Australian Tumbleweeds
Vale Retrograde
In the first ten minutes of its final episode Retrograde slapped down the “whoops, someone’s dead, time to get serious” card so hard for a moment we thought we were watching Please Like Me all over again. Was there an eulogy full of “confronting” swearing? Was there a slowed down super-sad cover version of Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime”? Was this show still a comedy? Answers on the back of a postcard.
It’s been close to thirty years now since sitcoms first started seriously exploring the concept of a wacky group of friends just hanging out. It’s probably time somebody came up with a new idea. The twist here was meant to be that the whole show took place via a “not Zoom” conference call, but most of the time that was used for the kind of reaction shots from other cast members that are supposed to make you think you’re watching something funny when all you’re really watching is a bunch of reaction shots.
Which pretty much sums up Retrograde. Firmly determined to put together a cast of cool types pushing 30 who act like teenagers, it never managed to come up with any kind of comedy dynamic between the cast, let alone much comedy in general (the comedy climax involved two characters hiding behind an umbrella while someone threw fruit at them). The online chat format definitely limited any kind of physical chemistry between the cast, but there was no real attempt to conjure up verbal sparks here either. Anyone could have been talking to anyone else for all the difference it made; there was never a point where two characters really stood out as a funny team.
Supposedly the biggest problem facing rom-coms this century has been the lack of obstacles to keep would-be lovers apart. When society is largely on board with the idea that “the heart wants what the heart wants”, it’s tough to keep two or more people apart long enough for a story to develop. So you’d think the enforced isolation of lockdown would be a boon to anyone looking to put together a romantic comedy, right? Not if you were watching Retrograde.
Considering there was next to nothing else going on dramatically each week, it’s bizarre how badly this fumbled the rom-com side of things. All that needed to be done was to have two likable characters flirt and fall for each other, only to find they couldn’t be together; instead this spun its wheels for six weeks as our heroine moved in with one guy then wondered about another but still felt something for the first guy and everyone else though the other guy was a jerk and… why did we care again? And how do you write a love triangle where both of the guys are losers?
Pretty much all the classic “will they or won’t they” plotlines in sitcoms weaved in and out of a whole lot of episodes that were about something else entirely (also: funny). Likewise, the rare successful dramatic moment in a sitcom usually came as a surprising change of pace well into the run, not as a predictable end to the first handful of episodes. Traditionally, these things worked because they were rarely used: the currently popular idea that if you take 22 episodes worth of unresolved sexual tension and surprise dramatic moments and pack them into six episodes they’ll work just as well has been proven to be a dud so many times now it’s worth wondering if anyone making sitcoms today ever watched anything beyond The Office and Friends.
We often continually bitch about how Australian television comedy is increasingly driven by the desires of funding bodies and TV executives rather than audiences. That’s because when you ignore what people want to watch the result is shows like Retrograde: perfectly well-made products with decent casts that give viewers no reason whatsoever to keep watching. There was no comedy hook, no premise beyond “friends talk on Skype”, nothing going on that you could even put in a promo as a reason to tune in – let alone something to keep you coming back week after week because all this had going on was dull soap opera twists and a bunch of generic types being blandly sassy.
Retrograde wasn’t a failure. It wasn’t memorable enough for that.
So, so wrong
The great myth put about by those in power is that they know what they’re doing and that we should trust them (maybe you can think of a recent example of that). So, ultimately, perhaps, we’re all better off putting ourselves in the hands of people who don’t know what they’re doing? Could we really be worse off if we did?
That’s the theory behind Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney’s sporadically-released podcast Only Wrong Answers, in which people with a problem email the Kates to ask for help. Relationships, kids, careers, this pandemic thing that’s happening…the Kates’ll have a go at finding a solution to anything. Or not, most of the time.
A lot of the laughs in Only Wrong Answers come from Kate and Kate not actually helping anyone, more beating themselves up, or having a go at the person who had the temerity to ask them a question. They’re the real problem, after all.
Everyone will have their favourite moment in Only Wrong Answers, but we particularly enjoyed the rant about Gen X music lovers hating on the music their kids listen to. Because men of a certain (highly opinionated) type are always worth kicking.
So – and we’re talking mainly to that certain type of man, here – if you didn’t enjoy the tone of Get Krack!n, you will also dislike this. It’s just not for you. Move on with your lives.
But if you did like Get Krack!n, then this is more comedy in that same vein. Except it’s looser, like you’re in an ideas session for Get Krack!n and someone’s edited-together the highlights.
That someone, by the way, is Greg Larsen (Tonightly, At Home Alone Together), who has very skilfully selected the best bits of Kate and Kate’s rambling and cobbled them together with some well-timed musical stings. Who knew editing could give a podcast the edge? Not many podcasters, that’s for sure.
Also worth noting is that this won’t be the last audio project from the Kates:
The duo are writing a new fiction podcast for Amazon’s Audible, eyeing a launch next year, titled Slushy – “a traditional sitcom, but for your ears,” says McLennan – set on an Australian research base in Antarctica.
So, listen out for that.
All Just a Little Bit of History Repeating
You can tell when Mad as Hell is angry at the ever-increasing rightward tilt of Australia’s media and politics because they start making jokes about Labor. So it was no real surprise that Mad as Hell came roaring back onto our screens this week with a few extremely cheap shots at the nominally left-ish side of Australian politics. Us? We loved it.
Partly that’s because, with the ABC itself seemingly trying to curry favour with the right – when ABC board chief Ita Buttrose isn’t calling young people sooks she’s asking mining magnates to give high profile lectures to explain why the country should continue to be run exclusively for their benefit – it certainly can’t hurt to provide a bit of “balance” when it comes to political comedy. The days when the right spent their spare time complaining that the ABC’s political satire was too hard on millionaires and didn’t spend enough time mocking the poor are long gone, but presumably Gerard Henderson could rise from the grave if anyone was foolish enough to spill some human blood anywhere near it.
But what we really enjoy about Mad as Hell‘s swipes at Labor is that they’re almost always really directed at the right-wing’s view of Labour. “If Labor got in they’d waste all the money and send this country into economic ruin” would be a devastating insult if it wasn’t for the fact that when it comes to economic mismanagement the Federal Coalition wrote the book and then sold it for less than it cost to print. It’s so stupid it’d be a joke if it wasn’t also a right-wing core belief… hang on, why can’t it be both?
Mad as Hell gets to have it both ways: if the Liberals and their minions complain that the show is biased against them, what with the 25-odd minutes of jokes and vitriol directed directly at them and everything they stand for, there’s a number of blunt anti-Labor statements Micallef and company can point at to balance the books. And for anyone with an actual sense of humour, those anti-Labor statements are clearly aimed directly at the kind of unthinking political automatons who would accept said silly statements at face value. The real winner? Comedy!
Our half-baked political analysis aside, this week’s return was a stark reminder of just how good this show is. Whether it was the return of Roz Hammond advertising a bizarre eye expander, Micallef explaining that they wouldn’t actually be doing a “release the Karen” bit because they’d already used that gag in a caption ten minutes earlier, or a hilarious monologue about testing for Covid in people’s sewage that contained the line “Fuckin’ government poo hunters”, Mad as Hell came back firing on all cylinders and thank god for that.
We did feel bad at finding out that the original “mad as hell” guy hasn’t been getting any royalties for his regular appearances in the opening credits though. Typical bloody commie ABC.
Money Changes Everything
Press release time!
Screen Australia has announced 14 feature films, eight online projects and 20 television dramas that will share in $1.6 million of Story Development funding.
The latest slate includes Toni Collette’s directorial debut with feature film The Best Of, and an anthology of Shakespeare’s works re-imagined by teams of creators including Leah Purcell, Elise McCredie and Anchuli Felicia King called Shakespeare Now.
Screen Australia’s Head of Development Nerida Moore said, “While this has been a turbulent, challenging time for many in the industry, it hasn’t stopped the drive, passion and imagination of Australian creative teams. In fact we have continued to see applications coming through with really strong and distinctive content, with the application numbers across March-June this year up 76% on the same period last year.”
“It’s exciting to see re-imaginings of well-loved stories such as Shakespeare Now and an animated series inspired by The Sapphires. And we continue to support storytelling on all platforms, with two online series from comedians Gabriel Willie (better known as Bush Tucker Bunjie) and Chloe Black who are each creating their first scripted narrative comedies.”
You can read the whole thing here, and rarely have we seen a more sustained assault on the idea that scripted television production in Australia is in any way driven by audience demand. So yeah, business as usual.
Still, after spending much of the year (decade?) bemoaning the fact that there simply isn’t all that much Australian comedy around, you might think we’d be thrilled at the prospect of a rush of new comedy projects lurching towards our screens. Oh sure, none of them sound funny – more on that in a moment – but it’s the execution that counts in comedy and any one of these could conceivably be a winner.
Unfortunately, it’s extremely unlikely that many (any?) of these series will ever make it in front of an audience. Well, the Shakespeare one probably will as they’ve already got the ABC on board and adapting Shakespeare means they don’t have to spend money on scripts, but by the time they get around to making this the ABC will be a couple of people driving around in a car shouting out the weather report to passers-by so lets not count our chickens just yet.
But otherwise? This is development funding – cash being given out to various insiders, mates and cronies to polish up some concept or another until the free money runs out they can pitch it to a network willing to put in some real funding to make it happen. Do we have any of those in Australia interested in this kind of thing? Do you really have to ask?
This (partially) explains why so many of these concepts are pitched as “comedy”, despite sounding about as funny as… well, this:
A six-part television comedy called DNA Dad (working title), centred on neurologically diverse young man Michael who discovers his biological father is UK actor Ben Miller, and travels to London to meet him. The connection leads both men to discover the true meaning of family.
Hilarious stuff, and we haven’t even got to The Mayor of Nothing, in which Andrew Knight decides to remake his hit Seachange only instead of moving to a quirky seaside town now our lead “in a grief-induced act of insanity, buys a rundown village in rural Italy and drags his three daughters on an ill-conceived restoration mission”. Yeah, that grief-induced insanity always gets the big laughs.
But because “comedy” sounds slightly more commercially appealing than “drama”, pretty much everything not set in the past or featuring a “mysterious young girl” is either a comedy or a dramedy, thus rendering those terms completely meaningless. You want proof?
Six-part dramedy New Animal, from writer Marieke Hardy (Laid), based on the upcoming debut novel by Ella Baxter. The television series follows 28-year-old oddball Amelia who works as a cosmetician at a family funeral parlour. After the sudden death of her mother, she is drawn into the local BDSM community in an attempt to deal with her grief. New Animal will be produced by Jason Stephens and Helen Bowden of Lingo Pictures (Lambs of God).
Where to start? Putting aside the involvement of perennial funding body favourite Hardy, what exactly makes an “upcoming debut novel” worthy of funding when presumably the whole idea of putting cash into adapting novels is that if you wait until they’ve been published you can pick the successful ones? Oh right, because the novel has such a brilliant concept the funding body wants to get in early and lock down the rights. What’s this book about again?
It’s somewhat telling that Laid is the series chosen to remind readers of what Marieke Hardy is capable of – or at least it would be if she had any other above-the-title credits to her name – because Laid was the last time Australian comedy tried to combine sex and death in such a thought-provoking fashion. Of course, going by the ratings the thought usually provoked was “is there something else we could be watching”, but at least the fine folks at The Age will be there to talk it up yet again because it’s not like they’re now owned by a rival network committed to the downfall of the ABC oh wait we didn’t think this through and fuck when did it stop being 2011.
But here’s the good news:
‘Development’ refers to any stage of a project’s creation as it travels towards production. It can involve everything and anything that will help get a project to the screen, from various stages of scripting to filming a proof-of-concept, such as a short film or series pilot. It can take many years for a project to reach the screen, and each project’s timeline from development to release is different due to many factors including financing, cast, locations and festival timing.
They could have just shortened that paragraph to “don’t hold your breath”.
Looks quizzical
Earlier in this pandemic, some stat went around that podcasting equipment was flying off the virtual shelves so fast that many online retailers were all sold out. Literally, everyone was getting into podcasting.
And while it’s nice that people are finding ways to keep active during lockdown…look, let’s be honest, not every idea for a podcast is worth pursuing.
The Saturday Quiz is a reboot of The Weekend Quiz, a podcast started earlier this year in which actor John Leary (you’ll have seen him in Get Krack!n, The Letdown and Upper Middle Bogan, amongst other shows) asks a couple of celebrities to try and answer the quiz questions in that weekend’s Good Weekend. Guests on The Weekend Quiz included Amanda Brotchie and Adam Zwar, Robyn Butler and Wayne Hope, and Celia Pacquola and Luke McGregor. Now, for The Saturday Quiz, Leary uses the questions from The Saturday Paper’s weekly quiz, with all-new pairs of celebs trying to answer them. In the first episode, released a couple of days ago, the guests were Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney.
If you like hearing comedians on podcasts, you may find The Saturday/Weekly Quiz interesting. But if you like hearing comedians on podcasts being funny then you probably won’t find it interesting. The basic problem is the premise.
On a comedy quiz that’s funny, Have You Been Paying Attention? for instance, the laughs come from comedians giving plausible-but-wrong or silly-but-wrong answers to questions. On The Saturday/Weekly Quiz, the theory is that the laughs will come from the guests struggling to the get to the correct answer. Because, you know, comedy is pain, right?
And if you’re a comedian who’s great at improv, and you’re on The Saturday/Weekly Quiz, then yes, you can maybe get some laughs out of the fact that you don’t know the answer to the question and are flailing about a bit. But we stress the word “some”.
See, that tactic works great for the first few questions. But after that? What the hell do you do? There are ten questions in total – you’ve gotta change things up a bit.
The best examples of anything – comedy, podcasts – look so effortlessly easy, don’t they? Like anyone can do them. But that’s just not true. Good comedy needs planning. And a good podcast has to have a premise that has been thought through.
Imagine if the comedians on The Saturday Quiz had been sent the questions in advance? Not so they could look up the answers, but so that they could plan funny things to say about them. But we suspect that’s not happening here, and it’s why this show isn’t terribly funny or much fun to listen to.
As it is, we’re just glad that The Saturday Paper only publishes 10 quiz questions a week. Imagine if it was 20? Imagine how long and painful that podcast would be.
Vale The Weekly 2020
“Let’s do this baby one more time” said host Charlie Pickering at the start of the final episode of The Weekly for 2020. Here’s a suggestion: let’s not? Oh wait, Pickering already said he’ll be back for The Yearly as part of his sappy moralising end speech that said we’ll all get through this just so long as we’re more like the generation that went through the Great Depression and World War II. What, you mean massively racist?
To be fair, there has been something of a lingering sense of doom hanging over The Weekly this year, what with everything up to and including the set jumping ship, leaving us in a strange limbo where the only thing we could rely on was that Briggs wouldn’t be appearing. Apart from that one time he did. He’s now the second longest running cast member!
Unfortunately for those of us who just want The Weekly to dry up and blow away, changing things up – even if forced upon them by the coronavirus – was exactly what the show needed. It didn’t stop it being shit, obviously, but it did stop it being stale. Yes, the new, more homely look was almost as much of a cliche as the fake news set and by the end of the series a new, just as boring rut had been dug, but for a brief shining moment there Pickering was appearing on screen without a jacket and they can never take that away from us.
Otherwise the show continued to set the bar low and then trip over it. Luke McGregor’s economics segments were pretty basic but still a thousand-fold improvement over Hard Chat, Judith Lucy did whatever she liked and was funny as usual, Corona Cops was frankly puzzling in just how amazingly unfunny it was determined to be each week and those segments focusing on Andrew Bolt’s love of scotch made him look like a harmless eccentric instead of a huge racist so thanks for that.
This was also the series that saw Tom Gleeson finally figure out he didn’t need to bother with this shit and could just go off and be a game show host for the next decade or so. Why he bothered coming back at all was a bit of a mystery: initially he was in lockdown on some property in rural Victoria, which… seemed a real thing? And then he just never bothered coming back. Presumably he wanted to take a victory lap at some stage because he’s Tom Gleeson and that’s what he does (which is probably why he didn’t just quit between series) but his few half-hearted appearances just made it even more obvious that the show didn’t really need him hanging around any longer. Kitty Flanagan went out on a high note; Gleeson went out on the brown note.
But the one thing that remained consistent throughout this year – and the show as a whole – is this weird idea that The Weekly is somehow something more than just a random collection of shit news jokes. Pickering giving a final “we’ll get through this” speech like some overly earnest glad handing politician trying to sell a new housing development in a bushfire zone that is also a flood plain was bad enough, but why put it at the end of the episode? “We’ll get through this” is exactly what we need to hear at the start of any given episode of The Weekly. Especially if the remote isn’t close by.
The problem is that whatever Pickering is like in real life, on The Weekly he comes off as a smug prick. While that occasionally works in his favour comedy-wise – some of the one-liners during his opening news round-up have almost been not bad this year – it chops off at the knees any attempt (by him) to seem like a trusted authority or audience surrogate. And yet the show still keeps on trying to ram his square peg into that round hole like he’s six months away from being called up to read the national news.
A snarky smart-arse taking pot-shots at current affairs? Yeah, when his writers are firing he can almost manage that. But a serious commentator on important issues? What possible reason could he have for thinking that’s what people want him to be? “If I’m guilty of anything,” you can imagine him saying, “it’s of caring too much… about myself”.
Guess somebody has to.
Ring my bell – Ding Dong I’m Gay: series one
The first episodes of web series Ding Dong I’m Gay, piloted two years ago, have now been released. We thought the pilot showed some promise when we reviewed it in 2018, and based on the first two episodes of the series proper, we were right.
In the pilot, Toby (Brayden Dalmazzone), a country boy, moves to Sydney to stay with his gay cousin Cameron (Tim Spencer). Except Cameron assumes Toby’s straight – and homophobic – and tries to hide his sexuality in front of Toby. But it turns out, Toby’s gay too. This leads to Cameron offering to mentor Toby around the gay scene, except, in true sitcom fashion, Cameron’s advice is often useless, while Toby turns out to be pretty cluey for a country bumpkin.
If this sounds like a classic sitcom premise, a bit like 80s/90s favourite Perfect Strangers, say, then yes, there are elements of that. Although the butt of the joke in Ding Dong I’m Gay is Cameron (rather than the out-of-town cousin), who seems to grow less and less sure of himself by the second as he repeatedly fails to snare almost-boyfriend Jack (Rupert Raineri), while Toby bags all the hot guys (including a local porn star).
Where exactly Ding Dong I’m Gay is heading, though, is a mystery. The pilot shows – and indeed the title sequence for this series – feature a pregnant neighbour, Lucy and a paranoid Chinese student, Sweetie, but there’s been no sign of either of them so far. Also, what’s up with the music video Instaboy featuring wannabe Instagram influencer Anton, whose hot mate got up close and personal with Toby in episode two? Will we be seeing more of him? You will have to subscribe to the channel to find out.
That’s Not A Comedy
Probably the most annoying thing about The Very Excellent Mr Dundee (now available on Amazon Prime) is that it didn’t have to be shit. It’s hardly a surprise that it is thanks to a whole range of factors including but not limited to it being an Australian comedy film starring Paul Hogan, but still: watching it (our recommendation: don’t), there’s just enough signs of life scattered throughout to make the constant dull thud as joke after joke clangs leadenly to the ground more painful than it needed to be. It was never going to be good, but it didn’t have to be this bad.
This isn’t actually in the movie, possibly because it’s funny
It’s tempting to say the rot started with the central concept, which is “hey, it’s Paul Hogan’s real-life adventures in Hollywood, only not really”. It’s true that the idea of a wacky “look behind the curtain” at a faded comedy star is both fifteen years past its use-by date and something Peter Moon already did. But it’s not a irredeemably bad idea, especially for Paul Hogan, knockabout Aussie larrikin. So of course, this instead gives us Paul Hogan, sad burnout who’s sick of the celebrity life and just wants to move back Down Under. Comedy!
Having thrown out literally the only comedy premise that’s ever worked for Hoges in movies – that of a charming fish out of water – this decides to go the Hollywood satire route, as Hoges (as himself) goes through a string of disastrous comedy mix-ups that constantly put him in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. Two of these mix-ups involve (accidental) racism, and even though both times the film makes it pretty clear that racism is bad, if racism is bad (it is) why have your comedic lead be racist? Hoges works on screen as a likable decent guy, not some edgy comedy firebrand; considering the director also directed Hoges’ three previous films (Charlie & Boots, Strange Bedfellows and the awful That’s Not My Dog) even this mild accidental racism in 2020 seems like a fairly fundamental misunderstanding of his comedic persona.
So the premise doesn’t work and Hoges is playing against type: what else can go wrong? Having no actual story doesn’t help matters, as this is just a series of one-note scenes that go in circles without escalating or developing in any way until suddenly there’s a time jump and everything gets resolved. The awkward scenes do get bigger as they go from bad business meetings and angry fan events to car chases and a helicopter catching him hugging a blow up crocodile in his back yard, but they never build to anything and the whole “stay out of trouble or the Queen won’t give you a knighthood” angle isn’t exactly a high stakes drama in the first place.
And yet somehow despite looking like it was filmed for seven dollars in a generic suburb with “Hollywood” painted on a fence, it’s not a total loss. You wouldn’t think filming a bunch of celebrities saying shit about Hoges at a red carpet event for something else entirely would be all that funny, but the one thing this does have going for it is that it’s perfectly happy to go after Hoges hard. Well, during the Hollywood parody scenes at least – there’s plenty of sappy crap with Hoges and his granddaughter (weirdly, her mother is never mentioned) to let us know he’s a decent bloke at heart no matter what the media says, but the media gets the edge here because they’re mildly amusing and his granddaughter can’t even manage that.
There are also celebrity cameos. If you are a John Cleese or Chevy Chase completist, they are in this film. If you are a Wayne Knight completist, maybe find a better hobby? And if you are a Julia Morris or Paul Fenech completist, stop.
Paul Hogan is now eighty, and there’s no good reason to think he’ll ever make another film. This would be a bum note to go out on, but it’s not that much worse than 2001’s Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles or any of the other movies he made in the 90s so it’s hard to feel particularly bad for him. It’s more frustrating than anything else; even at eighty Paul Hogan still has decent comedy chops when required, charisma to burn and enough name recognition to get movies made.
This whole thing just feels like a waste of his talents, limited though they may be. Even now, it’s easy to imagine him making better films than this – and not just because it’s hard to imagine films much worse.
Shaun Micallef Hits the Piss
If the ABC really wanted to pull a crowd with Shaun Micallef’s On The Sauce, they should have got Mick Molloy to host it. Having Micallef host a mildly anxious series about how maybe drinking is not great for everyone just feels like a natural fit: having Molloy out there desperately trying to fit his boozy persona into the ABC’s sober agenda would have given this series a spark that – it pains us to say – it really needs.
That’s right kids, drinking is bad
Those expecting Micallef in comedy mode would have been sorely disappointed by tonight’s episode, but comedy was never really on the agenda. This was always going to be yet another serious series where a comedian investigates a topic of personal interest in a mildly informative manner – in this case, Micallef needs to find a way to try and persuade his teenage sons to follow in his footsteps and stay off the grog, only with them skipping the handful of years where Micallef was a youthful tearaway sculling bottles of scotch and passing out outside bars.
While this initially presents itself as Micallef investigating the world of alcohol – a world he’s avoided for the last 30 years – so he can become an informed guide for his kids, you don’t have to look too deeply to see that this was only ever going to play out one way: hey kids, booze is bad. Which does tend to cut off the few comedic possibilities this series might have had, because the only way to scare people off booze is by taking booze extremely seriously. Fans of comedy vomiting and “youze are my bestest mates evaaa”, look away now.
So when Micallef goes to hang out with people who actually do drink, they’re always treated with a kind of bland arms-length respect. Micallef himself (who is out of his comfort zone more than once here) often seems a little awkward around them – possibly because, in this context at least, he has nothing in common with them – and their drinking is presented in a kind of “not for me but fair enough” fashion that rarely provides any real insight. A harsher show could have found a lot of mean-spirited comedy here, but (thankfully?) this is above that.
One thing that is interesting (and which ties in with the general anti-booze tone of it all) is that while the people who drink are treated with respect, the only reasons ever given for wanting to drink are social ones – peer pressure, making friends, being part of the group and so on. The idea that anyone might like to drink because they enjoy the effects of alcohol is barely touched upon (and then only extremely clinically) presumably because if you want to argue that drinking is bad then having it actually be pleasurable makes that a lot harder to do. But if drinking is purely a social thing, then it’s perfectly reasonable to replace it with sober social activities and get rid of the booze entirely – please sign our petition to make Australia a dry continent, thanks.
There’s also a weird sense here that drinking is somehow largely (entirely?) a cultural thing. The reason why Australians drink is presented as the result of the way Australian society is set up (farmers need to bond quickly with strangers, immigrants need a quick path to blending in, sport is linked to booze through advertising, we’ve always been a nation of pissheads, and so on), and not because of any personal desires – well, not any good ones at least, as the dark side of drinking is most definitely covered here too. Which means that if we could only change Australian culture, then Australia’s drinking problem would go away. Please sign our petition, etc etc.
(the fact that Australian drinking rates are in decline and have been for decades gets a very brief mention)
This opens a big door labelled “problematic”, because whose culture are we talking about here? Micallef is a clear outsider when it comes to boozing whatever the context, but for much of this first episode the people who drink are very obviously very much unlike him – mostly young people, often rough around the edges in a way that suggests they’re probably not big ABC viewers. This may just be accidental; on the other hand, everyone here is pretty white (at least until episode three, when the impact of alcohol on indigenous communities is supposedly going to be looked at), which suggests someone somewhere thought about what kind of Australia was going to be put under the microscope here.
It’s not quite getting into us versus them territory (and next week promises a visit to a boozy book club, which is about as ABC an activity as you can get), but there is the occasional sense here that drinking is really only something that other people do and maybe they need to be told to stop… you know, for their own good. Which is pretty much how the “alcohol debate” currently works in this country, so no big surprise there.
Well, maybe a little one if you were expecting something with a bit more genuine inquiry underlying things. But it’s clear that Micallef himself is no fan of the grog (and for good reason going by a couple of personal stories), and if the summaries of future episodes are any guide this three part series ends up as more of a “how do we stop people drinking?” show than anything else. You have been warned.
On the upside, how about those early Micallef clips, huh? Theatresports! The ABC had an entire channel named ABC Comedy and they never got around to repeating that. It’s enough to drive you to drink.
Vale Hard Chat
It was a shit segment and it should have ended four years ago. Good fucking riddance.
(is that going to be it? – ed)
Okay, fine. Usually we at least try to get in somewhat early with our so-called “news coverage”, but when we heard that Tom Gleeson was finally retiring his excreteable Hard Chat segment from The Weekly a good 80 episodes after it stopped being funny, we thought “hang on, let’s wait a minute here”. No point digging a perfectly good hole when we’re not 100% sure the fucker’s dead yet and all that.
After all, our only source for this information was Tom Gleeson, a performer who’s carefully developed over the last decade or so a subtle and nuanced comedy persona that’s best described as a lying sack of shit. Oh wait, we mean “colourful prankster” who just happens to say whatever the hell he likes so long as there’s a bit of publicity in it for him. Because it’s funny! To him at least.
So claiming his long-running segment had finally staggered to an ignoble end only to exhume the corpse in a week or so’s time is totally in keeping with whatever the fuck kind of comedy character he’s supposed to be playing these days.
“That’s the joke” his fans say, “he’s pretending to be a self-obsessed jerk who’ll insult anyone for attention! He also tells lies! Hilarious!” and no doubt in the hands of a skilled comedy practitioner – or even with a bit of context around it, as Gleeson sometimes provides during his actual comedy performances and on quiz show Hard Quiz – this kind of act works just fine. Well, probably not “fine”, but you can see what he’s trying to get at.
But the whole point of the increasingly pointless Hard Chat was that Gleeson was a loose cannon willing to talk shit to anyone anywhere, and that eventually spread out into the real world with things like his efforts at The Logies. Which again, wasn’t automatically a bad thing, except that unlike other professional bullshit artists around the globe there was no real comedy character – or joke – behind it. Gleeson wasn’t pretending he’d axed his show and it wasn’t coming back unless he won the Gold Logie to make any kind of greater comedy point, or even just to get laughs; he did it because he wanted to win a Gold Logie.
And now he has one. There’s even a reasonable chance he has the final one: TV Week just got bought by an asset-stripping venture capital firm almost certainly looking to cash in then cash out, and wasting money on an awards night that hands out statues to the likes of Tom Gleeson isn’t going to look good on the balance sheet. There’s a high note to go out on.
Hard Chat wasn’t just a one-joke segment that relied almost entirely on the quality of the guests involved and stopped being funny three weeks in: it took Tom Gleeson from rarely amusing comedy dickhead to the dizzying heights of award-winning quiz show host. Which means it took him from being the Ginger Ninja to somebody we can pretty much ignore, which is a win-win all around.
Mind you, it was still a shit segment that should have ended four years ago. Good fucking riddance.