Australian Tumbleweeds
AACTA awards nominations 2022
The nominees for this year’s AACTA awards have been announced, and when it comes to comedy, it’s a mixed bag of one or two good nominations, a whole lot of terrible nominations, and some odd omissions.
AACTA Award for Best Comedy Program
Aftertaste
Five Bedrooms
Hard Quiz
Mad As Hell
Spicks and Specks
Summer LoveAACTA Award for Best Comedy Performer
Wayne Blair, Aftertaste
Patrick Brammall, Summer Love
Harriet Dyer, Summer Love
Tom Gleeson, Hard Quiz
Charlie Pickering, The Weekly with Charlie Pickering
Doris Younane, Five BedroomsAACTA Award for Best Stand-Up Special
Geraldine Hickey: What A Surprise
Ronny Chieng: Speakeasy
The Melbourne International Comedy Festival 2022 Gala Supported by Oxfam
The Melbourne International Comedy Festival 2022 Opening Night Comedy AllStars Show
Tom Ballard: Enough
Tommy Little: I’ll See Myself OutBest Digital Series or Channel
A Beginner’s Guide to Grief – Renee Mao, Julie Byrne, Kate Butler, Linda Ujuk, Anna Lindner
Black As – Joseph Smith, Dino Wanybarrngu, Chico Wanybarrnga, Jerome Lilypiyana, David Batty
Iggy & Ace – A.B Morrison, Monica Zanetti, Melissa Kelly, Hannah Ngo
It’s Fine I’m Fine – Clare Delaney, Iain Crittenden, Florence Tourbier, Stef Smith
Jimmy Rees POV – Jimmy Rees
Ozzy Man Reviews – Ethan Marrell
People who worked on comedies also got a few nominations in the production categories…
AACTA Award for Best Original Score in Television
Aftertaste – Episode 3, Benjamin SpeedAACTA Award for Best Sound in Television
Aftertaste – Episode 3, Michael Darren, Pete Smith, Josh Williams, Leah McKeown
Summer Love – Episode 1, Scott Findlay
…but nothing in the direction category.
AACTA Award for Best Direction in Drama or Comedy
Bump – Episode 1, Geoff Bennett
Heartbreak High – Episode 1, Gracie Otto
Love Me – Episode 4, Emma Freeman
Mystery Road: Origin – Episode 3, Dylan River
The Twelve – Episode 9, Daniel Nettheim
And in case you’re wondering who decides the nominations, and will decide the winners:
Voting is exclusive to AACTA members, with members drawn from every sector of the screen entertainment industry including Free-To-Air Television, Streaming/SVOD/Subscription Television, Online/Digital, and Film and Documentary.
In a further expansion of our voting process, and to continue to ensure a broad and diverse cross section of voices and lived experience contribute to our awards, all AACTA members – Professional, General, and Youth – will vote on the nominees and winners across all major Award categories. Our General membership is inclusive and open to people from all backgrounds, including those that may be facing systemic barriers to their professional development, and we welcome their contribution to the conversation around our culture and creativity.
The determination of Technical Craft nominees and winners across TV, Film and Documentary is limited to Professional members with relevant craft accreditation. Professional members are invited to submit their interest to join a branch in line with their experience and accreditation.
It’s good to see there’s a diverse bunch of people making the choices, but what percentage of them knows anything about comedy, we wonder…?
The ABC: Young people need not apply
Turns out the ABC has given heaps of young people opportunities recently! And not almost none like you thought. An article published on TV Tonight yesterday lists them all:
Kurt Fearnley’s One Plus One, interview show hosted by Fearnley when he was 39.
Courtney Act’s One Plus One interview show hosted by Courtney Act.
The Set music show hosted by Dylan Alcott and Linda Marigliano.
Win the Week quiz show hosted by Alex Lee.
Tonightly, comedy / variety hosted by Tom Ballard.
Aaron Chen Tonight, comedy show hosted by Aaron Chen.
A Dog’s World factual series presented by Tony Armstrong.
India Now, Stuff the British Stole, The School that tried to End Racism, presented by Marc Fennell.
Q+A, forum show previously hosted by Hamish MacDonald at 39.
Good Game: Spawn Point gaming show hosted by Angharad “Rad” Yeo, Gemma “Gem” Driscoll.
BtN, news for kids hosted by Amelia Moseley and Jack Evans.
Question Everything, co-hosted by Jan Fran.
When you have to include people who were 39 when they started on the ABC, or hosted shows which were axed five years ago, or started out as hosts on other networks, you know there’s a desperate argument being made.
And, yes, we know things are difficult for the ABC right now. The article rightly mentions how years of budget cuts have prevented the ABC from commissioning shows featuring new talent:
After previous governments impacted ABC funding, the broadcaster publicly stated it would no longer commission shows to screen after 9:30pm. It’s largely stuck to that rule, with a few exceptions.
But post 9:30 was previously a playing field for younger talent to develop ‘off Broadway.’
Emerging comedy acts such as The Chaser and a young Wil Anderson in The Glass House began life in 9:30 slots or later. Looking further back, so did names such as Rob Sitch, Santo Cilauro, Marg Downey, Michael Veitch, Magda Szubanski and Tom Gleisner in The D-Generation.
The former comedy channel was also home to Tom Ballard’s Tonightly and ABC2 for a young Aaron Chen. In primetime there are less chances to take risks on new comedy acts, although Question Everything is adding some to its panel.
Wow. “Adding some to its panel.” That must be a great comfort for any newcomers out there trying to get on TV.
It’s not hard to see why talented younger people feel cheesed off at the lack of opportunities. Or why this story isn’t going away.
The mention of ABC2 is also interesting – five years ago (which is when Aaron Chen Tonight aired), there was a clear policy of shifting the obvious “young people” shows over to what would become ABC Comedy (and is now ABC TV Plus). There they rated poorly, were axed, weren’t replaced, and the whole channel went repeats-only as far as local content goes.
At a guess, we’d say the problem was that when the then LNP government started seriously cutting back on ABC funds, ABC2 (and youth programming in general) were seen as the easiest stuff to cut. Especially as ABC management were willing to shuffle their priorities to suit Canberra.
A plan to give opportunities to younger hosts was there. Problem was, it was set up to fail in an era of declining funding. In the battle between regional coverage, a rusted-on older audience and Australia’s youth, the kids were always going to go under the bus. Shifting their programming to ABC2 just made it easier to do out of sight.
But now that there’s a Labor government, and more funding is (presumably) on the way, how should the ABC deal with this? Well, a better tactic than some desperate PR would be for the ABC to commission some shows hosted by people in their 20s and commit to airing them for more than a couple of months. Or reduce the number of shows it makes aimed at older audiences thereby releasing funds for new programs fronted by young people.
Keeping on making shows aimed entirely at an ever-ageing audience is not a viable long-term strategy. Unless irrelevance and obsolescence is the ABC’s goal.
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