Australian Tumbleweeds
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…
The Flim-Flam King of the Rim-Ram Room
Press releases are supposed to be full of over-oxygenated waffle designed to fan the flames of interest in a program that otherwise would barely rate a grunt as your average viewer clicked past it to repeats of Seinfeld. And don’t we love Go!’s programming policy of all-Seinfeld, all the time. But occasionally, along comes a press release that sets a new bar for heights of wankery, and wouldn’t you know it, Andrew Denton’s involved yet again.
The show is called – wait for it, ‘cause it’s worth the wait – Hungry Beast. The excuse for this crap title is that “The media is a hungry beast – it devours everything and is never satisfied. Now, 19 newcomers to television [only not really, but more on that later] – recruited after a nationwide call for young talent [which seems to have served up a lot of familiar faces – but again, more later] are being given the opportunity by the ABC to feed the beast”. And a nation says as one: “huh?”
Behind the funky new – or if you prefer, lame – title lies the same old story: yoof news. But not your regular yoof news: according to Denton himself, it’s “an unusual hybrid of journalism, comedy and… something else” though considering there’s going to be ten episodes of it in the regular ABC comedy timeslot of 9pm (starting September 30th), the smart money’s on a more manufactured, less funny (how? – ed) more desperately “cool” version of The Chaser’s War on Everything.
Hang on – where’d you get The Chaser from? Why, the press kit filled in that blank for me: “A lot is being asked of this group. They know that they will have to deal with being compared with The Chaser”. By who exactly? Denton yelling at them “you better be like The Chaser”? And if you wanted to make a show like The Chaser, surely universities are teeming with ready-made packs of smart-arses – why manufacture a no-doubt chemistry-free group? Oh wait, this is a producer-driven show, so it’s just like all those other successful producer-driven manufactured teams – you know, on commercial radio.
(by the by, it now looks like Safran’s 2009 show is either not getting the locked-in ratings boost of a Spicks & Specks lead-in, or isn’t out until 2010. Which is a shame, as that sounded like it was going to do everything this show claims to do only with, you know, thought and laughs)
To help wise the team up to the challenges of being compared to The Chaser, Denton wheeled in “a wide range of guest speakers”, including John Safran (“can I have my timeslot back”), a couple members of The Chaser (“here’s a bunch of old scripts to study”), various journos and PR types, and, most terrifyingly of all, Richard Neville. Bad language alert, but what the fuckety fuck? Dusting off that old fossil to lecture a team of under-30s on anything should be a national disgrace. Neville’s pathetic, single-minded obsession with his brief flicker of relevance in the late sixties has made him a ghastly joke to anyone under 45, so unless Denton let him croak out his dusty views on the primacy of the Baby Boomers as an example of the kind of stories to avoid like the sex plague this counts as a massive cock-up and total PR failure once word gets out. So please, tell your friends.
Anyway, according to this press missive that’s all miss the Hungry Beast team “have been given one editorial instruction: ‘tell us something we don’t know’” So I guess that rules out “we suck”. Though to be fair to this press release, not only does it acknowledge that we’ve seen this kind of thing many times before as it name-checks everything from This Day Tonight and Beatbox to Race Around the World, Fly TV and The Chaser’s various projects, but also lets us in on a little secret: “our deeper hope is, regardless of the show’s success, many of the team will go on to contribute great ideas to Australian television for years to come”. And no doubt keep on kicking back 25% of their earnings to Denton. Not that anything like that is going on here, of course. He’s just nurturing their careers out of the goodness of his heart. Wait, that sounds even snarkier. THERE ARE NO KICKBACKS GOING ON. Denton is nothing at all like the dodgy resturant owner in Heat who employs then rips off that ex-con who was the President of the United States on 24 back when it was good.
So, let’s meet the team who, according to this release, not only have the vital skill of “bullshit detection”, but are “natural piss-takers” – because, as series producer Andy Nehl (who worked on both Beatbox and Blah Blah Blah, so you know he’s down with the kids… well, the kids in 1989) “We can’t wait to see how new people, raised in the Google, Twitter and cable universe, interpret the world”. Gee, if you really wanted to see that, perhaps getting in a series producer who wasn’t old enough to be their father might have been a sign of good faith there.
Ooh, quick sidebar: it seems that to get on this show you had to complete an application form, and “to complete the application form in any meaningful way would take at least three days, thus weeding out the lazy, the half-hearted and the people who thought this was going to be a reality TV show.” Considering that this show was looking for people in their twenties, this process would also serve to weed out anyone who actually had a full-time job (or a couple of part time ones) – unless they already worked in the media and could work on their application at their actual work. But surely Mr “tell us something we don’t know” Denton and company wouldn’t just want the same old would-be media hacks for their new cutting edge look at the world through the eyes of Da Kids?
Of course he did. Out of the seven on-air presenters – five guys and two girls, so I guess anything approaching a gender balance was too cutting edge this time out – seven come from the media! What a fluke! Here’s a quick rundown on the people you’ll come to know and love, then gradually get tried of and eventually dump for someone cooler and sexier:
Jessicah Mendes “recently returned to Australia after six years of inciting mischief and mayhem while searching for stories and journalistic meaning”; Dan Ilic is from Ronnie Johns (so yeah, comedy’s probably out of the question); Veronica Milsom: “Studied broadcasting last year and worked as a Producer / Announcer at Nova after her graduation”; Kieran Ricketts interned on Q&A and describes himself as “the bastard child of Tony Jones and Liz Hayes”, so no doubt he’ll be hysterical (PS: he’s the one who looks like Matt Tilley); Marc Fennell is the JJJ film reviewer and, according to this bio, a “wanker”; Chris Leben “studied acting and film” but dropped out to make videos of himself that he posts on-line; and RMIT graduate in Media and Design Kirk Docker “likes to communicate without bullshit” but clearly can’t judging by the solid stench of crap that wafts off his bio. Did you know that his website ViveCoolCity “broadcasts three five min documentaries a week, covering topics they wanna see but the media won’t touch, then doing it in an uncensored, ballsy way”? My eight cents a day is being spent on this?
There’s a few web content producers listed as well – don’t worry, they’re all media graduates too – and special bonus points must be given to Scott Mitchell, who honest-to-God looks exactly like a teenage version of Tim Ferguson in his promo shot. But why hate on them? They’re just cogs in a machine – a machine that seems to have woken up earlier this year and realised that The Chaser weren’t going to be making The Chaser’s War on Anything much longer and hip news satire wasn’t a niche they wanted to give up without a fight.
There’s about seventy obvious things wrong with this kind of thinking, up to and including the fact that any members of “the yoof” who want to watch the news aren’t really going to want to watch a dumbed down, hipster-injected version when the real deal is already readily available. Thinking that it was the news angle that made The Chaser work is the kind of thing you might think if you were Andrew Denton and produced The Chaser’s early shows, but when people think of ‘The Chaser’ these days they think of the high-rating pranky-prank show packed with pranks that probably involved politicians but it’s kinda hard to remember. The costumes were funny though.
This kind of show is a big steaming plate of vegetables broadcast in digital hi-definition: it’s no damn fun but you’re supposed to choke it down because it’s good for you. It’s the kind of show you can imagine being used as a teaching aid to try and get the kids to watch news, only the kids would rather watch The 7pm Project. And even the press kit admits that part of the aim here is to train up a new generation of ABC talking heads. So why is the ABC’s one dedicated slot for locally-made comedy being given over to what is basically a training exercise for future Arts presenters during the last ten weeks of the rating year? And why didn’t Denton dust off all that expensive David Tench technology rotting in his shed and just use that to create the presenting team? Oh wait, he doesn’t want us to talk about that…
Vale TV Burp
So farewell then TV Burp, the bought-in British format that could have worked. Some have argued that TV Burp wasn’t good enough to care about but, while it wasn’t the funniest thing ever, it was getting better. It certainly got more praise than its partner show Double Take (admittedly, not difficult), hence Seven swapping the two programmes to see if Double Take was dragging TV Burp down. But in the end it wasn’t getting good fast enough for Seven’s liking, hence the quiet axing of the show this week.
As for Double Take‘s survival, it’s only still on air because it’s already in the can. If it were made in the week of broadcast as TV Burp was, it and its 5000 crap parodies of The Biggest Loser would be history.
But as someone who’s watched the evolution of the original TV Burp, hosted by British comedian Harry Hill and aired on ITV-1, I think Seven’s pulled-out too soon, and made a number of mistakes with the programme.
The pilot of Harry Hill’s TV Burp aired on ITV-1 in late 2001. Three series of the show followed over the next three years, airing in late evening week-night slots. The show was criticised for being too family-friendly, so ITV-1 repeated series three in an early evening Sunday slot. From series 4 onwards the show aired in an early-evening Saturday slot, gaining increasing popularity and being the lead-in to populist Saturday night family favourites such as The X Factor and Dancing On Ice. In the past few years the show has won three BAFTA’s, and Series 9 is scheduled to start next month.
Given TV Burp‘s UK broadcast history, Seven’s decision to air the show in adult timeslots was a major mistake. Like The Goodies, TV Burp is the kind of family-friendly comedy show which appeals to both children and adults. People tuning in to see comedy at 9.30pm don’t generally expect silly shows with sing-a-long endings.
The fact that Seven chose Ed Kavalee to host is probably a factor too; while he’s funnier than Hughesy on Hughesy & Kate, he’s not really a writer/performer. In contrast the UK original was created by host Harry Hill and is very much in his style. While many TV formats can be bought and re-made in any country, comedies tend to be more personal affairs. Seven should have chosen a comedian to host, who could then adapt the show to suit their style. Shaun Micallef or Tony Martin would have been ideal, and would certainly have understood why the Harry Hill original worked. But Micallef was busy with Talkin’ ’bout Your Generation, and Tony Martin…well, he seems to be invisible to most comedy producers.
But in Seven’s defence, something like TV Burp is perhaps a hard sell to an Australian public who largely haven’t been exposed to the less mainstream end of British comedy for a decade or so. If more Australians had seen The Day Today, Brass Eye, Knowing Me Knowing You with Alan Partridge, Fist of Fun, The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer, The Mary Whitehouse Experience and Harry Hill’s Fruit Fancies, then maybe the leaps of logic and surreal aspects of TV Burp wouldn’t have looked so weird. Maybe Micallef Tonight wouldn’t have looked so weird.
Tony Martin may have driven Ed Kavalee mad on Get This by endlessly slagging off the ABC for not showing I’m Alan Partridge, but the now sacked Kavalee probably now realises how right his former colleague was to be angry. Any Australian working in comedy and trying to do anything a bit British these days has a problem; more and more people just aren’t familiar with that kind of humour. Which probably explains why promotional puffs for Ed Kavalee’s TV Burp compared the show to US comedy The Soup rather than, er, Harry Hill’s TV Burp.
Another problem for Australian comedies on commercial networks is that they have less and less time to get it right. Sometimes, as with the 2005 two episode shocker Let Loose Live, this is justified. But TV Burp was as improving show which needed a bit more time, a different time slot and probably a different host. Seven got it wrong.
The Mystery of Murray Foote (continues)
Looks like Sam Simmons has found himself yet another regular ABC slot to go with his jTV short segments and his upcoming series (of 5-minute episodes) The Urban Monkey for ABC2. For the second week in a row there’s a song by “Murray Foote’ (Simmons’ alter ego on The Urban Monkey) on Friday night’s Rage at around 2.20am. This one’s called “Maximum Man”. You might not want to stay up for it.
You Get What You Pay For
Pay TV in this country has been churning out sitcoms for well over a decade now, going at least as far back as Bob Franklin’s Introducing Gary Petty – and if anyone out there happened to record that show, please please please get in touch as damn does it sound well worth a look. But having two going at once – 30 Seconds on The Comedy Channel, The Jesters on Movie Extra – is still something out of the ordinary. Why this sudden burst of faith in the Australian sitcom? The idealist in me wants to say it’s the flowering of a new age of Australian scripted comedy; the realist figures it probably has more to do with the ABC coughing up cash for the free-to-air rights to Stupid Stupid Man and Chandon Pictures, both of which started out on pay TV. Either way, comedy’s the big winner… even if neither show is the kind of comedy that involves too many actual laughs.
Of the pair, The Jesters is the one that’s playing it broad, which is hardly surprising considering it’s the brainchild of a couple of Comedy Inc. alumni. The set-up is a bit of a worry as well, as it’s a behind-the-scenes look at a very Chaser-like comedy program called, naturally enough, The Jesters. This kind of in-joke scores points with the comedy nerds but in reality rarely works out well, being a sign that those involved are too busy slapping their own backs over their cleverness to remember to make their veiled references actually funny. But for the most part the storylines are kept accessible – the team has to hire a female writer, half the team is offered a breakfast radio shift, they’re offered a high-paying corporate gig with goes against their principles and so on. Which, while not as good as going super-specific and writing episodes based on actual inside situations, at least stays simple enough to ensure they don’t have to spend half of each episode setting the situation up.
(the one exception out of the episodes we’ve seen is the “female writer” one, which makes sure to name-drop all the right funny women – who would have expected to hear both Tina Fey and Victoria Woods mentioned on Australian television? – while still saying long and loud that women aren’t funny. The comedy twist on the idea that The Jesters – ok, just the smarmy one – would not want to work with a woman because women aren’t funny is painful at best: the woman they hire is more blokey than they are. So blokey and offensive in fact, that [SPOILER AHEAD] she ends up being sacked for it. But don’t worry ladies: they still have to hire a woman writer for the show! She’s just never seen or mentioned again. The episode as a whole is a weird mix of wanting to say something controversial but true – that women aren’t funny – while knowing that they can’t really say this so-called truth because it’ll turn off women. Of course, the real reason why they can’t say it is because it isn’t true, but this doesn’t seem to have crossed the writers’ minds. If it had, the story would have been about a woman writer who was funnier than the crap [even within the show they’re hardly seen as shit-hot comedians] Jesters rather than a “woman” who acts like no woman who has ever drawn breath.)
Simple premises are hardly what it takes to make great comedy, and this would still be a ham-fisted disappointment a la Stupid Stupid Man (right down to the same bitchy – uh, make that “assertive” – female personal assistant character), if not for one bit of inspired casting: Mick Molloy as The Jesters’ seen-it-all-before producer. It’s not that Molloy’s subplots and dialogue is that much better than the rest of the show; it’s that Mick is a really good actor who’s been doing comedy for so long that he knows just how to make even an average line funny. He’s the highlight in an otherwise so-so-sitcom, and even after a string of TV fizzles you really do have to wonder what is wrong with television in this country when Comedy Inc. writers are getting their own sitcoms while Mick Molloy has become a gun-for-hire.
On the other hand, the big name connected to 30 Seconds doesn’t appear anywhere on-camera. This behind-the-scenes look at an advertising agency is a production from Andrew Denton’s production company Zapruder’s Other Films, and there should be zero doubt in your minds that Denton’s success with The Gruen Transfer played a large part in giving this series (written by three long-time advertising execs) the go-ahead. As you’d expect from a Denton production (even if it’s really only his name on the door), this insiders look at how advertising works is interesting without being compelling – the shock revelation that when an alcohol company asks for a campaign aimed at “eighteen year olds” they really mean fourteen year olds is hardly shocking to anyone of any age, and most of the other insights are pitched at that level. Which means roughly a quarter of the show falls flat right there – at least when Frontline lifted the lid on current affairs television they were providing actual behind-the-scenes insight rather than basic common sense. But it’s not like anyone expects advertising execs to treat the general public as anything other than morons, right?
Most of the characters fall into the usual sitcom templates (the crazy 30 Rock-style boss, the sleazy know-it-all, the idealistic type who has to have the evils of advertising explained to her each week, the ditzy blonde PA and so on), though some decent dialogue and better than average casting (including Stephen Curry, Joel Tobeck, Gyton Grantley and Kat Stewart) lifts things a bit here. But it’s surprising how far a slick look and competent dialogue can take you, and 30 Seconds manages to be blandly enjoyable in a way that normally only high-end US sitcoms or big-budget beer commercials can manage. Which again, is kind of what you’d expect from Denton and his advertising team. Luckily for them, no-one seriously expected this to contain actual laughs (when was Denton last seriously funny? It’d have to be fifteen years ago at least, or whenever it was that his talk show on Seven wrapped up. And even then Anthony Morgan was the one bringing all the funny) because when you’re not only making jokes about ponytails but using them in the advertising for a show that is itself about advertising… well, the adage about the difficulty inherent in attempting to bring excrement to a level of high polish comes to mind.
Great Australian Comedy Mysteries of the 21st Century #2: Murray Foote
In between slaving over posts comparing upcoming pay TV sitcoms The Jesters to 30 Seconds (short version: The Jesters is crude but kind of funny, 30 Seconds is slick but more of a dramedy) and the DVD release of Graham Kennedy’s Coast to Coast (short version: God damn, this is some funny shit), I managed to find time to catch a bit of Rage (the ABC music video show, not the emotion) on Friday night. It’s hardly slacking off from the relentless pursuit of comedy that we pride ourselves on here: most music videos manage to be at least as funny as your average Double Take sketch (the dueling mimes on Art vs Science’s “Parlez-Vouz Francais” or the crap skipping comp on Blue Juice’s “Broken Leg”), even if it’s not always on purpose (every John Butler clip ever).
Still, even tuning in with an eye for laughs couldn’t have prepared me for what I saw at around 2.30am Saturday morning. Because while Rage was telling me I was watching Murray Foote in a purposefully poorly-shot clip for a song titled “Love Puzzle”, what I was actually seeing was notoriously unfunny jTV menace Sam Simmons wearing a fake mustache. Love Puzzle itself wasn’t a totally rubbish comedy song – if nothing else it was short, though “I’m crying sex tears” is trying a little too hard (like most of Simmons’ work really) – but what’s it doing popping up two hours into Rage?
(okay, only kidding with the bewilderment: Murray Foote is the name of the character Simmons plays in his upcoming series of five minute shorts The Urban Monkey with Murray Foote. Clearly his Rage appearance was some kind of viral sizzle thing. Though it might have worked better if he’d managed to let viewers know that The Urban Monkey starts Sept 14th at 8.55pm on ABC2. Full review / public service warning to come)
Hands up in the air
After watching The 7pm Project last Friday (21/8), it’s time to coin a new word: “Martin”. As in “to martin: to appear on a panel show and spend the whole night desperately trying to jump in with a joke, only to be talked over by someone far less funny but much, much pushier”. As for the opposite situation – where you’re the one doing all the talking, despite the fact you have nothing useful to say – we already have a word for that: to langbroek.
Let’s just hope SBS’s latest panel show, the history based AD/BC (starts this Thursday, 8.30pm), handles things a bit better: reportedly Tony Martin will be appearing on 12 of the 26 episode run, and it’s doubtful anyone wants to see him martin his way through week after week.