Australian Tumbleweeds
The Hostest With the Mostest
Earlier this week the ABC sent Tom Gleeson to the Australian Museum in Sydney. Initially we were excited, then we realised this wasn’t going to be a remake of 90s monster movie Relic and he wasn’t going to get eaten by a dinosaur. C’mon Aunty, even a cheap knockoff of Night at the Museum would have been better than this.
Don’t worry if you missed this chance to see one of Australia’s… let’s go with “best known” comedians wandering around someplace mildly incongruous, because the ABC’s got you covered: on November 1st they’re airing Magda’s Big National Health Check, in which she goes door-to-door giving prostate exams or something.
Remember when comedians used to host comedy programs? Not at the ABC they don’t. If Tom Gleeson wants to be funny*, he can do it on his own time: if Magda wants to get her face back on the ABC, she’s got to cough up a lung to do it.
With all the ongoing kerfuffle about how the ABC clearly has zero interest in investing in new comedy talent, these two shows are… well, not exactly a slap in the face, but another sign of exactly what’s going wrong at the national broadcaster.
Imagine a glass of water. The level of water in the glass is your level of popularity. Comedians have a big advantage here: being funny is something people like. When a comedian is funny in the public eye, water is tipped into the glass and their level of popularity goes up.
Hosting shows like this, on the other hand, does not make you more popular. The idea here is to use your already existing popularity to make something unpopular – museums, health checks – more interesting. Water from your glass is tipped into the subject’s glass.
What the ABC is doing, is saying to comedians “we won’t give you the chance to become more popular by airing shows people might enjoy, but we will use your popularity to make the boring shit we want to show more popular, thanks for the glass of tasty water”. You wouldn’t say they’re exploiting these comedians, but you wouldn’t want to rule it out entirely either.
The ABC used to get shitty if their home-grown stars left for commercial television. Both Andrew Denton and Shaun Micallef have talked about how, once they took up a commercial offer, the ABC shunned them for the next few years.
Presumably to avoid this issue, the ABC have now decided to not risk the nightmare of creating any further home grown stars, and will only let the stars they do have work on boring programs nobody wants to watch. Thanks guys.
To be fair, occasionally a sexy weatherman or nutty gardener will somehow get some traction in the wider community. But you don’t see them getting an one-hour prime time special where they’re rummaging in the bins behind Australia’s Top Transplant Hospital, do you?
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*yeah, we know
Music Makes the People Quiz Together
One door closes, another door opens: Spicks and Specks has finished up (for 2022 at least), and now RocKwiz is coming back. Remember when nostalgia wasn’t such a big deal? Those were the days.
The RocKwiz return has a surprise twist. It’s not coming back to SBS, where it aired for over a decade, but Foxtel, which is still operating despite general apathy.
Former SBS music trivia show RocKwiz will make a comeback in 2023 with new episodes commissioned by Foxtel after seven years off air.
Host Julia Zemiro, adjudicator Brian Nankervis, human scoreboard Dugald, and a new look RocKwiz Orkestra will all feature on a new look set in 30-minute episodes filmed in front of a live studio audience.
The new RocKwiz Orkestra will feature Peter Luscombe (Musical Director and drums), Clio Renner (keyboard and backing vocals), Bill McDonald (bass guitar), and Olympia (lead guitar and backing vocals).
Eight episode will see RocKwiz hosts and Orkestra joined by contestants and two surprise musical guests who will each perform solo before finishing the episode in the traditional RocKwiz duet.
This seems like one of those increasingly popular moves on Australian television where everything makes sense right up until you get to the part where the show is meant to attract an audience.
SBS axing RocKwiz made sense. They already had eleven years worth of episodes of a nostalgia-based music quiz that wasn’t going out of date any time soon. Guess you can have too much of a good thing.
Foxtel bringing it back also makes sense. They need (cheap) local content as part of their licensing requirements, and this has a proven format and name recognition. Who knows? It might even attract a new subscriber or two.
Haha only kidding. Nobody’s subscribing to their massively overpriced service for eight episodes of a quiz show. Maybe people will stream it. Maybe it doesn’t matter if anyone actually watches it. It’s back, take it or leave it.
At least when the ABC decided to bring back Spicks and Specks it was pretty obvious what they were doing. When it comes to light entertainment, the ABC has given up on trying to build an audience*. Now it’s time to hold onto the viewers they do have, and that means nostalgia and plenty of it.
When Spicks and Specks began, Adam Hills was an up-and-coming presenter, Myf Warhurst was a credible music commentator, and Alan Brough was a working comedian who liked music. A typical line-up for a show on a network that still made new things.
Now they’re all legacy characters, people who are on Spicks and Specks because… they’re on Spicks and Specks. The show used to tap into nostalgia. Now it’s nostalgia itself, a thing where the idea is that even new episodes feel like repeats.
The show itself has strengths and weaknesses – more weaknesses than strengths at 50-odd minutes, and it’s not helped by the way Australian music (and music around the world) has moved away from the kind of band / performer driven product the show champions – but it’s now a cozy slice of yesteryear no matter how relevant or successful the musical guests might be.
Any criticism would be beside the point anyway. This isn’t the fun musical quiz people loved a decade ago. It’s a hollow reminder of that show, 50 minutes of “remember when?” Even if it somehow managed to become a fast-paced and snappy comedy quiz – and it can’t, because the original wasn’t really that – it wouldn’t matter, because the whole point now is to dwell on the past.
Let’s put it this way: on the original, up-and-coming musicians were just “musicians”. Now they’re actively positioned as “young people”, there to provide insight into a world the audience has left behind.
If only Spicks and Specks had stayed part of that world instead of clogging up this one.
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*whatever you think of ageism on Australian television, the ABC giving their first late(ish) night talk show in years to 64 year-old radio host Fran Kelly is definitely some kind of statement as to where their priorities lie
Kind of a Bummer, Love
In the midst of the recent kerfuffle about the ABC’s lack of fresh comedy faces, one series was noticeably left out of the conversation: Summer Love. Which is odd, as it’s the one ABC series in recent years that’s gone out of its way to provide opportunities to up-and-comers.
While it’s a Gristmill production and they’ve been around for a couple decades now, the line-up of writers and actors has been heavily skewed towards those stepping into new roles. Even the episodes featuring familiar faces have usually also been written by those faces… well, not literally by the faces but you know what we mean.
Even the press release used the whole “emerging talent” thing as a selling point:
Screen Australia’s Head of Content Sally Caplan said: “We’re thrilled to support the powerhouse creative team of Wayne Hope and Robyn Butler in delivering this irrepressibly Australian series. They have assembled a stellar array of emerging and established diverse writing and acting talent and we look forward to seeing this well written and inclusive drama brought to life.”
So you’d think this would be a halfway decent counterpoint to the whole “where are the young comedians?” argument of a week or so back. “Look, there they are!” Case closed, everyone can go back to pretending Wil Anderson is the young fresh face of Australian comedy or whatever.
Obviously this didn’t happen. Partly that’s because by “young comedian”, many of those speaking up really meant “young TV hosts”. Writers and actors? We get them from Hollywood, right?
For most people these days television is just a place where people stand around talking directly to them. Newsreaders, reality show hosts, panel show guests, talking heads on current affairs programs, sports commentators, someone standing in front of the interesting stuff during a documentary, stand-up comedians. That’s television. You know, radio with pictures.
In Australia, giving creative new talent a place to express and develop their talent just isn’t a cultural or economic priority. Television is for people who want to be on television. If the ABC isn’t giving young people a chance to be on television, then the people who want to be on television – but currently have to make do with lesser forms of celebrity like social media or newspapers – aren’t going to be happy.
But the real reason why nobody mentioned Summer Love is because Summer Love isn’t funny. It’s the kind of show where any flashback – especially one featuring a character who isn’t currently part of the story – fills the home viewer with dread because there’s a very good chance that character is now dead. Relationships are a source of conflict and drama, not laughs. Quirky moments of bonding are the best you’re going to get.
Want to train writers and actors to be funny? Give them a sketch comedy series. Even the ABC knows this: see the semi-recent Black Comedy. Summer Love definitely should have been part of the conversation on why the ABC isn’t nurturing new comedy talent, but only because it’s exactly the kind of show you make when you don’t actually want new comedy talent.
Summer Love is perfectly fine for what it is. But what it is, isn’t going to lead to a new generation of comedy writers and performers. It’s a little hard to see exactly what it will lead to, though it may very well get a second season; the ABC doesn’t make character focused dramedy, or much of anything scripted that doesn’t involve a series of murders in a small town.
The ABC isn’t going to come out with the truth, which is that they’re not giving younger talent hosting opportunities because their audience doesn’t want to watch younger talent hosting their shows. Instead, the ABC is going to give younger talent the opportunity to make the kind of mild, “serious” dramedy that older viewers like to watch. Anyone hoping for the return of The Factory or Recovery or even The Money or the Gun is shit out of luck. But Summer Love?
Like the song says, “Well, I’m a freak ya right each and every night”.
Third Time’s the Harm
Wog Boys Forever is not, as you might occasionally wonder while watching it, an indication of the film’s run time. The “forever” is presumably meant to inject a note of triumph into proceedings – wog boys will never die! But the overwhelming feeling after this third visit with hot car-loving, leather jacket-wearing Steve Karamitsis (Nick Giannopoulos) is that sometimes dead is better.
After the sunny adventure of Wog Boys 2: Kings of Mykonos, Steve has fallen on… well, not so much hard times as just fizzled out. Single once again, he’s now a taxi driver who can’t even win a drag race against his former Chrysler Valiant.
Estranged from his best mate Frank (Vince Colosimo) and with his former life firmly in the rear view mirror, it’s hard to see why evil politician Brianna Beagle-Thorpe (Annabel Marshall-Roth) is setting him up for a fall. Oh right: if she doesn’t, there’s no movie.
There are two ways to look at this. As a movie that you have to pay money to see at a cinema, it’s barely worth your time. Giannopoulos is, uh, not a lively comedic lead. The serious moments don’t exactly soar either. Let’s not even go into Steve’s rekindled relationship with his much younger single mum love interest (Sarah Roberts).
The story wanders around a lot without ever settling on much of anything memorable. Subplots come up but are either immediately cut off (Steve’s secret “son”) or just dropped entirely (Frank’s ball-busting wife). There’s a few nods towards the next generation of migrants (and an awkward “yeah, each new generation gets treated like shit, but eventually they’ll accept you” speech), but for the most part this is a trip down an often inadvertently depressing memory lane.
At one stage the plot hinges on literally everyone tuning into an early evening current affairs show (hosted by Derryn Hinch!). The whole thing feels like a throwback to a time when the only way anyone ever watched an Australian movie was by renting the DVD by accident on a Saturday night.
But as an Australian comedy movie, everything retro becomes a strength. Actually, just existing is a strength by the low low standards of recent Australian comedy movies, which makes this…
“The Best Australian Comedy Movie of 2022 – Australian Tumbleweeds”
(feel free to print that out and slap it across the top of the poster at your local cinema – bonus points for putting it on one of those video screens they display posters on so half the time it’s across the poster for Black Adam or The Woman King)
Fifteen years ago, Australian comedy movies were actually trying to be entertaining and funny. Does Wog Boys Forever succeed at this? Of course not – not even close. But at least they made the effort.
Yes, the story is silly and meandering. But each scene follows on from the previous one rather than just repeating it. The jokes are average at best, but there’s enough of them that the occasional one lands. And the whole thing is a comedy first and foremost, not the now-typical lightweight drama where what little comedy there is gets dumped by the third act.
Acting-wise, Colosimo lifts the film a couple of notches every time he’s on screen. Comedy troupe Sooshi Mango are… well, it’s good to see Giannopoulos giving air time to those following in his footsteps (ok, their stakeout sequence got a laugh).
And director Frank Lotito does a surprisingly good job of putting a nicely varied range of Melbourne locations on show. That’s important in a comedy that’s meant to be an exaggeration of actual lived experiences. Wog Boys Forever often looks like a real movie; you can’t say that about every local comedy film.
Probably because in Australia the phrase “local comedy film” is now the biggest joke around.
Frankly, we give a damn
It’s been good to see people talking about the lack of opportunities for young people on the ABC in the past couple of days, prompted by this article in the Sydney Morning Herald.
“I don’t think the ABC could be accused of not giving younger talent opportunities,” the chair of the ABC board incredulously declared on the broadcaster’s RN Breakfast program on Friday morning, in an interview pegged to Ageism Awareness Day.
With that simple statement Ita Buttrose, the most powerful person in the organisation, revealed how little she understands about the ABC’s current programming slate, its trajectory, its growing disconnect from younger Australians who deserve a national broadcaster that caters to them and, perhaps most importantly, the experiences of its precariously employed younger workers.
The context for Buttrose’s remarks was a softball interview on her own network that referenced a column in this masthead that argued the ABC’s new chat show, Frankly, starring veteran RN broadcaster Fran Kelly, was a missed opportunity to take a risk on fresh talent, something the ABC used to have a reputation for, and to re-engage with younger audiences.
The article goes on to detail the ABC’s recent history of failing to incubate new talent and reach young audiences, something its Chair doesn’t seem to know:
Buttrose went on to say that “a lot of our comedy shows are hosted by wonderfully young people”, but didn’t name a single one. That’s because there aren’t any. There is not a single ABC TV comedy or panel show hosted by anyone under the age of 35.
This blog has long argued that the ABC needs to braver and more persistent when it comes to developing new talent and reaching youth audiences. It’s four years since the ABC’s last series of the pilot scheme Fresh Blood. And five years since the ABC launched Tonightly and John Conway/Aaron Chen Tonight. All three programs showcased a lot of young people; almost none of them have had regular gigs on the ABC since.
We know the ABC has suffered badly from years of Coalition budget cuts. And we know young people don’t consume traditional media, but it seems totally against the supposed purpose of the ABC to barely attempt to cater for them. As for attempting to reach young people where they are – social media, watching streaming services, listening to podcasts – forget it!
Having said that, ageism in broadcasting, particularly when it comes to older women, is as much an issue as youthism, and it’s good to see a woman in her sixties getting her own show. What we shouldn’t see the ABC having to do is pick one under-represented group over another. All groups should get their airtime.
Based on its first episode, Frankly will be a decent chat show. The guests were a well-curated mix of much-loved entertainer (Shaun Micallef), local hero (Dr Richard Harris, who helped rescue the Thai football team stuck in a cave back in 2018) and relatable intellectual (astrophysicist Kirsten Banks). And Kelly, drawing on her years of experience interviewing politicians, went beyond the sort of “tell us about your book/album/Netflix special”-type questions you’d get on a commercial television chat show.
If you’ve been watching Parkinson in Australia on iView, you may spot a few similarities between it and Frankly. Although one of them isn’t the duration. Parkinson in Australia can sometimes feel rather long, with some episodes lasting almost 70 minutes. Frankly, on the other hand, was almost too short at just under 30 minutes.
The interview with third guest, Kirsten Banks, who’d barely had time to give the basics on the fascinating topic of indigenous astronomy, was wound up almost as soon as she’d started, so that Kelly could give her closing remarks. It’s hard to tell why. But it’s hard not to bear in mind the ABC’s age and race biases when considering the fact that it was the young, non-white guest who got the least airtime.
We don’t have a problem with Frankly existing. Chat shows, done well, are a good thing. But we also need investment in genres like comedy and in talent aged under forty. Or else the ABC is dead.
Let’s Put the Future Behind Us
Channel Ten – or Paramount, as their owners like to be called – had their upfronts today, announcing all the big shows we can look forward to in 2023. And the biggest?
As the press release puts it:
Tom Gleeson Takes Comedians To Task.
BAFTA-winning and International Emmy-nominated comedy powerhouse Taskmaster is set to unleash the LOLs on Australian screens in 2023.
Tom Gleeson stars as the Taskmaster, with Tom Cashman his devoted assistant. Each week the two Toms set five comedians a range of ridiculous tasks designed to bamboozle brains and put funny bones to the test.
Who’ll master the tasks? The cleverest clogs will score the most points from the Taskmaster, while bemusement and bafflement will be rewarded with the fewest points. At series’ end, the comedian with the most points will be crowned Taskmaster champion.
And who exactly are these funny folk, ready to risk their reputations on TV’s most ludicrous, laugh-out-loud comedy show? None other than Julia Morris, Luke McGregor, Jimmy Rees, Nina Oyama and Danielle Walker!
Taskmaster Tom Gleeson said: “Taskmaster is a popular comedy game show from the UK where the host belittles comedians while they carry out tedious tasks.
“People have been asking me to host an Australian version for years. How could I say no? Hosting this show is a bloody match made in heaven!”
Adapted from the hit UK format of the same name, Taskmaster promises to be light on seriousness and heavy on laughs.
“Light on seriousness and heavy on laughs”. Phew, that’s a relief. Also light on originality and fresh faces, but as we’re talking about the network that brought you local versions of Would I Lie to You? (coming back in 2023) and Pointless (never coming back) we can’t really pretend to be surprised there.
In recent years Ten / Paramount has been the only commercial network even slightly interested in local comedy. Nine has a game show hosted by Andy Lee. Seven has whatever Paul Fenech can rustle up for $20. So to have this – and only this – as Ten’s new comedy offering for 2023 is, as is increasingly usual, grim news indeed.
Yes, Have You Been Paying Attention? and The Cheap Seats will be back. Of course they will; unlike pretty much all of Ten’s other recent comedy offerings, they rate well. If there’s any lessons to be learnt from locally created formats being hosted by and featuring new faces, they clearly haven’t yet sunk in after what, a decade now?
We probably shouldn’t complain. Going by the rest of the upfronts, we’re lucky to even get a new comedy show that doesn’t feature badly behaving dogs or some kind of home renovation project. They can’t even tell us if Pilot Week will be back. These days that’s just a collection of reality show formats that nobody but the executives will watch.
The point is, right now Ten is airing two examples of local comedy panel shows that work really well. Deciding the path to success leads directly away from them seems a bit…
This guy knows what we’re talking about.
Celebrities Answering Questions With Words
It’s been a while since the glory days of SBS comedy, when Pizza was a legitimate cult hit and Swift & Shift Couriers… wasn’t. But they haven’t given up on local comedy entirely – just the scripted stuff – and oh look, it’s a third series of Celebrity Letters and Numbers Australia. We were going to say “a much anticipated third series”, but it’s as big a surprise to us as it is you that it’s back.
Still, just because it snuck up on us doesn’t mean it’s bad (that’d be Wog Boys Forever, in cinemas this week). Pitched as “the show that’s just like Lego Masters, only without the lucrative merchandising opportunities” by energetic host Michael Hing, and with zero stakes and gag prizes, we are firmly on traditional comedy quiz ground right from the start. Only it’s on SBS! Which means we get fresh faces like… Dave Thornton, Alex Lee, Luke McGregor and Alasdair Tremblay-Birchall. Are we sure this isn’t on the ABC?
It’s always a bit of a worry when a comedy quiz starts out with a lot of banter. Yes, it’s a good way to get in a few laughs that the format otherwise wouldn’t allow, but c’mon. Banter is the lowest form of entertainment; chit-chat is available literally everywhere. If your format requires you to pissfart around for five minutes or so before the show really starts, maybe it’s a bad format?
To be fair, it usually works when it’s 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, which is a hit in the UK (and SBS has clearly been doing well enough showing the UK version to create a local spin-off). The thing to note here is that the UK has so many of these shows airing so often, they have a decent body of comedians who’re skilled in making these quiz shows work. Which is largely why they… well, work.
Do you see Sean Lock (RIP) on this panel? Neither do we.
In Australia comedians have to be generalists. We don’t have that many panel shows (and yet somehow it’s still too many) and not all that many comedians either. So we see the same faces again and again behind slightly different desks fumbling their ways through formats that are just different enough that the comedians never seem to get comfortable being involved.
Time to state the obvious: transplanting overseas formats here rarely works. That’s because the overseas formats stumbled across enough local talent with the skills to make them work. The comedians made the format their own, then local producers took that format, gave it to a bunch of people not really suited to it, and expected the magic to happen again.
[narrator voice: it did not]
Celebrity Letters and Numbers Australia is slightly more of an actual quiz than you’d get on the ABC. That makes it slightly better as a show to watch and slightly worse as a show to laugh at.
Generally speaking, Australian comedy quiz shows tend to shy away from requiring the guests to do actual quiz stuff (in case they look like dimwits?). So this has novelty on its side even as the mechanics of the quiz – lots of figuring out word jumbles here – leaves less time for comedy.
Not that this is entirely laugh-free: describing a “Q” as an O with a kickstand added isn’t bad as far as jokes about the structural quality of letters go. But over the hour, the quiz clearly takes priority over the comedy: the dramatic climax is thirty seconds of everyone looking puzzled as they try to unscramble the word “jellyfish”
If you want to watch a quiz show that’s an actual quiz only the contestants are halfway decent at banter, then this is the show for you. But then you probably want to watch a quiz show with stakes and tension and actual prizes, none of which this has. It’s a puzzle: maybe we could get a quiz show where Australian television producers try to solve it?
Of course, the team at Working Dog already have, with Have You Been Paying Attention? That works in part because the format is so rigid new guests can just go along for the ride and still do a good job. It helps if they provide their own spin on things, but if they can’t there’s always enough straight news jokes to get them through.
This doesn’t have news jokes. It doesn’t have jokes at all a lot of the time. But it does have a lot of opportunities to try and make words out of random letters. Next week: Mark Humphries!
Questions, Questions
Question Everything is back. For those of you thinking “hang on, a panel show taking a satirical look at the week in news? Didn’t Win the Week just finish up?” let us reassure you that yes, they are the same show.
In much the same way that The Weekly and Mad as Hell (RIP) covered roughly the same territory but only one of them was good at it, Question Everything covers the same ground as Win the Week, only the good version is Have You Been Paying Attention?, closely followed by The Cheap Seats.
They’re even covering the same news stories (again). Yes, the “how much would you pay for a hug” report gets its second comedy beat-down of the week. News flash: The Cheap Seats did it better.
So this is the third best news comedy show on this week: does that mean it’s complete shit? Well… not exactly.
The first series stumbled around trying to have a “premise” and a “reason to exist”. This year they’ve thrown all of that out the window – despite claiming they’d be revealing the facts behind the fake news in their promos – and just gone with “here’s a news story, lets make jokes about it”.
Host Wil Anderson brings up the basics of a news story, then asks each member of the three person panel for their jokey take on it. Pre-scripted hilarity ensues, though being pre-scripted does means the jokes are usually halfway decent. Unless they’re coming up with wacky captions for a photo of Ben Affleck, which is the kind of thing that used to take up a third of Hey Hey It’s Saturday.
It’s important to note that there’s no insight provided into the actual news aspects of the story. This is just yet more news jokes based entirely on whatever humourous angle is most obvious. Maybe they should do a segment on how their own promos turned out to be fake news?
Fortunately, based on the first episode at least, they have found some decent panelists. That’s 80% of the battle with these shows. If you don’t get a smile from Matt Parkinson revealing that the solution to dog shit (and every other world problem) is “leave it to the ants”, fair enough; it’s still a step up from whatever they were blathering on about between questions on Win the Week.
This shift in focus does however have one drawback, in the form of co-host Jan Fran. She now has nothing whatsoever to contribute beyond a few show-stopping (and not in a good way) “fact checks” where she reveals the boring truth behind whatever it is the panel have been yukking it up about. You’d assume she’d be quietly phased out if she wasn’t all over the promos.
The result is not quite Gruen News, but only because they’ve gone with halfway decent comedians rather than news experts. It’s pretty much the same structure – there’s even a “come up with your own wacky news headline”* segment – with the same host doing his same shtick. Wil Anderson smokes dope: who knew?
This is basically a superfluous lump of more of the same packed into an already crowded market. It’s also an improvement on the previous series. It’s not a show anyone wants or needs, but if the ABC is determined to have a schedule consisting entirely of panel shows where comedians make jokes about “the news” – meaning wacky minor stories from breakfast TV rather than the actual serious events that affect our lives – they could (and have, and will) do worse.
Whether they should try to do better is another question entirely.
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*Mad as Hell used to mock shitty tabloid headlines, now its replacement has comedians making up their own versions. There’s a moral there somewhere
Vale sketch comedy?
The end of Mad As Hell begs the question: is this the last we’ll see of sketch comedy on Australian television?
OK, it probably won’t be. There’s occasionally some sort of sketch show in the various new talent showcases and pilot weeks that periodically appear in the schedules. Except, they’re usually terrible and the pilot episode is all we ever see of them.
There have also been rumours of a new sketch show for Seven in 2023, but is that likely to last? Seven’s sketch show heyday was in the early 1990s when there was no internet, streaming or even Foxtel to provide alternatives to the five free-to-air channels. Consequently, audiences were more tolerant if a sketch show included a few dud sketches. These days? They’d have switched over to Netflix the second they stopped laughing. Assuming they’d switched over from Netflix in the first place…
And this is a pity, as it is sketch shows that have historically been a way into television for young comedians. Sketch shows are a place to try out ideas, develop characters and get the experience of making TV comedy that you need to get your own show. The creators of Have You Been Paying Attention?, Fisk and many more great shows all started out in sketch.
Shaun Micallef’s own career benefited from his time on Full Frontal in the early 90s. Until he joined the cast, Full Frontal was a lacklustre ensemble sketch show, trying to crawl out from the shadow of its popular and much-loved predecessor, Fast Forward. But when Micallef hit the screen in 1994, suddenly Full Frontal was worth watching.
The Australian National Nightly Network News sketches, featuring Micallef as former boxer Milo Kerrigan, Francis Greenslade as weatherman Phil Toinby, and another up-and-comer, Kitty Flanagan, as newsreader Narelle Parkinson, were a fan favourite. Viewed almost 30 years on, they seem like a pilot for Mad As Hell, with their surreal dialogue, oddball characters and digs at TV news presentation.
David McGann, another character featuring Micallef parodying TV presenters, also had his debut on Full Frontal.
McGann later appeared in The Micallef P(r)ogram(me).
There is no question the decades of experience Micallef, Francis Greenslade and writer Gary McCaffrie (another Full Frontal alumnus) brought to Mad As Hell were key to its decade-long run. Which is why we worry about the future of TV sketch comedy. Where, exactly, are tomorrow’s comedy teams supposed to get experience?
There are few opportunities to write and perform sketch on TV in 2022. Sammy J and Mark Humphries are basically solo acts, The Feed’s Jenna Owen and Vic Zerbst write and perform their own material, and The Weekly with Charlie Pickering focuses on comedy reportage rather than sketches.
YouTube and podcasting can occasionally propel people to fame and a decent income (Superwog, Aunty Donna) but it’s often a hard slog. Aunty Donna, who’ve been popular on YouTube for more than a decade, will finally get a series on ABC television next year. And the excellent podcast Newsfighters (which technically isn’t a sketch show but if turned into a TV show could easily fill the gap in the Wednesday night topical comedy slot) might not survive unless it can get enough Patreons and sponsors.
If TV sketch comedy is to survive, and we hope it will, broadcasters need to commit to and invest in it. And in the current environment, that takes guts. The last real attempt at this was Tonightly, a topical sketch show made by up-and-coming comedians, which, had it survived, would have been ideal to take over the Mad As Hell slot.
Unfortunately, it was axed. And even worse, it wasn’t replaced with anything. This means that it’s possible that the closest we’ll get to sketch comedy in 2023 is The Weekly with Charlie Pickering. No wonder #SadAsHell was trending.
P.S. We know that Micallef intends to bring back Mad As Hell, or a spin-off, or a 2.0 version, perhaps acting as a script editor or mentor. But it’s far from certain that this will happen, let alone work.
It’s hard to imagine the audience immediately accepting Mad As Hell without Shaun Micallef, for example. Or to imagine the ABC commissioning a new comedy show which isn’t fronted by an established star. So, unless it’s Wil Anderson’s Mad As Hell, or a sitcom featuring Donald McEngadine, we may have to accept that this is really all over.
Vale Mad as Hell 2022
Well, we knew it had to end sometime.
For a bunch of years and slightly more seasons, Mad as Hell has been an island of quality in a sea of mediocrity, the rare Australian comedy that was both Australian and a comedy. Times changed; it changed with it, going from a thinly veiled Newstopia rip-off to that show that was on when The Weekly wasn’t. We’re going to miss it, especially early next year when it’s not back and the ABC is showing some quasi game-show where smug comedians make up rumors designed to discredit government policies because they might possibly benefit the poor. Fun times ahead for sure.
Looking back over the final season of Mad as Hell, the change in government sharpened a lot of the comedy, while (presumably) the ever-shrinking budgets meant the pre-recorded sketches became special treats rather than a regular part of the diet. Mad as Hell was never a show to throw away a decent running joke before its time, but this season most of the classic characters were quietly put away well before the finale. We never got to say goodbye to Lois Price; a nation weeps.
The ratings were up slightly on last season, which is bad news for those commentators who said ABC audiences wouldn’t want to see their new leftie government being mocked. Possibly the news that this would be the final season kept viewers on board; whatever the excuse, they got to see Mad as Hell go out on a high.
The political sketches had bite; the show as a whole seemed more focused than in previous years. The audience knew their place, and Micallef played to them without drawing things out. Any long running show is going to orbit around a sweet spot rather than hit it week after week, but this final season of Mad as Hell got things right pretty much every episode.
The cast were great, but you could say that (and we usually did) about every season. It’d be unfair to single anyone out, especially as there was no Scott Morrison bobblehead or Malcolm Turnbull portrait around to force everyone else to lift their game. At least now Stephen Hall is finally “that guy from Mad as Hell” not “that guy from Romper Stomper“.
It’s unlikely we’ve seen the last of Micallef – he’ll be promoting his latest book for a while yet, and there’s already talk of working on more dramatic projects – but you never know. By the early 00s he seemed like a rock solid fixture in the Australian comedy firmament; a few years later he was doing breakfast radio in Melbourne. Nobody wants to see that again.
Unlike Mad as Hell, which was taken from us too soon. At least the ABC has been nurturing a new generation of comedy talent, as shown in the final ever scene where Micallef was finally unmasked as simultaneously being both Mark Humphries and Sammy J.
So yeah, we’re completely fucked.