Australian Tumbleweeds
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?
The Jesters: a prediction
Coming to Movie Extra next month is The Jesters, a sitcom which promises to “satirise the satirists”. In the show Mick Molloy plays former comedian Dave Davies, who takes four “upstarts” from the world of student newspapers and gives them their own TV show…but, ratings are poor and the show isn’t funny so Davies tries to whip up some cheap publicity by asking one of the team to get arrested.
A recent Herald Sun article previewing The Jesters drew comparisons with The Chaser’s War on Everything and quoted the shows’ writers Kevin Brumpton and Angus FitzSimons as saying “We thought it would be a funny idea to make a satire about satirists; to take a punch at the people who were throwing the punches”.
As someone who was hugely disappointed by The Chaser’s War on Everything and deeply irritated by the media hype which surrounded it, I should be looking forward to The Jesters, but even with the comparisons to The Larry Sanders Show and Frontline I suspect it won’t deliver.
Any decent send-up of The Chaser’s War On Everything would need to poke fun not only at the way in which the media (or was that the ABC’s publicity department?) wrung controversy out of nothing, but the wowserish responses to that controversy. Also worth taking a pop at would be the way in which The Chaser team rarely dealt with the important issues, the fact that most of the show couldn’t really be described as satire, and the poor, repetitive writing which became far more of a hallmark of the program than the APEC stunt or Make A Realistic Wish sketch.
It would be lovely to think The Jesters would take a full-spectrum look at the big topic of TV satire in the way that The Wire looked not just at the war on drugs, but the way in which politics, society, unions and the education system intersects with and influences that war. But given that Brumpton and FitzSimons’ writing credits include Comedy Inc, BackBerner, David Tench Tonight, Life Support, The Big Bite, Double Take, Good News Week, Hole in the Wall – and CNNNN – I very much doubt it. This will most likely be a surface-level send-up of sketch comedy by interested insiders and a program which confirms the stereotypes rather than challenges them. It won’t be the next Frontline, it’ll be the next Stupid Stupid Man.
Great Australian Comedy Mysteries of the 21st Century #1: I Love You Too (continued)
After our recent call for the inside scoop on Peter Helliar’s upcoming dwarf love flick I Love You Too, we were flooded with emails dishing the dirt. Well, okay, we found one person who attended one of the Melbourne test screenings and was willing to talk. And even then, the most they were willing to disclose was that it was “surprisingly good” – which, considering that this is a romantic comedy written by Peter “Straughnie” Helliar, could be refering to the surprising way that it didn’t completely suck. Still, our blatant snark aside, Peter “The Station Agent” Dinklage (as the dwarf) recieved a heck of a lot of praise from our mystery corrospondent, which goes to show that one way to get a world -class cast is to write a script with juicy roles for world-class actors who’re usually stuck in supporting roles. Now, where’s our script about the bearded lady who falls in love with Mick Molloy…
Overdue
When the first series of The Librarians arrived on the ABC back towards the end of 2007, it was pretty much the first ray of sunshine after a long, long winter for Australian comedy. Well, it had been a long winter if you weren’t a fan of the increasingly prank-based Chaser’s War on Everything, the panel-based drivel of The Glasshouse, and Chris Lilley’s strident efforts to turn the very form of comedy itself into a way to give himself as much screentime as possible. For what felt like years Australian television comedy had laboured under the twin cinderblocks of half-arsed “political comment” and increasingly self-indulgent variations on The Office’s David Brent.
It’s important to linger a little longer on Summer Heights High. Thanks to it’s ratings success, Chris Lilley had been crowned Australia’s King of Komedy for his ability to put on a range of annoying accents and play a variety of slight variations on a character best described as “a self-obsessed tool”. Australian scripted comedy had been re-defined, thanks largely to the fact that no-one but Lilley was actually making any of it, as little more than a collection of catchphrase-quoting, painful to watch prats we were supposedly meant to be laughing at… only Lilley’s clear love for his cast of lovable misfits meant that the laughs were constantly being undercut. Not that there were a lot of laughs in the first place, but with Jonah, Ja’ime and Mr G veering wildly between complete prats and misunderstood misfits, the few smirks going were undersold at best.
What made The Librarians a clear improvement on Lilley’s work was the fact that, despite having a Lilley-esque central character in the form of neurotic Head Librarian Frances O’Brien (Robyn Butler), creators Butler and Wayne Hope made room for a solid supporting cast (including Roz Hammond and Bob Franklin) and allowed them to share in the laughs by being good old-fashioned, two dimensional comedy characters. It wasn’t fully successful: there was still a heavy reliance on Frances “shocking” comments that weren’t really all that funny. But it was still streets ahead of much of what passes for comedy, sitcom or not, in this country.
Having stumbled across an advance copy of the first four episodes in a bin outside The Age offices, it’s safe to reveal that for the most part everything that worked in the first series has returned. Well, Josh Lawson isn’t back and Kim Gyngell’s role has shrunk to a cameo, but there’s more of Wayne Hope as Frances’ clueless, seemingly endlessly masturbating husband to make up for their loss. Frances is still saying the wrong thing inbetween stressing out and sucking up, while the rest of the Middleton Library staff continue to blunder along – except for children’s librarian and Frances’ former best friend Christine (Hammond), who’s now pregnant and so doing even less work than before.
All seemingly good news there. But the trend in Australian comedy since 2007 has been moving away from “subtle” (read: unfunny), supposedly confronting, barely smirk-raising characters and towards broad gags: while The Chaser failed to spot the mood shift and went from comedy heroes to pariahs and Kyle and Jackie O’s pranks got them yanked off air, Shaun Micallef’s wacky surrealist antics have made him the reigning king of Network Ten and Seven’s so confident that the lightweight silliness of Thursday night’s TV Burp will work that they’re bumping it up to 8.30pm from next week.
Against this backdrop, and despite the uniformly excellent performances and well-crafted scripts, The Librarians feels awfully of it’s time – and that time has passed. Unlike last year’s Very Small Business, which managed to feel like a good old-fashioned comedy thanks to, well, being funny, The Librarians (at least in it’s first four episodes) remains part of a trend towards social painfulness in comedy that has firmly gone out of style. That’s not to say that it’s without merit, or that it’s not very funny in parts – Bob Franklin’s mustache alone is worth a chuckle or two, and the running subplot about Frances’ hellion daughter works well too.
But the multicultural tensions and passive aggressive bitchiness that make up large chunks of most episodes are territory that have been mined a little too deeply in recent years. It’s difficult to know whether Hope and Butler’s Gristmill production company are simply of their time – Tales From the Golf, their series of shorts for SBS, was also very big on social awkwardness – or if they were just giving the customer what they wanted in the wake of Lilley’s triumph. Hopefully it’s the latter: there’s still a lot more promise on display in one episode of The Librarians than, say, every second of footage featuring Mark Loves Sharon’s Mark Wary. And Australian comedy can’t afford to throw talent onto the discard pile just yet.
Vale The Chaser’s War on Everything
So farewell then The Chaser’s War on Everything, whether it was the pointless and repetitive pranks, the seeming plagiarism, or the press and industry reaction – both the wowserish condemnation and slave-like devotion – it’s sure given us something to talk about for the past three and a half years. If I were to sum up my feelings on the series I’d say that it was deeply disappointing and one of the great lost opportunities in Australian TV comedy history, but admittedly, there aren’t that many who agree with me.
Going back through the many things I’ve said about The War online, I was surprised at how resolutely positive I’d been about the show for the first few months of its run. And why wouldn’t I be? The team had proved their potential through a funny spoof newspaper and website, and their previous TV shows CNNNN, The Chaser Decides and Chaser News Alert.
The War looked like it would be a noughties take on The Late Show, a group comedy show with an open format and a satirical edge – and if there was a time to declare a “war on everything” it was in that part of the Howard era when some of us wondered if the Coalition would ever get voted out. Sure the first few episodes of The War weren’t that good, but it was a new show which was finding its feet, right?
As it turned out, the show didn’t improve and only featured a few genuine hits. Most of the time The Chaser couldn’t even reach the level of satire you’d see in The Glasshouse, which given what was going on politically at the time seems almost unbelievable. This was partly the fault of the show’s format, with its heavy reliance on pranks (there are only so many satirical or funny lines you can deliver if you’re following a politician down the street, and they’re accompanied by zealous security guards while you’re dressed in a zany costume or manipulating a giant prop) but it was also a result of the Chaser team coming up with some pretty poor comic concepts. Is there any point in hassling low-paid workers like receptionists, security guards and shop assistants when your actual beef is with their bosses? Michael Moore proved that time and time again, so why didn’t The Chaser try a different approach?
There were a few good sketches and segments along the way, like Chas’s Logies Bonehead Challenge and Craig’s recent cock-sucking mime behind Wilson Tuckey, which summed up Tuckey’s idiocy in a succinct – albeit purile – way. But for every good segment like What Have We Learnt from Current Affairs This Week?, there seemed to be about 15 outings for the Surprise Spruiker, Clive The Slightly Too Loud Commuter and the Crazy Rug Warehouse Guy, followed by a lame parody of Are You Being Served? or Compass.
There’s also the question of the material and concepts which appeared to have been borrowed from other shows, and the tiny amount of genuinely topical material in the show, as I documented in a previous post. Even What Have We Learnt from Current Affairs This Week? seemed to recycle the observations and attitudes of Frontline. Add to this The War’s seeming “one joke about the Coalition, one joke about Labor policy” (an attempt to be balanced at a time when the ABC was under constant fire, which effectively stopped the team from tackling important issues and powerful people in any meaningful way, to the extent that ABC hater Gerard Henderson declared his support for the show) and you had a series so dull, repetitive and lame that you wondered if Rove or Daryl Somers were the ones actually behind it all.
Yet despite the shows’ screamingly obvious flaws, no one in the mainstream media ever really criticised the quality of the comedy or the satirical content. Instead, you had the likes of Phillip Adams and Mike Carlton lining up to say how wonderful it was that the team were pricking pomposity (something no other comedy has ever, ever done), while Tony Martin glossed over the fact that the far superior work of himself and his former colleagues was effectively being recycled. In fact it was only after over-hyped scandals like the APEC stunt or the Make A Realistic Wish sketch that anyone would criticise the show. Add to this the numerous articles previewing the latest “shocking” stunt from The Chaser and you had a resolutely average pranks show and supposed satire being hyped to buggery so often that any affection you had for the team’s past work was washed away in the stinking deluge of their over-exposure.
So, Vale The Chaser’s War On Everything. Rest In Peace. May whatever your creators do next be better, funnier, more original and timely, and less hyped. Despite it all there’s still a small part of me that thinks The Chaser can deliver a great comedy. I hope I’m right this time.
Great Australian Comedy Mysteries of the 21st Century #1: I Love You Too
As recently as this week, MMM in Melbourne were (and for all we know, could still be) running promos for the Pete & Myf breakfast show that proudly announced it to be the show “Melbourne wakes up to”. As the show was recently dumped after well over a year of falling ratings, we’d like to suggest that Melbourne woke up to Pete and Myf a long, long time ago.
But there’s a reason for this snark beyond the usual reminders that Pete & Myf’s arrival was one of the many reasons given for the axing of Tony Martin’s unimaginably superior Get This show, or that Pete & Myf was the last show that Get This‘ producer Richard Marsland worked on before he killed himself. No, a friend of a friend’s friend’s friend (how’s that for track-covering) recently let us know that sneaky test screenings of the Peter Hellier-scripted and starring romantic comedy (with a midget!) I Love You Too are currently taking place in Melbourne. As it’s pretty much the first big-name comedy film made in Australia since 2006’s Boytown, we’re really, really interested in finding out if it’s any good. So if you’ve seen it, please: get in touch. Helliar and the short guy from The Station Agent: how bad can it be?
You (Dave) Hughes, you lose
If Bladerunner has taught us anything – and it hasn’t, though our memories of it sure did come in handy for getting all those late-series references to it on Newstopia – it’s that there’s nothing worse than an itch you can’t scratch. And because it’s increasingly obvious that it won’t be all that long before the itch that is The 7pm Project is scratched- in the racing sense of the term – it’s time to rub the soothing cream of hate into that nagging, irritating mosquito bite.
Or to put it another way: in the face of plummeting ratings (according to the Herald-Sun) why did anyone at Ten ever think The 7pm Project wouldn’t be rubbish? News-based comedy has been a rotting corpse in this country since The Gillies Report finished in the mid-80s, with Seven’s The Big News and The Late Report both dying relatively quick deaths and the ABC’s various efforts getting closer to success (CNNNN) the further they moved away from “news-based satire” (BackBerner). And let’s not forget Mick Molloy’s 2007 effort The Nation, which fizzled fast despite Mick’s tried and tested (and still present judging by his recent fill-in work with Dave Hughes on Melbourne’s Nova FM breakfast show) ability to get real laughs out of the shallow end of current events.
So why return to that tainted well? Well, for years now it’s been accepted wisdom amongst the not-all-that-wise that “the yoof” get all their news from comedy shows. And if you believe that particular line, then The 7pm Project’s approach of reporting actual news followed by supposedly pithy comments probably makes sense to you. But out in the real world, it wasn’t that “the yoof” were in any way watching comedy shows for the news content: they watched shows like The Panel, The Glasshouse, GNW and The Chaser’s War on Everything to get a laugh. The news content – such as it was – was only there to set up the gags (did anyone learn anything about politics from The Chaser’s pranks past “politicians are stuffy, so it’s funny to attack them with big props”?). Cranking up the news content the way The 7pm Project has done is getting things exactly arse-backwards, like a fifteen minute set-up to a supposedly Gen-Y friendly punchline that revolves around the fact that Malcolm Fraser once lost his pants.
But this wrong-headed reliance on straight-faced news wouldn’t be quite so bad if the show actually imparted some real information to its viewers. Unfortunately, The 7pm Project also suffers from a severe lack of confidence in its own material. Fair enough – most of it’s shithouse. But rushing through a pile of shit doesn’t make the experience any more pleasant. For a half-hour show – one that has suspiciously short ad-breaks (barely two minutes) so presumably Ten is having trouble getting sponsors – there’s an awful lot packed into The 7pm Project, and the rapid scurrying through guests, news items, Skype interviews, featured gag-crackers, Hughsey’s creepy stares, Pickering’s day-old one-liners, and Carrie’s blather gives the impression of some sweaty-palmed blind date who thinks if he doesn’t stop talking you won’t be able to tell him to bugger off.
Case in point: Dave “hughsey” Hughes. Calling his on-air persona simply that of an unfunny moron would be insulting to all other forms of multi-celluar life. Often described in general conversation as “agressively shithouse” for the way he not only won’t let other people talk but demands to talk over them with things far stupider than anyone else in the room would say, his act seems to consist entirely of saying inane but blokey things and then staring at the audience like someone had replaced his eyes with buttons Coraline-style. But those who can remember the dawn of Hughsey’s career when he was just someone a then-far more talented RRR Breakfasters radio team would call up to laugh at as much as with know there actually is a way to use him to get laughs.
Everyone knows Hughsey acts like an idiot, and that he says idiotic things: if you come up with a topic that’s bound to get Hughsey all riled up and then – and this is the tricky part – get him to shut the hell up for a second so the audience can imagine the kind of thing he’s going to say in response to this idiot-baiting topic, then chances are the audience just might giggle in expectation. Christ knows they’re not going to laugh at anything he actually says.
But on The 7pm Project, there’s no time for any of that. Instead we get Dave Hughes just blurting out such dazzling insights as “I don’t get what all the fuss is about with corruption – if I was in a position of power I’d make sure that I was taken care of”. Hilarious! And it’s what we were all thinking – well, that and “why can’t I just make his head explode by staring at him like they did on Scanners”.
That said, at this stage even if Hughsey fell under a bus live on air this show couldn’t be saved. Pickering is on his second high-profile daily gig of his career after being sacked from JJJ drive a few years back, and with his determination to cough out his gags even when the conversation has moved on he seems to be reverting to sack-friendly form. Having no chemistry, let alone overlapping interests, with Hughsey doesn’t really help either, but as this show was put together on the breakfast radio model having co-hosts who barely tolerate each other is par for the course. And in other news, Carrie Bickmore is just… there, some of the guest presenters are funny but they’re just cracking scripted gags in two minute chunks (often from interstate, which means they can’t respond to the audience and grind on over the laughs they’re getting in the studio), and as far as we can tell the rest of the show is clips off YouTube. Which, of course, you can’t see anywhere else.
The problem, as is usually the case with producer-led projects like this one, comes down to talent. The daily grind and the rubbish timeslot could all be overcome if there were some truly funny individuals behind the desk, a team with real chemistry, timing, and the ability to get a decent joke out of a news item and then move on. But this is a Roving Enterprises production: where are these funny individuals going to come from? Rove is going to give jobs to his mates, and as the host of a tonight show Rove isn’t going to have any mates who are funnier than he is. Well, he could – but in close to a decade of Rove, he sure hasn’t shown any signs of following the “rising tide lifts all boats” approach to team management. The funniest people in Australia would have struggled to make The 7pm Project work: when you’re working with a talent pool limited to people judged by Rove to be not as funny as Rove, you’re setting the bar so low you have to call Telstra first to make sure you’re not going to damage any underground phone lines.