Australian Tumbleweeds
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.
You (Dave) Hughes, You Lose pt2: Lets See How Far We’ve Come (how cum)
Thinking about Dave Hughes? There’s never been a better time to explore his comedy career (yes, we have been re-reading Lolly Scramble), thanks to the efforts of the late-night programmers at the ABC. Drunks and insomniacs alike have been enjoying their fine work screening old episodes of The Glasshouse in the early hours of Friday morning, and thanks to the magic of timed recording you too can get in on the fun… assuming we have any readers who aren’t already drunks or insomniacs.
In these dark days where Hughesy rules the Australian comedy scene like some kind of giant mechanical wickerman – his 2006 comedy DVD Live went 7 times platinum, don’tcha know – it’s easy to forget that just a few years ago he was playing third fiddle to Corrine Grant and Wil Anderson. And gee, haven’t their careers kicked on? But for all The Glasshouse’s many, many, many flaws, rewatching it now reveals that they managed to get one thing right: they knew how to use Hughesy.
Even during the opening trio of monologues it’s obvious that Dave Hughes isn’t there just to crack jokes – he is the joke. While Wil and Corrine make the stock-standard GNW-production line gags we saw on Good News Week, then on The Glasshouse, then on The Sideshow, then on the current re-incarnation of Good News Week, Hughes does his own “Hughesy Loses It!” rantings. And guess what? Anderson and Grant are clearly laughing not only at his “jokes” (which are mostly crap), but at what a nutcase he is. And they’re right: he is a nutcase. It’s the only thing funny about him.
Of course, there are other readings of the situation. “Wil Anderson is an arrogant unfunny wanna-be left-wing intellectual tool sneering at the clearly working class Hughesy” being one some of us are fond of, mostly because you can never throw enough mud at Wil Anderson. But it doesn’t take too many episodes to realise that no, unlike the other two main cast members Hughes is clearly being treated like he’s playing a character – let’s call him Hughesy – that we’re invited to laugh at as much as with. “Oh that Hughesy,” this imagined Glasshouse viewer chortles inbetween shaking their fist at a poster of John Howard with a Hitler mustache drawn on, “he’ll say and do anything for a laugh.”
Meanwhile, over on Rove Dave Hughes was getting his own segment where he reheated the same crap they were swallowing over on The Glasshouse. Only difference was that Rove McManus generally lets his comedians get on with it, only occasionally cutting in with a comment or question to move things along. Dave Hughes was still “Hughesy”, only without the context. He was still getting “ongriiiiii” about things, and clearly part of the gag if you looked hard was that he was a crazy guy getting worked up over silly things, but that side of things was no longer an actual part of the act: if you took his rantings as being funny in and of themselves, no-one was there to remind you that they were coming from a man who was himself a joke. Certainly not Hughes himself, who gradually moved his act away from “don’t I say crazy things” to “don’t I say funny things” without actually developing any material that was actually remotely funny. He toned down the shouting, talked more about his life in a non “aren’t I crazy” way (this is surprisingly noticeable if you watch material from 2006 and 2009 in the same week), and went from a man ranting about weird stuff to someone who would tell it like it is. So long as “is” didn’t mean funny.
A few more years down the track and face value is the only value Hughesy accepts. Listening to his increasingly annoyed tone on Nova breakfast radio these last few weeks – where his usual sparring partner (and peer in the arrogantly unfunny stakes) Kate Langbroek has been replaced by the far funnier and massively more skilled Mick Molloy – reveals a man who no longer seems capable of taking a joke. And why should he? On The 7pm Project every ill-thought turd and gaseous bubble that bursts from his lips is taken as the worthwhile thoughts of a seasoned media commentator. Somehow the morons who took “Hughesy” and his rubbish sub-sub-sub-Belushi rantings at face value have made him their king, and Hughes – unaware or uncaring that the only part of his act that was funny is long gone – is riding their adulation to the bank.
As the press release for his new DVD Handy informs us without a trace of irony: “Honest and imperfect is how Australians like their comedy and Dave Hughes delivers exactly that in spades”. And here we thought people just wanted comedy to be funny.
21st Century Vizard (part 2)
It’s fairly easy to overlook Rove’s stranglehold on Australia comedy at the moment. Even on Ten, Good News Week and Talkin’ ’bout Your Generation aren’t from the Roving Enterprise stable. But Nine has no Australian comedy to speak of, and Seven’s efforts are token at best (Kath & Kim every few years and Thank God You’re Here if it ever comes back, leaving the struggling Double Take and TV Burp their first original efforts in years): if you want Australian comedy on a commercial network then Ten is all you’ve got, and at the moment Rove is providing well over 50% of Ten’s product.
The upside of all this is that Rove seems at least partially aware that the best way to get the best out of the talent he employs is to let them do what they want. Even the individual segments on his talk show seem a lot closer to what the performers want to do than you might expect from a prime-time gab fest. Judith Lucy’s first segment as a regular was, well, pretty much exactly what you’d expect from Judith: jokes about her crap personal life, heavy drinking, and looking for a shag. Considering she’s the replacement for Dave (“I’m ongriiiiiiiii”) Hughes and will be appearing alongside the cheap celebrity gags of Peter Helliar and the offbeat whimsy and editing tricks of Ryan Shelton’s occasional segments, it’s hard to argue that Rove has a house style he asks his contributors to conform to.
The range of Roving Enterprise’s product is another argument for Rove as benign dictator: Before the Game is easily the best of the lightweight footy shows out there (admittedly not difficult when The [AFL] Footy Show is your competition), Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader is a solid lightweight family-friendly gameshow (which shows that Rove’s real skills lie not in comedy, but as a gameshow host), and The 7pm Project is, well… a work in progress. The upcoming Hamish & Andy specials will no doubt be the usual collection of Rove segments and footage from their US Caravan of Courage roadtrip, which might not be compelling viewing but counts as yet another example of the variety of product Rove gets to put his name on.
Not knowing much about the internal workings of Ten, it’s difficult to know if the network’s current focus on comedy would be as strong or as wide-ranging if not for Rove McManus. After all, there have been non-Rove comedy projects on Ten in the last few years – Mark Loves Sharon and Andrew Denton’s “David Tench” talkshow come to mind (in a ‘Nam-style flashback way)- and just because they for the most part stank doesn’t automatically mean that without Rove there wouldn’t have been others. But in this universe, Rove rules commercial comedy in a manner unlike anyone since Steve Vizard. Except without the exploitation vibe and overseeing of various high-end crap factories (Skithouse aside).
And yet… while Steve Vizard presided over the rise of Eric Bana, Shaun Micallef, and the first stirrings of what would turn out to be Kath & Kim, what has Rove given us? Peter Helliar and Dave Hughes. Hughsey at least has succeeded out from under Rove’s umbrella with his radio work and run on The Glasshouse: Helliar’s radio career has been a string of failures, all his TV work has been with Rove, and if his upcoming movie I Love You Too flops surely questions will finally be asked about just how funny Helliar is when he’s not glued to Rove’s hip. Everyone else in the Rove stable is either a tried and tested name (Mick Molloy, Judith Lucy), someone who’s made it on their own in another medium or TV show (Hamish & Andy, Charlie Pickering, Hughsey), someone whose association with Rove is their big shot (Carrie Bickmore) or Ryan Shelton, who’s easily the best thing on Rove but is mostly working on radio these days. For all his power and reach, Rove is yet to unearth a talent capable of stepping out from his shadow and doing worthwhile work.
Of course, getting any kind of comedy up and running without powerful friends is extremely difficult, and Rove should (and despite the general tone of this blog, is) be praised for helping people get their own personal comedy on air. But whether it’s a savage indictment on the quality of the current crop of Australian comedians, a sad reflection of just how difficult it is to get a show up without help, or a sign that Rove likes to surround himself with funny people who aren’t too funny, the fact remains: no matter how many shows he might have up and running, no matter how many mates he gets to help out, the way things currently stand… he’s no Steve Vizard.
21st Century Vizard (part 1)
Rove (the show and the man) returns to our screens this week, no doubt emboldened by the failure of his latest effort, The 7pm Project, to fail. Hughsey’s quit Rove and Carrie Bradshaw’s quit reading the news on Nova, so despite struggling ratings they clearly know something about the show’s future that’s not obvious to those watching – even if it has improved markedly over the last few weeks. Which means that Rove’s comedy stable now includes three year-round “comedy” shows (we’ll count 5th Grader and Before the Game as one show), which makes him the most influencial figure in Australian comedy since… Steve Vizard.
Before you rightly recoil in horror, consider this: when Vizard basically ran commercial comedy in this country through the late 80s and most of the 90s, this country saw a flowering of decent television comedy the likes of which had… well, been seen before, obviously. But not seen since. Full Frontal and Totally Full Frontal and not-quite-right efforts like Big Girl’s Blouse and Eric Bana’s talk show might have been crap factories, but they provided a hothouse for comedy talent that lead to pretty much everything decent in Australian comedy since The D-Gen and Clarke & Dawe. Of course, Vizard himself is a much-loathed figure in Australian comedy, and going by his various shady dealings in pretty much every other area of his business life it’s not difficult to guess at how he ran his comedy empire. But we’re all about the results here, and the result of his numerous comedy sweatshops was a flowering of oppertunity for Aussie comedy talent that gave a leg up to everyone from Bob Franklin to Eric Bana to Shaun Micallef.
And then there’s Rove…
A Flaming Bag of FM-friendly turds
On JJJ a few weeks back, while talking up his upcoming ABC television series, John Safran described it as being full of pranks and making fun of people – basically, “everything people don’t want in comedy anymore”. And he has a point: according to various opinion-makers, gone is our former love for all things “shocking” and “confrontational”, replaced in 2009 by a kinder, gentler laff-riot. The proof? The barrage of hate directed at The Chaser for their Make-A-Realistic-Wish sketch, followed by the howls of outrage directed at Kyle and Jackie O (but mostly Kyle) for the duo’s teen rape lie detector stunt. Actually, on the other side of the ledger there’s the rise of Talkin’ ‘bout Your Generation, which supposedly signals the dawning of a new age of “fun” comedy, but around these parts we like to call that kind of show by its proper name: good comedy.
What’s actually interesting about this new wave of superfun happy slide comedy – let’s not forget the halfway decent Laurence Leung’s Choose Your Own Adventure as another example of this new wave, even if pretty much everyone else already has – is that the supposedly positive side of this trend has barely made a ripple in the media. Remember when the “shocking” and “controversial” comedies like The Chaser’s War on Everything and Summer Heights High were all the rage? The press wouldn’t shut the hell up about them, to such an extent that The Chaser might as well have been working for A Current Affair and Today Tonight they appeared on both so often. Talkin’ ‘bout Your Generation might be hitting similar rating highs, but Shaun Micallef is going to have to out himself as a sex pest if he wants to make it onto A Current Affair in this lifetime.
In contrast, the negative side of this latest comedy trend has been front page news for days on end. Part of that – a large part – is that neither The Chaser or Kyle appear on Seven and Nine, the networks who do have attack dog current affairs shows ready to take down anyone who doesn’t conform to their idea of social values. Another part is that Melbourne’s Herald-Sun has, over the last year or so (roughly since, if my memory serves me correctly, a particularly well-respected Editor-in-Chief was given the arse after falling foul of Rupert Murdoch’s sister) gone downmarket in a rapid way to the point where pretty much every front page is given over to some kind of moral outrage campaign. With The Chaser having built their careers on being “shocking”, and Kyle being so damn easy to hate (and working out of Sydney, so with no Melbourne advertisers to offend), they were both dead in the tabloid media’s sights, just waiting for them to do… well, whatever it was that had earned them so much praise a few years ago.
The point of all this is that out in the real world there has been no change in what kinds of comedy Australians actually want to watch. The Chaser’s ratings were soft, but the show had been hit-and-miss for a long time. Kyle was hated by many for acting like an arrogant prick every single chance he could grab, but his radio show still rated well and it’s not as if tacky, offensive stunts were anything new on their show (as Media Watch pointed out) or in the Australian media in general.
Make no mistake, Kyle and Jackie O’s show was a flaming bag of FM-friendly turds dumped daily on the doorstep of radio listeners. But Current Affairs shows have been turning up on (for example) the doorsteps of “the tenants from hell” and hounding them down the street before cutting back to the studio to start stage two of a targeted hate campaign since at least the early 1990s and all we ever heard from the rest of the media was the occasional heavy sigh. Why then was this arguably equally moronic and only mildly more evil radio segment enough to have people calling for the sacking of everyone who even owns a radio capable of being tuned to Kyle and Jackie O? What’s really going on here?
To make one thing clear, it’s not like there was a massive ground-swell of serious community anger over Kyle and Jackie O’s crap. By which I mean, we didn’t see any staged protests and active consumer boycotts: emails, talkback radio, letters to the editor and blogs don’t count – it takes more effort to collect your mail. Remember when Get This was axed? They actually had people physically protesting outside Austereo stations nationwide (tho’ mostly in Melbourne) demanding it be re-instated and… nothing happened.
So if that level of public commitment to a cause can’t change anything, what makes anyone think that limp internet-based “community outrage” got Kyle and Jackie O taken off the air? All that we’re seeing with The Chaser and with Kyle (tho’ it’d be a lot more obvious if the order had been reversed) is an increased willingness on the part of the crappier end of the mainstream media to go in fast and hard over even the slightest transgression of what they believe to be “community values” until employers and advertisers cave in. The public doesn’t get a look in.
But so what if it’s just the media pressuring other parts of the media: we’ve had a good few years of “shocking” comedies pushing society’s limits, so it’s not really much of a surprise that the pendulum has started to swing back. It’s how far it’s going to swing back that’s the worry: what if these increasingly rabid sections of the media suddenly decide that a radio or TV personality that is actually funny has “gone too far”? Judging by the fates of both Kyle and The Chaser we can expect yet another rapid cave-in on behalf of their employers whoever they may be.
To draw an example from real life, remember the various scandals they tried to whip up about Summer Heights High involving that real-life teen who died from a drug overdose in much the same way as the one Mr. G was calling “a slut”? Back in 2007 no-one gave a shit and the story died out fast: I have a sneaking suspicion that if something similar happened today we’d see the front of the Herald-Sun screaming “Lilley spat in the face of a dead teen”. Whatever you might think of Lilley’s work, that’d be a bad thing for comedy. Because this new trend in Australian comedy isn’t about a kinder, gentler laff-riot: it’s about slapping down hard anyone who steps out of line. And isn’t stepping out of line what comedy is supposed to be all about?