Australian Tumbleweeds
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?
One Idea, No Joke
It’s got to be tough for Australia’s political comedians at the moment. Not only do they have to struggle with the whole “not funny” thing, but with a new Federal government in power they’ve finally got to come up with new jokes. Or do they?
Remember last week’s The Weekly haha of course not. Here’s a refresher: towards the end of the show there was one of their “add a new voiceover to existing footage” sketches titled “Party Pooper”. There didn’t seem to be an actual joke involved – it was just footage of a Labor party room meeting with a voice over telling us that somewhere in the room there was a “party pooper”. Oh look, there he is:
That was it. That was the whole sketch. Albo is the current leader, and former leader Bill Shorten is raining on his parade by… existing?
If you squint reeeeeeeeal hard you can maybe see some kind of “the Labor party is wracked with internal ructions, how long before they turn on each other” comment being made… which is a problem because the next night on the ABC we got this:
Containing such pithy insights as “I got into government to knife a sitting PM. We are Labor – this is what we do!”, the premise was that after three weeks in government pressure was already building to “knife Albo”.
The joke was that this idea was a joke. And sure, as the sketch itself points out, it’s early days and the government is in its honeymoon period: there’s not a whole lot to make jokes about. Unless you actually think about what it would be like to form a new government, with all the new powers and status and upheaval and people we’ve hardly ever heard of now running the country.
Nah, let’s just make the same jokes we were making ten years ago.
Even then this wouldn’t be so pissweak if around 95% of Australia’s “political satirists” hadn’t spent the last three years ignoring the fact that the LNP is exactly the same, if not worse. How many leaders have the Nationals had in the last few years? How did Scott Morrison become Prime Minister in the first place? Did anyone – outside of Mad as Hell – even mention that Peter Dutton would have knifed Morrison in a second if he didn’t know it would have been political suicide?
Also, fun fact: Scott Morrison is still in Parliament. These exact same jokes could be made right now about the Liberals – and would arguably be even funnier as they’d be about a guy who, having just lost an election, figures a fortnight out of power is too long for his liking. Which doesn’t seem out of character for ScoMo.
After federal Labor lost government nine years ago, they’ve been remarkably settled as far as leadership goes. After Morrison knifed Turnbull four years back, the Liberals have been the same. Backroom #auspol rumbles aside, this shit just isn’t a real thing any more. And this is what our top satirists decide to joke about with a new government in power? Up next, scathing political commentary on the response to the GFC and a bunch of jokes about “bottom of the harbour” tax schemes.
There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about how the ABC is either staffed by right wing types or is so scared of the LNP they’re acting like they’re staffed by right wing types. If this week has shown us anything, it’s that it doesn’t really matter why the ABC might seem skewed more towards one side of politics than the other.
If they can’t make better anti-Labor jokes than this, they’re hardly doing the Liberals any favours.
Gruen: Can’t Stop Won’t Stop
Gruen is back! Okay, yes, Gruen was back a few weeks ago to cover the election, but considering how pro-LNP their coverage was we’re all pretending that never happened. After all, what good is a crack team of experts who keep on getting it thuddingly wrong? Anyway, now they’re back to covering things like KFC and movies, so… yay?
If you’ve been waiting for someone to ask “Is Top Gun the best propaganda campaign ever?” and make jokes about Police Academy, good news for you and your blog about 80s pop culture. And if you’re thinking “hang on, since when did Gruen do movie reviews?” maybe you can focus on the wacky banter between the panel instead. Is war a bad thing? Not if you’re advertising the Army!
The strange thing about watching Gruen 2022 isn’t that we’re even still bothering with this garbage it covers such a wide range of topics, but that there aren’t any other series competing for those topics. Even The Weekly now has to fight with The Cheap Seats over that footage of that motorcyclist not realising he still has a lap to go; if it’s not news, sport, or bad reality television, the Gruen team has it all to themselves.
Hang on, wasn’t it not that long ago that the quickest way to get a show up on the ABC was to come up with “it’s Gruen, but about something else”? And not just the ABC; The Joy of Sets on Nine was clearly intended to be Gruen Television until Tony Martin got ahold of the format.
There was Gruen Arts (Screen Time), Gruen Consumer Affairs (The Checkout), Gruen Reality Television (Reality Check), Gruen Manners (How Not to Behave), too many Gruen Sports to count, and a whole bunch of other shows featuring a panel of experts that were probably more influenced by The Footy Show if we’re being honest.
Sure, none of these shows were much good (well, The Checkout was ok), but neither is regular brand Gruen. If a bunch of marketing “gurus” laughing at their own jokes about how the viewers at home are gullible fools can run for over a decade, surely a panel show with likable experts talking about interesting topics could be entertaining?
We’re clearly now in the terminal decline stage of Australian television comedy on the ABC. Not only are there no new series, but the spin-offs and knock-offs spawned by the few series still running flamed out years ago. Hey look, Spicks & Specks is coming back!
And meanwhile, what we do get just keeps on getting more and more out of touch. Example: the first big segment on this week’s Gruen was about the new Top Gun movie and how it’s promoting the military, encouraging kids to enlist, and so on.
This was interesting stuff back during the first Top Gun movie in the 80s, which actually did boost military recruitment. Then Todd Sampson pointed out that the new movie wasn’t going to do anything for recruitment because a): it’s aimed at middle-aged viewers and b): now the US Military now does most of their advertising via Twitch and online gaming – two vital advertising markets Gruen never mentions and wouldn’t know how to cover if they tried. And the whole segment became completely pointless.
Gruen in various forms has now been running for 14 years. Advertising has changed a lot since then: social media as we know it barely existed in 2008. And yet Gruen remains static, increasingly unmoored from the realities of advertising, featuring a bunch of marketing types whose main job is selling themselves to their cashed-up clients.
Whatever educational value Gruen might have had about the realities of advertising has long since faded: with no other reason to exist, why doesn’t it at least try to be funny?