time.
[At this point it’s only fair to point out that the show itself features a lot of solid work from very talented people. Comedy-wise it’s always seemed especially promising, with host Sam Pang quickly warming to the host’s job while Tony Martin semi-regular and always-funny appearances should have made it a must-see. So why wasn’t it?]
Comedy quiz shows are as boring as watching a turd dry. That’s their default setting. Without the best possible talent available, you will get a shithouse show. This isn’t wild conjecture, it’s a proven fact. Look at actual popular quiz shows – you know, the games shows on before the 6pm news. What do they feature? Massive prizes, loads of tension, fairly easy questions – when they’re not just guessing games – and guests kept as bland as possible so the home viewers can imagine themselves as the person they’re watching winning big.
Comedy quiz shows are the exact opposite: no prizes, no tension, usually obscure or esoteric questions, and guests doing their level best to impress us with their quirky personalities. They’re one step below panel shows, because on panel shows the guests often have to bring along funny stories of their own: on quiz shows all they have to do is answer questions and the hilarity will naturally flow. Or not. Mostly not. Mostly because, despite what TV executive seem to think, answering a question isn’t a natural form for any kind of hilarity more advanced than Mad Magazine’s “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions”.
It might be an odd idea to put forward in connection with free-to-air television, but comedy quiz shows – unless they feature the aforementioned best possible talent, talent you would pay real money to see live – represent just about the worse possible value for your entertainment dollar. They’re almost always amazingly cheap television – ADbc is seemingly filmed on a giant sheet of A4 paper – and unless the guests or the host supply really first-rate laughs there’s nothing at all else on offer.
Crap dramas or scripted comedies might feature cute cast members or interesting locations or dialogue that roughly approximates human conversation or a vague level of polish that indicates some kind of care. Comedy quiz shows do not. Without – yes, let’s say it again – the best possible talent involved (and in this country that means Shaun Micallef, with the Spicks & Specks team a distant second) you have nothing else at all to fall back on in a comedy quiz show. As ADbc proves yet again, a boring show no-one wants to watch is a boring show no-one wants to watch even if you got it at a bargain price.
And yet, how much more expensive would it be to film a sitcom or sketch show? People on C31 seem to manage it all the time and sure, most of their efforts are pretty rough. But it wouldn’t take much to polish the visuals – Frontline was mostly shot on home video and that was over a decade ago – and even a shoddy script wouldn’t be worse than the flailing and dead air you get when no-one can answer a quiz question. The networks have been trying to cut costs in local television product for the last decade by cutting out the writers and look how well that’s worked out. Maybe it’s time to try cutting some other part of the budget for once.
The Gervais Delusion
As part of my ongoing examination of Australian comedy online (see my last blog) I’ve been working my way through every Australian comedy podcast I can find. I’ll write more fully about more of them in the future, but one thing I’ve been struck by is how few of them contain scripted material.
I suppose that’s not much of a surprise, such is the dominance of the yammer-fest on radio and the panel show on TV that scripted comedy is getting rarer and rarer these days – meaning it inspires less imitators. Similarly, in the world of podcasting, the “small number of people having a chat” model is the one that dominates. Why? Probably because while a microphone/webcam, some software and a decent enough computer are within the budget of the average aspiring content producer, sitting down for ages and writing a sitcom or some sketches, and then spending hours and hours recording and editing it/them, isn’t something most people have the time, inclination or skills to do – it’s far easier to just hit record and have a chat. So, it was refreshing to see Josh Thomas ditch the chat-based format of his previous podcasts and upload a sketch he’d made on video last week.
”I haven’t heard a new or exciting idea on the radio in this country, ever” said Thomas in a recent interview, which covered his podcast, Josh Thomas & Friend, in a reasonable amount of detail. Thomas’ statement is pretty hard to disagree with, for it’s the failure of commercial radio stations to divert from their yammer-fest format and do something different – like produce sketches – that makes them so dull. But while I admire Thomas for making the effort to produce a sketch, with it, it seems, he’s swapped one exhausted style of comedy for another – that of Ricky Gervais.
As Thomas says in the same interview, he’s become obsessed with Gervais’ work recently, because he’s working on his own sitcom (part of the ABC’s STITCH initiative) and has been seeking inspiration. Thomas isn’t the first comedian in Australia, or indeed the rest of the world, to look to the highly successful Ricky Gervais for inspiration, and as such the Gervais style had become pretty tedious. If there’s anything worse than the humour of Gervais – stuffed as at is with jokes at the expense of the victim rather the perpetrator (or as my colleague 13 schoolyards described it in his last blog, “bullying”), jokes about women/gays/the disabled which are supposed to be ironic but in fact aren’t, naturalism that’s nothing of the sort, endless poorly-written lines performed tediously slowly and cringey moments which are supposed to be hilarious but actually just make you physically uncomfortable – it’s the humour of people trying to be him.
In Thomas’ sketch his friend Tom Ward has been taken on to help him market his Comedy Festival show. Thomas’ idea is for the pair to sit down and create some decoupage posters, hand-made things being hip in comedy right now (for which you can thank UK stand-up Josie Long, among others). Ward’s not very keen on the idea, but as the hired help has little choice but to do as Thomas wishes, and starts labouring away, cutting out parts of Thomas’ old promotional material to form the words “Josh is funny” in decoupage on a poster. Thomas, meanwhile, impatiently supervises, ripping up some of Ward’s work because it’s not good enough, and whiling away the time eating rose pannacotta, which he doesn’t share. Eventually he helps a bit, creating a decoupage penis poster, while Ward completes his work. The final scene shows Ward reluctantly wearing the “Josh is funny” poster in the street as a sandwich board, turning ’round at the end to reveal that he’s wearing Thomas’ penis poster on his back.
This isn’t full-on Gervais-style humour – it’s nowhere near as mean-spirited or cringe-making, indeed Thomas’ personality, and the fact that Ward’s laughing along at some of it, enables him to get away with some of his behaviour far more easily than the acerbic Gervais – but it does suffer from being a bit slow, as well as light on laughs. And the fact that the punchline of Ward turning around to reveal that he’s wearing the penis poster was given away several scenes beforehand is a big problem, as is the fact that most of the humour’s derived from Thomas bullying Ward, although, at least with the rose pannacotta, Thomas is made to look like a bit of a git.
So far Josh Thomas hasn’t shown himself to be the greatest comedian in the world, indeed he often comes across as dumb, self-centred and annoying – like a real life Chris Lilley character, in fact – but occasionally he shows some promise (check out his Twitter, every so often he’ll post a surprisingly sharp one-liner). However, adopting the style of Ricky Gervais isn’t going to help him – The Office may be considered a classic by many, but besides its many flaws, it’s been copied so often it’s rapidly getting boring. Thomas needs to combine his endearing innocence with his pithy sharpness, and ditch the Gervais-aping and the Chris Lilley-style self indulgence. If he does, who knows, he might start to be really funny.