Australian Tumbleweeds
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.
Molloy improves Hughesy & Kate non shocker
Mick Molloy is currently filling in for Kate Langbroek on the ludicrously popular Hughesy & Kate whilst Langbroek is on maternity leave. This comes only a few months after Molloy filled in for Dave Hughes when he became a father at the end of April. Like both Langbroek and Hughes, Molloy is a commercial radio veteran who knows the score when it comes to breakfast radio, but with one vital difference: he’s funny.
Listen to any normal edition of Hughesy & Kate and laughs are way down the list of the shows’ features. You want dull personal anecdotes? They’re covered. As are phone-ins, competitions, stunts, celebrity guests, footy tips and some surprisingly biting interviews with federal politicians, but comedy? No, not with Dave Hughes on board.
Enter Mick Molloy, with his knockabout, hard living, blokey persona, carefully crafted through years of stand-up, propping up front bars and his much-missed radio partnership with Tony Martin. Beneath the stubble, the beer gut and the flannelette shirt, Molloy’s a smart man, with a cheeky charm and the ability to come up with a funny line on cue. Throw him into a formulaic breakfast radio bland-fest and he makes it vaguely worth listening to, even with the dull personal anecdotes (Hughesy’s wife bought him jeans that were too tight), crap phone-ins (should it be against the law to leave a toilet in a “disgraceful state”?), nasal whining (Hughesy’s teeth are eroding!), semi-tasteless competitions (text in with the sex of Kate’s baby and win tickets to Pink if it’s a girl or Green Day if it’s a boy), stupid stunts (Mick and Hughesy raced each other in the Nova 100 Gift, with the loser being zapped with an electric dog collar) and Ed Kavalee reminding you before and after every single song that Kate was on leave having a baby (as if the Murdoch press hadn’t drummed this fact into you by now).
As with Tony Martin’s Get This, Molloy rolls with the commercial radio cliches and subverts them as best he can, questioning them, taking the piss out of them and spicing them up where possible, bringing more laughs to Hughesy & Kate than anyone ever thought possible. Even Ed Kavalee’s there to spur Molloy on.
But, before you rush off to download the podcasts, don’t forget that this programme still contains that ultimate spectre of comedy doom: Dave Hughes. Hughes with his whiny voice, dead eyes and ability to make almost no one laugh yet still be described as a comedian, seems to be barely off TV or radio these days. He’s got Hughesy & Kate every morning, Before The Game on weekends and now The 7PM Project every night. Does he ever sleep? Or does he just lurch from studio to studio, grinding his way through commentaries on topical issues and going off on humour-free rants, like a surreal cross between a factory and a zombie.
Not even Mick Molloy in good form can defeat Hughesy, who, unsurprisingly, continues to dominate the show which bears his name. If Nova’s program director has any sense they’ll plump for comedy, and give Molloy a show with Ed Kavalee next year. But as any Get This fan knows, comedy isn’t what drives commercial radio, it’s crap songs and mindless yammer, meaning Mick Molloy (and his former comedy partner Tony Martin) are condemned to a life of guest appearances and fill-in slots, while the Dave Hughes comedy cyclone continues to reek its devastating havoc.
No so much a backflip as a Somers-assault
With hindsight the upcoming return of Hey Hey it’s Saturday to our screens (link) was obvious, an excrement-laden juggernaught bearing down on an unwilling nation like a strident university student’s clumsy rape metaphor. Some might like to console themselves with the knowledge that – as far as we know – there’s only going to be two one-hour specials (shown in the ratings deadzone of November no less), and that once our nation is reminded of just how dull Chooklotto, Red Faces, Molly’s Melodrama, Dickie Knee, et al actually are then hopefully this brief flirtation with recycled shite will pass.
(Then again, John Farnham keeps on keeping on despite having nothing new to give for the last two decades, and no doubt he’ll stop in for a chat with his old mate Daryl to give the ratings a boost.)
But we’d rather take a look at how this nightmare actually came about in the vain, desperate hope that by documenting the horror we might be able to avert a similar disaster next time. Let’s start at the beginning, shall we…
A): Daryl Somers. Usually when a show is axed, those involved go quietly. Partly because the battle is over, partly to safeguard what little chance they might have of being re-invited to the ball. Not Daryl. Over the last few years of Hey Hey’s run, when the show was clearly struggling to attract viewers who could stay awake into the second hour, Daryl was constantly out there talking about what a shame it would be for Hey Hey to not reach 30 years on air. He fought long and hard to keep it alive when even the on-air staff clearly didn’t give a shit, and when the axe finally fell he wasn’t afraid to go on the record about how disappointed he was in pretty much everyone but himself. The dirt had barely settled on the show’s grave when he started talking about a revival, slipping it into conversations about pretty much anything else, constantly talking about how good old fashioned variety needed to make a comeback to our screens – under his guiding hand, of course. Frankly, he wouldn’t shut the fuck up about bringing Hey Hey back despite a general indifference from everyone he spoke to. Well, everyone apart from…
B): Channel Nine: In ratings terms, they’re been struggling for years now. Reviving an old favourite isn’t exactly a difficult move to make, and when the host is basically camped on your front door begging to be let in, giving a revival the green light is a lot easier than having to have an actual idea. Of course, the time has to be right…
C): The Current Televisual Climate: with Thank God You’re Here rating solidly even after four series, and Talkin’ ‘bout Your Generation the second biggest hit (behind Master Chef) of 2009, clearly audiences are in the mood for a lot of lightweight piss-farting around in a semi-live format. Bad news for Nine is, those shows are on other networks and their attempt to cash in with Wipeout Australia made no impact whatsoever. But if bringing back Hey Hey is such an obvious move, what was the hold-up…
D): The Gavin Disney Sex Trial: as co-creator and producer of Hey Hey, (not to mention Somers’ manager) it would have been near-impossible to bring back Hey Hey in anything like its original form without his involvement. And it would have been difficult to secure his involvement if he’d been locked up for raping a teenage male employee. Fortunately for Somers and for Nine, on July 9th Disney was found not guilty of all charges. Barely a fortnight later, the Hey Hey revival was officially on. But still, did the public really want Hey Hey back…
E): The Herald Sun: barely a week after Disney’s acquittal Melbourne tabloid The Herald Sun suddenly seemed to find a Facebook group calling for the return of Hey Hey surprisingly newsworthy. The largest story on page three of the July 15th edition was headlined “Hey, hey – we want Saturday back”. And we quote: “FANS of legendary TV variety show Hey Hey its Saturday have launched a campaign to pressure a commercial network to bring the program out of hibernation”. By The Herald Sun’s own admission this Facebook page had been in existence for at least three months; why all the coverage now? And written not by some junior journo but by Darren Devlyn, editor of the Herald-Sun’s TV liftout?
It hardly seems likely that a busy man such as himself would spend his days cruising Facebook looking for sites calling for the return of long-axed Australian variety shows. So did someone bring it to his attention as a way to build public support for the show’s return? Maybe even Somers himself, who is quoted in the article and certainly wanted to bring Hey Hey back? Which raises yet another question: if this was basically a self-promotion exercise, why did this story get such a free kick in the Herald-Sun? The only two people quoted are Somers himself and the Facebook page’s creator, both calling for the show’s return; couldn’t they find a TV insider or Nine spokesperson to provide another angle? After all, this wasn’t a puff piece to fill a gap in the TV Guide – this was on page three of the nation’s biggest-selling tabloid and it reads like nothing more than a paid ad demanding the return of Hey Hey. And let’s not forget to follow-up news items that ran, letting us know that the Facebook groups numbers were growing off the back of the Herald-Sun’s efforts: barely a week later the paper reported that the group’s membership was well over 20,000, and a few days after that… well, now we’ve got new Hey Hey to look forward to.
Like we said, in hindsight it’s all so clear. And it’s not like Somers doesn’t have an extensive track record of playing the Melbourne media like a harp: if anyone out there can confirm or deny the rumours that Somers was the one pulling the strings (maybe directly, maybe he just had some media mates wanting to do him a solid) behind the media campaign that led to the axing of The Mick Molloy Show – a show broadcast in a Saturday night timeslot following Hey Hey during 1999 and clearly seen at the time as a possible replacement / threat to Somers – we’d love to hear from you…
The 9pm Project
One of the rarely mentioned but screamingly obvious factors behind the success of most of the ABC’s local comedy ventures over the last few years is the timeslot. No-one wants to point it out because it’s kind of embarrassing, but it’s about as close to a fact as you can get in television: being on at 9pm after Spicks & Specks sure doesn’t hurt.
First, some facts: Spicks & Specks rates extremely well across the nation and it starts at 8.30, which, thanks to the way Australian television generally works in prime time, is a changeover point. Everyone has a new show starting at 8.30, so if you want to change channels that’s the time to do it. Sure, plenty of people channel-surf once a show gets boring or the ads are on, and most networks try to get sneaky by having their shows drag on until 8.35 or so in the hope that’ll put people off changing (if you’ve missed the start on the other channel, why bother changing at all?). But generally speaking, if you’re going to lose or gain viewers in bulk, 8.30pm is the time when it’ll happen. And it doesn’t happen Wednesdays on the ABC at 8.30pm, because people like Spicks & Specks.
9pm – when shows like The Chaser’s War on Everything, The Librarians and The Gruen Transfer are on – is a different matter. Everywhere else is showing hour-long dramas in that timeslot, so if you’ve come for Spicks & Specks, unless you want to jump into a show that’s half over you’re going to stay for whatever’s next. Shows on the ABC at 9pm on Wednesdays don’t have to do the hard work of gaining a viewing audience, they just have to prevent the one Spicks & Specks delivers them from wandering off to check out YouTube. So it’s fairly safe to assume that the ABC is going to continue to have a string of home-grown comedy rating hits at 9pm right up until the moment people get sick of watching Spicks & Specks.
This old news is still news because at the moment there’s a rare opportunity to watch what happens when people with no idea what they’re doing attempt to engineer the same scheduling scenario. Over on Seven on Thursday nights we currently have Double Take at 8.30pm, and the Ed Kavalee-hosted TV Burp at 9pm. As mentioned earlier, Double Take is yet another flavourless yet gristle- packed sketch comedy sausage from the Comedy Inc abattoir – the kind of show that’s completely forgettable yet… nope, it’s just forgettable.
In contrast, while TV Burp has its flaws and plenty of them – a lot of the gags are weak, the pace drags and Kavalee can’t quite sell some of the sillier jokes in the way that, say, Shaun Micallef could – there’s a passion for television that comes through every now and then which grounds the show in a way that the slicker Double Take lacks. Kavalee seems like an actual person interested in television and in poking fun at it, which sounds obvious until you stop and think about how few TV presenters show any real emotion about what they’re doing on camera. That alone instantly makes him far more likable than most comedy figures doing the rounds (does Hughsie ever show any interest in anything past collecting a check?), and it’s amazing how important likability can be in making a show work. TV Burp is super-light entertainment that should probably be on when Funniest Home Videos is over, but on Seven’s Thursday night comedy double it’s the show that shows real potential.
Unfortunately, it’s also the one on at 9pm, and no-one’s going to tune in for it at 9pm. Double Take will more than likely suffer the exact same fate as every other commercially produced sketch comedy show since the turn of the century, and it’ll take TV Burp down with it. Which would be a shame: considering the seemingly vast number of clearly-insane people who want Hey Hey it’s Saturday to come back, a show with such a similar, gags-n-clips-and-general-silliness vibe should find a niche somewhere. Just not on Seven Thursdays at 9pm.
Double Take Take Two
Seven isn’t quite confident enough of this week’s new return to sketch comedy Double Take to send out full episodes to reviewers, but they have sent out discs featuring ten minutes worth of sketches to various media outlets and surprise surprise, one just happens to have fallen into our hands. Okay, “fallen” isn’t quite the right word –maybe “hurled” is a better description of the way one media type discarded this particular slice of prime Aussie comedy. And really, who could blame them? It’s basically the usual mix of celebrity impersonations, TV parodies and more traditional gag sketches, and to be fair at first glance it’s a slick but colourless effort with some good ideas on display. Which isn’t really that surprising when you look at the credits: there’s at least twenty writers listed (including Shaun Micallef’s regular co-conspirators Gary McCaffrie and Michael Ward and John Safran cohort Mark O’Toole), so someone’s bound to have had a good idea eventually. But as anyone who remembers The Wedge knows, these kind of sketch shows are usually driven by the head writer and executive producer (most of the writers listed in the credits would have only sent in a sketch or two), and that’s where the real fun begins.
You see, there are two kinds of comedy shows: the ones where a bunch of funny people get together to put on a show, and the ones where a network decides to order up some comedy for their schedules. The first group includes pretty much all the decent comedy of the last two decades, including Kath & Kim, John Clarke’s The Games, the work of The Chaser and Chris Lilley, and anything from Working Dog (Frontline, The Panel, Thank God You’re Here). The second group mostly includes shows that were quickly axed or died lingering deaths in late night timeslots, such as The Wedge, Comedy Inc, and the ill-fated Let Loose Live. And a quick look at Double Take‘s credits reveals that executive producer / director / co-creator David McDonald was a writer / producer on Comedy Inc for a number of years while head writer / co-creator Rick Kalowski was the head writer on Comedy Inc and the head writer on Seven’s short-lived (despite the presence of Chris Lilley) 2004 sketch show Big Bite.
So what we can expect here – especially as the cast are mostly inexperienced newcomers to TV comedy and therefore hardly likely to start throwing their own weight around – is pretty much Comedy Inc redux. And no doubt this is a calculated move on Seven’s behalf: with shows like Thank God You’re Here and Talkin’ ‘bout Your Generation (not to mention The Chaser) scoring big with comedy, clearly they feel that the time is right to revive the old sketch formula of celebrity impersonations and advertising parodies, TV send-ups and restaurant sketches. Bloody restaurant sketches.
But while more Australian comedy on our screens is pretty much always a plus, let’s just look at the negatives for a moment. For starters, this isn’t a formula that has actually worked all that well since the glory days of Fast Forward / Full Frontal in the late 80s and early 90s. The last decent sketch show this country’s produced – The Micallef P(r)ogramm(me), as if you didn’t know – featured almost no impersonations, no commercial / film parodies, and no send-ups of current television. That’s not to say the formula couldn’t work in the hands of people who believed in it or had something new to say, but after years helming Comedy Inc surely we would have seen some sign of it there. And… nope. Plenty of “hilarious” sketches involving a stuttering train saying “cunt” though.
On a more commercial front, didn’t anyone at Seven notice that this kind of manufactured comedy effort has failed time and time again in recent years? Remember The Wedge? Remember all two weeks of Let Loose Live? The Hamish & Andy Show? Even Big Bite, and that had Chris Lilley – that’s right, even with Chris Lilley playing Mr G it got the chop after the first series, which must say something about how popular this format is with audiences. For the last decade this kind of thing has been snubbed by audiences at first glance, and while it’s easy to spot why, why give that information away for free? Any TV execs reading this, feel free to email us. We’ve got PayPal accounts.
But wait a minute – didn’t Comedy Inc run for five seasons? Wasn’t there something like ninety hour-long episodes made? Surely that’s a sign of some kind of success? Maybe Seven had the right idea in hiring the brains behind Comedy Inc to run their new show – after all, they clearly made a go of their last sketch outing, right?
Uh, no. Whether the execs at Seven fell for that argument or not who knows. But what we do know is that for a large part of its run Comedy Inc was renewed not because Nine had any real confidence in the product – a product they kept shifting timeslots and dumping for weeks or months at a time before springing new episodes onto a clearly disinterested public, lets not forget. No, Comedy Inc kept coming back because in the early and mid-90s Nine has a serious problem meeting its Australia drama quotas. Seven and Ten had nightly soaps to boost their numbers, and Seven had a couple of prime-time dramas on the go as well, but Nine had nothing apart from McLeod’s Daughters, and that wasn’t enough to get them over the line. A line, by the way, they had to get over as part of their licensing conditions. And so, with Comedy Inc cheap to make, already up and running, and somehow classified as a drama (well, it sure wasn’t a comedy), Nine just kept on churning it out until they finally started producing the real stuff around 2007.
Of course, none of this is to say that Seven’s gamble won’t pay off. But where pretty much all the hit comedies of the last two decades have offered us charm and insight on top of the jokes, Double Take gives us Paul McCarthy doing the exact same Kochie impersonation he did on Comedy Inc. It wasn’t all that funny the first time: exactly what does Seven think has changed since then to make this a ratings winner?