Australian Tumbleweeds
Like Moths to a Lame
Press release time!
Sketch comedy returns to Australian screens! The Moth Effect launching 30 July on Amazon Prime Video
Amazon Prime Video’s new Australian six-part Original satirical sketch comedy series The Moth Effect from Bondi Hipsters co-creator Nick Boshier and Tonightly’s Jazz Twemlow
From the less attractive half of the Bondi Hipsters and the comedic savants that created Nice Shorts comes The Moth Effect – a six-part daft and joyous journey into comedy satire
COMING TO AMAZON PRIME VIDEO WEEKLY FROM 30 JULY
Produced by Bunya Entertainment and Amazon Studios
SERIES SYNOPSIS
The world is melting but fear not: satirical sketch show The Moth Effect is here to repeatedly flap and bump into humanity until all our problems go away. Created by Nick Boshier and Jazz Twemlow, this satirical bonanza features some of Australia’s best and funniest performers as they punch up and punch themselves, tackling everything from climate change and reality TV to the military industrial complex and time travel paradoxes. There’s no target too weird, complicated, silly, or dumb in season one of The Moth Effect, as Australia’s best and funniest performers send up humanity in 2021.
OVERVIEW
The Moth Effect is a 6-part sketch comedy series filmed in Sydney Australia for release on Amazon Prime Video from Friday 30 July in Australia, United States, United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand, plus select additional territories launching later this year.
Nick Boshier and Jazz Twemlow are bringing a new kind of satirical comedy to 2021, going broader, bigger and funnier than ever before with a sketch show that goes above the news cycle. This weekly show condenses current meaty issues, zeitgeisty vibes, and cultural catastrophes into quality, high production-value universal comedy.
Featuring sharply written sketch comedy, where no area is off limits, The Moth Effect pokes fun at social movements, parodies the worlds of breakfast and reality TV, the Aussie way of life, and much more, all with sheer comedic flair. The Moth Effect is set to deliver the finest Australian sketch comedy for Amazon Prime members.
The Moth Effect, features over 30 sketches, music videos and interstitials starring superstars including Bryan Brown, Vincent D’Onofrio, David Wenham, Jack Thompson, Miranda Otto, Ben Lawson, Peter O’Brien, Kate Box, Zoe Terakes, Miranda Tapsell and Jake Ryan alongside some of the best and freshest Aussie and Kiwi comedic talent and personalities including Mark Humphries, Nazeem Hussain, Zoe Coombs Marr, Jonny Brugh, Lucinda Price, Dave Woodhead, Louis Hanson, Steen Raskopoulos, Tim Franklin, Sam Cotton, Christiaan van Vuuren, Sarah Bishop, Sam Campbell, Megan Wilding and Brooke Boney.
The Moth Effect is directed by Craig Anderson (Double the Fist, Review with Myles Barlow, Laid, Black Comedy) and Gracie Otto (Under the Volcano, The Other Guy, Bump). Produced by Lauren Elliott (KGB, Small Town Hackers, DAFUQ?) and Jordana Johnson (Nice Shorts), and Executive Produced by Sophia Zachariou (Nice Shorts, The Checkout, Gruen, The Chaser, Shaun Micallef’s Mad As Hell and Judith Lucy’s Spiritual Journey). The series was written by Nick Boshier and Jazz Twemlow with a team of contributing writers including Sarah Bishop, Bridie Connell, Mark Humphries, Nazeem Hussain, Natesha Somasundaram, David Woodhead and Meg O’Connell and Ramsay David Nuthall.
CREATOR’S STATEMENT
Moths are famously distracted by bright, shiny lights and as people we’re often drawn to the biggest, loudest spectacle, even if it’s bad for us. We have created The Moth Effect to take Prime Video viewers on a daft, joyous, and every-so-often-not-a-dumb journey into satirical absurdity. The series seeks to tap into what’s on everyone’s mind and even tap into what’s not on their mind, but perhaps should be. We’ll even put some stuff in your mind you never wanted there in the first place!
Is it just us, or does it sound like this show has no regular cast? And part of the run time is going to be filled up with “music videos and interstitials”? And Vincent D’Onofrio? And… look, lets just say this poses more questions than it answers. Especially as the press release goes on to mention a few of the sketches, which are… okay, here goes:
Smart Pillow: A couple (David Wenham and Miranda Otto) have their lives turned upside down when they order a manipulative, needy SmartPillow™
Q-Eye: Old-fashioned academic, Ted (played by Bryan Brown), gets Q-Anon to give him a stylish, modern rebrand.
Dad Vibes: A catchy anthem for all the busy daddies out there who get a disproportionate amount of praise for doing the same as, or less than, mum.
“And those are the good ones!” is the kind of thing you’d expect us to say, but no, they’re just the ones with name stars involved – apart from Dad Vibes, which suggests the music videos will be comedy ones. Answers on the back of a postcard as to who’ll be doing the singing (Vincent D’Onofrio?)
It’s totally possible this could work: getting a bunch of people, many of them funny, to do one or two really good sketches each would definitely lift the current strike rate of Australian sketch comedy. And if it doesn’t… well, it’s not like yet another crap Australian sketch show is going to be front page news or anything.
Mind you, “season one of The Moth Effect” is hilariously optimistic.
That Was The Week Nobody Won
When the ABC’s new news quiz Win the Week was revving up, we were asked by some smartarse how long it would take us to make a comparison with the ABC’s last attempt at a celebrity-led quiz, the notoriously shithouse Randling. Hey, just because we bought The Best of Randling on DVD doesn’t mean we’re obsessed.
Turns out the ABC saved us the bother of coming up with an excuse: hey look, there’s former Randling host Andrew Denton as one of the contestants! Wow, guess nobody thought reminding audiences of a quiz show so awful it actually destroyed Denton’s hosting career was a bad move.
So is Win the Week as bad as Randling? Well, it’s a weekly news quiz, so by definition they’re going to record it on a week by week basis, which means they’ll (hopefully) be able to address the show’s flaws – something the pre-recorded Randling could never do. Does that mean Win the Week has flaws? Hell yes. But the real question is, are these flaws going to be seen as flaws that need fixing?
Hosted by Alex Lee (she’s fine) with Craig Reucassel (also fine) as a regular contestant (the other two celebrity slots will presumably be filled by the usual ABC types – week one was Denton and Nina Oyama, who were both also fine), Win the Week has two angles. One is the news quiz side of things, which as it currently stands is most definitely not fine for a show appearing in the same week as Have You Been Paying Attention?
It’s slow, many of the questions are over-complicated (shades of Randling there), and while a lot of the segments are of the “buzz in” variety, going from team to team – and having the team banter amongst themselves (each team is made up of a celebrity and a regular person) – is always going to slow things down.
The basic rule of comedy quizzes is that ideally you should be fast and funny; if you can’t do both you need to do a good job of one. Win the Week‘s second angle – at the end of each round the regular person in the last-placed team can swap their celebrity for one from another team – slows things down. A lot.
It’s only week one so maybe it’ll work better in future, but all we got out of this side of things this week was the same loser cycling his way through each celebrity, none of whom made much of a difference to the score because – and seriously guys, this is how Randling fucked up – this is a quiz that wants to be two things at once.
It wants to be funny all-star banter time (ie, HYBPA?), and it also wants to be an actual people-from-home-answering-questions quiz (ie Hard Quiz). Being paired with a non-funny regular person didn’t massively hurt the celebrity banter, but it definitely didn’t help it; meanwhile, with the regular folk doing the quiz answering, it’s up to the celebs to be entertaining. That means they’re not that important to the quiz, which means it doesn’t make much difference who they’re paired with, which means the whole “changing partners” side of things doesn’t really work.
It wasn’t a good sign that a large part of the reason why this episode worked as well as it did was because there was a contestant who knew her shit and answered questions correctly and promptly. A comedy quiz show should be fun; if the best part of the show is just someone delivering correct answers (always the least amusing part of a comedy quiz), it suggests the “fun” side of things isn’t there.
So we have a slow, not all that funny news quiz. Surely those are flaws they’ll address in coming weeks? Eh, let’s not get our hopes up, because there was one thing this show did get right: it was a non-stop celebration of a very specific kind of Sydney-centric smugness the ABC really likes to serve up every chance it gets.
If you’ve been foolish enough to watch any ABC arts-related panel program over the last decade or two you know exactly the smug tone we mean. It’s television disconnected from any obligation to an audience; it’s a show that exists so a range of entitled media professionals don’t have a blank space on their LinkedIn profile. It’s jokes like the ones Wil Anderson drops with a leaden thud on Gruen; it’s people who seem to be on television because they’ve always been on television or the general manager’s kids follow them on twitter.
It’s Andrew Denton, basically. And look what happened last time he was on an ABC quiz show.
Vale How To Stay Married
Series 3 of How To Stay Married ended last night as it began: with little to no laughs.
Sitcoms generally make their viewers laugh by a combination of funny dialogue, funny characters, funny situations and funny performances. How To Stay Married seemed to avoid including most of these elements because it, presumably, assumed that the highs and lows of raising a family or the rivalry within a parents’ group would be funny in and of themselves. And perhaps they might have been if any of the Butler family (played by Peter Helliar, Lisa McCune, Willow Ryan-Fuller and Vivien Turner) or the parents in the group (played by Casey Donovan and Broden Kelly, amongst others) were given anything remotely funny to do or say.
And this is despite the demonstrable ambition of the writers to inject a bit of parody into this series, with topical plotlines involving political spills and celebrities going on telly to talk about the conspiracy theories they believe in. Mind you, if you’re going to make a point or make people laugh by referencing something topical, you might want to consider going beyond merely shadowing real-life events in your story…
So, most of the problems with How To Stay Married were down to the creative choices of the writers. But what’s worth remembering is that those creative choices affected the output of everyone else working on the show too. Imagine trying to direct How To Stay Married. There’s almost nothing to work with! You could try to inject some laughs into the show, by, say, encouraging the cast to really go for it, performance-wise. And as the cast included Aunty Donna’s Broden Kelly, not the type of comedy performer to not go for laughs, and Judith Lucy, a comedian who over the past three decades hasn’t exactly been shy to “go there”, then you should be onto a winner with that idea.
Yet here the script let everyone down yet again. Broden Kelly had little choice but to play it straight most of the time – because – and we really can’t stress this enough – there really was nothing to work with. And as for Judith Lucy, well, she tried hard, but there’s only so much even a performer as good as her can do.
The basic problem, really, is that the writers of How To Stay Married have chosen to centre their show on a bland everyday family, who do bland everyday things. There’s a way to make everyday people funny, of course, but as they’ve not worked out how to do that after three series, it’s pretty unlikely that any future series of How To Stay Married would suddenly become character-based cack-fests.
Superwog Returns
Superwog is back on both iView (all of season 2) and the ABC, and you know what? We actually enjoyed it. Sure, it’s not as funny as the time Nick Giannopoulos got his lawyers to try and stop comedians from using the word “wog” in their shows, but that remains the pinnacle of wog-based comedy in this country; there’s no shame in standing in that mighty shadow.
There’s not a lot of moving parts in your average Superwog episode. Superwog (Theodore Saidden) is a teen doing teen shit with his best mate Johnny (Nathan Saidden); his parents (also the Saiddens) are broad comedy stereotypes who remain recognisable enough to get laughs.
The first episode of season 2 has two parallel car-related storylines: Superwog tries to get his P plates, while Wog Dad tries to stop his neighbour from parking out the front of his house. Will Superwog get the angry instructor who fails everyone? Will Wog Dad’s scheme to set up house on the road outside his house pay off? Will there be a fair amount of yelling and flailing about either way?
Most Aussie sitcoms are culturally non-specific; locations and the occasional accent aside, there’s nothing particularly Australian about shows like Rosehaven and How to Stay Married. What they are is firmly middle-class. For some reason, Australian culture is seen as something only poor people have – middle class sitcoms exist in a bland netherworld where the occasional reference to cricket is as local as it gets.
Superwog, on the other hand, is Aussie as – or at least, it’s not afraid to make jokes about things that actually happen to average people in Australia. A major plot point is the importance of giving the thank you wave after another driver lets you in; if you haven’t been pissed off by a neighbour parking their car in front of your house then you probably live in a block of flats. It’s not exactly subtle, but it’s also the kind of comedy we don’t get to see often enough.
(A later episode involves a swooping magpie; good luck pitching that plotline to the US)
“But what about the extensive body of work belonging to one Paul Fenech?” we hear you ask. Yeah, it’s true, once upon a time Fenech had a few real observations about working class / immigrant Australian society scattered in between the shouting and swearing and thonging. But these days? His characters’ aren’t recognisably human, let alone Australian.
Superwog is pretty blunt at times and there’s plenty of shouting and running around, but even the comedy swearing isn’t usually a punchline in itself. And while we’re not talking Seinfeld-level plotting or anything, both plots in the first episode have a beginning, middle and end that make (comedy) sense while being funny all along the way, which isn’t something you can say about most Aussie sitcoms.
Sure, nobody’s claiming that a sequence based around turning on the cold taps while someone’s in the shower is classic comedy or anything. But it’s still funnier than anything on two entire seasons of Squinters.
Hughesy Loses It
Over the last 24 hours or so, millionaire property owner and TV host Dave Hughes has managed to make a bit of a dickhead of himself. Going on social media – and seriously, we could stop right there – to stand up for gyms in the midst of a covid pandemic spread in part by people exerting themselves in confined spaces, he rapidly discovered nobody sensible was on his side and deleted his tweet. Like that ever works!
This isn’t the first time Hughes has gotten himself in hot water on Twitter; last year he seemed to be making fun of Joe Biden’s stutter, which went down about as well as you might expect. But there at least he was just making an ill-informed stab at commenting on the news. Here he’s tapped into a slightly bigger issue.
Australian comedy has always had “elder statesmen” that act like dickheads. Daryl Somers. Daryl Somers. And of course, Daryl Somers. But in the past we also had young up-and-comers pushing their way into the spotlight to balance them out. In 2021 Australian comedy no longer has a spotlight; you’re either just starting out and already looking overseas, or you’ve been around since the 90s.
In itself, not a serious problem: comedy is comedy whatever your age. But the decline in comedy opportunities over the years means that the opportunities to actually be funny have also declined, which means if you’re one-time comedian Dave Hughes most of your career (outside of stand-up) over the last decade or two has been hosting gigs where “funny” means “what a character!” rather than, you know, being funny.
Problem a): the comedy muscles atrophy, and you get one-time comedians who end up thinking people are interested in their opinions, not their amusing comedy opinions. WRONG.
Problem b): as these comedians (and pretty much everyone else in the Australian media) move up in the world, they often, for want of a better term, “lose touch with the common man”. This is why there’s been so much focus over the last year on the effects of lockdown on small business owners: while most people mostly know people who work for a living, successful media people make the kind of money that means they socialise with small business owners. They don’t hang out with personal trainers at the gym, they hang out with the person who owns a chain of gyms.
Covid has been a disease that has created winners and losers in society. If you can work from home in a secure job, then you’re a “winner”; if you work in an essential service that means you have to run around visiting multiple people who may be affected, you’re less of a winner. And if you’re a small businessperson who’s invested heavily in a business that requires a large number of people being packed into a small area for a lengthy period of time, you’re now also somewhat less of a winner.
This has come as a shock to Dave Hughes’ mates small business owners, because for as long as anyone can remember both sides of politics (but mostly the LNP) have treated small business owners as winners. Remember wage theft? Remember working shit jobs in retail? Remember how wages and conditions for low income workers have been rolled back over the last decade?
Suddenly now, just because of some mildly fatal disease, their mates in government are telling them they can’t just do what they like. What the hell? No wonder they’re getting their heads on the news every single night of every single lockdown complaining about pretty much everything.
Dave Hughes’ problem isn’t that he’s an ill-informed nitwit; he’s perfectly well informed on what his mates think is important. His problem is that he’s forgotten what his job is. Any way you slice it, saying what every unhappy small business owner is already saying on FB only with staring dead doll eyes isn’t comedy; if he isn’t trying to be funny, what’s the point of keeping him around?
Vale Everything’s Gonna Be Okay series 2
Josh Thomas’ Everything’s Gonna Be Okay has had a lot of positive media coverage. Often the focus has been on how it has positively and realistically portrayed characters who are neurodiverse and/or not heteronormative. And yes, it has done that. Depression, panic attacks, anxiety, awkwardness, frustrations, missteps, arguing couples…it’s all been covered – and in a way that has rarely been seen on TV previously.
However, the one big thing missing from much of Everything’s Gonna Be Okay has been a compelling reason to watch it. Leaving aside the latter episodes, which, SPOILERS, contained dramatic events including a relationship breakdown and a will they/won’t they/should they wedding plot, much of the series just seemed to just drift along. Even the notion that Nicholas (Thomas) has a career as an entomologist, or that Matilda (Maeve Press) and Genevieve (Kayla Cromer) have to go to school, or that Alex (Adam Faison) is trying to become a dentist, seem to have been forgotten as potential drivers of the storyline in favour of episodes which just seemed to involve the principal cast mooching around the improbably enormous and beautiful house they all live in. Was this because they were confined to home due to COVID lockdowns? Hard to tell, as the pandemic was barely mentioned in this series.
You could argue that Everything’s Gonna Be Okay was trying to challenge the traditional three-act, A- and B-plot, structure of most contemporary sitcoms, by experimenting with something a bit more freeform. But if that’s what the show was doing, it didn’t work. Not if the aim was to produce something entertaining, anyway.
Oh, and wasn’t Everything’s Gonna Be Okay meant to be a comedy? Because jokes and funny lines and amusing situations were also not a feature of this show. Occasional witty lines or wryness from a character was about as much as we got. That and truckloads of poignancy about them coping with something. Or attempts to be charming, which mostly came across as tweeness or sappiness.
So, while Everything’s Gonna Be Okay has absolutely succeeded in representing rarely-seen character types on our screens, it has absolutely failed as comedy and entertainment. This is a shame, as there’s definitely no reason we can think of why a comedy about neurodivergent characters with a range of sexualities couldn’t be hilarious. The problem here seems more that the people behind this show didn’t want to or couldn’t be bothered to go there, and that no one on the production side questioned this.
Truth to Power
Mad as Hell is back! Yeah, there’s not a lot more to say about that really: they know what they’re doing and haven’t stuffed it up, so we can all sit back, relax and continue to enjoy the best Australian comedy series of the last decade. Case closed, mission accomplished, time to put the blog in hiatus until the next series of Housos.
Well okay, there was one thing maybe worth a quick mention: there’s a certain kind of satire best described as “telling it like it is”, where you take the structure of the thing you’re making fun of and make the hidden message obvious. You know, you make a fake Harvey Norman ad and you fill it with references to boss Gerry Harvey telling poor people to fuck off and so on. Hilarious!
This kind of thing can be hit and miss, mostly because it’s usually just cheap shots at obvious targets. The audience already knows both sides of the joke – who you’re talking about, and what you’re talking about – with the laughs coming from the fact you’re somehow exposing their real selves. Considering the increasing shamelessness of our politicians and pretty much everyone else in public life, good luck with that.
There’s not a whole lot of mileage to be had in repeatedly making fun of Gerry Harvey because it’s all out in the open. He says what he likes safe in the knowledge that his wealth and power will protect him from any real repercussions. He doesn’t really care that you’re making fun of him, which takes away the “fun” part of making fun of him.
Likewise, a lot of the time there’s not a lot of comedy to be mined from taking this approach to politicians because politicians themselves are often happy to have their political beliefs (if they have any) mocked – it’s a great way to advertise their beliefs to voters who actually agree with them. Not to mention this kind of thing usually leads to the actual politician wanting to get involved to show they’re a good sport, and we’re back to there being no fun in the making fun part of the joke.
A smarter way to go about it is to use the public’s familiarity with one aspect of what you’re parodying to bring another aspect into the light. This is what Clarke & Dawe did so well: more often than not the target of their comedy was as much how politicians say things as what they were saying, the roundabout way they refuse to go beyond a certain point but always seem frustrated that their message – which they can’t come out and say because it’s usually a variation on “fuck everyone else” – isn’t getting through. They didn’t have to be specific in their impersonations because what they were making fun of is something pretty much all public figures have in common; the comedy came from recognising the bullshit, spin-addled way they all speak.
And then there’s this:
Sure, the jokes are funny and as soon as our local library has a copy free we’ll totally get onto reviewing Tosh’s book, but a big part of why this works is because it’s giving the ABC a much deserved (in this case) kicking.
For one thing, even if you don’t have a problem with the content, the iView ad this sketch is parodying is shit. Charlie Pickering as “cool dude” is painfully try hard at the best of times. This ad? Not the best of times. Who’s it even aimed at? Old people (AKA “ABC viewers”) don’t trust Pickering because nobody trusts Pickering; young people are just going to make up a fake login if they don’t give up on iView entirely. So mocking him gets the thumbs up.
More importantly, the sketch works because it’s pointing out things the object of the satire would rather weren’t mentioned. Yes, maybe the ABC just wants our data to help them figure out what their viewers actually want to see (here’s a guess: more UK murder shows?). Still, pointing out that the government is shit at keeping data private and literally everyone else who wants this kind of information is planning to sell it to advertisers and other “interested bodies” is completely fair game.
There’s been a shift in recent years towards more thoughtful, reflective, insightful comedy and that’s all well and good, but if you’re doing satire a big part of what you’re doing is making fun of people in a mean way (the trick is to find people who deserve it and make fun of what they do not who they are). Long story short, if you’re going to make comedy where the joke is that you’re saying the quiet part out loud, it really helps if your target isn’t already going around loudly saying the quiet part.
So bad news there for anyone looking to make satire in Australia.
New original comedy? Amazing! No, Amazon
Last week we heard the news that Amazon Prime Video is investing $150 million in seven original local shows. Amongst the shows announced at a Sydney launch event were three, count them, three comedies:
Among the commissions are documentaries Burning and Warriors On The Field, four-part docuseries Head Above Water, drama series The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, and comedy series The Moth Effect, Deadloch, and Class of ‘07.
The comedies are described as follows:
Class of ‘07: An eight-part Australian original comedy series that will commence filming in Australia this December. Class of ‘07 is created by writer and director Kacie Anning (Upload, The Other Guy) and produced by Matchbox Pictures. When an apocalyptic tidal wave hits during the ten-year reunion of an all-girls high school, a group of women must find a way to survive on the island peak of their high school campus. Like Lord of the Flies (in cocktail dresses), the series follows a group of former classmates, now freshly entangled in decade-old drama, as they attempt to survive not just the apocalypse but each other.
Deadloch: A comedy series written by Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan and produced by Guesswork Television, OK Great Productions, and Amazon Studios. ‘The Kates’ latest creation is a feminist noir comedy set against a bucolic backdrop with a rising body count. Filming of the eight-part series will commence in Tasmania this November.
The Moth Effect: A satirical six-part sketch comedy produced by Bunya Entertainment, Amazon Studios and created by Nick Boshier (Bondi Hipsters) and Jazz Twemlow (Tonightly). The Moth Effect will launch one episode per month premiering on July 30 on Prime Video in Australia and select countries around the world. The series will showcase some of Australia and New Zealand’s finest talent including Bryan Brown, Miranda Otto, David Wenham, Ben Lawson, Jonny Brugh, Peter O’Brien, Kate Box, Sam Cotton, Christiaan van Vuuren, Sarah Bishop, Nazeem Hussain, David Woodhead and Zoë Coombs Marr.
Oh boy is it hard to get excited about a new sitcom from the writer/director of The Other Guy, a series that dared to explore just how tedious a sitcom about an entitled man-boy can be (answer: very). Whether the same writer/director can make Class of ’07, a sitcom about a group of women at a school reunion, less tedious than The Other Guy, well…hopefully.
Put it this way, we’d feel a lot more confident if Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan were in charge. They recently proved with Slushy that they have range beyond the hard-edged political comment of Get Krack!n, so they should have no trouble making us laugh with Deadloch a parody of Northern European police procedurals.
As for The Moth Effect, anything new in the world of sketch comedy is welcome, even if this show does seem to be selling itself more on its big-name actor stars than its roster of actual, decent comedians (Zoë Coombs Marr, the only decent thing in the most recent series of The Weekly amongst them).
Vale The Weekly 2021
This year all the blame fell on Charlie Pickering’s shoulders. Who else was left? Even the regular guests only turned up for a handful of episodes across the season; otherwise it was, as the title had always said from the start, the Charlie Pickering show. And what a show it was.
Wait, we mean what, that was the show? Pickering spent at least half of every episode recapping the previous week by basically reading out the actual news reports – only you could tell it was comedy because he was smirking while he did it. “You give us thirty minutes, we’ll give you the shits”.
Then he moved into “the lounge” to slip into an earnest expression while he spent a good chunk of the show explaining that things were, you know, complicated and you couldn’t believe everything you read on the internet… unless you read the same things he did, in which case you already knew everything he had to say. Let’s make a joke about how the Tour de France is so boring it put Pickering to sleep… then spend five more minutes talking about it! You can’t fail with that.
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the basic idea of a satirical news recap. You could even argue that Pickering’s material was slightly – slightly – stronger now that the focus was firmly on “here’s what only just happened”. But Pickering isn’t the person to host it. Pickering isn’t even the person to watch it.
Considering Pickering pretty much picked up the ABC Satirical Torch from The Chaser, it’s more than possible that the higher-ups at the ABC see “smug well-off private schoolboy” as a useful worldview for satire. We beg to differ, mostly because having failed to get into the housing market we need all the begging practice we can get. Remember when The Weekly used to make jokes about house prices? Hilarious stuff.
Speaking of total fucking embarrassments, we didn’t think it was possible to sink lower than Corona Cops but of course The Weekly‘s comedy bathyscaphe was all fueled up and ready to plumb new depths. “Ha ha, let’s get a snooty film reviewer to cover trash television” is the kind of thing a chump might say once and expect to get away with it, but The Weekly kept bringing Margaret (“stop picking on my son’s movie“) Pomeranz back to do a joke that wasn’t all that funny when she teamed up with sparring partner David Stratton to review “2020” for The Shovel last year.
But hey, clearly the team at The Weekly thought it was good enough to rip off again and again, right? Unless they’d been sitting on it for a while but didn’t want to step on the toes of now-departed ABC Comedy Chief Rick Kalowski – after all, he’d used Pomeranz (well, impersonations of her) to make basically the same joke on both Double Take and Wednesday Night Fever. At least he didn’t come up with the “all new” idea of getting some smooth dude to deliver bad news.
This kind of news recap needs a spark Pickering’s never shown. In the battle between smug and couldn’t give a fuck, Pickering’s face waved the white flag years ago. Now more than ever, the news is little more than a string of things to get angry and outraged about (as the entire internet has known since 2011) and yet the ABC’s big satirical gun just sits back with an eyebrow raised and says “it’s a funny old world” after yet another story about outrageous levels of entrenched corruption at the highest levels of government.
Sure, the people benefiting from the shitty way things are deserve a chance to tell their side of the story. That’s what News Corp, Nine / Fairfax, Channel Seven and literally every other media organisation in the country do all day every day. It’s too late for the ABC to join the big boy club; the big boys want them shut down. So what if they – and it’s a crazy thought but hear us out – put on a news recap that actually challenged the status quo instead of begged to join it?
But then you’d have to sack Pickering, and who’d front the ABC’s ads for their new “totally secure” login requirements for iView then?
It’s a Fraud, I Tell You!
Why would you make a movie in Australia? Sure, there’s generous tax breaks, plenty of skilled tech crew, stunning locations, loads of moderately skilled actors, even- okay, let’s start again. Why would you make an Australian movie in Australia?
We got to wondering this while watching Fraud Festival on C31 last Sunday night (you can also catch it here). It’s a perfectly amusing mockumentary loosely (extremely loosely) satirising the Fyre Festival debacle of a few years back, only this time the crap festival is being held to save the suburb of Coburt from being demolished for a massive highway. Do they do the comedy bit where a scale model of the sleepy suburb has a giant flat chunk of road smashed down on it? Yes they do – and it’s Tony Martin holding the board.
Fraud Festival has a lot of obvious things going for it, by which we mean there are a lot of cameos and brief appearances from comedians you’ll recognise. It also has a fairly decent plot, in that things keep on happening, and there’s even a bunch of quality jokes in there even though it’s clear just about every scene was largely improvised. So it’s a decent movie? Oh hell no.
The movie format is currently the absolute worst format you can get when it comes to comedy. We all remember fondly all manner of classic comedy movies; we might even remember seeing some of them at the cinema. But at the moment, right now, comedy movies do not make it to cinemas… or much of anywhere else.
There are plenty of reasons why, but the (current) big one is that there are no big comedy stars who can get people to go to a movie. Comedies have nothing to offer marketing-wise aside from big stars – just check out the trailer for any comedy and no matter how funny the actual film, you’ll be watching at least 30 seconds of dead air – and movies don’t get to cinemas (or anywhere else) without marketing.
If you want to make visual comedy that people will watch and think “hey, that funny person deserves more work”, then it’s off to YouTube (or even TikTok) with you. Those kind of places are ideal for sketch comedy, which is why they’re the only places sketch comedy now exists. And if you want to do longer pieces – time to break your dream project into episodes.
Australian movies are made as calling cards. They’re calling cards for the cast and crew to try and get work in the US, they’re calling cards for the locations (many if not most Australian films get funding from tourism bodies and the like), they’re calling cards for the funding bodies to show off their taste and refinement when it comes to funding “quality Australian productions”. Comedy is next to useless in any of those roles, which is why even Australian “comedy” movies are really just dramas with a couple of jokes sprinkled in (yes, we’ve seen the trailers for June Again).
Plus now “feature film” tends to mean things like “good lighting” and “fancy locations” and “high production values”, which we’d argue aren’t essential to making a classic film (The Castle looks a bit cheap even by the standards of the time) but these days are essential if you’re going to get your foot in the door. Put it this way: these days a shithouse movie that looks good is always going to do better than a funny movie that looks shit.
So while for us the fact that Fraud Festival had some good laughs – it’s safe to say Emily Taheny’s “Fat Asian Baby” song was funnier than all of Aftertaste – is a big plus, in the outside world a comedy movie is just kind of a curio at best. Which is a bit grim, because 10-15 years ago comedies were going gangbusters at the box office worldwide.
And now they’re dead. We never should have let them make You and Your Stupid Mate.