Australian Tumbleweeds
The Wrong Kid Died: Vale The Weekly 2022
Sure, this was the week we learnt that the next series of Mad as Hell would be the last but don’t worry, Charlie Pickering’s got some news that’ll turn our nation’s frown upside down:
“We will be back in December to wrap up 2022 with The Yearly, and we’ll be back next year with season nine of The Weekly“
You know, it’s hard to imagine that The Weekly being axed would get coverage in any news media, so it’s probably good that now we don’t have to spend the next few months getting our hopes up.
It wasn’t all that long ago that the ABC didn’t have even one regular news satire program. There was whatever The Chaser were up to, which was sometimes adjacent to the news but was usually more about politics in general. A bit further into the past there were panel shows like The Glasshouse and Good News Week along the lines of “comedians poke fun at the headlines”. But regular, topical, news-based comedy? Nowhere to be seen.
And now with the end of Mad as Hell, those days are back.
The Weekly has lifted its game slightly over the last few weeks. But that’s almost entirely down to a boost in the number of comedian-fronted segments and interviews. The fact this shift has come at the end of the series makes it feel more like “oh shit, we better use up these pre-recorded segments”; what was the deal with giving Corey White a new segment – introduced as “a new segment” – on the very last episode of the year?
Maybe this was an actual decision to make a funnier show. But why now? They’ve been doing just fine so far without comedy. And when you’re making a show that actually gets better once you get to your end-of-run clearance sale, questions need to be asked.
The Weekly and Mad as Hell usually rate roughly about the same, and yet – even accounting for our biases – you’d be hard pressed to argue that they both make the same impact on the public consciousness. Now, if they could somehow figure out how to make Gruen News, then that ungodly creation would probably blow both shows out of the water. But it’d just be a slower, yappier, more annoying version of Have You Been Paying Attention? and nobody needs that.
So it’s possible to argue – look, we’re about to do it right now! – that for the last few years the ABC has really been running one long 30 episode news satire show a year, only there’s been a middle segment hosted by Charlie Pickering that just isn’t as good as the other bits. The question is, can The Weekly stand alone?
Look, there’s no reason why it can’t… if you’re willing to ignore every single thing that’s come before. Currently operating as a “news recap”, it seems utterly unaware that simply recapping the news with the occasional “check out that funny name!” joke is completely pointless in 2022. Everyone is walking around carrying a portable supercomputer connected to a global web of information: if you want to get caught up on the news, you’re not waiting until 8.40pm on a Wednesday.
And yet the final Weekly of 2022 led with a big segment and interview on the well worn and worn out subject of the mass resignations designed to force Boris Johnson to resign. This was, as they say, “old news”, complete with “old jokes” and “Charlie Pickering”.
Oh yeah, Pickering. The Weekly started as a show that needed a bland host so the other, wackier cast members could play off him. Then the other cast members left and bland is all that remains.
Then again, what else does The Weekly actually have to offer its audience apart from Pickering’s dubious charms? Sure, if you’ve been desperately looking for a disinterested rich nihilist’s take on the week you’re in luck, but half the time the show can’t even figure out how to make that point of view anything more than a sustained smirk.
To wit: what was going on with Luke Heggie’s segment about dud roots in veggie boxes that turned into a (comedy?) attack on farmers? Saying the opposite of conventional wisdom to get laughs is fine – though it worked for Tom Gleeson, so yeah, “fine” – but this segment just felt all over the place.
Then again, a sneering, punch-down joke like “I don’t mind donating to farmers, but I do mind when thieving shelf stackers steal my donation” is pretty much prime The Weekly. Fuck those minimum wage workers who provide a vital service, they’re thieving scumbags. Yeah, it’s a joke – and that’s the joke.
We’ve enjoyed much of Heggie’s work this season and Australia definitely needs more comedy misanthropes. But judging by the (slightly) muted reaction from the usually nuts Weekly audience, even those sugar-addled fruit loops weren’t sure how to take this bit.
In 2022 The Weekly feels like a collection of slapdash segments thrown together by a team of clock-watchers with only a passing interest in the news and zero interest in how it relates to the real world. This was sustainable when there was something better around the corner; when all we have to look forward to is (say) Chris Taylor’s News Blammo, not so much.
It’s impossible to predict the future of The Weekly because (and we’re going to be charitable here) every year it reinvents itself. At the moment the only sure thing is that there’ll be a desk and Pickering will be sitting behind it for at least some of the show; everything else is up for grabs.
Well, apart from it being funny.
Pilot error: Time to Die and The Bush Blonde vs The World
10’s pilot showcase for 2022 dropped on 10 Play recently and, it’s fair to say, the two comedies on offer, Time to Die and The Bush Blonde vs The World, aren’t the greatest shows ever.
The Bush Blonde vs The World is the worst of the two. It involves the Bush Blonde (Nikki Osborne), aka Bushie, a good-looking but dim-witted rural type, trying to solve big problems. In one sequence, she tries to become Prime Minister, with the slogan “Yeah, nah, fuck it!” In later parts of the show, she tries to save koalas by making it big on Only Fans, and then tries to improve the Olympics by inventing sports such as the hammer throw but with suitcases and water polo but with people drinking from goon bags.
There are some potentially funny ideas here, and the influence of the likes of Borat is clear, but unlike Borat, this is all totally fake. Bushie didn’t really stand for parliament at the recent Federal Election, she didn’t really start a real Only Fans account to save koalas, and she didn’t really shop around her ideas to improve the Olympics. Hence, the opportunity to get laughs out of real journalists or Olympic officials being shocked and appalled by what she’s doing isn’t there. Instead, we get fake TV news stories and fake newspaper headlines, and the whole thing has the look of a sequence from Housos where Frankie’s filmed by news cameras whacking some politician with a thong.
The Bush Blonde… might work better as a character-led sketch show or sitcom, but it would also need much better material. Or else it would just be Housos but with a woman.
The comedy is better thought-through in Time To Die, but only slightly funnier. And, yes, that is deliberate, except why would you deliberately make your comedy less funny?
In Time To Die, hosts Gen Fricker and Ben Russell ask Tom Cashman and Sonia Di Iorio to write bad stand-up material for each other, which they then have to perform at real comedy clubs, in front of unsuspecting audiences. With the help of Tommy Little and Mel Buttle, Cashman writes a lame set about cheese for Di Iorio, while Di Iorio writes a routine for Cashman that suggests he’s a borderline sex offender.
Who will be the best at writing bad material? And who will be the best at getting laughs from it? In one sense, it doesn’t matter, as surely any deliberately bad comedy is… well… bad. And indeed, Cashman and Di Iorio both struggle to get laughs no matter how hard they try. Their flailing about, and the obvious bafflement-bordering-on-hatred of the audience, is kind of amusing but it’s hard to see anyone other than comedy nerds wanting to watch this week after week.
Yes, it’s semi-interesting to see the thought process behind the creation of the routines, but it’s also something that most people watching comedy wouldn’t find that interesting. Most audiences for comedy, oddly enough, just want to laugh.
Should either of these shows get a series? The short answer is no. The Bush Blonde vs The World either needs to be a real Borat-style prank show or to lean into the fake and become a sketch show or sitcom. As for Time To Die, it kind of works as a one-off exploration of why stand-up can go wrong. But it’s hard to see anyone wanting to watch this every week when there are plenty of other places where you can watch stand-up that’s actually good.
Sad as Hell
Well, it may not be a surprise, but it’s definitely still a shock:
(the bad news here isn’t the bit about there being a new season – keep reading)
As Micallef himself points out, he’s pushing sixty – a perfectly reasonable age to decide to slow things down a little. Comedy is traditionally a young person’s game, and while Mad as Hell has never really shown its age (unlike The Weekly, which often seems to have been born seventy), there has been the occasional moment in the last few seasons where the show has taken a noticeably older view of current trends. Not a bad thing! But a thing still.
More importantly for the non-Micallef segment of those affected by this decision, it does currently seem slightly more likely that we actually will get a real replacement for Mad as Hell and not just an announcement that the ABC remains committed to topical satire followed a year and a half later by a one-off special hosted by one of the original Chaser team. If absolutely nothing else, the new federal government should be providing the ABC with slightly more money; that’s good, right?
But realistically, this is shithouse news on pretty much every level. There’ll be plenty of time later on to discuss exactly what we’ll be losing when we lose Mad as Hell: let’s look at what we almost certainly won’t be gaining.
Fresh faces? That’d be great… except that the ABC hasn’t given space to any fresh satirical faces since they axed Tonightly, and that was more of a wacky tonight show than a scalpel-sharp dissection of our current social climate.
The ABC’s current frontline satirists – both of whom you’d better believe are making a few calls to sound out support as you read this – are, to be blunt, not great at their jobs. Do we want more of them, or just people chosen by the people who gave us more of them?
The tiny possible upside to the whole “where are the young fresh satirists?” deal is that Micallef was a very unlikely pick for top satirist when he started out a billion years ago with Newstopia. What he was, was a very funny man with a number of equally funny friends who found themselves doing news comedy because that was the job(s) being offered.
So our suggestion to the ABC: find someone very funny and ask them if they’d like to make fun of the government, because otherwise Charles Firth is going to be involved.
Micallef goes on to suggest that all hope may not be lost: maybe Mad as Hell can live on without him. Get Kat Stewart to host: problem solved. But it feels safe to say that the ABC is not going to give a high profile hosting gig – because keeping the show but losing Micallef turns it into a hosting gig – to someone who isn’t already a big name (could work, is Judith Lucy busy?), or part of the ABC’s rotating roster of regular hosts (will not work).
This is a situation where Wil Anderson’s Mad as Hell is not the worst case scenario, which should tell you just how bad this could get.
The other issue with keeping the show going is that, with all due respect to everyone involved, this almost never works. Remember the 2014 version of Spicks & Specks? The ABC (and SBS) trying to make movie shows work without Margaret & David? The (AFL) Footy Show staggering on for years past its prime once Trevor Marmalade got the chop? Every single thing Max Gillies did since The Gillies Report?
Giving (for example) Professor Ian Orbspider his own science series is both a crap idea and also the only kind of spin-off that might possibly be worthwhile. Much as we’d love to cling to the idea that Mad as Hell could go on without Micallef – because seriously, and we can’t stress this enough, as things currently stand without it the ABC basically has no comedy content worthy of the name – watching any random episode will show you just how much of the show is just Micallef doing his thing.
Cut all his bits out and you’re left with a handful of sketches and maybe a few interviews where his persona isn’t vital to selling the jokes. The rest of the team are excellent, and losing them from our screens would be a massive blow. But if their future isn’t going to involve Shaun Micallef as host then they need to come up with a new format that will show them off to their best – not the same show only now with Tom Gleeson as host.
And while we’d love to agree with Micallef that there’s never been a better time for him to first put on a hat and then hang it up, in the real world the ABC’s comedy output has been in serious decline for a decade now and there simply isn’t enough depth in their – or Australia’s – current comedy roster for a decent replacement to step up.
Everyone out there (and we’ve been looking) is either an old hand who’s failed to show the level of ability required or an unproven young gun who’s main skill is networking on twitter. A big part of why Mad as Hell‘s brand of topical comedy worked was because it was put together by people whose idea of (sketch) comedy didn’t come from social media: has Twitter ruined a generation of Australian satirists? We’ll never know, but only because they might have been shithouse anyway.
Mad as Hell didn’t come out of nowhere, but its replacement is almost certainly going to have to. You can point to half a dozen or more skilled and funny current comedy performers who in theory would be brilliant heading up a satirical program, and yet it’s all too likely that any show fronted by them is going to have the training wheels on just long enough for it to get axed as a failure.
This is important to stress: whatever comes next shouldn’t be some entry-level showcase for up and coming talent. The ABC definitely needs those, no argument: they also need a polished, professional product providing what is a central part of the ABC’s core mission. Replacing it with a couple of (for example) Triple J breakfast hosts with their own twisted take on the news isn’t going to cut it.
This was a day everyone could see coming. There should have been multiple ongoing opportunities for new talent to get the experience required to take over a top gig like this. There should be young comedians with multiple series under their belt champing at the bit for a seat at the big table.
Instead, there’s nothing. And not a lot of time for things to turn around.
Yet Again it’s Whoever Wins, We Lose
Press release time!
Win The Week returns to ABC in August
Win the Week, the news quiz where you can betray your way to the top, returns to ABC for a brand new series premiering Wednesday 3 August at 8pm on ABC TV and ABC iview. Hosted by Alex Lee (The Checkout, The Feed) along with regular panellist Craig Reucassel (The Chaser, War on Waste), Win the Week pairs celebrities with regular Aussies as they battle their way through current news stories.
Win the Week has brand new games, brand new celebrities and brand new news! In 2021 the show covered Australia’s rising covid numbers, Putin’s threats in Europe, and a world economy teetering on the brink – thankfully, none of that is in the news anymore… right?
Joining Alex and Craig this season are much loved celebrities such as Wendy Harmer, Mark Humphries, Tony Armstrong, Nazeem Hussain and returning champion Ellen Fanning, amongst others.
The new season also includes exciting changes to the format. Instead of having fixed “Stay or Betray” moments, players can hit the “Betray” button at any time.
Host Alex Lee said “Contestants mentioned wanting to remove Craig from their team earlier, so we’ve introduced the “Betray” button at any time during the show. It’s complete chaos, but so much fun.”
Producer and regular panellist Craig Reucassel said “My therapist is really looking forward to me returning to this game where I am betrayed on a weekly basis.
“It’s great that team captains can betray at any time. This way the celebrities can get the kind of immediate negative feedback they would normally only receive on social media.”
Filmed weekly in front of a live studio audience the pressure will be dialed up as our celebs seek to prove their worth, talk themselves out of being betrayed or beg not to be discarded. Egos might be dented but champions will be made.
Did anyone watch the first series of Win the Week – and really, we should stop right there – and think the whole “betray” angle was the most important part? It feels like they’re doubling down on what was (in the episodes we watched) a drawn-out and occasionally confusing element that didn’t really add much to what was really just another news quiz.
In theory the whole “betray” angle works in two ways. You’re trading up to someone you think is better, and you’re saddling your opponent with someone you think is worse. But purely as a television show, it means almost nothing: we’re still watching the same people answering the same questions, they’re just in different seats.
Also, it’s not like the contestants are being paired off with specialists or known experts or anything. They’re just getting stuck with the usual ABC panelists, and swapping one for another doesn’t make much difference – just watch any ABC panel show from the last few years for proof there.
There are ways to make Win the Week funnier and there are ways to make it a better quiz show, but tinkering around with the whole “betray” angle ticks neither box. Then again, who knows? “Exciting changes to the format” could mean literally anything.
Even that Win the Week somehow becomes entertaining.
Celebration of a nation
The ABC’s 90th-anniversary program ABC 90 Celebrate! was a noble attempt to fit nine decades of broadcasting in to just over two hours of television but left some comedy fans disappointed.
With segments on ABC news, investigative journalism, regional broadcasting, sport, lifestyle programs, kids’ shows, drama, arts coverage, music, and comedy, there was a lot to pack in. Inevitably, some favourite shows of yesteryear were skimmed over; some weren’t even mentioned at all.
The comedy segment, hosted by Wil Anderson, had so much packed into it that there was even an apology at the end that they couldn’t include everything. Highlighted shows included The Big Gig, The Late Show, The D-Generation, Kath & Kim, Utopia, Black Comedy, Rosehaven and Please Like Me but other popular and highly regarded shows from different eras were skipped over. Eighties satire like The Gillies Report and the nineties sitcoms Frontline and The Games barely got a mention. As for Clarke & Dawe, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it clip was all there was remembering them.
Long running shows like The Glasshouse and Good News Week were entirely forgotten, as was the career of Wayne Hope and Robyn Butler, with no mention of The Librarians, Very Small Business or Upper Middle Bogan. The Micallef P(r)ogram(me) was another strange omission, but there was a tiny mention of Mad As Hell. Micallef himself was not interviewed or live in the studio. Appearing on the show was “beneath my dignity,” he’s supposed to have said.
The Big Gig was the show which got the most attention, with Wendy Harmer, Jean Kittson and the Doug Anthony Allstar’s Tim Fergusson appearing live in studio. Hard luck if you’d been hoping for clips of DAAS Kapital, though.
Andrew Denton’s Blah Blah Blah got a mention, as did his role in establishing the Gruen franchise and The Chaser, but there wasn’t much about The Money or the Gun, Live and Sweaty or Enough Rope.
Also forgotten, and understandably so, was the career of Chris Lilley. It would be unforgivable to broadcast his shows now (it was unforgivable at the time – Ed), but his absence was notable. A mea culpa segment, examining the shows the ABC regrets airing, would have been interesting, but that’s easier done with shows from the seventies which no one remembers. And it would look a bit strange to, on the one hand, big up the ABC’s pioneering work airing dramas with indigenous leads in the sixties, and the first same sex kiss in 1970, and then on the other hand remind people of Jonah from Tonga (2013).
ABC 90 Celebrate! was a night to highlight diversity and the breadth of the ABC’s operations. We heard from a blind newsreader, saw the impact of ABC radio on rural communities and crossed live to a NAIDOC celebration in Broome. Those old enough to remember 1988’s Australia Live may have spotted some borrowed format ideas, which is odd because Australia Live and the ABC’s crucial role in ensuring the whole country saw it, wasn’t mentioned.
The ground-breaking international telecast Our World (1967), now best remembered for a live performance by The Beatles of ‘All You Need Is Love’, did get a mention, but only briefly. This was a huge technical achievement for the ABC at the time, with three live crosses, to a Melbourne tram depot, a CSIRO research facility, and the Parkes Observatory, beamed to 24 countries around the world via satellite.
Another oddity was the Happy Birthday messages from celebrities tacked on to the end of the show. Messages from Molly Meldrum and Garry McDonald suggested that both had been interviewed – not that we saw the results in the brief sections on Countdown, The Aunty Jack Show, Norman Gunston or Mother & Son.
Similarly, international celebrities associated with the ABC, like Michael Palin, Stephen Fry and Sesame Street’s Elmo, hinted at a possibly planned segment on imported programs associated with the ABC. Given the enduring affection for shows like The Goodies, Doctor Who and Monkey, as well as stars like Palin and Fry, it’s odd that international shows weren’t mentioned at all. The fact that the ABC no longer has first dibs on BBC shows may have something to do with that, of course.
Also, why have a studio audience full of ABC stars and not speak to most of them? Luke McGregor, John Waters, the woman from Back Roads… was there once an ambition to interview them live as part of the program, which was later dropped due to time constraints?
One live section worth noting is Sammy J’s song about pedantic letter-writers, the sort of people who complain to the ABC about presenters mispronouncing words or using incorrect grammar. This was one of Sammy J’s better and funnier songs of recent times and was more enjoyable than some of the other live music performances in this show.
ABC 90 Celebrate! could easily have been a multi-part series, with separate one- or two-hour-long programs covering themes such as comedy, drama, and current affairs. And given the ABC’s commitment to making local comedy over the decades, a program charting the evolution of ABC TV comedy, from the early days to the comedy boom of the 80s and 90s, to the modern day would be interesting (although the conclusion about the state of comedy in 2022 might be a bit depressing!).
90 years is a long time to condense into two hours, and in many ways an impossible task. ABC 90 Celebrate! was a noble attempt to stimulate memories, remind us of the ABC’s important civic role, and keep us entertained for a couple of hours. But if you’re after a deeper look at the ABC’s legacy, especially is comedy legacy, try elsewhere.
Credit Where Credit’s Due: The Weekly Edition
Sometimes critics will heap praise on a television show (or book, or movie, or whatever it is they do down at MONA) because it does a good job of what it sets out to do. On other occasions they praise it for simply being smart, or funny, or exciting, or memorable. Sometimes an creative endeavour gets the good word simply because the critic wasn’t really paying attention. And most annoying of all, there are those times when a critic will praise a show solely because it has somehow drifted closer to their misguided idea of what they expect it to be.
Reader, this is one of those times.
A while back, we said this about The Weekly with Charlie Pickering:
Here’s a suggestion. Over the last month Melbourne has been packed with comedians in town to catch Covid at the Comedy Festival. Would it have been so hard to set aside a couple of days for Pickering to interview (by which we mean, get them to do a few minutes from their act in interview form) a dozen or so of them to create segments that could run throughout the series so there’d be at least one bit that was reliably funny?
This week, we got our wish.
Over the half hour, we saw segments from Frank Woodley (getting a sleep test), Annie Louey (floating around being a ghost talking about cremation and funerals) and Luke Heggie (walking around occasionally mentioning doctors), plus a report from US correspondent Jena Friedman on the ongoing trash fire over there. Which was roughly four times as many comedy segments as the week before, and at least three more than the usual Weekly dose of comedians.
Were all the segments classic comedy? Well no, unless you’re going by Weekly standards, in which case… yes? They were funny, informative-ish reports on various issues – all vaguely medical, which did make things seem a little samey. Maybe it was meant to be a theme?
The point is, they were all somewhat funny, and they were all different from each other. Which made them more amusing than just a solid half hour of Charlie Pickering’s news references and attempts to explain whatever was trending on social media a fortnight ago.
(interesting sidebar: by having a bit of variety around him, Pickering’s usual antics came off as funnier too)
Obviously our gripe from a month or so ago had absolutely nothing to do with this week’s surprisingly comedy-packed episode of The Weekly. So why the sudden influx of talent on a show that more often than not this year has just been Charlie Pickering reading from the autocue?
Going by the occasionally haphazard fashion in which The Weekly seems thrown together, we’re guessing these were mostly segments that had been bumped from earlier episodes (you know, for important stuff like an interview with Jimmy Barnes). None of them were all that topical, they all felt like things that could slot in anywhere, doesn’t hurt to have a few in the tank in case the interview with Jimmy Barnes falls through.
Then someone finally realised they had to start using them up before Mad as Hell returns in three weeks and hey presto: the best episode of The Weekly this year.
Whatever the cause, we’re not complaining. Turning over the explainer side of The Weekly to other comedians would be the best thing the show could do. Adding a few fresh voices to the format would go a long way towards making it more vital and more funny.
So yeah, we’re not expecting it to continue.
10’s Pilot Showcase: More maiden flights
If there’s one network apart from the ABC with a solid commitment to making Australian comedy, it’s 10. The Cheap Seats and Have You Been Paying Attention? are amongst the few must-watch comedies on air each week. But 10 has struggled in recent years to succeed with comedies which aren’t both desk-bound and made by Working Dog. How To Stay Married (2018-2021), Mr Black (2019) and Kinne Tonight (2018) are just three of the 10-made comedies you’ve probably already forgotten.
Yet even though they’ve had a poor success rate, 10 keep on trying, announcing their Pilot Showcase for 2022 a few days ago. And amongst the six pilot shows to premiere on 10 Play are two comedies: The Bush Blonde vs The World and Time To Die.
The Bush Blonde vs The World is described as:
A sketch comedy show featuring Nikki Osborne in her original viral character “Bush Barbie”. With ludicrous moments of sheer insanity from the rich comedic traditions of Russell Coight and Borat, this program promises to be a wild, over-the-top send-up of Australian culture at its funniest.
Based on Osborne’s Facebook videos, this will largely involve pranks, visual comedy and double entendres, fronted by an outback ditzy blonde character. Which already sounds miles better than Housos yet won’t quite be up there with the cleverly staged visual humour of All Aussie Adventures or the expert deception work of Sacha Baron Cohen as Borat.
Time To Die, on the other hand, is a show trying to capture the seat-of-your-pants atmosphere of live comedy nights combined with that thing Colin Jost and Michael Che do on end-of-season episodes Saturday Night Live, where they make each read out distasteful jokes:
Hosted by comedians Gen Fricker and Ben Russell, Time To Die is a devious and down-right evil challenge that dares two comedians to write the worst possible stand-up set for each other to perform in front of an unwitting live audience –will they really follow through with the dare? Just how awful will the jokes be? And how on earth will the audience react?
The success of this show will hinge entirely on how well the comedians will be able to style out having to tell terrible and questionable jokes. Will they improvise their own jokes instead? Twist the material to suit themselves? Or just beg the audience for forgiveness after they’ve told a series of clangers?
Also, while several minutes of deliberately bad comedy works well once a year on Saturday Night Live‘s Weekend Update segment, half an hour of it on Time to Die could be a bit too much take. Even a Hamish & Andy-style sequence, showing the crafting of the material – and the aftermath of the telling of it, might not be enough to make this entertaining.
In theory, Time To Die sounds like the funnier show, but it could also end up being a self-indulgent, unwatchable mess. That and, as Last One Laughing reminded us, turning stand-up into a challenge doesn’t necessarily make it funnier.
Oh yeah, Housos: The Thong Warrior
It’s taken us a while – okay, a full month – to get around to Housos: The Thong Warrior, but we’ve got an excuse: is this show even a comedy any more? And for once we don’t mean our usual hilarious “haha, this shit ain’t funny” take. After five weeks it seems increasingly clear that whatever Housos is aiming for, laughs aren’t it.
This season sees the Housos hitting the road, as the thong-wielding deadbeat dad Frankie Falzoni (creator Paul Fenech) is now somehow a crypto millionaire (hope he cashed in his bitcoin before now) and “thong terrorist” who has fled Sunnydale and is currently hiding out in some kind of Mad Max set-up in the desert to avoid various angry mobs.
Looking to cash in, a bunch of the Housos cast have stolen a van and are driving out to confront him, which will no doubt be hilarious as they stagger through the desert bashing people and seeing UFOs and so on. Also, the government is… bad? And sex is funny if it involves a dwarf? At least they haven’t forgotten their classic catchphrase “fucked in the face”.
Australia has a long, if hardly stellar, tradition of quasi-comedy series that are basically live action cartoons where the “comedy” comes from the general over-the-top nature of things rather than anything specific like jokes.
There’s a fairly unique set of circumstances in Australia that have led to this kind of television. Most countries across the globe have television industries: if you want to make television, there’s a career path you can follow. Go to Harvard then write for SNL, have a parent who wrote sitcoms, etc etc.
In Australia, despite having multiple networks that occasionally show scripted local programming, that career path doesn’t really exist. So if you want to make television you can just go out and film your mates doing dumb shit and maybe it’ll lead somewhere.
So good news, right? Australia – the land of can-do initiative! Well yeah, except that one of the things people – okay, almost always guys – who want to make television (or movies) gravitate towards is a certain kind of loud, shouty, “check out these crazy stunts!” effort that’s maybe a couple notches above a gang of teens filming themselves doing dumb shit.
And so you get everything from Double the Fist to The Wizards of Aus to Danger 5 to a bunch of community television shows we couldn’t figure out how to watch. They’re shows where the scenario is the entire point, the kind of thing that in the rest of the world would be a clickbait article with the subheading “the headline is the joke”.
Fenech started out making wacky short films, but his first series Pizza (and then Fat Pizza) had a bit more going for it. Even Housos started out as something like a traditional sitcom, with various distinct characters and subplots and running jokes and so on. Not a great sitcom, but you could see what he was aiming at.
Now? Most of his collaborators have bailed, leaving Fenech dicking around while the few remaining regulars pop up occasionally to screech the same lines again and again. It’s the closest thing to a vanity project Australia has seen since Daryl Somers’ last Hey Hey special.
Throw in a bunch of scenes where people get hit by thongs, a few more scenes that involve the kind of sex once championed by Picture Magazine, and recaps that seem to assume the audience is hitting the bongs pretty hard – insert “Bong Warrior” joke here [no- ed] – and you’ve got something that’ll keep on turning up on 7Mate until the end of time.
Comedy!
Comedy: What is it Good For?
Australian comedy: what’s the point? Making us laugh, sure – but a fart can manage that. Which puts the collected works of Charlie Pickering in a pretty bad light.
On the other hand, there’s this:
Which was a timely reminder that, once upon a time, Australian satire used to go beyond just re-stating what was being said on the nightly news.
Sure, Clarke & Dawe were world class; we won’t see their like again. And shows like Mad as Hell – well, just Mad as Hell come to think of it – also do good work making fun of the facts behind the fiction. But it’s just a little surprising that, at a time where “the explainer” seems to have become a central part of what’s left of television comedy, that most comedy explainers don’t explain much and aren’t very funny.
Partly that’s because of the whole “Clarke & Dawe were world class” thing. Partly it’s because those who used to make shows explaining things in funny ways have vanished from the ABC in recent years: John Safran and Judith Lucy come to mind, but there have been plenty of others giving it a stab in recent years.
And why wouldn’t there be? Explaining stuff in a funny way is a sure-fire format – just ask the advertising geniuses at Gruen.
And yet, shows like Gruen and The Weekly almost never seem to get to the heart of the matters they’re discussing. Clarke & Dawe could nail the problem with Australia’s power market in under two minutes: Gruen takes 40 minutes a week to tell us that advertising is… good? You know, the opposite of pretty much everyone’s visceral reaction to it in all its forms.
One of the many reasons why Clarke & Dawe were loved – or just highly regarded – is because they were on the side of the general public. When 2022’s ABC decides to get a laugh out of explaining something, they always explain it in such a way that they’re talking down to their audience.
There’s no real sense of amazement or confusion or astonishment that we could have somehow found our way into such a bizarre situation, because the people putting together these explainers like things just the way they are. The Gruen panel might dislike an individual ad campaign, but the idea that being bombarded by advertising is a good thing is always taken completely for granted.
And if The Weekly tried to explain why the power market is so screwed up, sure, they might touch on the fact that we’ve turned an essential part of society into a market where some make huge profits while others freeze. Based on past performance though, they’d do it in a meandering, kak-handed way that would leave you with the impression that yeah, things are stuffed – but what are you going to do?
Comedy isn’t the place we should turn to for the solution to all of society’s ills. But when the comedians talking about those ills seem to think they’re not really ills at all – or at least, not ills they’re particularly concerned about, cue Wil Anderson making yet another hilarious joke about how advertising is inescapable – then what’s the point?
Well, apart from telling people that this here right now is exactly as good as it’s ever going to get and hoping for anything better is a futile waste of time. But why would the government broadcaster ever want to tell people that?