Australian Tumbleweeds
Holding Up a Mirror to Multicultural Society
Despite generally avoiding Australian literature like it was a pub trivia night hosted by Peter Costello, recently I started reading Christos Tsiolkas’s novel The Slap. It’s one of the most highly praised Australian novels of recent times, it’s crossed over to have (relatively) wide mainstream success – and it’s total crap. It’s not crap because it’s badly written or because its characters fail to convince; it’s crap because the whole time I was reading it all I could think of was “this is what a book written by Chris Lilley would be like”.
If you’re reading this blog you have at least a passing interest in Australian comedy, and – avoiding the various “comedy?” jokes that leap to mind – you know the work of Chris Lilley. He’s one of the most highly praised Australian comedians of recent times, he’s crossed over to have wide mainstream success – and his shows are total crap. They’re not crap because they’re badly written or the characters fail to convince: they’re crap because the only thing Lilley wants his audience to do is think “that’s so true!”
For example: when you hear people talking about how “hilarious” We Can Be Heroes or Summer Heights High is, do they repeat actual jokes or funny lines, or do they say “I know someone just like [insert character name here]”? Chances are it’s the latter, because that’s pretty much the whole point of the show: to impress you with what a great and insightful actor Chris Lilley is. Otherwise he wouldn’t be playing every major character and saying every single supposedly funny line.
[There’s a whole ‘nother post in how Lilley’s supposedly sharply observed characters are just the same old clichéd comedy characters, only treated slightly more realistically – Ja’ime is Kyle Mole, the policeman in WCBH is David Brent, the rolling Mum is Kath and / or Kim, and so on. Suffice to say, we’re all waiting for his take on Col’n Carpenter.]
Unfortunately for those of us who like comedy to be funny, Lilley has been a massive success here and a moderate success worldwide. Feel free to cut some cheese to go with this whine: WHHYYYY? After all, he does the same jokes again and again (“offensive” musical numbers, anyone?) and seems to specialise in stale stereotypes such as the brainy Asian (Ricky Wong) and the camp drama teacher (Mr G). But while reading The Slap (remember? I mentioned it a billion years ago?) I realised something: if Lilley’s shows were funnier, they wouldn’t be anywhere near as successful.
The Slap, for those not in the know, is about a bunch of middle-class inner city Melbournites from varying ethnic backgrounds whose circle of friends falls apart when one of them slaps someone else’s bratty child at a barbeque. It’s not exactly narrative driven: each chapter is basically a character study, with the slap and its repercussions ticking over in the background. So the appeal seems to be that Tsiolkas is painting a picture of various character types that the reader will recognise. In short: “that’s so true!”
Whether Tsiolkas is successful or not is up to others: personally, I found his plotting (one of the things I value most in a novel) to be so arse I just couldn’t get past it. For example, an early chapter has a single woman a): throwing up in the morning, b): having unprotected sex with her much younger boyfriend, then c): we got the shock revelation that SHE’S PREGNANT. Even a trashy Hollywood blockbuster would get laughed out of the cinema for trying that – not win the 2009 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Book of the Year.
Then in the same chapter the woman calls up her (sensible) friend to have lunch, knowing that said (sensible) friend will invite their mutual (but sentimental) friend along. As the woman wants to discuss having an abortion, she knows the sentimental friend will block any rational discussion, yet when the sensible friend – not knowing it’s an abortion talk – says “I’ll invite sentiment-girl” the woman’s reaction is “she didn’t know why she didn’t say no”. I know why she didn’t say no: because Tsiolkas couldn’t be arsed going back and coming up with a reason, despite it being totally out of character.
But you see, none of that matters so long as people can go “that’s so true!”. As a novel The Slap has massive flaws that in other genres would be greeted with cries of FAIL, but as a serious character study… well, in real life people do things all the time without knowing exactly why, right? If it was slickly plotted and packed with hilarious one-liners and surprising developments it wouldn’t seem as true-to-life, would it?
And so we return to Lilley. His shows work for a lot of people because those people seem to think every time he puts on a dress and says something bitchy that “that’s so true”. Lilley’s shows “work” because – just like The Slap – they’re supposedly holding up a mirror to the reality of Australia’s multicultural society. If they were more polished, if they were funnier or better plotted or more satisfying, they’d be less like real life. Real life is full of crap not-quite-jokes and embarrassing pauses and unconvincing dialogue and so on. Just like Summer Heights High.
Call me old-fashioned: I like my comedy to be funny and my novels to have a story and I honestly don’t see why a work can’t be “realistic” and still have those things. But clearly I’m in a tiny minority: for a lot of people out there – the people who just want to laugh at brainy Asians and violent Islanders all over again, and the people who think that the occasional dramatic moment makes a comedy cliché somehow realistic – this kind of crap deserves all the praise it can get. Because nothing’s more entertaining than looking in a mirror.
And the Living Shall Envy the Dead (yet again)
From Variety:
CBS is developing a new daytime talkshow starring Valerie Bertinelli and Australian TV host Rove McManus.
Rarely has news so expected managed to strike such a chill down the spine. But there’s no worse fear than fear of the unknown, so lets arm ourselves with knowledge:
“Say It Now,” hosted by Bertinelli and McManus, is being developed through sister syndicator CBS TV Distribution. Show reps the latest of the Eye’s pilots serving in a sort of bakeoff, as CBS looks to fill the void left by the soon-to-exit sudser “As the World Turns.”
Which, for those not tuned into Variety-speak, means that Rove’s pilot – though the article itself makes it very clear that he’s playing the sidekick here – is just one of a bunch of possible replacements US network CBS is looking for to replace a recently axed daytime soapie. And those other shows are…
CBS hopes to pick its “As the World Turns” replacement by July. In the running are a new version of “Pyramid,” hosted by Andy Richter; a mother-themed talkshow hosted by CBS’ Julie Chen, Sara Gilbert, Sharon Osbourne and Holly Robinson-Peete; and a food-centric gameshow starring Emeril Lagasse.
All of which sound at least as likely to get the job, so let’s not get too carried away just yet.
But either way, what tha? We had ten years of press telling us that Rove was secretly some kind of “dark” comedian, a man super-tuned into the world of comedy yet trapped in a talk-show straight-jacket (we really should post some excerpts from that The (Melbourne) Magazine article on Rove – they’d be even more hilarious now), and now it’s revealed that the one thing he really wanted in all the world was to co-host a daytime talk show in the US? Fingers crossed he does succeed – and takes Dave Hughes with him…
Four Lions, Five Wimps
British comedy legend Chris Morris was at the Sydney Film Festival last weekend attending the Australian premiere of his film Four Lions, a comedy about suicide bombers. And as part of the festival he was interviewed in front of an audience by The Chaser’s Julian Morrow.
There has been a bit of coverage about the great meeting between Morris and The Chaser at the pre-screening party given by Time Out, such as Mumbrella’s piece describing Morris as The Chaser’s “spiritual father”, and noting that Morrow “pounced the moment Morris walked into the Time Out party, and barely left his side until it was time to go and see the movie”.
An interview with Morris by The Doctor on Triple J also suggested some kind of love-in was in progress, with Morris saying that he’d been boning up on The Chaser and had become a fan.
But if you think the idea of Chris Morris liking The Chaser is weird (their best stuff is good, but hardly reaches Morris’ heights) don’t worry, he’s a discerning fan. In a video interview with The Sydney Morning Herald, Morris said “I’d like to ask [Morrow] why he apologised for the Make A Realistic Wish sketch. I wouldn’t apologise for that”, before grinning broadly.
Morrow’s response was less jokey: “Compared to Chris Morris [who made a show about paedophilia] we are soft cocks, and that probably includes the fact that we apologised…I hate him for saying that, but he’s got a point.”
At last! An admission from The Chaser that they were wrong to apologise after almost a year of cow-towing and we-got-it-wrong-ing. As we’ve been arguing on this blog from day one, the Make A Realistic Wish sketch was a joke, and not a bad one at that. Certainly nothing to apologise for.
So, let’s hope comedians all over the land take a lesson from the man who’s influenced so many of them. It’s very possible indeed to keep your career after a major media backlash against your latest comedy show – even if your jokes involve children.
Down Down, Deeper and Down
TV ratings for Wednesday June 9th, as taken from Throng:
Hey Hey falls below a million
Which you’d think would be good news – people seem to be figuring out that not only is Hey Hey it’s Saturday the exact same show week in week out, but it’s also the exact same show that was axed eight years ago – but seriously: almost a million people are still watching Hey Hey after two whole months. They’re probably still slamming their fingers in the car door wondering why it hurts too.
Of course, “watching” simply means the television is on, and it hardly seems possible that even the most devoted fan could watch an entire two hour episode of Hey Hey then return a week later to watch another two hours of Hey Hey. That’s why so many of the show’s fans wanted / still want it moved to Saturday nights: this is a show so lacking in viewing calories even its fans want it shifted to a night where it can better serve as nothing more than background viewing for people getting ready to go do something more fun. Like slamming their fingers in a car door.
Keep that in mind the next time someone says Hey Hey needs to go back to Saturdays (and with the ratings falling below the magic million mark, a timeslot shift or outright dumping would seem on the cards) – they’re actively calling for the show to be shunted to a timeslot where less people will watch it, and less of those people will be paying attention to it. And why stop there? Using that logic Hey Hey would work even better going out at 3am on a Monday morning. To one television set. Locked in the boot of a car at the bottom of a river. With a fan’s hand still trapped in the door.
The Best Australian Comedy of the Last Eight Years Has a Problem
Back in 2002 Shaun Micallef made a sitcom called Welcher & Welcher. And it’s hilarious. So why is it only now coming out on DVD with no fanfare whatsoever? Why isn’t it hailed as the comedy classic that it is instead of a minor footnote in the career of an increasingly popular game show host? What, in short, the fuck went wrong?
Rewatching the series now, there’s a shitload going on in Welcher & Welcher that is – there’s seriously no other word for it – astonishing. People who claim that Chris Lilley’s efforts are the pinnacle of scripted comedy in this country should be forced to watch an episode of this simply so they can be reminded that you can do more with comedy than just make bitchy comments and sing “offensive” parody songs.
For example, Welcher & Welcher has visual jokes. When there’s a car crash, a VW Beetle is left slowly spinning on its roof. When Micallef and Francis Greenslade both stand on a wheelie bin to peer in a window (and therefore see one of the strangest sights shown on Australian television, as acknowledged by Micallef’s perfect double-take), they break the lid and end up wedged in the bin face-to-face. They’re throw-away gags – but what other Australian sitcom would even try to make people laugh with an image?
There are so many classic moments in this series that it’s hard to believe they all fit into just eight episodes. Micallef eating a boot in the ABC canteen. Robyn Butler’s sweatshop dress falling apart on stage. Greenslade lurching around the office wearing a Frankenstein mask. Guest star Tony Martin running a porn store. What other sitcom would fill in a minute when its running time came up short with an impromptu but note-perfect rendition of “When I’m Cleaning Windows”? The best damn sitcom in the land, that’s what.
And yet, the big problem with Welcher & Welcher is that it’s a sitcom. That’s because all those tools who claim that “Australia can’t make a funny sitcom” – ignoring everything from Frontline to The Games to Kath & Kim to yes, Welcher & Welcher – do have a point… just not the one they thought they were making.
Since Frontline, all the decent Australian scripted comedies have been, if not out-and-out mockumentaries, at the very least filmed like gritty low budget dramas. Frontline: hand-held camerawork for the behind-the-scenes stuff. The Games: mockumentary. Kath & Kim: started out as a mockumentary. Chris Lilley’s shows: mockumentaries. For fifteen years now, Australian audiences have been trained to expect scripted comedies will be filmed with hand-held cameras and characters wandering in and out of frame at will while speaking supposedly naturalistic dialogue.
Welcher & Welcher though, is a sitcom. It’s largely filmed on a set, the dialogue isn’t remotely naturalistic – it has jokes! Lots of them! One after the other! – and the characters pause after their lines to allow space for laughs. That last one makes it especially odd to watch if you’re not used to it: a laugh track would have been a big help in establishing a viewing rhythm, but laugh tracks were too far out of style for even Micallef to add one. And the show features too much location footage (which may have been filmed before or after the studio sequences) to presumably make filming in front of a live audience possible.
As a result, watching it is a slightly jarring experience. Dialogue doesn’t flow like you expect it to: Micallef says something funny, then there’s a tiny pause before things go on. If you’re not used to it – or can’t see your way past it – it’s just distracting enough to drain the life out of the show. To be honest, it took me a second viewing before I really got the hang of things. But once I did I never looked back. Welcher & Welcher has been shamefully neglected for far, far too long: in the seven-odd years since it went to air no-one in this country has made a funnier show.
Non-brevity is the arsehole of wit
Australian TV’s not exactly crying out for more panel shows, but the recently launched Santo, Sam and Ed’s Cup Fever is a welcome addition to the schedules. It’s a fun mix of chat, sketches and enjoyably bad jokes (only Santo Cilauro could sell a gag as bad as “Diego Maradonut”), which even a non soccer fan like myself can enjoy. And at less than half an hour per episode, it’s the exact right length.
Length is something Australian broadcasters always seem to misjudge when it comes to panel shows. Probably because they’re so focused on how cheap panel show are to make – and how much more money could be saved if they made ones with really long episodes. Perhaps this is why you get a show like Good News Week, which is based on a 30 minute show (the British satirical news quiz Have I Got News For You), and started out on the ABC in 1996 as a 30 minute show, gradually evolving into the bloated mess that it is today. For when it comes to Good News Week, quantity, not quality, has always been the focus of the people behind it.
Good News Week started to get popular in 1997. This led to a rash of spin-offs, starting with the hour-long Good News Weekend (1998), which was the same show, but with pop culture-focused questions. When the Good News Week moved to Channel 10 in 1999, the show’s length was increased by a third to fill a 1 hour timeslot. The following year it was extended again, to fill a 90 minute timeslot. At the same time, the team were making the 90 minute long GNW Nite Lite (similar in format to Good News Weekend), which would air on Thursdays, while Good News Week aired on Sundays. There’d also be occasional the debate involving the Good News Week cast, which would air as a special. To say that there was too much Good News Week on, and that everyone was suffering, was an understatement, and Channel 10 mercifully axed the series at the end of 2000.
In the current incarnation of Good News Week, those involved seemed to have learnt their lesson as far as over-stretching themselves with spin-offs goes, but the 90 minute timeslot remains. This is a huge mistake for a show that wasn’t really never that funny when it ran for just 30 minutes. Good News Week has never had the wit and bite of the British original, and derives most of its humour from sub-par panellists making crap jokes about news stories rather than actually satirising them. Thus, it’s worthless as both a topical satire and a comedy quiz, and this is compounded by the over-long timeslot, where the show is padded out with gags which shouldn’t make the edit, rounds which last about 5 minutes longer than necessary, and barely-relevant musical interludes.
Increasingly, Good News Week seems to be evolving again, from over-extended topical news quiz into a mash-up of the original concept and it’s variety-style 90’s spin-offs. The show has lost its original focus (which was a good concept, at least) and become yet another show which can take people who have something to plug. If it goes on for much longer it’ll evolve into the try-hard hipster cousin of Hey Hey It’s Saturday. Claire Hooper’s certainly got the air-head co-host role covered.
Going out on a meh
Lowdown has now finished and while it wasn’t an amazingly great show by any stretch of the imagination it has been the Australian comedy TV highlight of the year so far. Why? Because unlike anything else on offer – panel shows, dramedies, Hey Hey It’s Saturday – it was a reasonably well-written show with some decent laughs in it. And with dramedies and panel/variety shows the dominant formats in entertainment right now, a scripted show which gets laughs is something to be happy about. So, what the hell was going on with that final scene?
Having delivered the lucky scoop of their lives Alex and Bob return to Melbourne to find the Sunday Sun has closed down anyway. Cue the final scene where the pair walk off down Flinders Street carrying boxes of their belongings.
This kind of ending would be fine, or at least acceptable, if Lowdown had been a dramedy, but it wasn’t – it was sitcom. And if you’re making a sitcom (or any type of comedy), isn’t your primary aim to get laughs? So, shouldn’t you be ending on a gag, rather than a moment which is trying to be, well, my best guess is poignant, but as it failed to be that, who actually knows?
I’m all for comedy writers experimenting with the form and trying to take it into new areas, but when the vast majority of the recent experiments into drama have resulted in comedy which is less funny and less interesting, isn’t it time to declare these experiments worthy, but failed?
The job of a comedy writer is to be funny. If you don’t want to be funny, go write for a drama. And take that box of belongings with you!
The Operation Was A Success, But The Patient Died
From Throng.com:
The 7PM Project is to be commissioned for another year, further demonstrating Ten’s support for the program, which many had written off when ratings fell after just a few weeks on air in 2009. Even early this year, and into the ratings period from February the show failed to attract the ratings it has been achieving now.
The 7PM Project has seen a recent surge in ratings, surpassing the 1 million mark and winning its timeslot over Home and Away on Seven and Two and a Half Men on Nine last Thursday.
Ten’s director of programming David Mott said the network was extremely pleased with the present success of the show.
“I’m so proud of this show after we took a huge risk and everyone wrote it off at the beginning.
“But we tweaked it, gave it a more newsy edge and Charlie’s old look was a victim of that process. The old look wasn’t right and the new one is. We’re very, very happy at how Project is coming along,” he added.
The improvement has been attributed to the team’s recent image and wardrobe overhauls. Presenters Carrie Bickmore, Charlie Pickering and Dave Hughes were all made to look more like news readers.
July 20, 2009 was when the show premiered on Ten, after the conclusion of the first series of Masterchef.
Yes, you read right. But let’s repeat that just to confirm:
The improvement has been attributed to the team’s recent image and wardrobe overhauls. Presenters Carrie Bickmore, Charlie Pickering and Dave Hughes were all made to look more like news readers.
Because no-one would ever in their right mind tune in for the 7pm Project‘s actual content. Which, although it wasn’t mentioned, has also tidied itself up by dumping the “comedy news” angle in favour of running a lot of Today Tonight scare stories about race and diet fads. And let’s not forget this:
The old look wasn’t right and the new one is
Why not just hire Ray Martin? He’s got a better “look” for current affairs than Pickering, after all. That said, my fist with a mouth drawn on it is a more credible newsreader than Dave Hughes, so there’s still room for improvement there.
This announcement is hardly cause for back-slapping over at Ten. All this really means is that the original, “failed” 7pm Project was axed a few months back and replaced immediately by a show with the same name and hosts but a totally different engine under the hood. An engine, let’s not forget for a single second, that is only firing now because the ratings juggernaut that is Master Chef takes off the split-second it finishes, dragging it along in its’ wake.
The real question is, if a crap quasi-current affairs show hosted by a collection of B-listers can have so much time and money and commitment thrown behind it even after months of rating failure, why is it that every Aussie comedy series that comes along gets the boot the second it shows the slightest sign of not being a massive runaway hit?
Darkness falls across the land…
Look everyone! A press release from Channel Seven!
Channel Seven today announced Tim Ross will make his solo television hosting debut on the new comedy series, Australia Versus.
Australia Versus sees national pride at stake with our leading comedians taking on their international counterparts to prove that Australia is the best country in the world bar none.
England, Ireland and the United States are in the firing line as Australia fights for global supremacy in anything from sport to movies, food to music, and who’s sexiest!
In each episode, it’s a fun battle of wits as the featured comedians patriotically argue and sledge their way through a series of subject rounds, while contemporary and historical archive clips back up their arguments.
An independent international judging panel determines a winner of each round and the overall winning country is announced at the end of the episode.
The roll call of comedians includes Peter Helliar, Rebel Wilson, Anh Do, Fiona O’Loughlin, Corinne Grant, Peter Berner, Julia Morris, Heath Franklin, Dave Thornton, Greig Pickhaver and newcomer Joel Creasey for Australia , while the likes of Hale & Pace, Pauly Shore , John Moloney, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Des Bishop represent the internationals.
“I’m very excited about Australia Versus and I’m very proud to be hosting this show which features some very, very funny comedians,” Ross said today. “Obviously I see this as the first of many projects at Seven and expect to be co-hosting the Australian Open in 2011.”
Australia Versus – hosted by Tim Ross – is coming soon.
Because I know when I cast my eye across the TV schedules, the glaring omission that leaps out at me is the lack of a regular series of those crap GNW debates from the late 1990s. At least the title will provide headline writers with plenty of options when / if it follows every other Seven comedy project this century down the Dick Ritter. “Australia Versus Disinterest”; “Australia Versus Boredom” ; “Australia Versus the execs at Seven that greenlit this doomed pile of re-heated turds”. Yeah, let’s go with that one.
Seriously though, wouldn’t it be nice to occasionally see the announcement of an Australian comedy series that sounded like it was actively trying to be more than just pointless background noise?
The Wonderful World of Australian Comedy Online Part 4: Sketch comedy
In yet another indication that the future of entertainment is online, a recent-ish episode of the Mediaweek podcast revealed that Andrew Denton’s production company Zapruder’s Other Films has employed nine members of the Hungry Beast team to work on “online projects”. What exactly these projects are was not revealed; it’s also not terribly clear at this stage what types of entertainment will work best in an online context.
Sites like YouTube or Funny or Die?, probably the most popular portals for online comedy, suggest that online audiences prefer comedy videos to be short, making sketches or short series an ideal format, but this may well be as much a reflection on the state of technology as it is on how long people are prepared to sit watching something on a small computer monitor whilst sitting in a hard computer chair (as opposed to watching something on a giant plasma screen whilst sitting on a comfy sofa). And with computers and TV merging, 3D TV and touch screen monitors on the way, mobile devices getting better and better, and broadband getting faster and faster, the future of film and video delivery is far from certain. Either way, with companies like Zapruder’s Other Films making serious investments in the medium, the race to make it profitable in Australia seems to have stepped up a gear.
But, of course, all we’re really worried about here is whether online comedy’s any good or not, so my quest to find something decent continues. My first stop for sketch comedy was the website of 2007 Australian Tumbleweeds Worst Newcomer winners Ministry of Truth, a Brisbane-based “media collective” who’d contributed some sketches to jTV, but alas, they seem to have disbanded. Their website – http://www.ministryoftruth.tv/ – which enabled anyone to sign up and submit their own videos, Hungry Beast style, although without the $1000 prize, no longer exists, but if you’re curious about what they produced their YouTube channel lives on. The channel contains a number of professional-ish looking videos, of variable quality, ranging from student-level sketches, to quirky short films, to a not-that-interesting interview with Barnaby Joyce, to sub-Hungry Beast satire. Indeed the more I re-acquainted myself with Ministry of Truth, the more I wondered if it was an inspiration for Hungry Beast – the concept (and the results) were certainly similar.
My next stop was Funny or Die? I found several hours worth of comedy sketches made by Australians, but unfortunately absolutely every single one of them was so utterly shithouse that my right index finger developed RSI from hitting the Die button over and over again. Whichever of our readers suggested the Americans do it better online got it dead right, at least as far as Funny or Die? goes.
Feeling quite disheartened at this point, I decided to skip YouTube and instead check out a couple of links I’d seen posted on a forum. The first was the website of Melbourne-based sketch comedy group The Consumption, whose shows feature a mix of live and pre-recorded sketches. When you consider the recent history of TV sketch comedy in this country, it’s a wonder anyone’s still bothering, so The Consumption get points for trying, but production values aside, I didn’t enjoy their output much. The main problem with their work is that many of their sketches don’t contain many ideas. Often a single idea or gag will be stretched out for a minute or more, while some of their sketches make the mistake of prioritising weird over funny – the latter may appeal to a certain audience, but not one looking for laughs. The best sketch on The Consumption’s site is PAC: Creativity, which features a cameo appearance from Tony Martin. What’s good about this sketch isn’t Tony Martin’s cameo, more the fact that it contains a couple of funny, clever lines which he delivers really well.
A better site for sketch comedy is that of Touched by an Angle Grinder. Consisting of Greta Harrison, Matthew C. Vaughan and Troy Nankervis, Touched by an Angle Grinder is another collective of emerging artists. Most notable amongst their output is Free Internet, a short series in which Greta’s grandfather “Pops” tells viewers all about the wonders of the internet. The concept of juxtaposing the elderly with modern phenomena is a well worn way to generate laughs, but the twist in this case is that instead of laughing at an ignorant old man, we’re laughing at the internet. Social networking, LOLZ humour, internet entrepreneurs and lots of other stuff with little relation to the internet cop a serve. It’s kind of like watching early footage of Graham Kennedy, as he’s working out how to de construct the key components of television presentation and put them back together again with devastatingly funny effect. It’s exactly the kind of online comedy that should be making it to TV instead of a new series of Beached Az.