Australian Tumbleweeds
Australian Tumbleweeds 2009: Category nominations
Each year we ask for your input on the categories for the next Australian Tumbleweeds. Below is the list of last year’s categories. Tell us what you think should stay, go or be added. You can leave your comments or suggestions until 6th November 2009.
LAST YEAR’S CATEGORIES
WORST NEWCOMER
WORST NEW COMEDY
WORST ACTOR
WORST ACTRESS
WORST ENTERTAINMENT PERSONALITY
WORST ENTERTAINMENT PROGRAMME
WORST SITCOM
WORST STAND-UP
WORST GAME OR PANEL SHOW
WORST FILM
WORST SKETCH SHOW
WORST OVERALL COMEDY
WORST OVERALL CHANNEL / NETWORK FOR COMEDY
WORST RADIO COMEDY
WORST RADIO PERSONALITY
WORST PODCAST OR CD
WORST BOOK OR ITEM OF SPIN-OFF MERCHANDISE
WORST DVD
WORST EXPORT
MOST USELESS PANEL / TALKSHOW GUEST
THE ROBERT FIDGEON MEMORIAL AWARD FOR WORST CRITIC
MOST OVER-RATED COMEDY
MOST UNNECESSARILY OVER-EXPOSED COMEDIAN(S)
LEAST HOPED-FOR RETURN
MOST DISAPPOINTING COMEDY
MOST DISAPPOINTING COMEDIAN
THE ‘PISSING ON THEIR LEGACY’ AWARD
MOST IRRITATING OR POINTLESS CAMEO
MOST BLATANT PLAGIARISM
THE ‘MORE EFFORT INTO THEIR HAIRSTYLES THAN THEIR COMEDY’ AWARD
THE LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD FOR CRAP COMEDY
BEST NEW COMEDY
BEST COMEDY
Why We Fight
With a call for nominations for the 2009 Australian Tumbleweed Awards set to go out any day now – remember, Daryl Somers can’t win every award – it’s probably a good time as any to explain exactly why we bother putting together an awards designed almost entirely to slag off bad television. “If you don’t like it, don’t watch it,” the cry goes out from far and near, completely missing the point as per usual. So let’s spell it out:
We like Australian comedy. We also like comedy from other countries and a whole lot of things that aren’t comedy at all, but as far as this blog is concerned, we really like Australian comedy. And guess what? We’d like to see more good Australian comedy out there. Not only that, but we think that there are a lot of people who are actually pretty good at making good Australian comedy who – given the chance – would be out there making more of it for us to enjoy. But it’s those three little words – “given the chance” – that are the rub.
You see, despite what a lot of “if you don’t like it, don’t watch it” types would have you believe, television is not a rising tide that lifts all boats equally. If you don’t watch a bad Australian comedy show, it doesn’t go away to be replaced by a good one: Australian comedy as a whole goes away. You don’t even have to think back that far to know it’s true – check the TV listings for 2005 – and for those that claim “yeah, well, it goes in cycles”, you’re wrong. Or at least, you’re wrong if you think those cycles exist outside of the quality of the shows made in this country, because Australian television is simply too small to keep open dedicated slots for Australian comedy. If we get a run of shitty Australian comedy shows – as we did in the early 2000’s – then after that we get no Australian comedy at all. Until Chris Lilley comes along, which is saying the same thing.
“But that’s not happening now,” we occasionally hear. “At the moment, Australian comedy is looking pretty healthy. When good shows are on, why are you focusing mostly on the bad?” And our answer is always the same: because Australian television is a zero-sum game. There is only so much viewing time to go around – if Nine is showing a repeat of CSI on Tuesdays at 9.30pm, they can’t also be showing a variety show hosted by Wil Anderson at the same time (thank God). They can’t be showing it on Go! Either, because there’s a Seinfeld repeat on (and aren’t we all grateful for that).
Let’s say it again: if the networks are showing shit Aussie comedy that doesn’t rate and they axe it, they don’t replace it with another Aussie comedy – they go with something else that’ll rate better. Which means that it’s in everyone’s best interests for them to, on the rare occasions when they decide to put on an Aussie comedy, put on one that’s actually good.
Remember Double Take? Its’ failure has pretty much killed the idea of a sketch comedy show screening on a commercial network in this country into the foreseeable future. We can’t blame people for not watching it, because it was crap. But we can blame Seven for putting together a show featuring proven losers, and we can blame those proven losers for not being funny enough to deserve the chance they were given because honestly – anyone who’s watched any TV comedy made in this country over the last few years could have come up with a better line-up for a commercial sketch show than the one featured on Double Take.
There’s just that much talent out there that doesn’t get a shot – and now won’t, because Double Take closed that door and welded it shut behind them. That’s part of why we hate: in the hope that, by recognising past failures, those same mistakes won’t be repeated in the future.
“But who cares about what the commercial networks do,” we sometimes hear, “the ABC is the natural home of Australian comedy and they keep on giving new guys a shot.” Really? Which new guys would this be? This year the only new guy getting a shot was Chaser writer Laurence Leung, and that was in part because The Chaser was doing a shorter run. Otherwise it’s been Andrew Denton (Hungry Beast, The Gruen Transfer, also starring ABC fave Wil Anderson), Gristmill (The Librarians), John Safran (Race Relations), The Chaser (The Chaser’s War on Everything) and Spicks & Specks. And next year (maybe), Chris Lilley. Again.
To be fair, some of those shows were / are very funny. But no-one on that list is on their first or even second go on television. And when the commercial networks stop being interested in Australian comedy because they’ve put on crap that doesn’t rate, the talent that gets a start at the ABC has nowhere to go and so sticks around. And that’s another part of why we hate: when there’s no natural progression in the system, it’s even more important to recognise the dead wood and urge for its removal. Surely Wil Anderson’s time must be about up?
“But it’s not as if anyone with any power cares about what you have to say” we hear once in a while. And they’re right (though we have had the occasional message from Tumblie winners, so someone’s reading it). But sometimes it just feels really, really good to slag off the crap that everyone else is praising to the heavens. And with Daryl Somers coming back in 2010, we’re going to need all the practice we can get.
So easy: RIP Don Lane
A couple of years ago I spotted five of those Golden Channel Nine Comedy DVDs going cheap – Golden TV Week Logie Moments, Channel Nine Salutes Bert Newton, Graham Kennedy: The King of Television, The Best of the Paul Hogan Show and The Best of the Don Lane Show – and snapped them up. The latter was a particular bargain at $3, but unlike the other discs, which I watched quickly, The Best of the Don Lane Show sat on my coffee table for months and months, unplayed. Maybe it’s because to my generation Don Lane was a guy who’d clearly been famous once, but for what we weren’t sure. His appearance on The Late Show was fun, and he presented American football on the ABC and turned up in the odd special, but that was it: he was just some old has-been in embarrassing trousers. So why am I about to launch into a heartfelt tribute to the Lanky Yank? Because, to paraphrase his theme song, he made it so easy.
If there’s one thing about Don Lane that came across on that Best of… DVD it was the ease with which he entertained. His relaxed, smooth style enabled him to present live TV, interview guests, perform song and dance numbers, chat to the audience, do stand-up comedy, and plenty of other things besides – the last ever Don Lane Show (an extra on the DVD) saw him juggle a ball, do a routine with his labrador Shadow and conduct an interview with last-minute surprise guest David Bowie, whom he’d never met. Plenty of people have done some, all or more of these things, but few have been as cool – and as skilled – as Don Lane.
Lane was an old-school, all-round entertainer who’d honed his skills through more than a decade on the tough US club circuit, and several years presenting The Tonight Show in Sydney. He could crack wise and cope when things went wrong, charm a difficult guest or put a nervous member of the public at ease. In many of the tributes to Lane over the past couple of days, his friends and fellow stars have noted that he was a generous performer, not caring who got the laugh, as long as someone did. A well-known example is the famous footage of a live link-up between Lane’s Tonight Show and Graham Kennedy’s In Melbourne Tonight. During a song Kennedy held up a sign saying “GO HOME YANK”, causing Lane – and everyone else – to convulse with laughter.
What makes Lane interesting in this day and age is that his style of performance bore all the hallmarks of an era now passed, and key to it was experience and good judgement. Sure, Lane mucked around when he could, and the barrel segments with Bert Newton were almost unprofessionally shambolic, but he knew the craft he loved so well that he could get away with breaking the rules. There’s a received wisdom that a host, particularly one who’s the highest-paid entertainer in the country (as Lane was at one time), is as much a star as anyone they have on their show. But when Robin Williams came onto the Don Lane Show for his first ever chat show appearance, wearing roller skates and bursting into the surreal improv he became known for, Lane sat back and enjoyed it, even walking off set to give Williams the spotlight when he started to roll about the place and play with the props.
Deflecting attention away from himself and onto the guest was something Lane did during many of the interviews on his show. By leaning over the arm of his chair and looking into his guest’s eyes, Lane could create the atmosphere of a relaxed, intimate chat – not easy in a large, hot, over-lit studio. In this way Lane soothed many a nervous, unhappy or intoxicated guest – and with his encyclopaedic knowledge of sport and show business, and ability to crack sharp gags, Lane could make it funny and interesting too. It’s a tribute to his skill and likeability that big overseas stars of the period, such as Sammy Davis Jr, Liza Minnelli and Phyllis Diller, became friends with Lane, appearing on his show time and time again.
But Don Lane wasn’t just talented, funny and easy going, he was classy and charming. He had a notorious eye for the ladies and a fast-paced lifestyle, but never came across as a sleaze, despite the many times Bert Newton referenced glass coffee tables (although what of the several possible things Lane is supposed to have done with one has never been made clear). Sure, Lane got riled-up occasionally, punching Ernie Sigley at the Logies one year (which alone is a reason to like him), and famously telling skeptic James Randi to “piss off” when Randi de-bunked many of the psychics and supernatural proponents Lane’s show had featured, but during a 1994 reunion special (also on the Best of… DVD), Lane recanted, even showing how right James Randi had been about Uri Geller.
The Best of the Don Lane Show is now one of my favourite DVDs, and one of the few I’ve watched numerous times and shown parts of to friends (a group of British TV enthusiasts and sceptics not only loved the James Randi sequence but were fascinated by the bizarre satellite cross to London in the final Don Lane Show, where British TV presenter Angela Rippon hosts a party in Don’s honour at which Billy Connolly and Pamela Stephenson, Chas and Dave, Noel Edmonds [before he became Britain’s answer to Daryl Somers with the Hey Hey-like show Noel’s House Party], Bernie Winters, Cilla Black and Harry Secombe’s manager pretend to quaff champagne in Michael Caine’s restaurant on a chilly London morning). Many would dismiss The Don Lane Show for lacking edge, being indulgent, banal, embarrassing or messy, but the guest list’s impressive, the production values are high, Lane’s a fabulous host and it’s lots of fun.
As I re-watched the final Don Lane Show and the 1994 reunion special this weekend in preparation for this blog, I was struck by how differently Lane handled those difficult shows to Daryl Somers. Lane had none of the bitterness and sense of entitlement that Somers displayed when his show was axed – “this isn’t a wake, it’s a celebration”, he told the audience – and none of the desperate desire to return with his reunion special. Lane was sad and nostaligic, but forward-looking, and the reunion show featured up-and-comers Jane Kennedy, Tom Gleisner and Santo Cilauro (then making the first series of Frontline). Compare this to the role-call of acts whose best was most definitely in the past on the recent Hey Hey reunion.
Don Lane had a dignified end to his career at Channel 9 and a dignified, quiet death in a Sydney nursing home last week. When Daryl Somers finally departs the stage, will he go with such grace?
Respect my Vari-atay
Watching tonight’s episode of Rove – in which he attempted to interview 60 guests in an hour – was always going to be worth a look for comedy fans. Say what you like about Rove McManus (chances are it’s already been said by one of us) but he does seem to like the comedy. It might seem obvious, but imagine Daryl Somers trying the same thing when he comes back with his not-Hey Hey show next year. Would he have John Safran on? Sam Simmons showing off his crap drawings (bonus points to the Rove producer who had the camera cut to an unimpressed Safran during that bit, by the way)? Shaun Micallef singing “My Generation”? Three of The Chaser grabbing people out of the audience? Justin Hamilton making a joke about getting glitter in a wedding invitation? Wil Anderson wasting everyone’s time yet again? Of course not. Daryl would have a bunch of crap sportspeople, shitty musos, and members of the general public who’d grown vegetables that looked like goolies. And then Daryl would glare at the rest of the cast until they cried.
Rove might run a fairly bland talk show, but at least he seems to want it to be actually funny – he’s given Judith Lucy a regular segment, so he’s clearly ahead of the pack there. And watching his ’60 Guests’ episode was a decent reminder that there’s a hell of a lot of solid comedy talent out there who could happily appear on-camera for a few minutes every couple of weeks and get a laugh. Sure, most of the big names (The Chaser, Safran, Micallef) were there to plug stuff – and you don’t have to know the intimate working of a TV show to suspect that the 60 guests gimmick was in part a way for Rove to squeeze in all the comedians he likes who have stuff out to plug – and the rest of the featured comedians either write or have written for Rove, but so what? Nepotism doesn’t make them less funny, especially when they’re only on for a minute or two.
Rove’s been struggling in the ratings in recent weeks thanks to a crap lead-in from the flagging Australian Idol, and reportedly there’ll be less episodes in 2010 than in previous years. Which isn’t really a bad thing – Rove’s had ten years on Australian television and he’s never managed to string two good segments together – but in a year when we can expect to read countless headlines proclaiming that “VARIETY’S BACK” thanks to the return of Daryl Somers, it’d be a shame if the only variety show that features a host who actually likes comedy that goes beyond smutty roadsigns was crushed in the stampede. It could be that this time next year we’ll all be looking back fondly to a time when we thought Rove’s blandness was as gut-wrenchingly awful as variety in this country could get in the 21st century.
What Is Truth?
Reviewing Tony Martin’s second book, A Nest of Occasionals, is easy: in pretty much every way it’s just like his first. So if you’re a fan of Lolly Scramble, rejoice! All the wit and insight and solid gags you loved in Martin’s first collection of personal stories and anecdotes continues to impress here. In fact, in some ways it’s even more impressive, as the material Martin is working with isn’t quite as strong. He gets just as many laughs out of more general topics like pornography before the internet and how he discovered racism as he did out of that now-famous bus trip where everyone turned on him for suggesting they watch Spinal Tap, but it could be argued that in this book we’re watching Martin go from being a guy with a bunch of funny stories to an funny author who can make anything he turns his hand to into a story.
It’s a welcome development in a couple of ways. Firstly, considering the rubbish state of Australian comedy at the moment, writing is probably the only field where Martin can do what he wants and be reasonably assured that it’ll reach the public. Another movie is unlikely, commercial radio seems closed to him for a few years at least, ABC radio is too restrictive to bring out his best, community radio is great but where’s the cash, and television… well, guest shots on panel shows are fun but rarely give him a real chance to shine.
So if Martin decides to focus on writing in a more general way – actually, make that “when Martin decides to focus on writing” and backdate it a few months, because his highly entertaining weekly appearances at The Scrivener’s Fancy (see sidebar for the link) have been running for a few months now and they’re always worth a look. If Martin’s third book turns out to be a collection of those pieces, I doubt too many people would complain.
But having Martin move away from personal recollections to more general writing is also a good thing because personal recollections as a genre are, well, kind of lame. Martin’s books are the best of a bad bunch, but it’s hard to deny that a bad bunch is a reasonable way to describe the ever-growing ranks of quirky collections of strange things that happened to people who aren’t quite as funny as they think they are. David Sedaris, we’re looking at you. And while it’s never a good idea to hate on something that doesn’t exist yet, when it’s announced that Marieke Hardy is planning a collection of personal reminiscences it might be time to entertain the idea that it’s a field that isn’t attracting the best and brightest.
Again, let’s stress: Martin’s book is very very funny. Compared to pretty much everything book or otherwise out there labeled “comedy”, it’s streets ahead of the pack. But it’s fair to say that the pack his book is currently in is not a pack that’s packed with well-crafted hilarity (Judith Lucy’s The Lucy Family Alphabet aside). Martin himself pointed out why in a recent interview (one that, if the person responsible gives us the green light, we hope to be putting up excerpts from here): stories are funnier if the reader knows that they’re true.
I probably didn’t need to wheel in Tony Martin himself to point that out to you. “Based on a true story” is a cliché in film and television, and there’s a good reason why there’s a steady stream of literary hoaxes where true stories turn out to be fake but almost none where fake stories turn out to be true. Being a true story is an easy way to gain the heft and grounding and belief that a fiction writer has to work for: you can be as sketchy and garbled and unrealistic as you like when it’s a true story because it really happened. Story confusing? Doesn’t matter, it really happened. Characters unrealistic? Doesn’t matter, it really happened. Whole damn thing is too crazy to believe? Believe it, it really happened.
Let’s bring this back to comedy. For a lot of people out there, Australia’s Funniest Home Videos is the funniest show on television. Not because of the subtle plots, enduring characters or brilliant running jokes, mind you. It’s because funny – stupid, but passably funny – things are really happening to real people. If you made a show that was exactly the same as AFHV but was entirely staged (and most importantly of all, everyone watching knew it was staged), hey presto, not as funny.
For a lot of people, the big attraction to the pranks on The Chaser’s War on Everything was that they were really happening. Funnier things happened in other segments on that show – hell, funnier things happened during the commercial breaks on other shows – but for a very large chunk of the audience the fact that the pranks were real (despite The Chaser themselves admitting there was a certain amount of staging involved in many of their pranks involving the general public) was what made them funny.
There’s even been an echo of this around John Safran’s Race Relations. Did he really steal those women’s underwear? It shouldn’t matter on a show like his where he’s clearly doing crazy things to illustrate a more serious point, but to many of us it does. If he did it for real: hilarious and daring. If it was staged: why bother. Remember Bruno? More people were interested in how it was done than whether the end result was funny, because that simple distinction – real or fake – has a big impact on whether a lot of people find something funny. A shit joke that really happens will often get a lot more laughs than a great one that takes place on a set.
The hopefully interesting thing in all this debate is that something written down – or filmed, for that matter – can never be really “real” or “true”. What actually happened involved living, breathing people moving through space and time: what you’re giving me are black printed squiggles on a white page. No-one not studying way too hard for a film degree can be bothered wading into the many, many discussions about realism in documentaries, but it’s fair to say that even people setting out purely to record actual events with audio-visual recording devices have serious doubts that what they present to the public is in any actual sense “real”. Writing something down can’t even come close.
So the problem with relying on “truth” as a guide to what’s funny is that age old question: what is truth? To spin it a purely personal way, one of the things I took away from my reading of Lolly Scramble was that Tony Martin’s childhood was a little grim. The stories he told were funny, but the occasional detail about family dramas, school horrors or workplace bullying seemed – to me – to suggest that he’d had a bit of a rough go growing up.
But reading A Nest Of Occasionals – written by the same man telling true stories about the exact same life – it seemed to me that he’d swept that side of things a little further under the carpet. There are mentions of family feuds and the like, but in his first book his job at an army surplus store was skimmed over with the most memorable detail being some nasty-sounding abuse involving a forklift; in the second book, the same setting seems like a fun place to work, with not a hint of abuse in sight.
They’re both true stories though, so which version of his past is more real? Did I find the first book funnier because to me the laughs felt a little like someone trying to shrug off the darkness of their life (OMFG how many times is Tony going to the doctors?), or is the second book better because the tone is more consistently light and it’s easier to relax into the laughs? Could it simply be that what was surprising about Martin’s past in the first book now blurs into the background of the second?
In the end, the only thing we can be truly sure of is the words on the page. Sticking “true” on a story will only get you so far, and while for a lot of hack writers and publicity seekers that’s as far as they’re ever going to get, Martin is a writer of true skill and a boundless ability to make people laugh. The real truth in the stories he tells is that he saw a way to shape the events in them to make them funny. Truth is, whatever story he’s telling, he’s a funny guy. If you’re looking for laughs, that’s the only truth that counts.
[next week: are farts funnier when you can smell them? How important is it to the truth of the fart to fully appreciate all aspects of it? If a deaf person farts in the forest and there’s no-one to hear it, does it automatically become a Silent But Deadly?]
The Censor’s Test
This weekend Sydney-siders had the chance to attend World’s Funniest Island, a two-day, Big Day Out-style festival of comedy on Cockatoo Island. Amongst the acts were Alexei Sayle, The Goodies, Jane Bussman, Merrick & Rosso, the Scared Weird Little Guys and a host of others. The Goodies’ show, featuring Tim Brooke-Taylor and Graeme Garden with Bill Oddie on video (he’s currently ill, so couldn’t make it) in conversation with The Chaser‘s Andrew Hanson, is of particular interest as it featured censored footage from The Goodies which was recently discovered in Australia but no longer exists within the BBC Archives. With recent talk about how “political correctness” and media OUTRAGE is, or may be, resulting in the censorship of comedy, it’s interesting to examine what was actually censored from comedy almost 40 years ago.
From the beginning of television in Australia until some point in the 1970’s (or 1980’s?) the Film Censorship Board (now the Office of Film and Literature Classification) rated and censored (if they saw fit) all television programmes bought in from overseas. A number of episodes from programmes such as Doctor Who and The Goodies were victims of the Censorship Board, and went to air on the ABC in an edited form (or in the case of some episodes of Doctor Who, were banned entirely). The Goodies, which tended to air in later timeslots in Britain, had some adult content which was deemed unsuitable for the early evening timeslot the ABC gave it, although Doctor Who aired at a similar time in both countries. This latter fact and the nature of some of the cuts made to The Goodies (which are listed on the website The Goodies – CENSORED!, compiled by comedy historian Matthew K. Sharp) suggest that standards were very different in the two countries.
Amongst the sequences removed from The Goodies at the request Censorship Board were images and footage of naked, semi-naked and scantily-dressed women, references to sex, nudity and homosexuality, words such as “bloody”, The Goodies threatening to kill themselves if they were locked up in a cell with Rolf Harris, a sequence in which The Goodies refuse to release singer Cilla Black from a prison cell because she sings annoyingly high notes, and a scene in which society is shown to have degenerated to the point where a bishop is handing out the pill, members of the Salvation Army are stripping (accompanied by their brass band playing The Strip), scouts are pushing old ladies out into traffic and ice-cream vendors are rounding-up children and taking them to meat pie factories to become pie ingredients – and that’s just Series 1 and 2.
While nudity, sexual references and swearing (though possibly not such mild words as “bloody”) are still banned in early evening timeslots, what exactly the Film Censorship Board thought would happen to children if they were exposed to anti-Cilla Black or Rolf Harris sentiments will forever remain a mystery. The list of censored footage also suggests the Board’s members were just as interested in instilling a good moral code in children as they were in presenting them with a world which was unrealistically free of sex and swearing.
Information about edits made to episodes of Doctor Who is detailed on many websites and within this interview with Australian Doctor Who fan and researcher Damian Shanahan. Shanahan is legendary within Doctor Who fandom as the man who discovered that the footage censored by the Film Censorship Board still existed within the National Archives of Australia. While this footage was largely short extracts, some of it was all that remained of episodes of Doctor Who which were wiped by the BBC.
In the 1960’s and 1970’s, when video tape was a new and expensive technology, an accountant at the BBC instigated a money-saving scheme in which shows were wiped and the tapes reused. At the time new tapes cost around £50 each, and no doubt this policy resulted in a significant savings, but as history has shown this saving ultimately resulted in a loss of not only important footage but of money, as when home video and DVD emerged, and entire TV channels became devoted to repeats, the BBC had less in their back catalogue to sell.
But while episodes from series such as Doctor Who, Dad’s Army, Not Only… But Also, The Goodies and many more were thought to have been lost forever, some of them started to turn up in countries such as Australia, where local broadcasters had bought and screened the shows but, for whatever reason, had held on to the tapes. In the case of The Goodies, several episodes were recovered from Australia, although these were in black and white rather the original colour (as while British television networks began to switch to colour in 1968, Australia did not get colour television until 1975), and had been edited at the request of the Censorship Board. One such episode was Commonwealth Games, in which The Goodies are asked to train the British team. Approximately 9 minutes into the episode is a sequence known as The Sex Test, which was so heavily and obviously edited at the request of the Censorship Board that it barely made sense.
After Damian Shanahan’s detective work was made public, Goodies fans assumed that censored footage like the Sex Test could also be found within the National Archives. The problem was, however, that accessing the Archives is notoriously difficult (as detailed in the interview with Shanahan) and while a few fans made attempts, nothing came of it. It is only thanks to an as yet unnamed researcher (who, according to an interview with Garden and Brooke-Taylor on Triple J’s Robbie, Marieke and The Doctor, contacted Andrew Hanson with news of their discovery) that the footage was found and ultimately screened at the Goodies’ show. Unfortunately, fans who saw the World’s Funniest Island gigs, along with The Goodies themselves, have been pretty coy so far about what was actually discovered and screened, although this is supposed to have included The Sex Test, and Matthew K. Sharp’s The Goodies – CENSORED! website presumably lists most of the other found material.
But what was in the Sex Test which was deemed unfit for broadcast? Research conducted in 2000 at the BBC’s Written Archives Centre by British television historian Andrew Pixley solved the mystery. Below is the Sex Test’s blatant filth in all it’s glory (combined from Pixley’s research, which was originally published in the e-newsletter of The Goodies Rule – OK! fan club in January 2000, and the information on Sharp’s website) and you can compare this with the edited version of Commonwealth Games, which can be seen on You Tube in three parts – Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 (see the start of Part 2 for the Sex Test scene).
THE GOODIES ARE SURVEYING THE RADDLED OLD BUNCH OF BOWLER-HATTED MEMBERS OF PARLIAMENT (MPs) THE MINISTER OF SPORT (PLAYED BY REGINALD MARSH) HAS ANNOUNCED ARE BRITAIN’S COMMONWEALTH GAMES TEAM.
GRAEME: This is the whole team, is it?
MINISTER: Yes, it is indeed, yes. They’ll represent us at the Games, provided, of course, that they pass one little final technicality.
DURING THIS LINE THE MINISTER HAS BEEN WANDERING AROUND THE OFFICE, OPENING AND CLOSING THE DOORS.
GRAEME: What’s that?
MINISTER: The Sex Test.
{START CUT SEQUENCE #1}
THE MINISTER OPENS THE DOOR TO REVEAL – ON COLOUR SEPERATION OVERLAY – A BEDROOM.
MINISTER: Ah yes, this will do. (INDICATES DOOR) Gentlemen, will you file in there one at a time please?
THE OLD MPs GET UP AND MOVE TOWARDS THE ROOM. THE MINISTER CROSSES BACK TO THE FRONT DOOR AND OPENS IT.
MINISTER: Miss Foster?
MISS FOSTER COMES IN WEARING A REVEALING SHORTIE NIGHTIE, FOLLOWED BY TWO WORKMEN. SHE GOES TO THE BEDROOM DOOR.
MISS FOSTER: First one please.
FADE TO BLACK – MUSIC LINK – FADE UP WITH CAPTION: “A LITTLE WHILE LATER” – THE TWO WORKMEN EMERGE FROM THE BEDROOM CARRYING ONE OF THE MPs BETWEEN THEM. THEY ADD HIM TO THE HEAP OF OTHER MPs IN THE CORNER. THEY ARE FOLLOWED BY MISS FOSTER, STRAIGHTENING HER HAIR. SHE MOVES OVER TO THE WAITING MINISTER AND HANDS HIM A REPORT.
MINISTER: Thank you Miss Foster.
{END CUT SEQUENCE #1}
MINISTER (READING REPORT): Failed?
MISS FOSTER: Yes, sir – all of them.
{START CUT SEQUENCE #2}
MINISTER: But, I mean didn’t any of them try to…I mean…didn’t they even…I mean…none of them?
MISS FOSTER WHISPERS TO HIM.
MINISTER: No, no, that doesn’t count.
MISS FOSTER: Then I’m afraid none of them….
{END CUT SEQUENCE #2}
MISS FOSTER: …have passed, sir.
THE SCENE PROCEEDS UNCUT WITH THE MINISTER PERSUADING THE GOODIES TO BE THE NEW TEAM UP TO THE POINT WHERE MISS FOSTER WHISPERS TO THE MINISTER ABOUT THE GOODIES AND THE SEX TEST. WE SEE SHOTS OF GRAEME AND BILL, AND THEN TIM, REACTING.
{START CUT SEQUENCE #3}
MINISTER: What, all three of them?
MISS FOSTER: Yes, sir.
MINISTER: You didn’t, did you? This morning? Well – I didn’t even get a cup of tea. All right, gentlemen…
{END CUT SEQUENCE #3}
MINISTER: …that’s settled then.
Hardly Pier Palo Pasolini’s Salo, is it? But was it really too adult for children? There’s no swearing and nothing which could be described as “sex”, it’s more innuendo – the sort of thing many children saw regularly in many comedies of the era and probably didn’t quite get. The nature of the censorship also lacks consistency – the Miss Foster character is wearing her revealing shortie nightie throughout the scene and the phrase “sex test” survived the edit – perhaps to retain enough material to ensure that the episode made some kind of sense. But full analysis of the type of material edited from The Goodies for broadcast in Australia suggests that anything other than applying a high standard of prudishness in an inconsistent manner was fairly low down the Censorship Board’s list of priorities, and any instances in which scenes or episodes made sense after such censorship were mainly accidental.
One such example comes from the fourth episode of series three where a reference to a book on witchcraft having the sub-title “A Bum in the Coven” is removed, meaning the lines which follow it – and relate to it – cease to make any sense. Yet two episodes earlier, the word “bum” had been retained, but the laughter which followed it was edited out. As Matthew K. Sharp points out “Presumably you can say ‘bum’, but you can’t draw attention to it by having the audience laughing. Silly.”
Such crude and obvious editing, and a basic lack of respect for a show which had been written and edited in a certain way for a reason, suggests that the ABC cared more about putting The Goodies out at the time of day they thought it should air, rather than the time of day it was designed to air (admittedly, this isn’t a bad thing as an entire generation of Australians grew up on the show, but I doubt we’d have been harmed much if we’d been able to see The Sex Test). As for the Censorship Board, its replacement with broadcaster self-regulation is clearly a good thing as it enables us to see programmes without innocuous words and references being removed at the request of wowser bureaucrats.
The nature of the censorship of the past also suggests that complaints about how comedy is being censored in this day and age aren’t quite such a concern. While the Murdoch press have taken a break from moaning about how “political correctness” has gone so mad that you can’t do blackface, in order to start moaning about John Safran sniffing some underwear and masterbating over pictures of Barack Obama in his new series Race Relations, and in so doing prompting a few unappointed moral guardians (who probably haven’t seen the show) to declare that it’s “filth”, we need to remember that the sequences in question will go to air no matter who complains. It’s only when any references to sexual practices or underwear, or studio audience laughter following words like “bum”, are removed from TV comedy that we’ll know that really stupid censorship is actually taking place.
Outrage Without Alcohol
Sam Simmons must be kicking himself. If only he’d done The Urban Monkey with Murray Foote in blackface, people might be actually talking about it now. Instead… well, pretty much nothing. Which, let’s be fair, it what it deserves: it’s not all that good. But even if it was the most amazingly hysterical comedy made in this country to date, chances are you wouldn’t hear much about it in the media. Because in 2009 in Australia, comedy no longer equals funny: it equals OUTRAGE.
How do I know this? Because comedy shows told me so. Hungry Beast crapped on about the nature of OUTRAGE just last week. Ryan Shelton’s latest segment on Rove had a bunch of jokes about the dangers of stirring up OUTRAGE, followed up by Rove hosting an OUTRAGE segment titled “PC or not PC”. And The Jesters – which is about a Chasers War on Everything-style show, making OUTRAGE it’s bread and butter – has made plenty of gags about the need to stir up OUTRAGE to get press.
Even if I wasn’t foolishly watching every Australian comedy show I could lay my hands on, a brief flick through the papers or listen to talkback radio over the last few months would have provided me with a steady stream of comedy-related OUTRAGE, from minor flutters like the Hungry Beast “netball rape” promo and the Double Take school bullying sketch to flow-blown shoutfests like The Chaser’s “Make a Realistic Wish Foundation” sketch and John Safran’s African-American impersonation. And yeah, I guess that Hey Hey blackface act counts too.
Whatever happened to comedy having to be funny? The one thing that unites every single skit or segment running on OUTRAGE is that they’re not that funny – even the Safran one, which is actually more of an social experiment than a non-stop gagfest. OUTRAGE is the cheap option you go for when you can’t figure out how to get a reaction any other way: no-one in their right mind thinks the OUTRAGE-heavy episodes of The Chaser’s War on Everything were funnier than CNNNN or that the Double Take school bully sketch wasn’t just a collection of tabloid taking points turned on their head. As for the the Hey Hey skit, there should have been a public OUTRAGE simply because it was completely pointless and laugh-free on every level. Unless you find blackface funny in and of itself, in which case I believe Channel Nine is currently hiring.
But in 2009, for whatever reason – slow news year, a lack of political power forcing conservatives to strike out in other areas, The Chaser pissing in the pool and ruining it for everyone else, the ABC press department thinking that stirring shit up is the only way to get people tuning in – it’s increasingly assumed that comedy is setting out to OUTRAGE. Which is bad news for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, as previously mentioned, OUTRAGE makes for crap comedy. It’s possible to laugh because something has gone too far, but if you’re just trying to go too far chances are you’re not going to make people laugh. It’s hard enough to get our television writers and producers to do one thing right; distract them from the goal of getting laughs and chances are they’re not going to even come close to raising a chuckle. Or put another way, rating-wise the biggest comedy hits of this year – Talkin’ ‘bout Your Generation and the most recent series of Thank God You’re Here – didn’t OUTRAGE anyone. Though TGYH’s increasing tiredness should have.
More importantly, with comedy now well established as a breeding ground for OUTRAGE, it’s that much more difficult for decent comedians to mine sensitive areas for laughs. It’s perfectly possible to get laughs from putting a white person in blackface – Bean is a Carrot has mentioned here that getting comedy writers to perform their own material where possible is the best way to make it work, and doing impressions of specific individuals shouldn’t be confined by race (amongst other things, blackface is a generic insult to all people of colour, dismissing an entire race as identical figures of fun) – but with fingers constantly hovering over the OUTRAGE button even a clearly well-thought out and justifiable effort like Safran’s is going to bring down a media shitstorm.
[that said, the tabloids’ interest in Safran’s new show might actually help him. After all the build-up to how outraged we’ll all be once we see it, anything less than riots in the streets will be an anti-climax for The Herald Sun and its ilk. And even if people do complain en masse, the ABC can turn around and say “hey, it’s not like you didn’t know what you were in for after three weeks of wall-to-wall coverage – why should we take you seriously when you clearly just tuned in to piss yourself off?”]
Sadly, it seems increasingly clear that even as shit comedians push harder and harder for bigger and bigger doses of OUTRAGE (and who could forget The Ronnie Johns Half-Hour actually sending out press releases complaining that their “Jesus” character wasn’t causing enough OUTRAGE in the community during their second season? Clearly we all had some perspective on things back then), the comedians who just want to make people laugh – AKA the good ones – will shy away from controversial topics. Partly because OUTRAGE isn’t what they do, and partly because when people are full of OUTRAGE, they’re usually not laughing. And once upon a time, laughing was what comedy was all about.
Short Thoughts
This week’s Hungry Beast proved to be more of the same: unfunny sketches and stuff we already knew. (Snack bars for kids are packed full of sugar, apparently. What next? They tell us the world’s round?!) But at least that netball group sex scandal sketch turned out to be a joke (and I don’t say that because I agree with The Daily Telegraph that the sketch was an “outrage” and “poor taste humour” that “raise[s] new questions about the judgement of senior ABC staff” – the only outrage and misjudgements here are that a sketch so unfunny could make it to air), and anyway, as the Hungry Beast team gleefully informed us during the opening to episode 2, the real joke wasn’t that netballers would get themselves caught in such a scandal, it was on us. Ha ha – fooled you! You thought we’d actually do a longer version next week! You idiot! Sucked-in!
Anyone feeling bullied by the show, or patronised by the screaming claxons the team used at several points during episode 2 to indicate that a joke had just been made isn’t alone. There was no indication that the netball group sex sketch might be fake, and with it appearing during the first episode of the show, viewers were not familiar with the style or format of the show and couldn’t reasonably be expected to have spotted that it was a fake. It’s a bit like telling someone from a different culture that in Australia we all take shits in the gutter, and then laughing at them as they do it. And the even bigger crime: the claxons gag wasn’t funny. Still, at least we know the team’s smug arrogance isn’t confined to its better known members, and with said arrogance and smugness on display only seconds in to episode 2, I think we know more than enough about the Hungry Beast team to switch off.
* * *
Another arrogant TV berk who showed his true colours this week was Daryl Somers. My colleague 13 schoolyards has brilliantly picked-apart the blackface scandal, but the news just to hand is that singer Kamahl, so often the victim of racial taunts back in the show’s hey day, is supposedly threatening to sue the show for including an Andrew Fife cartoon of him during the Jackson Jive’s appearance.
“I used to laugh along when I was a guest but deep down I was thinking why are people so unkind? It’s just the same old rubbish.” Kamahl told The Daily Telegraph. “Hey Hey is devoid of any real wit…It’s desperate. It’s toilet humour and it should be flushed.”
* * *
Many Australian comedy fans have been debating the blackface saga online in recent days and one issue which has come up is the long list of comedians who have blacked-up in the past. The Fast Forward team are guilty of this in their parody of The Cosby Show (which isn’t on You Tube, but is in The Fast Forward Book, if you happen to own it); a more recent, and seemingly more obvious comparison to the Jackson Jive, is The Chaser’s ALP, a re-working of the Jackson 5’s ABC which sends-up the move to the right by Labor under Rudd.
Where the Fast Forward and Chaser sketches differ from The Jackson Jive, and what in my view makes them acceptable, however, is that these sketches were accurate and funny send-ups of complex human beings who happened to be Afro-American. The make-up artists took care to give the white performers the correct skin-tones (Steve Vizard as Bill Cosby had darker make-up than Marg Downey as Phylicia Rashad) and the performers impersonated the vocals of whoever they were playing as best they could. In contrast, the medicos involved in the Jackson Jive simply slapped on a bit of boot polish and put on the sort of “happy go-lucky darky” voices associated with the long-dead US theatrical tradition of blackface.
It’s important in my view to draw a very clear distinction between a white person impersonating a black person through the tradition of blackface (which is racist) and a white person impersonating a person who is black and in so doing applying appropriate make-up (which is valid). What makes blackface offensive is that the performance (the voice adopted, the physical mannerisms, the use of language and the mode of speaking) is a grossly-exaggerated stereotype which reflects the true nature of no real black person who has ever lived. The physical features of the stereotype are highlighted, by the performer applying jet-black make-up to their face and accentuating their lips and eyes with bright white make-up, making them look rather like gollywogs.
All blackface performers have this gollywog make-up, and all blackface performers adopt the same voice, physical mannerisms and so forth. Whereas Steve Vizard’s portrayal of Bill Cosby was an accurate parody of Cosby, a blackface performer’s act reflects nothing that it is real, lumping all blacks into one. The implication here is that the performer considers blacks to have so little value that they can’t even be bothered to acknowledge their complexities, their very human nature. This is highly insulting and the tradition of blackface is rightly a dead art. The reason the Jackson Jive caused such a furore throughout the English-speaking world is that they, ignorantly, revived this art.
The Nightmare Out Of Time
Here’s a question: what makes the Hey Hey it’s Saturday blackface controversy different from the controversy over The Chaser’s “Make a Realistic Wish Foundation” sketch, or Hungry Beast’s promo for a fake story about netball rape, or the looming global horror that is John Safran’s Race Relations? It might not seem like an important question in the face of the far more obvious Hey Hey question WHAT THE FUCK WERE THEY THINKING? (that one’s coming up), but as these kind of comedy controversies seem to be becoming a regular feature of the media landscape in 2009 it’s important to figure out exactly what we’re dealing with here.
See, various commentators have been pushing hard the idea that they’re all basically the same thing: well-meaning but misguided types going too far for a laugh. (others have claimed that Australians don’t know that blackface is offensive, or that other countries don’t understand the Aussie sense of humour: these people are wrong in every direction, and can be safely ignored). Occasionally comedy is going to step over the line, they argue – it’s a shame but we should all just pick ourselves up and move on. Sure, Daryl went too far, but don’t get too smug, leftie PC types: The Chaser also went too far and Safran no doubt will go too far as well. So don’t think you can make this more than it is – and anyway, our on-line / phone survey said that at least three quarters of Australians didn’t see any harm in the skit. Move along folks, nothing to see here.
This is, of course, complete bullshit. Here’s a fun fact: three quarters of Australians can be and often are clueless, ignorant twits. And if you think putting a blackface sketch on Australian television in 2009 is “just a bit of harmless fun”, then you sir or madam, are a clueless, ignorant twit, at least as far as this subject goes. Blackface is not making fun of a black individual: blackface is a shameful, disgusting act of cultural exploitation and denigration, treating an entire race as identical for the purposes of dehumanizing them and mocking them. End of story.
Yeah yeah, but but but. There are no buts here: blackface is indefensible in 2009 whichever way you slice it. “But Harry Connick Jr. did a comedy sketch in blackface in 1996”. Was he made up to look like a Golliwog? No? Then it’s not the same thing (and gee, there’s a real-life black man beside him in that sketch). “But Robert Downey Jr. was in blackface in Tropic Thunder”. Have you even watched that movie, ABC reporter who made the link in the story for the Melbourne news the night of October 8th? The joke in that mostly intelligent, nuanced film – made forcefully, clearly and repeatedly – is at the expense of self-obsessed white Hollywood actors who think something as appallingly racist as blackface is justifiable in their quest for “realism”. “But the Hey Hey skit was equally as intelligent and nuanced”. Oh, fuck off.
The fact that large sections of the Australian public – okay, large sections of the section of the Australian public who vote in phone / on-line news polls – are pretty much clueless in this area isn’t news. What is news – and what makes this controversy different – is that, for the first time in the recent history of Australian comedy controversies, the flames of this particular outrage weren’t fanned by the tabloids.
Many recent “controversies” have largely been tabloid beat-ups; even with The Chaser, where there was clear public anger over the sketch itself, the tabloids ran with it hard out the gate. But this time, for whatever reason – political leanings, commercial ties to Nine and Daryl, lack of interest in internet chatter on the topic – the Australian tabloids weren’t interested in throwing fuel on the fire.
It’s compare and contrast time: on Wednesday October 7th , Melbourne’s Herald-Sun ran a story taking up a third of page three claiming that when John Safran’s upcoming series Race Relations was aired on the ABC people would be outraged. No-one (apart from a rent-a-quote figure who, it was later revealed on ABC radio, hadn’t actually seen the show) was actually outraged yet – the Herald-Sun just figured they’d write up a story about something that might happen in the future. You know, just in case.
Then on Thursday October 8th, the day after the blackface skit went to air, The Herald-Sun ran a small story on page seven about the previous night’s episode of Hey Hey. Mostly consisting of a photo of the Hey Hey team, the short sidebar covered the impressive ratings for last night’s show, and in the final three sentences mentioned that Harry Connick Jr. hadn’t been impressed by a blackface skit on Red Faces. This wasn’t a case where a Herald-Sun reporter thought someone down the line might be offended: this was a case where someone ON THE ACTUAL SHOW ITSELF was clearly offended and with obvious good reason. Not to mention the internet pretty much exploded over it. Three sentences on page 7, huh? If Daryl had shot someone live on air I’m guessing they would have run that story somewhere up the back under the tide times.
Of course, by Friday’s edition they were right on top of it all, trying to reassure many of their readers – no doubt unsettled by the revelation that laughing at people dressed as golliwogs wasn’t on any more – with polls saying most Aussies didn’t think a shameful act of blatant racism was all that bad. Not to mention a column from the newly returned Andrew Bolt saying Daryl et al were guilty of nothing worse than stupidity. Oddly, when The Chaser were guilty of “stupidity” they were supposed to quit public life forever in shame; Daryl’s punishment for the same crime was supposed to be understanding and hugs all ‘round. After all, he was just trying to make us laugh. No-one was supposed to get hurt.
Only thing is, anyone with even halfway clear memories of how Hey Hey operated during its’ final decade knows that someone always got hurt. How many poof jokes were made about Molly Meldrum? How many jokes were made against women by the Hey Hey boy’s club? Seriously, Jackie MacDonald was the only woman on the show and her theme song was “folks are dumb where I come from”? And then her replacement Denise Drysdale left because it was obvious to everyone watching that Daryl didn’t like her getting more laughs than he did. There’s a good reason why hardly any YouTube clips of the show come from the 1990s: the truly memorable moments of the final decade mostly involved Daryl glaring at anyone who got in his way.
Hey Hey it’s Saturday, which in its early years was a highly entertaining muck-up involving a bunch of people clearly having a good time doing what amused them, became a stale, humourless ritual humiliation long before the axe finally fell. That’s why – for anyone capable of looking past their own warm fuzzy memories to the reality of what actually went to air in the 1990s – the return of Hey Hey was always a disaster waiting to happen.
Beyond the silly segments and miming “live” bands, in its final years Hey Hey was a mean-spirited show that largely got its laughs from picking on groups seen as “weak”. Seeing it back on our screens was seeing some nightmare from a nastier age returned to remind us that some people are still getting cheap laughs from mocking others.
Kind of like tuning into Australian television in 2009 and seeing a blackface act on air.