Probably the most impressive thing about At Home Alone Together is that it exists at all. A rapidly thrown-together reaction to Australia’s comedy crisis – uh, coronavirus crisis – it was largely filmed in the presenters own homes using minimal camera equipment… so yeah, if you’ve ever wanted to check out the inside of Ray Martin’s house then now is your big chance to seek professional help.
As for the show itself, it’s a lifestyle parody show, which is a genre that died somewhere between the third and fourth series of LIfe Support a couple decades ago. Having Ray Martin as host seems like it should be funny until you remember that Ray hasn’t had a high profile gig in a decade and never really had the cheesy charm of your Ian Turpies or Baby John Burgesses. A natural comedian he is not, unless he’s having a go at John Safran for going through his bins.
But on a night when The Weekly seemed to suddenly remember that its remit is to be as unfunny as humanly possible – quick, stick a sports jacket on Charlie Pickering and play loud distracting background music under both of his seemingly endless “news-in-review” segments – having something on the ABC that was actually trying to be funny was something of a relief. Remember when Julia Zemiro’s Road Trip was all about comedians? You won’t when it returns next week.
Being made up of a bunch of sketches recorded individually by comedians under lockdown, At Home Alone Together was always going to be hit and miss. The weird thing was that the two weakest sketches – Harry Potter sex play and turning your bathroom into a sauna – were put up the front. And that fake non-ad for Bleach was a bit of a head-scratcher until it became obvious what it was referring to, which was a news story that by 2020 standards took place a thousand years ago. In the age of twitter, topicality is not your friend unless you’re very, very funny.
Surprisingly though, by the end the good largely outweighed the bad. Craig Reucassel’s bins full of bottles was a good solid laugh that didn’t outstay its welcome, that fake ad for the Adelaide Wet Market filled with cheap toast was weird enough to be a decent palate cleanser, and Helen Bidou having yet another meltdown while putting out a bizarre song was everything you want from Anne Edmonds.
We’ve been fans of Ryan Shelton’s sketch work since his Rove days and presumably he’s doing just fine working behind the scenes with Hamish & Andy but his appearance here really did make us wonder why he’s not doing more front-of-camera work. Caution: the next paragraph or two is going to get even more wanky than usual.
The appeal of the lifestyle parody is that lifestyle show segments already have a plot – you start out trying to make or do something and by the end you achieve it. As most Australian sketches are basically just someone coming up with a funny idea then doing that over and over until it stops being funny then coming back with the exact same idea for the next six weeks, it’s easy to see the appeal of a format where the story work is done for you.
Most of the segments here didn’t really do much with that: Harry Potter sex fantasy had one twist – the dude was more into Potter than sex – while the sauna one didn’t even have that and the bit about making soup out of weeds went exactly where it was always obvious it was going to go.. Bidou was just a performance piece with the side joke of her son getting pissed off, but when you can perform like Edmonds that’s plenty.
Shelton though, not only had the joke that he was crap at handiwork so he’d got in his twin brother Jase to help, but then had Jase be everyone’s nightmare sibling before the segment somehow degenerated into a hammer toss with a dick pic as the prize, followed by the dick pic being blurred out and Shelton coming up with a truly pathetic excuse for losing. Comedy is subjective and if you found Ray Martin’s soapy pockets hilarious more power to you (okay, the bit where he accidentally used them next to the sink was good), but when it comes to sketch work Shelton remains the one to beat.
Whether it’s lack of oversight from the corporate bigwigs or the idea that maybe now might be a good time to make people laugh, having a comedy series on the air that’s clearly putting being funny first is a refreshing change from the majority of ABC output. It’s too hit and miss to be any kind of classic, and chances are next week will reveal that this week’s jokes are in fact the only jokes this series will be offering over its eight week run, but for now it’s the best local comedy on the ABC.
Remember Danger 5, SBS’s period spy spoof series where a group of secret agents had to kill Hitler? There were two series of Danger 5, the 2012 series set in the 1960s and the 2015 series set in the 1980s, and since then, nothing. Now the team are back with Danger 5 Stereo Adventures, an eight-part series for Audible in which our heroes, Danger 5, uncover a secret evil organisation called Big Knife and try to stop them from…whatever they’re planning.
What Big Knife is planning, however, isn’t necessarily the point. Like James Bond, Thunderbirds and the various spy series which inspired Danger 5, it’s really about the romp. So, don’t go in expecting a cohesive or easy-to-follow narrative – even with Shaun Micallef’s narration – and certainly don’t go in expecting cohesive comedy. Like the TV version of Danger 5, the humour can be a bit ‘random LOLZ’ following by ‘crowbarred-in gag’… Hey, look a guy with an animal head! Ha ha ha!
Most of the comedy in the first episode of the Danger 5 Stereo Adventures – a romp around the Caribbean involving the Loch Ness Monster and a pirate potion – is just different versions of the seaman/semen pun. And while we’re not saying we don’t find the seaman/semen pun funny, it gets a bit relentless.
On the other hand, subsequent episodes don’t include the seaman/semen joke but are even less hilarious. And it’s not as if the writers aren’t trying to be funny… There are crazy characters, silly foreign accents, commercial breaks (including parodies of the Bunnings Warehouse ads and Today Tonight promos), the odd excellent line (‘Quick, let’s trust this mysterious stranger!’), plus a bunch of barbed satirical digs at Australian patriotism and the ANZAC spirit. (The ANZAC stuff’s quite good, to be fair.)
Thing is, overall, it just doesn’t gel. There’s a lot of assumed knowledge about the show (an assumption that listeners know or remember who all the members of Danger 5 are), and the writers haven’t been the best at translating the kind of characterisations that work fine on TV – because you can deliver the character notes visually – to audio-only. Hence, Claire, who’s British, female and uptight is…yeah, we don’t need to spell out what her character’s like.
As for the broader concept of this being a spy series spoof, well, it is a spy series spoof, except it’s a spoof of a type of spy series that never really existed. It’s more a spy series set in ‘the past’ and because it’s ‘the past’ it’s made to sound like the kind of audiotapes people used to borrow from their local library in the 1980s, complete with those little beeps before and after the show ends… Which is mildly interesting to recall if you’re old enough to remember that kind of thing, but probably seems pretty weird if you’re under 40.
Not that anyone under 40 is listening to this kind of comedy. Probably.
Danger 5 is funny in fits and starts but is a bit hard going if you’re after a reasonably comprehensible plot and clearly defined characters which can generate a lot of decent gags. It’s not even worth listening just to hear Shaun Micallef, because if you want a Micallef spy series you’re better off watching Roger Explosion.
Television made on a weekly basis has a tendency to revert to the mean; there just isn’t enough time to make big changes every single week. But that doesn’t explain The Weekly‘s refusal to stick with any changes at all even when the basic version of the show is crap. Was it only last week that we stupidly suggested that maybe this year might see some positive changes? We’re in an abusive relationship here and we just keep on coming back.
Obviously some of our sour mood this week comes from failing to realise that this week was always going to arrive. Sure, we like Judith Lucy a lot, but the version of her segment where she “interviews” some poor sap by turning up and has an abusive meltdown in front of them is pretty much our least favourite version of her segment. Was that on this week’s episode? Sure was!
Meanwhile, Luke McGregor did roughly the same thing he did last week, only now it’s just that little bit clearer that making intentionally crap explainers should possibly be left to the experts. Remember Ryan Shelton? His segments on Rove a thousand years ago showed how to do this kind of thing right, which is why they’ve been completely forgotten today. Australian comedy: 50 years of classic gear to rip off and we’re still stuck on remaking Kingswood Country.
Something else that made an unwelcome return is the “international correspondent”, which is code for some overseas comedian you’ve never heard of turning up to do a meandering five minutes via satellite. This week’s star performer was dimly related to some slightly notable figure in US governance, which is all we remember about her and we only remember that because Pickering mentioned it twice, including as his very first question to her. What, Ronald Reagan’s great-grandkids weren’t available to do some knock-knock jokes?
Then again, Pickering’s own segment was on the hilarious and highly relevant topic of “will we ever fly again?” a question literally nobody is asking because how the hell else are we going to get to Bali? Even if people have to seal themselves inside full body condoms sleeping bag style to travel by air, people will still travel by air. And this is week two! What are they going to be asking in week seven? “As the coronavirus continues to take a deadly toll, is it time to rename coffins… cough-ins?”. Because that would be shit.
But it wasn’t entirely a dead loss. For starters, there was an astonishingly poor “wacky corona home videos” style clip collection – you know, the kind of thing that tries to have it both ways by being both a collection of mildly notable news clips and a half-arsed “sketch” – that ended by cutting back to a clearly unimpressed Pickering who said “wow” in the kind of tone that suggests someone’s getting fired. No doubt a lot of work goes into finding the clips for these bits but if they can’t figure out funnier ways to use them… wow.
And hey, Tom Gleeson’s back! Coming to us from lockdown in… some kind of family country estate in the Macedon Ranges? We don’t know if Pickering was joking about the estate covering “multiple postcodes” or not and frankly we don’t care, because hearing that kind of passive-agressive dig on air is pretty much the only way we’re ever going to find either of these clearly very well-off sods remotely likable.
We’ll get back to you regarding which one we felt sorriest for. We’re guessing whichever one has fewer butlers.
Over the last few thousand years – or the last few weeks depending on how solid your grip on time currently is – the big question in comedy circles has been… well, probably that twitter thread that listed all the #metoo offenders on the local comedy scene, but let’s not air those screenshots just yet. Slightly further down the list was a question slightly more relevant: how could they make Have You Been Paying Attention? work during a period of social distancing?
While shows like The Project have been able to get two or three people together in a studio, and Mad as Hell often had a range of people interacting with host Micallef, HYBPA? involves six or seven people on-camera in relatively close quarters. For now, that’s not on. So how to get the band back together?
As solutions go, having everyone teleconference in wasn’t exactly seamless – much like the live ad reads scattered throughout the show. But considering the cast were all phoning in from various locations, the interactions between them were about as interactive as you could hope for (we’re guessing there was a bit of editing to polish up the chit chat).
The producers made sure to wheel out the A team for this first socially distanced show too. You’re not getting too much dead air with Marty, Kitty and Urzila on board, even if the running joke about “Yongle” did outstay its welcome.
Likewise, while the studio audience isn’t really a big part of the regular show, they managed to get enough people into the studio to get a decent laugh track going throughout. And the lack of an audience had an upside: the desultory half-arsed response when it was announced that Malcolm Turnbull would be a celebrity quizmaster to promote his memoir seemed perfectly appropriate.
Turnbull’s appearance also helped answer the other big question of the night: how do you do a news-based comedy when there’s only really one news story and it’s not really all that funny? Fortunately the development of the coronavirus in Australia has been more about people being annoyed and bored than having their corpses stacked in hospital carparks, so by focusing on viral videos, home schooling and Ed’s appearance on Dancing with the Stars things were kept light and topical.
Still, the show was looking a little threadbare coming into the home stretch. HYBPA? might have been off-air for the last five or so months, but the comedy potential of the Ruby Princess has pretty much been tapped.
It’s a problem the show has always faced during a slow news week, and they don’t get much slower than this. Hopefully they haven’t already burned through all their decent coronavirus material, or we could be taking a lot more return trips on that cruise liner.
ABC & Screen Australia announce At Home Alone Together, a lifestyle show for a world in which nobody has a life
ABC has partnered with Screen Australia on a joint initiative in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic which will culminate in a new eight-part comedy series AtHome Alone Together, starting on ABC and ABC iview on Wednesday 13 May at 9pm. It’s the survival series we all need right now: a lifestyle show for a world in which nobody has a life. A comedic take on the lifestyle magazine genre, At Home Alone Together will gather Australia’s best comedians and revered actors to give audiences advice on how they can live their best life in the time of COVID-19.
Hosted by beloved ‘national treasure’ Ray Martin, each half-hour episode will feature regular contributors, including comedians Anne Edmonds, Ryan Shelton, Becky Lucas, Christiaan Van Vuuren and Adele Vuko, who will share their knowledge, inspirations and advice on how to achieve self-improvement during the corona crisis, covering a range of topics, including D.I.Y, wellness, parenting and personal finances. Each week they’ll be joined by a variety of Australia’s funniest comedians and favourite actors who will assist them by providing handy hints, clever hacks and entrepreneurial know-how to help everyday Australians optimise their time in isolation. At Home Alone Together will show us how the Coronavirus isn’t just a pandemic – it’s an opportunity.
Host Ray Martin said, “I’ve worked in journalism for over 50 years, but it’s always been my dream to front a lifestyle show. 60 Minutes was all well and good, but it never gave me an opportunity to build a pergola. Australians are experiencing a difficult time and I believe I’m the right person to step up to hold the country’s hand through it – just so long as that hand has been thoroughly sanitised.”
ABC’s Head of Entertainment and Factual, Josie Mason-Campbell, said,” We recognise that the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown the comedy industry into crisis, so as well as making a great show that will encourage Australians to do what they do best in a crisis – laugh – the ABC also wants to support the writers, performers, producers and technicians who are the life blood our of industry. We’ll commission ideas from teams across the country who will write, produce, edit and deliver sketches and bring them to a mass audience. It’s no mean feat to go from concept to screen so quickly – At Home Alone Together is an extraordinary project for this unprecedented time.”
Online Investment Manager at Screen Australia, Lee Naimo, said, “The entire comedy industry has been impacted by COVID-19, but it’s emerging writers and performers who have been the hardest hit. This project presents an opportunity to give these creatives experience with a broadcaster and help them develop their careers during this time. At Home Alone Together will entertain a nation hungry for relevant content while employing a sector of the industry hungry to flex their comedy muscles. I can’t wait to see what these teams bring together in these unique circumstances.”
At Home Alone Together will be produced following strict COVID-19 OHS guidelines, using modern production techniques requiring minimal crew for broadcast standard results. Much of the series will be recorded in the contributor’s homes, either using their own equipment or a single person crew.
So, Australia, come and meet your new best friends who are here to help you through the crisis!
So… people stuck at home are going to be filming sketches on their phones and sending them in? How could it possibly go wrong? Though using “hungry” twice in the same sentence isn’t a good sign.
Still, it’s not like there’s anything else out there we’d rather be watching. Here’s hoping John Safran sends in a clip of himself going through Martin’s bins.
A quick and probably highly inaccurate survey shows that roughly 50% of the time we greet the return of The Weekly with something along the lines of “hey, maybe this year won’t be so bad”. Which clearly makes us idiots, because every year The Weekly is pretty much the same only with slightly less Briggs.
But now, all that’s changed! Okay, not the part about there being less Briggs, but he’s still in the opening credits so you never know. But check out that fancy new set! It’s all earth tones and exposed wiring like the inside of the TARDIS during a season of Doctor Who where they were trying to go for “cosy”.
Sure, it’s the casual version of an utterly generic television show set with that “hey, it’s just like your loungeroom only there are cameras and who the hell still has board games under the television set, oh right people who still have a television set” vibe. But it’s something different, and for The Weekly that’s always – always – a good thing.
It’s honestly hard to know how much this first episode is setting the tone for things to come. The big thing to note is that there was no Tom Gleeson, which was strange but hardly unwelcome. Pickering made sure to let us know he’d be back though, so presumably Hard Chat will also be returning and suddenly The Weekly doesn’t seem all that different any more.
Likewise, there was no interview segment this week, and not to sound like a cracked record but this was also a welcome subtraction. The extended “Greg Norman hates clothing” sketch that replaced it wasn’t exactly a comedy highlight in any way shape or form, but it was at the very least an attempt at comedy so let’s focus on our somewhat unconvincing thumbs up and not our pained expression.
The real highlights were, of course, Charlie Pickering explaining the coronavirus like none of us had watched a news report since January. Oh wait. Maybe it was Pickering explaining how the governments tracking app works? Pickering throwing to a clip from New Zealand breakfast television? Pickering laughing at his guests jokes?
Yes, the show’s slogan is “He’s watched the news so you don’t have to”, so we all know what to expect. But when the news is entirely about a lethal pandemic that could kill you and information is the only real defense, it feels safe to suggest people just might be giving their full attention to the regular, snark-free news and coming here for the comedy. Which means we’re not the only idiots here.
So what did work? Judith Lucy was hilarious as always, and much as the lockdown is well and truly into the “hey, maybe death won’t be so bad after all” stage, she still did an excellent job of wringing the last drops of comedy out of staying at home and getting shitfaced.
Luke McGregor was the big surprise, in that his financial segment just went for flat out silliness and was definitely the better for it. His explanation of negative gearing didn’t seem to explain much of anything, but McGregor as his own trash-talking dad was the episode’s highlight and hopefully Link from The Legend of Zelda will be able to afford a badly drawn house of his own one of these days.
The Weekly is always going to be hamstrung by a number of built-in flaws that will never change. Pickering isn’t all that funny, Tom Gleeson is a sidekick who never threatens to overshadow Pickering comedy-wise, the idea of a comedy show that explains the news is a tricky one to make work as comedy (if explaining a joke ruins it, having to explain the set-up before you make a joke isn’t a lot better) and for some reason while almost everyone on the writing staff of The Weekly is funny elsewhere the comedy bits on The Weekly just aren’t great.
What’s left is a couple of people who would be funny anywhere being funny on a show that wouldn’t be funny without them. Which isn’t exactly a great argument for keeping the unfunny show going but we all know The Weekly is going to outlive every single one of us and most likely the concept of comedy itself. You want big laughs? Check out this couch:
As Shaun Micallef repeatedly said on a far funnier show, “dat’s nice!”
A lot of stand-up shows have been filmed for streaming services in recent years but Judith Lucy vs Men (available now on Amazon Prime) is, as you’d expect, a cut above the rest.
No one, absolutely no one, can sell material like Judith Lucy. As with Barry Humphries, you might have seen some of the jokes before (her crowd work at the start of the show is near identical to crowd work I saw her do live a few years back), but it’s still funny. In fact, it’s a highlight.
Judith, we learn, is over 50, menopausal and single. She also recently discovered, thanks to some market research by a TV company, that she polls very badly with the one demographic that matters as far as relationships go: cis men.
The LGBTI+ community love her, as do women, but straight men? Er…not so much. So, she asks the audience, should she persist against all the odds? Or should she give up on men entirely?
She presents the evidence: a string of failed relationships and bad relationship choices, including her last boyfriend who stole money from her. And, yet, SPOILERS, the audience wants her to keep at it. You could interpret this as the audience willing her on to find the man of her dreams. Or maybe they just want her to fail again so they can see the resulting show? Either way, it’s back to the coal face, Jude.
And happily, she’s okay with that. The nice thing about turning 50 is she feels more liberated; she even gets one of those MONA-style vagina portraits done.
Meanwhile, in the land of podcasts, the final episode of Judith Lucy – Overwhelmed and Dying has dropped. As we said previously, it’s not strictly a comedy, but in these dark times, it does offer some ideas for improving our mental health, dealing with the bad things happening in the world, getting involved in good causes and making positive changes in your life.
Judith Lucy’s even launched a Facebook group for those who want to discuss the issues raised (although some are also asking Judith about her comedy and one person’s even requested a copy of her vagina portrait).
So, while Judith Lucy is older, wiser and better at processing things, rest assured she hasn’t lost any of that unique comedy style that we’ve all loved for decades.
As seems only fitting in these unsettled times when we’re all scrabbling for the smallest snippet of certianity, Mad as Hell series 11 ended with host Shaun Micallef letting us know that he and the rest of the team would definitely be back later in the year. They also spent much of the episode hammering home the currently largely overlooked fact that our current federal government is packed with liars, shonks, intellectual dim bulbs and marginally competent charlatans. Presumably to balance out The Weekly, who are back next week and must be jumping at the chance to run more jokes about the state of the housing market.
But as we farewell the latest production from Giant Baby – no, not that giant baby
(Peter Dutton’s proxy Brion Pegmatite seen in a rare moment of… pleasure)
It’s time to take a look back at what has to be one of the stranger news satire shows currently being made in the English-speaking world, even if this year the Kraken’s appearances were kept to a minimum. At a time when “news satire” basically just means a smirking scold lecturing the audience on the latest cons and thefts from the various right-wing grifters that have set up shop as Supreme Leader, Mad as Hell… okay, it does its fair share of that.
Refreshingly though (in an Australian context at least), Mad as Hell seems to mean it, often coming across as both authentically angry and generally dismayed at the local council-level cretins found infesting politics at the Federal level. The days of The Chaser’s insipid “hey, they’re all the same really, here’s Julie Bishop in a staring contest, what a good sport right guys?” are over… at least until next week, when we can look forward to the return of whatever blah blah blah.
That’s not to downplay the serious comedy chops on display every episode. There’s no weak link here: the writing is world class, the performances are uniformly excellent, and for a show that must be run on a shoestring all involved consistently make the obviously low budget nature of some of the sketches into a plus.
Reportedly it was once common (before the money completely dried up, that is) for comedy performers to hear that audiences wouldn’t go for rough and ready sketch shows because they’d only watch expensive, polished productions. Mad as Hell repeatedly proves that attitude to be as ill-informed now as it clearly was back when the idea of any network paying for a polished sketch show wasn’t like something out of Narnia.
Let’s not forget – though the fact it’s possible to do so is a salute to the show’s professionalism – that two-thirds of the way through this season the audience suddenly wasn’t there. For Australia’s other “live” comedies this would be a blip at best; both The Weekly and Have You Been Paying Attention?, while happy to surf on the live audiences reactions, aren’t exactly built around responding to the crowd.
Mad as Hell though? Whether it’s Micallef milking laughs with a raised eyebrow, using their response to time a joke, or cutting to plants in the crowd to set up segments, increasingly the audience is an active participant in the goings-on in a way rarely seen in recent studio comedies.
So no audience was a big problem. But after a few minor bumps (and they were really only bumps compared to the show with an audience) and one excellent sketch about adding a laugh track, the show took the impact of coronavirus in its stride. Fingers crossed all of us at home can do the same.
Julia Zemiro’s Home Delivery returns to Wednesday nights on ABC
Premieres Wednesday 20 May at 8pm on ABC and iview
The ABC’s beloved series Julia Zemiro’s Home Delivery returns for its eighth season on Wednesday 20 May 8pm on ABC and iview. Julia traverses the country to meet her guests. They come from around Australia and an assortment of professions, all with a passion to effect real change in the world.
“Little did we know when we were filming this 8th series of Home Delivery that the world would soon be in lockdown,” Julia Zemiro says. “Presenting these shows to an audience now feels a bit more special. I’m so thrilled we can share with you eight brilliant people walking us through their past and reflecting on the future… a future they had no idea would include Coronavirus.”
“There’s a bittersweet quality in watching those musings now,” Julia adds. “Personally, I’m moved also by my physical closeness to each guest and how that is no longer possible. Our guests come from Science, IT, Politics and more particularly the Arts, an Industry that has become so vital in keeping our spirits alive in this lockdown period. Enjoy. ”
The new series kicks off with a trip down memory lane with Australia’s favourite boffin, Dr Karl Kruszelnicki, while other guests include, maverick Senator Jacqui Lambie, comedian, social media queen and bushfire heroine Celeste Barber, actor and activist Yael Stone, comedian Craig Reucassel, legendary film director Gillian Armstrong, billionaire software entrepreneur Scott Farquhar and singer-songwriter Casey Donovan.
As Julia’s guests visit significant sites from their formative years, they ponder their lives and the paths they have forged so far, sharing personal stories from their childhoods to the present day, giving the viewer a real insight into their public and private persona.
Remember when this was a show about comedians? Yeah, us neither. Still, it’s back yet again and it’s replacing Hard Quiz in what is presumably still technically a comedy time slot – though really, 8.30pm Wednesdays seems to be the only timeslot the ABC is fully committed to running comedy in… and The Weekly starts there next week.
(also, “bushfire heroine Celeste Barber”? Did she actually go out and fight the fires while we weren’t watching?)
Luke McGregor joins The Weekly with Charlie Pickering, watching the news so you don’t have to!
ABC is pleased to announce The Weekly with Charlie Pickering is back from April 29, locked down inside the ABC’s sanitised bubble and holding your well-washed and hopefully gloved hand through the next 14 weeks of the End Times.
Joining The Weekly this season is Tasmania’s own Luke McGregor, who has finally found a use for his Economics degree. With the economy falling apart, no one is better placed to guide us through these anxious times than a deeply anxious comedian with an enduring passion for graphs. Prepare to watch an adult man apologise to a virus while willing a curve to flatten.
Luke McGregor said, “I’m really excited to join The Weekly team. One, because I’m a fan of the show; and two, because I’m at home self-isolating with nothing to do and this gives me a reason to shower.”
Charlie Pickering added, “After being bullied for five years by a Logie-winning red-headed comedian with an out of control ego, I’m very happy to be joined by a Logie-winning red-headed comedian with no ego at all. I’m even happier that he’s one of my favourite comedians in the country.”
Luke isn’t the only one keeping Australia laughing in season six of The Weekly. Historic times call for a cast of historic proportions. Joining Charlie will be Judith Lucy, Gold Logie winner Tom Gleeson, Adam Briggs and a phalanx of Australia’s funniest to laugh right up in adversity’s face.
In a world that makes no sense, you might as well turn to the team at The Weekly with Charlie Pickering Wednesday 29 April at 8:30pm on ABC and iview.
As with literally every other piece of casting news at The Weekly, this is good news. It’s a show that could most definitely do with new talent, as shown by the two comedy quotes in this press release: one contains a slightly amusing joke, while the other contains a slightly amusing joke which is then promptly walked back just in case we thought for a single solitary second a blatant insult might have somehow made its way into a press release. Is there a comedian in this country who isn’t one of Charlie Pickering favourites?
The real question here is, will McGregor be a regular like Tom Gleeson is a regular (one to two segments a week every week), like Judith Lucy is a regular (roughly two segments every three weeks) or a regular like Briggs is a regular (Briggs is a regular?). Actually, now that Briggs can’t do his oddly-located interviews with big name politicians or appear in the occasional pre-recorded sketch, maybe they’ll be forced to let him be as funny as he is pretty much everywhere else.
Anyway, it sounds like McGregor is going to have a regular segment on the economy, and while we’re not expecting it to reach the heights of Tosh Greenslade in a Wig and Glasses on Mad as Hell, the idea of getting on board actually funny people for regular segments on topical issues is a good direction for The Weekly to take. Will it last more than a few episodes? We’ll have to watch more than a few episodes to find out!
