Australian Tumbleweeds
History Repeating
Yes, it’s time once again for yet another slice of manufactured, pre-packed outrage – courtesy, as seems to be increasingly the case, of Melbourne’s Herald-Sun. In case you missed it here, pretty much all you need to know is this:
THE ABC is facing another barrage of public anger over a new TV show in which shock comedian John Safran simulates sex acts to an image of US President Barack Obama.
Canny readers will have already noticed the all-important word there: “facing”. That’s right – this is a news story about something that hasn’t actually happened yet. Someone at the Herald-Sun checked out the first episode of Safran’s show Race Relations (the first two episodes are floating around, having been sent out to media last week) and thought “if I beat this up hard enough, there’s a page 3 story here”.
Not much of a story, mind you. The only person outside of the journalist, ABC sources and government spokespeople who actually go on the record is a spokesman for Australian Family Association, Mr John Morrissey. He called it “filth”, and according to this story said “it would be the lowest point in Australia’s television history.” Thank you Mr Rent-a-Quote. It’s be interesting to know if he’s actually seen the show or merely had it described to him by the Herald-Sun writer down the phone: either way, the fact he’s not a fan isn’t exactly news to anyone not breathing through their mouths. Guess Fred Nile wasn’t taking calls that day.
Disclousure time: I’ve seen the first episode of Race Relations. And guess what? Probably not for everyone. Mostly not for people without a sense of humour, but seeing Safran steal a varity of (seemingly) unsuspecting women’s undergarments and then sniff them is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. But when / if you actually sit down to watch the show, one thing becomes very, very clear: the joke is always on Safran himself.
In Race Relations – at least in the first episode – Safran often comes across as a fairly creepy perv. Maybe not someone Herald-Sun readers would want to hang out with, but who cares? This is a comedy show, and creepy pervs are a great source of laughs. Just dig up then ask Benny Hill. Cheap comparisons to Kyle or The Chaser will be made by various media types (the Herald Sun you say?), but again, the show makes it very clear that Safran is taking the piss out of himself – and perhaps, in the sperm banks sketch, also having a swipe at a fairly unsettling form of genetic segregation. And you’d kinda think that, as a Jew, Safran is entitled to stick his oar in there a little bit.
That said, the real laughs in all this come from the Herald-Sun‘s outraged editorial. Highlights include: “If the public gives a shocked thumbs down to the first episode of Race Relations, director of television Kim Dalton would seem to have no choice but to sack himself.” So presumably if it turns out to be a ratings smash he’ll have no choice but to give himself a raise? And just in case you were planning to make up your own mind about all this, don’t bother: “This is trash TV. It’s not funny and it’s grossly insulting.”
Insulting to who? Presumably, judging by the first line of their news report, they mean President Obama. Gee, somehow I think he can take it. Otherwise, well, Safran himself is insulted a fair bit, and the idea of preserving a unique and seperate Jewish and Palestinian genetic heritage takes a few knocks, and he flies to Africa to ask if a African guy who does well with the white ladies in Melbourne would be considered handsome back in his home country so perhaps some of the un-named and un-identified white women with jungle fever might feel slighted. Those cases aside, the Herald-Sun editorial really seems to be big on rage but short on facts. So again, no news there.
Somewhat surprisingly, the real hero of this story is revealed in one sentance: “Communications Minister Stephen Conroy refused to buy into the outrage.” Fingers crossed the rest of this supposedly level-headed nation does likewise.
A Beast of a programme
This week’s most overlooked debut was Hungry Beast, which inevitably stood no chance against the Hey Hey reunion and the premiere of Celebrity Masterchef. That’s probably just as well for those “19 newcomers to television” who are involved as “tell us something we don’t know” – the show’s motto – it didn’t.
The show’s first story concerned a spoof survey on gullibility put together by the some of the team and distributed by them posing as a fictional organisation called The Levitt Institute. They aimed to prove that today’s media are so time-poor and under-resourced that they’ll accept anything in a legitimate-looking press release as true, and succeeded in doing so, with the gullibility survey’s results being reported on websites, in newspapers, on radio and even The 7PM Project.
Sadly, the thunder for this admittedly rather good prank was stolen by Media Watch, who’d received a tip-off that the survey was fake, done some digging, established a connection with the about-to-start Hungry Beast and aired a story which pipped Hungry Beast to the post by two days. Media Watch‘s story included the comments of Mike Osborne, Editor of AAP – “No-matter what the rationale behind this hoax, it is cheap and mischievous” – and ended with Jonathan Holmes’ warning “No doubt many of you would reckon it’s pretty funny too but there’s another lesson for the folk at The Hungry Beast in all this: it’s a cut-throat world out there. If you think you can put a hoax on the web two weeks before you go to air, without anyone else spotting it you’re living in fairyland. The Beast is much too Hungry for that.”
Hungry Beast‘s response? They included part of the Media Watch story in their story, and cheeky little beasts that they are, ended by accusing Media Watch of cross-promoting their show. Zing? Probably not. Witness how often ABC TV stars appear on ABC radio to promote their shows. Media Watch probably hasn’t breached any rules, it just beat Hungry Beast to the punch on a topic they’ve been covering for years. The real problem here is that for any regular viewer of Media Watch (or anyone who’s read the book Flat Earth News, or thought about the media for more than a second) this isn’t “something we don’t know”.
An even bigger problem was that that was Hungry Beast’s best story. Thereafter we were treated to a spoof of commercial current affairs shows beating things up (a mix of the kind of stuff already well covered by Frontline and Media Watch, as seen through the eyes of someone trying to ape British comedian Chris Morris), a tit-for-tat debate about whether pandas are worth saving (among other things, panda’s inadequate sexual organs make it hard for them to reproduce – as discussed in numerous nature programmes and in the 90’s stand-up of Sue-Anne Post), a short segment where it was pointed out that by signing up to a cause on a social networking site you’re not actually achieving much apart from making yourself look like you care (even John Safran at his most glib on Sunday Night Safran probably wouldn’t bother with something that obvious) and an interview with Susan Staden and Bree Till, the mother and wife (respectively) of Brett Till, an Australian soldier who was killed in Afghanistan in March.
The Staden/Till interview was meant to be a different look at the long-running story of Bree Till’s plight as the pregnant wife of a dead solider, and was intended to show the family’s dignity in the face of the media hype surrounding Bree’s battle with the Department of Veteran’s Affairs for some compensation for her unborn child, and the children from Brett Till’s previous marriage, for whom she cares. The resulting piece showed Staden and Till sitting at a table talking about Brett. For about 5 minutes. As therapeutic as it may have been for the pair to share a few memories, it wasn’t very interesting television and basically told us exactly what we’d expect a dead solider’s mother and wife to say: Brett Till was a decent bloke and a good father who they miss very much.
There are plenty of interesting things to say about the Afghan war and the lives of military families, but this wasn’t the way to cover it. Similarly, there are plenty of interesting things out there that “we don’t know” and expecting a bunch of newbies to find them is probably expecting a bit much.
As with so many new programmes, much of the problem comes from over-hyping a damp squib. Even if the marketing team had inserted “probably” into the show’s motto, it might stand a better chance….although it’d stand an even better one if it was funny, incisive and entertaining. And judging by the promo for next week’s show, which promise an hilarious spoof of the rugby “group sex” scandal with the oh-so-wry twist that Liz Ellis and the Diamonds had group sex with a bloke, it won’t be. Still, judging by the comments on Hungry Beast website the show’s graphics were a hit. And that graphics are really important for television was something I didn’t know.
Gilding the Lilley
Look what turned up in our inbox at the end of business Friday – okay, you probably already know all this, but it’s always fun to check out the original press release so you can see just how little work is involved in journalism today:
CHRIS LILLEY GETS ‘ANGRY’ WITH ABC TV
In the most hotly-awaited news in television, ABC TV and the USA’s HBO jointly today announces a new 12-part, half-hour series from multi-award winning writer and performer, Chris Lilley.
Angry Boys is a co-production between the team of Chris Lilley and Princess Pictures, creators of the enormously popular Summer Heights High and We Can Be Heroes, ABC TV and HBO.
In an Australian first, the series will be co-produced with HBO, a broadcaster which has built its reputation by offering some of television’s most creative and edgy programming, and in association with the UK’s BBC, the home of British comedy.
Shooting in a mock documentary style, Angry Boys explores what it means to be a 21st century boy by putting the male of the species under the microscope. It will be shot in Australia and overseas locations and goes into pre-production on Monday October 5.
Chris Lilley says he’s been writing the new show for a long time. “There will be new characters and lots of surprises for the audience, and I’m really excited about having a longer-running series to work with.”
Laura Waters, Princess Pictures, says “Angry Boys will be the biggest challenge and most fun we’ve ever had making a television show.”
ABC TV Executive Head of Content Creation, Courtney Gibson says “The scripts are absolutely terrific: Once again Chris is pushing comedy and character somewhere really challenging and ambitious. Moving forward with HBO and the BBC as partners means the series will play on the world stage right after we premiere it here in Australia.”
Sue Naegle, President, HBO Entertainment. said “Chris Lilley combines a wicked sense of humour with fearless insights into human nature, which gives his comedy a universal appeal. We were thrilled to share Summer Heights High with the U.S. audience and are sure that Angry Boys will connect with our subscribers and the media.”
In 2007, Summer Heights High screened in Australia to phenomenal success, with a peak audience of 1.48 million and a 33.5% share (5 cities).
Summer Heights High has not only been a success in Australia but has been seen in dozens of countries around the world including on HBO in the USA and on the BBC in the UK.
It’s the highest-selling Australian comedy TV series DVD. In 2008 it won the Most Outstanding Comedy Series and most Popular Actor Logies and the AFI Award for Best Comedy Series and Best Actor in a Comedy Series.
We Can Be Heroes was also seen in dozens of countries including the US (Sundance Channel) and UK (FXUK), and won the Most Outstanding Comedy Series Logie in 2006.
Chris won the Logies’ inaugural Graham Kennedy Award in 2006 and the AFI’s the Byron Kennedy Award in 2008
Far be it for anyone here to slag off a show before it’s gone to air – or in this case, before it’s even begun filming – but for anyone with even the slightest hope that the clearly somewhat talented Chris Lilley would eventually figure out a way to put that talent to good use, this is pretty much a procession of bad news. Such as:
*”Angry Boys”. What more needs to be said? It’s going to be a collection of character studies where Lilley acts like various “angry boys” – that is to say, like various shades of rip-offs of David Brent yet again. It might be an all-new cast, but unless Lilley’s been hit on the head with a comedy pot plant and completely changed his personality, the fact that all his characters since Extreme Darren on Big Bite – a character imposed on him by some accounts – have basically been minor variations on passive-aggressive jerks does not leave much scope for optimism there.
* “12 part”. Lilley’s best work to date remains the short sketches he did for Big Bite. Don’t believe it? Track down the DVD and check them out for yourself. Who knew that Mr. G could be funny, or that parodies of crap high school musicals could raise a smile? Of course, that’s largely because there the joke was on Lilley: once he started making his own series he stated to become protective of his characters, to the extent that by the end of Summer Heights High he had hell-bitch Ja’ime shout “State schools rock!”. Out of character? Totally. A reminder that deep down this monster is a sweet kid at heart? Sure. Comedy fans will note that neither of those things are how you get laughs.
With each project Lilley attempts, the episode length gets longer: We Can Be Heroes: six episodes. Summer Heights High: eight episodes. And now twelve episodes of Angry Boys: War and Peace didn’t take as long to tell, and that wasn’t just some guy in a wig talking to camera. And it’s not like the extended length comes about because of a grander scope or wider range of topics covered: Does anyone really think there was anything more to say about the SHH cast after episode three? The series itself only had enough plot for five or so episodes, with the middle of the series feeling heavily drawn-out. In fact, SHH had less story than We Can Be Heroes, and two more episodes to tell it in. Why? Lilley likes the improv. Just check out the massive amount of deleted scenes on his DVDs.
So it’s fair to say that with twelve episodes, we can expect even less story than SHH – seriously, does it sound like anything more than just a run of character studies – and a lot more scenes that go nowhere. Could this be too much of a good thing? At this stage, who knows? Eight episodes of SHH seemed like a nightmare at the time but there’s no denying its success, at least in Australia (the rest of the globe, not so much). Maybe if Lilley was actually trying something new, but… well, that brings us to the next point:
* “Shooting in a mock documentary style”. Jesus Christ, where to begin. Mockumentary has been old news for years now, its cliches milked completely dry of comedy potential long before The Office came along, but Lilley isn’t going to let it go. Why? Because in mockumentary, he can talk to the camera as much as he likes. It’s great for him, because it means he doesn’t have to interact with other actors and share the spotlight – something Lilley’s been loathe to do throughout his career.
His refusal to allow anyone else to get a laugh in his various series is his biggest weakness as a comedian. It limits his work to basically him (no matter who he’s playing) saying something offensive or shocking while everyone else reacts. Even with Jonah in SHH, the various teachers were one-dimensional authority figures he could crack wise against: letting someone else get a laugh simply wasn’t an option. Good news if you want to watch six hours of Lilley wearing various wigs; not so good if you want a bit of comedic back-and-forth.
Going mockumentary also means he doesn’t actually have to do much acting. He can simply get his characters to explain themselves to camera instead. Okay, often they’ll say one thing and mean another, but that’s hardly great acting. It is, however, a great way to allow stupid people to think they’re watching great acting: “wow, I thought Ja’ime was a complete bitch but she’s really emotionally affected by what that kid said to her” “You’re just repeating what the character just said YOU TOTAL TOOL!”
For all the talk of how amazing and chameleon-like Lilley is, the fact remains that a lot of his work consists of him dressing up and then telling us he’s someone else. “Show, don’t tell” is how the saying goes when it comes to great writing and acting. Someone might want to remind Lilley of that. Of course, then he might have to live up to the hype, which at this stage would be impossible even if you cloned Graham Kennedy and gave him four extra sets of arms. Even in this press release – press releases not being a genre designed for subtlety – it’s already out of hand:
“Once again Chris is pushing comedy and character somewhere really challenging and ambitious.” What, you mean like with SHH, where he was either a): a man in a dress, b): a bitchy drama teacher or c): a surly teenager making dick jokes? I suppose Lilley did set himself one challenge there: to take these well-worn comedy cliches and get no laughs whatsoever out of them. Mission accomplished.
“Chris Lilley combines a wicked sense of humour with fearless insights into human nature, which gives his comedy a universal appeal.” Fearless insights into human nature? That would be “teenage girls are superficial and bitchy”, correct? Or were you think more along the lines of “drama teachers are bitchy and self-obsessed”? Perhaps “smart-arse kids are poorly served by a rigid educational system” was what you were thinking of? Once again, maybe it’s time to re-write the dictionary, because mine doesn’t seem to have a definition of “fearless” that means “predictable and superficial”.
The good news in all of this is that, going by the blown deadlines for SHH, there’s very little chance of seeing Angry Boys until 2011 at the earliest. Reportedly Lilley filmed over a hundred hours of footage for the eight-hour SHH: even if he doesn’t go past that ratio here (and as SHH was a big step up in footage shot from We Can Be Heroes, I wouldn’t count on that), that’s at least one hundred and fifty hours of footage he’s got to shoot. And two out of three SHH characters were ones Lilley had already developed, so if he has to feel his way into a bunch of new wigs – uh, I mean characters – by performing as / in them for a while until he “knows who they are”… well, even 2011 could be a bit on the optimistic side…
Burn GTV9, Burn.
There’s a long tradition in post-apocalyptic film and literature where the shattered survivors of a world after some unimaginable holocaust desperately attempt to escape into the past. From A Canticle for Leibowitz to 12 Monkeys to Wall-E: when things turn to shit, people (and robots) escape into the past. But the return of Hey Hey it’s Saturday to Australian screens tonight must be the first time where the holocaust that wipes out civilisation and the nostalgia people turn to as an escape from the nightmare that remains turned out to be THE EXACT SAME BLOODY THING.
There’ll be time enough for a detailed dissection later – or not, because who in their right mind would want to go through two and a half hours of Daryl and company congratulating themselves on how amazing they are? Not so much an actual television show as yet another congratulatory lap of honour – and let’s not forget that Daryl turned the last few months of Hey Hey into a non-stop barrage of “you’ll miss us when we’re gone” – the smugness radiating off the host was enough to power a small death camp full of a nation’s dreams that entertainment might one day no longer involve a televised version of Celebrity Head.
Long time readers of this blog are probably thinking “but you would say that, wouldn’t you? You’ve been hating on Daryl and the Hey Hey team since day one – can’t you just let the fans enjoy a brief trip down memory lane?” Firstly, who knew that memory lane abruptly stopped at a thousand mile drop into a churning lake of flaming lava where the souls of the damned burn for all eternity? And secondly, what was the first complete sentence out of Daryl’s mouth once the show proper began? Not “great to be back”, not some smutty gag, but “There should be a show that showcases some Australian talent.”
That’s right: the same tired line we’ve heard from every no-talent, rightfully unemployed hack trying to guilt a nation into giving them a career as a public service rather than making them earn one through talent and entertainment. But maybe he has a point? After all, television exposure is the kind of thing up and coming acts desperately need. So what was the first act showcased by this much-needed venue to highlight Australian talent? That struggling young artiste Jimmy Barnes. Who got a gold record after his song, and then promptly gave Daryl one in return.
What word means more smug than “smug”? MegaSmug? Smug 2.0? Doubleplus Smug? The guys down at the dictionary will be working overtime trying to coin a word that can cope with the strain Daryl’s putting on plain old “smug”, and the show’s barely into the first ad break. It might sound like snark and maybe it is, but for years and years Daryl has run hard on the line that Hey Hey shouldn’t have been axed because it provided a showcase for Australian talent. So his dream came true: he got his show back. And when it was time to shit or get off the pot as far as showcasing Australian talent, we get Jimmy Barnes. Oh, and Akhmal Saleh. And The Amazing Jonathan. And John Farnham. And some Aria-award winning band who’s name Daryl fluffed three times. And Kylie Minogue. And an a cappella band singing Stayin’ Alive, which I guess wasn’t something you’d see anywhere else.
And a live cross to John Farnham’s concert? What in the name of… well, all the clearly hefty deities that Farnzie’s eaten over the last fifteen years? If they wanted to love-up Farnzie that much, why not just forget about reviving Hey Hey and just show his concert? If Daryl just wants to cut to people who aren’t even on the damn show, why not cut to an episode of The Mick Molloy Show? Daryl doesn’t even want to put on a show, he’s just sticking his mates on the TV now. So I guess that hasn’t changed either.
There’s plenty of other grounds to sink the boot in, from doing the Great Aussie Joke with a CGI Morrie Fields (aieee!) and then making sure no-one was actually laughing by getting all emotional over the digital resurrection of Morrie (hey, it wasn’t the Great Aussie Eulogy) to having the enjoyably funny Lavina Nixon around pretty much solely to make a joke about her being pregnant to Plucka Duck and then read emails. Actually, the whole audience participation stuff was as creepy as all hell: Hey Hey always cut away to the audience, and they’re the ones to thank / blame for its return, but if they’re so important that we have to hear from them every five minutes why not just do the show to them without the cameras? Or just put up the facebook fan page address for two and a half hours so the fans can high-five each other there? Oh wait, now they’re telling us that Hey Hey is the number one topic on Twitter. Gee, that’s gripping news. Wasn’t the show’s increasingly insular appeal aimed solely at rusted-on fans the reason why the show was axed in the first place?
At the start I mentioned the nostalgia theme running through a lot of post-apocalypse fiction. The best riff on that theme turns up in the first Terminator movie, where during one of Kyle Reese’s flashbacks to his past in the future (hey, it’s a lot easier to follow than anything in T’s 3 or 4) we see a couple of children huddled together watching a television set. What show could they possibly we watching that could distract them from the devastation all around? How could a television set even work in the ruins? The joke, of course, is that they’re watching a fire burning in the remains of the broken set. After tonight, I envy those kids.
It’s not you, it’s the format
I haven’t had time to watch much comedy in the past few weeks apart from catching up with LOLZ RANDOMS-magnets Beached Az and The Urban Monkey with Murray Foote – hey, at least they’re short! – and fast-forwarding through several weeks worth of Rove to see how Judith Lucy’s segment’s been going – she’s great, but as someone who’s always divided audiences I worry how long she’ll last…which kinda brings me to what I have had time for: Tony Martin and Tony Wilson filling in for Derek Guille on 774 ABC Melbourne and ABC Victoria’s evening show.
Martin and Wilson, sometimes known as the Two Tones, have come off the subs bench for various people on 3RRR throughout the year, to much acclaim from their fans. But while the laid back, youthful, free-wheeling style of 3RRR has suited the Tones, their time on ABC Local has been a different experience.
As fill-ins, Tony and Tony couldn’t mess too much with the established format, which was fine when the topics of discussion were crime fiction, music, cinema, or even AFL (although Wilson obviously did the heavy lifting there), but when it came to more serious matters, like a segment on sexual assault, Tony Martin in particular struggled to find something appropriate to say.
Perhaps the clash of radio cultures was most strikingly obvious during the phone-ins. Whatever the topic, the majority of callers had anecdotes so deathly dull that Tony Martin could barely stop himself from laughing at whatever ageing waffler was telling them, while Tony Wilson tried as quickly and politely as possible to wrap said waffler up, and move things along.
It’s also fair to assume that such wafflers, who make up ABC Local’s core audience of baby boomers, radiophiles and the elderly, weren’t universally won over by Tony and Tony’s style of playing eclectic music between lots of joking around and obscure pop culture talk. Such listeners are essentially wowsers, used to hearing a very detailed, very serious and very long weather forecast at a certain time each evening, and definitely not the type to actively encourage Tony Martin to talk about Corey Haim or reference Blakey from On The Buses.
And herein lies the problem for Tony Martin, as brilliantly talented as he is, he’s a man with a distinctive style that doesn’t endear him to everyone. Opportunities at the increasingly bland youth-focused commercial radio stations are probably closed to him even if he wanted to go back (witness the failure of any of them to sign him after the demise of Get This), ABC Local tends to suit a more everyman personality (because as Tony pointed out repeatedly during the two weeks – on the ABC you can’t comment on anything), the commercial stations aimed at more mature audiences wouldn’t be right either (as proved when Tony filled-in on Melbourne’s Gold FM breakfast show and took the piss every time he had to do a live read – funny, but not something likely to keep you your job, even if it’s how Graham Kennedy kept his), and 3RRR, which does suit him, can’t pay him.
A different, but related problem is that whichever format a station’s gone for, that format is king. For someone like Tony Martin, who basically has his own format, the only possibilities are that:
-
he tries to adopt a different persona in order to get work (unlikely)
-
he is given a slot somewhere and is allowed the freedom to make it his own, with obscure pop-culture talk a-plenty and sketches consisting of clips of Julia Gillard using ill-fitting metaphors to describe the school’s stimulus fund being cut into Little Boot’s Remedy (sadly, also unlikely)
-
digital radio takes off enough to make “minority interest” channels of the type that would suit Martin viable (again unlikely, if the British experience is any guide quirky start-up channels will either die on their arse or realise they have no option but to bland down in order to attract an audience)
-
he plays the long game and sticks with 3RRR until someone offers him a paid gig elsewhere (things will get better soon, right?)
-
he leaves the industry and starts a video shop (well, I’d join).
And if that doesn’t make you weep for the future of both comedy and radio in this country then clearly nothing will.
Of course, it’s not all doom and gloom. Generation X are now in their 30’s and 40’s and starting to outgrow the youth-focused stations like Nova, the Today Network and Triple J. Amongst the alternatives for these increasingly settled and family-oriented Gen Xers is ABC Local, which every couple of years manages to sign up someone a bit younger than their traditional audience, indicating that they’re not adverse to trying to attract the newly middle aged. A Gen X hero like Tony Martin could draw such people to a station like 774, but only if he were allowed the freedom to do what he does best.
Comedy Free Comedy
The number one thing a comedy has to do is make people laugh. But that’s kinda hard, so every few years there comes along a sweeping trend in comedy – one that doesn’t involve comedy at all. Instead of simply trying to make people laugh, the people behind these trends will claim to be “breaking new ground” in comedy by adding something to the mix to distract viewers from the fact that they don’t really seem to be laughing at anything they’re seeing. The most recent version of this – the Ricky Gervais / Chris Lilley school of saying something crass or offensive and just lingering on it until the viewer hopefully laughs out of nothing more than sheer embarrassment – has been pounded into the concrete enough for now. So let’s instead take a look back at the attempt before that to create comedy-free comedy, an approach that’s best summed up by three words that’re enough to send a chill down any eight-cents-a-day viewer’s spine: Dog’s Head Bay.
In the late 1990’s, the ABC found itself with an unexpected hit on its hands: Seachange. Why it was unexpected is a bit of a mystery today: a more nakedly commercial program it’s hard to imagine, what with the family-friendly mix of soft-sell romance, lightweight drama, and a few decent laughs (let’s not forget that Seachange’s co-creator was Andrew Knight, the guy next to Steve Vizard during the Fast Forward / Full Frontal days). Seachange’s effect on Australian television drama was massive: basically, apart from The Secret Life of Us and Underbelly, you can’t make a successful Aussie drama without ripping off either its tone (Packed to the Rafters, anyone?) or the whole damn thing (Always Greener, East of Everything).
But who watches Australian drama? We’re here for the comedy, and Seachange – combined with shrinking ABC drama budgets – put forward a new model for Aussie comedy, one where the numerous laugh-free spaces could be filled with the kind of quirky drama that audiences had refused to pay for at the cinemas since the late 1980s. Presumably in this climate hiring noted playwright and unfunny bastard David Williamson and his wife to write a 13-episode sitcom seemed like a good idea, as did sticking solid dramatic tree stump Gary Sweet in the lead; whoever was supposed to check the quality of the finished product was clearly asleep at the wheel and the wheel wasn’t attached to anything in the first place because the second this crapfest went to air the ABC found its budget pretty much cut in half out of sheer disgust at the contempt being shown for the very concept of entertainment.
At this point it’d be great to post a few links to clips or reviews to illustrate just how amazingly bad it and its reception was – and trust me, it was bad. But you will just have to trust me, because the second this turd started stinking up the ABC’s bowl everyone involved ran a thousand miles. There was no video release; no DVD release is planned. The reviews – scathing at the time –are locked away in mouldering piles of print down at your local library. There’s next to no information on the show itself to be found on the internet: if you didn’t know anything about it, you might even think it was a halfway decent (or at least, misunderstood) show. And this kind of mass forgetting of how our home-grown television is often made for the enjoyment of everyone but the viewer is how we come to having a series – not one, but a series, with each episode two and a half hours long – of Hey Hey It’s Saturday reunion specials.
Dogs Head Bay wasn’t quite enough to kill the idea of quirky Australia dramedy stone dead, sad to say. Corridors of Power was a six-part political-themed stab at the comedy / drama crossover that managed to combine the few crap parts of Frontline with the barely noticeable weak points of The Games into a series about a pre-selection struggle that felt like being bailed up at a party by a junior public servant desperate to tell someone about the amazing new insights he’d had into preventing rorting of the internal mail system at their Reservoir depot. It did, however, get slightly better reviews – unfortunately, they almost entirely gave off the impression that this was a show that was good for the nation rather than something a sane person would want to watch. A televisual version of steamed broccoli might have sounded like a good idea inside the ABC, but out in the real world lessons on how the country is run are about as popular as Corridors of Power turned out to be.
And then there’s Bad Cop Bad Cop. Coming in half-hour chunks, this one actually looked like a sitcom – a curiously laugh-free version based around the antics of two corrupt cops running through various dodgy schemes while both sleeping with the same mildly sexy bent lawyer. To be honest, this did feature semi-decent plotting and some halfway effective performances (especially Michael Caton as the older, more laid-back of the two corrupt cops) – only problem was it was being sold as a half hour sitcom when it showed next to no interest in making anyone laugh. Whether the makers simply thought “two corrupt cops getting tangled up in various schemes – that’ll be hilarious!” and left it at that or tried to put in jokes but they were so bad no-one outside the writing staff realised that that’s what they were meant to be and so the actors simply played them straight… well, at this stage who cares.
It was around this point that the ABC suddenly seemed to realise that if they were going to bother making comedies, they probably should get comedians to make them. Seachange’s legacy lives on in the drama department – I did mention the strident and painful East of Everything, didn’t I? – but the comedy side of the street seems to have shrugged it off for good. Well, on the ABC it has: Seven’s Packed to the Rafters probably counts as comedy to some, what with a wacky neighbour called (for Christ’s sake) Carbo…
We come not to praise Double Take, but to bury it
This week sees the last episode of Channel Seven’s sketch series Double Take. Unlike its former stablemate, the Ed Kavalee-hosted TV Burp, there are no calls for a second series, or rumours that it may return re-jigged for a new timeslot, or whispers that the stars may go onto other projects, or flat-out lies that it wasn’t anything but a big fat flop. It’s dead. Which should come as no surprise, as it was pretty much born that way.
Australian television has a pretty good history of putting on shows that no-one demanded then acting all surprised when they fizzle out, but old-style sketch comedy – and by “old-style” we’re talking about basically building a comedy assembly line out of various writers and actors with no track record of working together – hasn’t worked in this country for well over a decade now. Seriously, if you wanted to make a show that people would watch, would you choose to follow in the footsteps of the following: Totally Full Frontal; Big Bite; Eagle and Evans; Comedy Inc; Skithouse; Let Loose Live; The Wedge; Flipside; BackBerner; and The Ronnie Johns Half Hour?
Some of these shows struggled into second seasons – Comedy Inc ran for years thanks entirely to Nine’s need for cheap local content – but none captured the public’s imagination in the way that even a struggling reality series or crap police procedural can manage with no effort at all. Some of those shows were even halfway decent: for all the snark directed here at The Ronnie Johns Show, in its second series (once you ignored the desperate attempts to stir up controversy by religion-baiting and the completely pointless Chopper sketches) it had more than its fair share of decent sketches. But that was the best of a very bad bunch (some of Chris Lilley’s Big Bite work aside): so why return to the shitty well for Double Take?
It’s almost as if there was no-one working in Seven’s programming department who could remember further back than 2007. Before then, sketch comedy’s long, slow demise was common knowledge, hence Seven’s last two efforts – The Hamish & Andy Show and Let Loose Live – brought something new to the table. H&A featured Hamish & Andy doing basically everything that’s made them superstars today inbetween rubbish sketches from the Big Bite team – that’s right, people hated the sketches so much that even Hamish & Andy couldn’t make up for them. As for Let Loose Live, it’s fantastic innovation was that, er…it was done live. Live sketches were cutting edge in 1960; in 2005, not so much.
Double Take didn’t even get the crap sketch show basics right. Where were the arse running gags? Where were the re-occurring but completely annoying comedy characters? Even The Wedge managed to come up with a couple – notably Rebel Wilson’s stalker schoolgirl and Jason Gann’s sportsman Mark Wary – that were semi-successful. Wary got his own spin-off and Wilson ran that fat chick act into the ground for a few years; Double Take, on the other hand, gave us Paul McCarthy’s Kochie,(recycled from Comedy Inc) and… that’s pretty much it.
The thing is, Double Take wasn’t appallingly bad. Compared to some of the recent sketch shows – large chunks of Flipside, the first series of Ronnie Johns, the second “adult” series of The Wedge – it was actually halfway decent. The musical parodies were mostly crap and McCarthy was given way too much time to ramble on with his limited range of impersonations, but the shorter sketches usually got the job done. Heck, if the show had featured some likeable personalities in the roles they might have even got a laugh.
And personality was the missing ingredient here. For better or worse, these days people want to watch personalities on television. And by “these days” we mean since about 1958, as even a brief glance at the recent DVD release of Graham Kennedy’s Coast to Coast (featuring plenty of old B&W sketches from Gra-Gra’s early days, in which having fun is waaaay more important than looking slick) will reveal. As will summoning up memories of the sketch shows that have worked on Australian television since the late 1980s: The Late Show, The Micallef P(r)ogram(me), the parts of Fast Forward where Steve Vizard corpsed, and… well, that’s pretty much it.
What they all have in common was that they gave viewers a sense of the people behind the performances. On The Micallef P(r)ogram(me) it was a false sense thanks to the combination of “live” in-studio segments and pre-recorded sketches, but as it’s the best sketch show made in this country since forever we can cut it some slack there. Sketches on The Late Show looked like what they were: a bunch of mates piss-farting about, and during the times when the writing didn’t quite cut it the slap-dash performances gave it a charm and a light touch that kept you laughing.
Perhaps if Double Take had been less slick and polished and more the product of a team with actual chemistry, maybe it would have worked. Or maybe not: Ronnie Johns came from a established team and it failed, while TV Burp piled on the cheap gags at the expense of polish and it got the chop too. And polish is always going to be tempting to TV producers – unlike funny, polish is something pretty much anyone can do.
(fun fact: The day Fast Forward started getting praise not for being funny but for having ad parodies that looked like the actual ads was the day that sketch comedy died in this country.)
Until someone – that is, someone with actual proven audience drawing power, be it Hamish & Andy, Shaun Micallef, Chris Lilley or the ghost of Graham Kennedy – comes up with something really special that just happens to involve sketches, the format is going to continue to cough up duds. After well over a decade of rubbish sketch shows stinking up the place, there’s no point blaming an individual show for turning people off sketch comedy – the general viewing audience already has plenty of good reasons not to bother tuning into the latest version.
Double Take didn’t fail because it didn’t get the job done; it failed because it was doing the wrong job in the first place.
Hype: Shaun Micallef’s comedy CD
Yeah, yeah, we’re just re-printing the press release. But it’s still big news – after all, when was the last time a comedy CD came out in this country that wasn’t just a collection of radio prank calls or a live stand-up set? Plus it’s Micallef mucking about for just under an hour, making it the comedy high point of 2009 – FACT.
SHAUN MICALLEF – HIS GENERATION
Although he’s written, produced and starred in such award winning TV programs as Full Frontal, The Micallef P(r)ogram(me), Micallef Tonight and Newstopia PLUS fronted the immensely popular Talkin ‘Bout Your Generation, comedian Shaun Micallef is anything but a one-man band – he’s a WHOLE GROUP!On His Generation, Shaun finally gets to play all the roles he’s ever wanted to play. Every interview, character, scene and song is brought to life by Shaun and Shaun alone. His megalomania, unchecked and rampant on this, his first album, will appal you.29 tracks! Over 47 voices! Almost 55 minutes of hysterical laughter! From murderous doctors to Satan-obsessed Gospel singers, from boring fruit shop owners to Oprah-watching al-Qaeda operatives. Shaun Micallef does them all. HEAR Charlton Heston record the Bible! LISTEN as Christopher Walken sings a David Bowie song! GASP at the sheer audacity of Shaun attempting to cover of The Who‘s ‘My Generation‘!This soon to be Platinum album is yours to own legally if you take it to the counter and purchase it with money. Or why not buy it bit by bit on iTunes for $1.69 a track (you miss out on the cover and attractive photos of Shaun though).SHAUN MICALLEF – HIS GENERATION – RELEASED NOVEMBER 13 2009
Comedy Mysteries: The Chaser’s War on Scheduling
Remember when the ABC cut back their order for the final series of The Chaser’s War on Everything from eight episodes to six after the “make a Realistic Wish Foundation” sketch earned them a two week ban? The reason given by the ABC at the time was that their scheduling was so tight for the traditional Aussie comedy slot (9pm Wednesdays) they couldn’t possibly push everything back two weeks to make up for the two non-Chaser weeks. At the time? Sounded kinda plausible. And now? Well, after looking at this weeks schedule and noticing that crap UK series Star Stories is holding down the 9pm Wednesday slot for two weeks until Hungry Beast takes over, all that scheduling guff seems a lot harder to swallow.
Of course, after about two seconds thought this starts to make even less sense. Was there always going to be a two week gap in Aussie content right about now – and if so, why couldn’t the two cancelled episodes of TCWOE have filled the gap? If cutting the show order from eight to six was a punishment, why not say so at the time – it wasn’t like the ABC had shown any spine in standing up to the show’s tabloid critics before then. And what happened to the DVD release of the final series? It was scheduled for the usual quick turn-around after the show wrapped on free-to-air, only to vanish from schedules with no release date currently in sight. Surely the commentary tracks and deleted scenes alone would make it worth checking out…