Australian Tumbleweeds
No Easy Answers
It must be the best of all possible worlds right now for Tom Gleeson. Sure, he’s won a Logie, but who gives a fuck about that? What’s really important is that he took his hilarious comedy persona to new heights with his Gold Logie campaign and now we can all reap the rewards on Hard Quiz. That was the whole point, right? To make his show funnier?
It’s kind of odd then to report that Hard Quiz post Gold Logie-gate remains basically unchanged. Gleeson doesn’t take his act to new heights; he doesn’t take his act to new anywheres. Obviously “if it ain’t broke” applies here – after multiple seasons everyone knows what to expect from this quiz show and you’re either on board or you’re not with Gleeson’s mildly snarky antics – but then what exactly was the point of trashing the Logies?
Considering Gleeson didn’t walk out on stage at the start of the show waving his Gold Logie about (not a euphemism), it seems likely the show was recorded pre-win and his “threat” to stop production on Hard Quiz if he didn’t win the Gold Logie was even more dodgy than first expected. Maybe he would have halted production – but with a bunch of episodes already in the tank, the show would go on.
Was it even good promotion for the show? A prize-free quiz show that’s basically just regular people being tested on their claims to know stuff about a particular subject doesn’t sound especially appealing to the traditional Logies fanbase, and considering Gleeson’s win was, as they say, “marred by controversy”, the Gold Logie isn’t exactly a stamp of approval here.
Also, and this doesn’t seem to get mentioned much with Gleeson, the broad appeal of a comedy dickhead is often that we get to see the comedy dickhead get his or her comeuppance. The obvious promotional angle for Gleeson’s Logie’s win is: “he trashed the awards – now see the public get their revenge on Hard Quiz!” But that’s never been how Hard Quiz works – it’s mellowed a bit since the early days, but even when the contestants get a snappy comeback or two it’s still clearly a show where Gleeson makes (mild) fun of a bunch of would-be smartarses.
It’s all set-up, no punchline with Gleeson’s act. He goes around acting like a dick, and… that’s it. You could maybe argue he was taking the piss out of people who deserve it with the Logies, but on a quiz show with regular contestants, firing off insults is an odd path to go down. Which is presumably why it’s increasingly underplayed on the show itself these days.
Gleeson can go around calling himself a Gold Logie winner, but so can Rove McManus and his career hasn’t exactly soared since Rove. Unless you’ve really done a lot of work over a long, long period of time, winning a Gold Logie is as much about the show you’re on as who you are. So the real fuck-up here is that, as far as Hard Quiz is concerned at least, Gleeson won by acting out of character; he might be a snarky bastard elsewhere but as a quiz show host, he’s basically just another quiz show host. Anyone who tunes in to see more of the “fuck the Logies” guy is going to be disappointed.
But if you want to see people answer questions about rugby players and Jewish holidays, then this is your lucky day.
Sketchy at best: The worst Australian sketch comedy shows
TV Tonight’s recent article on the all-time best Australian TV comedies got us thinking…what are the all-time worst Australian TV comedies?
Having been blogging about this for more than a decade, we think we have the answers. First up…sketch shows!
If you grew up pre the late-90s, sketch shows were something you saw on TV a lot – and they were hugely popular. The Late Show, Fast Forward, The D-Generation, The Comedy Company, The Naked Vicar Show and The Mavis Bramston Show are just some of the sketch shows that Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers remember with fondness, shows that were every bit as good as their overseas cousins Monty Python’s Flying Circus, A Bit of Fry and Laurie, Not The Nine O’Clock News and French & Saunders. And yet, Troy Kinne and the odd pilot aside, TV sketch shows have died an almost complete death in the past 20 years. Why?
The cast of The Comedy Company
It’s not as if people don’t appreciate short form comedy anymore. It’s all over YouTube and social media, and kids – and even professional comedians – are making sketches in their backyards with great success, MyChonny, Aunty Donna and Superwog amongst them.
It’s even possible for these online sketch artists to make money from their work, from YouTube advertising, merchandising and live tours. Not bad for something they wrote for fun in their spare time and shot on a phone.
Problem is, sketch is far less profitable for a TV network – and a lot riskier. Sure, it’s local content you can say you made, but it’s also expensive – too many sets, costumes, locations, actors, FX and stunt performers to pay for – and if the viewers hate it, you’re screwed. Many a post-millennium sketch show has died a long, painful death because the producers assumed we’d all love the Annoying Waiter character they’d created, meaning they shot weeks worth of Annoying Waiter sketches, and even pitched an Annoying Waiter spin-off book to a publisher, and then it turned out that the public hated the Annoying Waiter. Which is a shame, as The Annoying Waiter’s Restaurant Guide had some great stuff in it.
What we imagine the annoying waiter looks like
So, networks don’t bother with sketch anymore. Not when they can pull in big audiences for cheap – and meet their local content quotas – with reality shows.
Of course, part of the reason no one watches sketch shows on TV anymore could be that younger audiences, i.e. the Millennials and Generation Z, don’t have the happy memories of sketch comedy that Baby Boomers and Gen X have. If they’ve watched TV sketch show at all it was Comedy Inc, The Wedge, or, God help them, Open Slather.
And can we really blame them for turning away from TV sketch shows when their only experience of them are shows like these?
So, let’s remind ourselves of what TV sketch has been like over the past 20 years…
It was all going so well. After a 90s where comedy on TV was king, networks entered the 2000s with a programming mindset that included sketch comedy. And in 2003, Nine and Ten each launched a new sketch show. skitHOUSE, Roving Enterprises’ effort for Network Ten, ran for 19 episodes and featured Peter Helliar, Corinne Grant, Roz Hammond, Tom Gleeson, Cal Wilson and Tripod, amongst others. Comedy Inc., which featured Emily Tahey, Paul McCarthy and Hey Dad’s Ben Oxenbould, ran for an astounding five series on Nine. Yep, those were the days when sketch shows could stay on air not because they were good but because the networks needed to make and air local content.
The cast of Comedy Inc.
And so, Comedy Inc. gave us recurring characters like oddball neighbours Matt and Bray, plus shitload of TV show parodies featuring Paul McCarthy playing basically the same character in every single one, and skitHOUSE gave us Tom Gleeson’s Australian Fast Bowler. You remember the Australian Fast Bowler – he was a cricketing superhero that saved people using his cricketing skills – he was on the show multiple times every damn week.
Being on TV multiple times every damn week is something Tom Gleeson presumably learnt during his time on skitHOUSE, but, alas, the Australian Fast Bowler’s time was soon up, as Network Ten launched a new sketch concept in 2005… The Ronnie Johns Half Hour.
In theory, The Ronnie Johns Half Hour was a good idea – a bunch of ex-university comics who’d already been touring around in revues for a while. Yes, it would be just like The D-Generation, who’d done the same thing in the 1980s and had come to dominate TV comedy for years afterwards.
Or not, as it turned out. The one stand-out was Heath Franklin’s parody of Chopper Read, which considering Chopper was at this point a sort of a stand-up, was basically just a rip-off of Chopper’s own act. And given that Franklin still does Chopper, who’s now long dead, an increasingly tasteless one.
But in 2005 Network Ten didn’t just give us Ronnie Johns, it also gave us The B Team with once-popular Triple J duo Merrick & Rosso. Axed after eight episodes, it’s mainly remembered for Rosso dressing up as Russell Crowe (or Rosso Crowe) and fooling members of the public. Classic.
Of course, the early noughties ABC was also serving up sketch comedy duds. Anyone remember Flipside, which featured all three Curry brothers? It was such a good program that the ABC put it out late at night on a Saturday, in a timeslot when only the most dedicated, or those who’d remembered to set the video, would ever see it. We caught a few episodes and boy did it suck. And we’re saying that as people who remember the final series of Totally Full Frontal, a once-great, or at least half-decent, sketch show which had become so tired by this point that entire sketches consisted of a cast member dressed up as John Howard dancing down the street.
But let’s get back to the mid-noughties, a time when it was announced with great fanfare that 80s comedy legends Ian McFadyen (The Comedy Company) and Steve Vizard (Fast Forward) had developed The Wedge, an exciting new concept in sketch comedy where all the sketches would be set in typical Aussie suburb of Wedgedale. Amongst these was Lucy, a delusional schoolgirl who lived her life online, played by Rebel Wilson, and a parody of newsreader Sandra Sully called Sandra Sultry. Future Wilfred creators and stars Adam Zwar and Jason Gann were also in the show. The latter creating a recurring character, disgraced sports star called Mark Wary.
Rebel Wilson as Lucy
But the central problem with The Wedge wasn’t so much the concept or the personnel, but the fact that the writing was so bad and none of the cast knew each other. Sketch comedy works best when it’s centred around an established duo or team, who have a distinct style and shared point of view. McFadyen and Vizard, who’d worked together since the 80s, might have had shared a point of view, but the cast and writers were just random people they’d hired, so this sucked.
Hilariously (or not hilariously as it turned out) the exact same thing happened almost ten years later when the ABC made This is Littleton, a show about characters in the fictional city of Littleton, featuring a bunch of people who’d never worked together. It included sketches about a trophy wife, a Schapelle Corby-type character, and some old Greek men who discussed youth phenomena like Snapchat. And it lasted just four episodes.
Another one-series screamer of a sketch show was Seven’s Double Take, notable only for Paul McCarthy (he was in all the worst sketch shows) and his Kochie parody. And we only remember that because we wrote about it here.
One of the hallmarks of great sketch, of course, is taking a simple, funny premise and expanding it from there. Monty Python’s cheese shop with no cheese, for example. Meanwhile, at the turn of this decade, Beached Az took the idea of a cartoon whale on a beach with a New Zealand accent and…that was the entire joke. They somehow sold a lot of merch off the back of it, though.
And so, we move on, ultimately, to crap sketch comedy of the 2010s. 2013’s The Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting has been one of many attempts in this decade to revive the sketch show by having it written by new writers. New talent initiatives like Fresh Blood and Channel 10’s Pilot Week have always had a least one ensemble sketch show, either featuring an established act from the live scene who couldn’t get their material to work on TV, or a bunch on stand-ups and character actors shoved together into a show written by the usual hacks.
In this context, The Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting looked kinda interesting in that it brought together a group of new writers who’d all had their work presented online and then brought them to TV. Except, oh dear, the new writers only managed to write the same old unfunny crap that all the established writers seemed to be writing. We described the full horror of it over here if you can be bothered.
So, it seemed, hacky comedy was the future of sketch. Or at least the makers of 2015’s Open Slather thought so. This show, made by, of all networks, Foxtel, saw Fast Forward alumni Gina Riley, Jane Turner, Marg Downey, Magda Szbanski and Michael Veitch teamed-up with newer comedians such as Demi Lardner, Emily Taheny and Shane Jacobson, and appearing in parodies of Downton Abbey and Game of Thrones, sketches about Gina Reinhart…and loads of even less memorable stuff.
The cast of Open Slather
When it works, sketch comedy is amazing. It’s funny, it’s quotable, it’s re-watchable and sometimes it’s even generation-defining. But when it doesn’t work, and it doesn’t work a lot, it’s a reminder of how much money and human effort you can waste on a pointless folly.
Sketch comedy is hard, but the secret to it is quite simple: bring a group of people together around a central comedic premise or attitude, and spend ages making every second of the show as funny as humanly possible.
In the past two decades, the only shows that seem to have achieved that on Australian TV have involved Shaun Micallef. And as much as we love Shaun Micallef, that’s a big, big problem.
Like a Highway at Night
Having had this article drawn to our attention, we can’t seem to look away.
ABC head of comedy Rick Kalowski has a ready answer when producers complain they can’t get a show funded because they have been unable to land an international financier or co-producer.
“If you can’t co-finance your scripted show internationally it’s not because it’s too local, it’s because it’s not good enough,” he tells IF.
That’s an interesting way to put “the only way the ABC will pay for your show is if you get somebody overseas to pay for your show”, but hey, we don’t work in television production. It’s just good to have it on the record that being “too local” is in no way an obstacle to getting money from overseas networks looking for programming they can show to audiences who know next to nothing about Australia.
“One of the few good things about the budget cuts in the past few years is that they have forced us to think internationally about our financing,”
Which sounds great if the international financing people are just handing out money willy-nilly and are happy to fund exactly the kind of shows the ABC wants to make with zero input into the show itself. Let’s hope that’s what’s happening! Because otherwise what this means is that the scripted comedy output from the ABC now relies on the approval of overseas funding bodies, which doesn’t sound ideal.
And speaking of things that don’t sound ideal:
For calendar 2019 he commissioned six full-length series
…
Next year he is aiming for a slate of five full-length series, all of which are in negotiation or being financed. He expects between one and three will be renewals.
So the “ambitious agenda” laid out in this article is… “less comedy on the ABC in 2020”? With (let’s split the difference) half those shows being returning series? Get Krack!n‘s definitely not coming back, and Diary of an Uber Driver is a drama (right?) so we’re looking at the possibility of third series of Squinters, a fourth series of Rosehaven, or a jaw-dropping fifth series of Utopia? Suddenly the idea of bringing back Sando seems like a breath of fresh air. Especially as 2021 is already booked solid with the return of The Letdown and the as yet unseen Frayed.
Also, we’re shit at maths, but when you only have five slots a year and half of them are going to returning shows, does this add up?
As well as executive producing scripted comedy production for the network the executive has 30-50 projects in development at any one time
If co-developments are the future and overseas funding bodies are happy to fund Australian shows so long as they’re “good enough”, why is the amount of scripted comedy on the ABC falling from six series to five? Why not double the amount of overseas funding and make (okay, less than) double the shows? If there’s at least 30 shows in development and the overseas money is there, what’s the problem?
As we’ve already mentioned, we don’t work in television production. But we have watched a lot of Australian comedy, and at a guess we suspect the real problem with all this is that international money just isn’t interested in seriously funding decent Australian comedy.
It’s been established wisdom since the dawn of time that – unlike drama – comedy doesn’t travel well. It’s not hard to figure out why: if someone has to explain a joke to you its not funny, and unless you’re immersed in a culture you’re not going to understand the references being made.
If you’re making American comedy, this isn’t a problem: your culture has been exported around the world for decades. If you’re making Australian comedy… half the time Americans can’t even understand what you’re saying. Even the UK isn’t all that interested: Australia is at the bottom of a culture well, where we know heaps about other countries and they know next to nothing about us. You probably know the UK has a new Prime Minister; do you honestly think anyone there who’s not an ex-pat knows who our PM is? Does America even know we have a PM?
So you get shows like The Letdown, which are barely Australian (so as not to confuse overseas audiences) and barely comedy (because overseas audiences won’t get the jokes) but are funded by Netflix. Expect another hilarious look at being kinda bummed out about your shitty baby in 2021.
At the extreme, it’s possible that this “show us the international money” approach to approving local comedy pretty much guarantees that anyone Australian with any kind of uniquely Australian voice is going to be locked out of the Australian market for being too Australian. Which you’d think might be a problem for an organisation called The Australian Broadcasting Corporation but no, it just means you’re not good enough:
“There is so much hunger out there for scripted content that if you can’t finance it, it’s not a conspiracy. Many good Australian producers have had a lot of success selling their shows internationally.”
Just not the shows that have anything funny to say about Australia.
Vale Ten’s 2019 New Comedy Line-Up
It may have taken us a little while to notice – maybe we were distracted by the ABC playing the wrong episode of Mad as Hell, maybe we were too depressed over the return of Squinters – but over the last week or so pretty much all of Ten’s new comedy programs for 2019 have wrapped up. Mr Black; Kinne Tonight; even Taboo. All mates, all dead.
Of course, Ten still has Have You Been Paying Attention?, which for sheer comedy (and ratings) pretty much renders all the rest superfluous. And there’s still a couple of shows left to come from their pilot program last year – not that Trial by Kyle and whatever they end up calling Rove’s Saturday Night variety show are really going to count as “comedy”. But still, for a brief moment Ten was treating local comedy like it was something commercial networks should be making and we’re still struggling to get the surprised look off our faces.
That said, do we really think this brief spurt of comedy is going to have any lasting effect? Mr Black may or may not return but it kind of feels like it probably won’t; Kinne Tonight – or some version thereof – probably will, if only because Troy Kinne has proven remarkably resilient over the years. Taboo only had a handful of episodes in the first place and even then felt like it was maybe outstaying its welcome, but if they can find some more telegenic yet troubled people (pro tip: hang around outside the studios where they film the ABC’s You Can’t Ask That) we wouldn’t be surprised to see a few more episodes somewhere down the line.
What really made this burst of comedy interesting was that it still felt like an experiment. Usually comedy series on commercial networks – and increasingly the ABC, but we’ll get to that – are presented as basically a done deal: here’s our big new comedy series, if you like comedy you’d better watch it because if it flops we’re not coming back here in a hurry. But by putting a range of different shows on at roughly the same time, it felt like Ten was supporting the general idea of comedy rather than putting all their eggs in one basket: here’s a range of comedy, fingers crossed you’ll like at least one of them.
It almost goes without saying that this is a much, much better way to treat comedy. Drama might work just fine when expectations are built sky high, but comedy requires a lighter touch… which is why comedy increasingly struggles to stand out in our hype-focused world. Put another way, nobody ever says a drama was “surprisingly dramatic”, but “surprisingly funny” is high praise indeed. We’re not getting carried away with Ten’s line-up here – none of these shows were ground-breaking, or even particularly fresh – but this is the path to go down if you want to give fresh comedy a chance.
Notably, this is not the path that the ABC has gone down in recent years. While they’ve talked a good game with their various Fresh Blood online efforts and their own Comedy Showroom pilot week, the actual scripted comedy shows they’ve put to air over the last five years or so have almost entirely been renewals of series that nobody really wanted back.
Where previously nothing scripted went past two series, Rosehaven and Upper Middle Bogan both scored three series (so far) and Utopia has its fourth coming up; even Very Small Business got a second season after almost a decade off the air. And the “new” series have just been the same kind of thing from the same handful of producers. What was Sando but a slightly tweaked version of The Moodys? What’s Squinters but a slightly bigger version of No Activity?
“Playing it safe” doesn’t begin to cover it with this tired line-up: the ABC’s scripted comedy is predictable, boring, boringly predictable and predictably boring. The reason why Ten can look a lot better with a handful of shows that aren’t exactly ground-breaking is that there’s a sense that they’re willing to put things out there and see if they work whereas the ABC has already decided what’s going to work long before their shows reach the screen and they’ve locked in a second season no matter what.
Which is even more depressing because Ten’s Pilot Week line-up for 2019 is pretty much devoid of comedy as we know it, instead featuring four reality shows and this, which has “not very dramatic but also not very funny” written all over it:
Part Time Privates.
Two mothers at a local primary school decide to start a home-based private investigation business so they can enjoy flexible working hours. As their business unexpectedly thrives, they find themselves thrown deep into the world of working ‘undercover’; moving between school pick-ups, dance group and lunch orders, to threesomes, insurance fraud and failed relationships. Starring Heidi Arena and Nicola Parry.
Still, at least it’s not another season of Rosehaven.
The KGB are coming for you
Now on ABC iView and released in time for NAIDOC Week is KGB, a five-part short comedy series about indigenous cops solving a drugs case in the notorious Perth suburbs of Koondoola, Girrawheen and Balga, AKA the KGB.
The makers of KGB, Perth-based Mad Kids, were also responsible for The Legend of Gavin Tanner (made as part 2016’s Comedy Showroom season) and the iView-only Vice parody DAFUQ?. Neither of which were any good. And neither is KGB.
Think Housos but with cops in Perth. Jack and Nigel are promoted to junior detectives to work on a case sparked by a huge explosion at a meth lab in a suburban kitchen. Desperate to impress their boss (Genevieve Morris) and become full detectives, they try to outwit a rival pair of indigenous detectives who always seem to get it right. Can Jack and Nigel crack the case first?
To be honest, we lost interest fairly quickly. There’s a lot of ponderous exposition in this show, which isn’t that engaging, and a lot of high-energy gags and capers which either don’t work well or move way too fast. It’s unusual to watch a program which is both moving too fast and moving too slowly, but KGB has done that.
If you like the work of Paul Fenech then maybe this is for you. But if you don’t, probably best to leave it.
Squinters: Going Around In Circles Since 2018
You know how Squinters has directors listed in the credits? Ever wondered what they actually do? Because when you watch an episode of Squinters you rapidly notice that there are only ever three camera angles – a shot through the windshield, then shots through the drivers and passengers windows – and all you’d need to do to film a segment is set up cameras at each point and let them roll. There’s no deciding what to focus on in a scene or figuring out how to frame a shot. It’s just the same three angles, over and over and over and over and over and…
(okay, that guy did get hit by a bike at the end of tonight’s episode)
Look, Squinters has been more of the same since the second half of episode one season one, so pretty much all we’re here to tell you is that fuck-all has changed. Oh, plenty of superficial shit has changed, obviously: all the big names from series one have left, some of the cast have chopped and changed, the show seems slightly more aware that Sam Simmons is probably the best thing it has going for it, and Kirsten Schaal is here to make it clear that even really really good comedians struggle when all they’re given is a car seat to sit in. But the core of the show? Same old. Same old.
While this is an official promotional photo, one of these people is not actually in season two of Squinters
That’s always been the problem with Squinters, a show seemingly made on the cheap which also has to be filmed in both Sydney and LA: it’s rotten to the core (concept). Oh sure, the basic idea seems reasonable: let funny people talk and the funny will flow. But pretty much every single example of “let funny people talk” outside of shit talk shows lets the funny people talk for a reasonable length of time: Squinters chops its conversations up into segments under five minutes so all you get is a couple of near-random jokes and we’re off to the next couple.
Worse, the series’ fondness for improvised dialogue means that while there are plot lines that develop across episodes and the series as a whole, they move at a glacial pace. Pretty much all the real developments take place between episodes, leaving this feeling like a series that deliberately wants to be boring; meanwhile, whatever story does happen on the actual show is buried under a bunch of wacky riffs.
If you really do think that people sitting around talking is the funniest thing you can put on television – and not, just for example, radio – Squinters seems designed to do so in a way that’s been clinically proven not to work. Stand up comedy, AKA people being funny by talking, is usually either a bunch of different people doing short sets, or one person doing a lengthy performance. You don’t bring the same people back again and again and again to do short sets that are basically the same thing over and over again. Because it’s boring.
And if all that sounds a little vague and technical, let’s talk about Anne Edmonds doing her usual “I’m totally normal no wait I’m a shouty person” bit a full minute into her first appearance. Let’s listen to Sam Simmons repeating the word “man” over and over again until it loses all meaning. You want Genevieve Morris being Aussie as? Is this a show that features a chilled dude with a clucky girlfriend telling him he’s got to lay off the wanking because she just might want to have a baby? This isn’t a show serving up ground-breaking comedy.
All the other TV series that have used this basic idea of car-based comedy – there’s been lots, feel free to google them – have gone “well, this is a very cheap way to make a television show” and have used that as a strength. We’re talking two-handers between people with established comedy chemistry (or even a solo act in the case of Rob Brydon in Marion & Geoff), the kind of thing where you can honestly say “watching these particular people talk is the whole point of the show”.
But with Squinters, it’s like they’ve taken that basic idea and gone “let’s throw some crud on it”. All they’ve done is added things that take away from the concept’s basic strength: instead of two really funny people in one car, now there’s a whole bunch of cars featuring a range of performers, none of whom have any real A-grade comedy chemistry (imagine how much better this would have been if even a B-list team like Hamish & Andy were in the car; then imagine if Working Dog were making it and staffed the cars with established commercial radio duos). The entire business of movies and television is based around filming in a cheap, boring part of the world and then pretending the story is set somewhere exciting and glamourous: why on earth would you film a show in LA and pretend it’s the western suburbs of Sydney?
It’s not to entertain the audience, that’s for sure. Which sums up Squinters as well as anything.
The end of the world as we know it: Sarah’s Channel
What the hell happened to the ABC Comedy YouTube channel, wondered probably just us the other day. What is this “Sarah’s Channel”?
Sarah’s Channel is a new web series available on iView, which has also taken over the ABC Comedy YouTube channel (except they’re still uploading Sammy J to “Sarah’s Channel”, and there’s still a bunch of old sketches from Tonightly with Tom Ballard available if you really look for them).
Set in a post-apocalypse world, Sarah’s Channel imagines what life would be like for a beauty vlogger (played by Claudia O’Doherty) if she was reanimated and had to live in a world populated by strange “mole people” who live underground, in fear of an evil monster called Quahmork.
What would happen, it seems, is that beauty vlogger Sarah would carry as she had in the early 21st Century, creating videos about makeup looks you can try at home. Except instead of makeup she has mould she scraped from the ceiling, and instead of an internet to upload her videos to, she’s presumably just talking to the wall.
The mole people, who reanimated her in the hope that she would help them, indulge her in her vlogging and even help her recreate social media by offering he likes or loves in the form of cardboard thumbs and hearts. The really enthusiastic ones even offer to re-tweet her, by repeating the content of the “status update” she just uttered to the person next to them. The sheer madness of it is kind of funny.
Problem is, though, unless you’re really familiar with makeup YouTube, this is quite a specific parody. It’s a bit like watching one of Chris Lilley’s parodies of a teenager. You know the performer’s spent a lot of hours observing these kinds of people, and the writer’s spent a lot of time getting the script to sound authentic, but ultimately, there just aren’t enough bits of characterisation or dialogue that are funny without an in-depth knowledge of makeup influencers.
What does work, comically, is the “mole people”. They’re not onscreen often but they are funny – and no specialist knowledge is needed.
Another problem with Sarah’s Channel, is that there’s clearly some satirical intent here, at least, if you believe what O’Doherty says in this article on Junkee, but it doesn’t really come across in the show. Here’s what she had to say:
“I think that’s the funny thing about Sarah’s Channel,” O’Doherty muses. “It reflects two really true things about what’s going on right now. There is this huge culture of beauty bloggers and influencers on YouTube, that’s huge, and millions and millions of people are very embedded in that world and watching it. But then also climate change and climate catastrophe is looming at every moment.”
There’s also the question of what beauty blogging says about our culture’s fixation with consumption.
O’Doherty brings up the ‘haul’ videos vloggers produce, where they are either gifted with or buy stacks and stacks of cheap stuff at places like Kmart or Primark in the UK. In Sarah’s Channel, Sarah makes her own ‘haul’ video, of remnants of human civilisation she scavenged from the surface.
“There’s this sort of amplified consumption that comes with all these easily watchable social media things,” O’Doherty explains. “They do tend to ignore the climate emergency that we live in right now.
“Lots of [beauty vloggers] are really likeable young women who seem to be fairly nice, ethical, sweet women, but they’re also consuming at such a crazy rate. Like when they do these ‘haul’ videos and they come back from Primark and they have like 50 items of clothing and you’re like, these are definitely all bought in a sweatshop, these are made under horrible conditions, you’ll never wear this stuff again.”
Fair enough. Except this absolutely does not come across in Sarah’s Channel, partly because we have no idea what caused the apocalypse and partly because Sarah can’t exactly pop out to Kmart in her post-apocalypse cave world. Also, makeup YouTube NEVER EVER thinks about the impact of what it does. And, therefore, neither does Sarah. And as Sarah’s pretty much the only person to ever speak, this is never going to come up.
Still, it’s there if you imagine it. And personally, we’d rather imagine – or better yet, actually, see – some laughs.
Back to the Front(line)
Is Frontline Australia’s all-time best comedy? Of course not: why would you even suggest such a crazy thing? Oh wait:
The critics have spoken.
Frontline is Australia’s all-time best TV comedy.
TV Tonight has asked some of the nation’s top TV critics to choose their favourite Australian comedies* -either sitcoms or sketch- with Working Dog’s 1990’s satire on current affairs emerging at #1.
We’ve been reeling from this nutty result all week – ha ha, only joking, going by half the critics surveyed the real shock is that Hey Hey It’s Saturday didn’t end up on top (and going by the other half Laid really missed out) – and while our somewhat more full-throated reply to the whole nutty enterprise is on it’s way (or not, depending on how depressed we get at the whole thing – seriously, The Letdown at number 8? Get fucked), this definitely did inspire us to ask the question: Why do people keep saying Frontline is Australia’s best comedy ever?
Now, if they were saying that Frontline is Australia’s all-time best sitcom then sure, no real argument here. Well, maybe a little – The Games is funnier and smarter – but for pretty much the entire history of television the word “sitcom” has been a term for a show that, while funny, isn’t amazingly all-time funny, and that suits Frontline down to a T. The very idea at the core of the sitcom is repetition (hence “situation comedy”), and as repetition is the enemy of comedy (jokes don’t get funnier the more times you tell them), sitcoms are usually more comfort food than laugh-out-loud hysterical. Hit sitcoms are just as likely to be Two and a Half Men or The Big Bang Theory as they are The Larry Sanders Show or Fawlty Towers; most of them aren’t even trying to be seriously funny.
So sitcoms are one thing; claiming that Frontline is Australia’s “all-time best TV comedy“? Yeah, nah. Shaun Micallef’s sketch work is better; Working Dog’s previous series The Late Show is better; John Clarke & Bryan Dawe’s work together is better; The Gillies Report was better; the very best episodes of Fast Forward or Full Frontal were better; that joke about “This is for 9/11” in Fat Pizza: The Movie was better oh wait that wasn’t a television comedy but you see where we’re going here. Your top ten Australian comedy moments are better than Frontline because those top ten moments almost certainly didn’t come from Frontline.
Again, don’t make the mistake of thinking we’re slagging off Frontline here. Frontline is a great sitcom – maybe not as consistently funny as the first season of Very Small Business or the second season of The Katering Show, but still up there with the greats. You know, like Mother & Son, which was the sitcom that topped these kinds of lists until its fans finally started to die off. Just don’t mention that Australia’s “all time best comedy” is basically a mix of Drop the Dead Donkey and The Larry Sanders Show.
What Frontline is, more than any of the other shows on this list, is Drop the Dead Donkey filmed like The Larry Sanders Show safe. Saying Frontline is Australia’s greatest comedy doesn’t start a discussion, it ends it. Nobody today watches Frontline – shit, it’s a show about the media that predates the internet and is about an Australia that a): has current affairs television and b): has male hosts of current affairs television, so rest assured it’s probably not as “timeless” as it’s claimed to be – but everyone knows it’s quality television. So why not say it’s the all-time best comedy to come from this country?
Well, for one thing, it’s pretty bloody depressing to think that the best comedy made in Australia was made a generation ago. Seriously, has nothing has been funnier on Australian television screens than Rob Sitch in a wig? More than most art forms, comedy is of its time: so the best Australian comedy in 2019 is one packed with in-jokes about Stan Grant hosting Today Tonight and Mike Willesee calling up a man who’d taken hostages in a siege? That Glenn Ridge cameo is timeless comedy? Kids today are still into Christopher Skase?
Michael Lallo from The Age said, “A quarter-century after its debut, this note-perfect satire of TV current affairs – and Australian journalism in general – still feels remarkably relevant.”
And sure, if you’re the last person with a full-time job at The Age it probably does feel relevant. Unlike The Age. You know why media types still love this relic from an era before streaming, before the internet, before newspapers went to shit and the few people who still cared about news started getting it from #auspol? Because it reminds them of a time when they were still relevant enough to have decent television shows made about them. You know what recent Australian sitcom had jokes about working at a newspaper? Mr Black. Hmm, that doesn’t seem to be on this list.
Frontline is a solidly made, clearly intelligent show that isn’t even the funniest sitcom made by Working Dog (that’d be Audrey’s Kitchen). Twenty five years later, the only possible reason to put it at the top of a list of all-time comedy greats is if you hadn’t actually enjoyed, let alone laughed at, an Australian comedy this century and had no real desire to find out if anything new might change that.
Considering all the voters on this poll have to watch Australian television for a living, we shouldn’t have been surprised.
The 2019 Logies. And Tom Gleeson.
And so the Logies have been and gone for another year, and we’re asking: how did comedy (and Tom Gleeson’s campaign) fare?
Tony Martin was in the voiceover booth once again and got a largely positive reaction from the viewers. Although a few grumbled on Twitter that he didn’t go Mick Molloy when Molloy appeared on stage with Jane Kennedy. Yeah, because reviving a 13-year-old fight is absolutely what a grown man should do in the middle of a live broadcast where almost no one watching would know what BoyTown Confidential was. That and maybe, you know, he’s over it now?
Meanwhile, the Logies, as ever, handed out awards to a slightly odd mix of personalities and shows from the world of comedy…
And it’s only in the increasingly weird world of the Logies that Luke McGregor would receive the Most Popular Actor award, beating five of this country’s most-loved male performers. Especially as McGregor isn’t really acting in Rosehaven, more playing himself (and arguably not even doing that very well).
Celia Pacquola, who was nominated in the Most Popular Actress award, also for basically playing herself in Rosehaven, was beaten by Deborah Mailman (Mystery Road).
In other comedy news, Gogglebox beat Gruen and Hard Quiz in Most Popular Entertainment Program but Have You Been Paying Attention? beat Gogglebox and True Story with Hamish & Andy in the Most Outstanding Entertainment Program category.
Have You Been Paying Attention? also won Most Popular Comedy Program, beating Hughesy, We Have A Problem, Rosehaven, Russell Coight’s All Aussie Adventures, Shaun Micallef’s Mad As Hell and True Story With Hamish & Andy. Maybe not the best result ever, but at least The Weekly wasn’t even nominated.
Speaking of which… Tom Gleeson, as predicted, won the Gold Logie. Of course, he did. Loud-mouth idiots and loud-mouth idiocy are de rigour right now: Trump, Brexit, the Federal Election… Isn’t it brilliantly hilarious to vote for the joke option?
And Gleeson’s Gold Logie campaign was presented as the kind of joke that you couldn’t really argue against – after all, the Logies are crap and full of TV hosts who’re clearly a bit up themselves, so why not take the piss out of them? To which we reply: good luck seeing anyone try the same thing at a sporting awards night, even though they’re equally crap and sportspeople are in general at least as far up themselves as your average TV host. Awards nights are always a bit crap no matter what they’re for, and the whole idea behind them is to give people a pat on the back; the Logies might be a bit shoddy, but that’s how awards night work.
The real problem with Gleeson’s campaign was that he wanted it both ways: he was a piss-taking comedian who wanted people to vote for him to show the Logies just how much of the joke they were, yet he also said:
You say I’m a disruptor but I also have a legitimate claim to the prize because out of all the Gold nominees I’m pretty sure Hard Quiz rates the most
But if you run as a joke then you win as a joke; all awards are meaningless unless people give them meaning – good luck waving your [insert arthouse cinema award here] around at some sporting club and vice versa – and if your method of getting votes is to actively devalue the meaning of the awards (“this award is a joke so vote for the joke candidate”) then you can’t then turn around and try and claim your win means something. An industry in decline is an industry that lets Tom Gleeson win a Gold Logie? We’d say it’s the other way around.
Also, what exactly was the joke? Saying that the Logies is a popularity contest is a joke in the same way that stating the totally obvious is a joke; “these celebrities need to be taken down a peg” isn’t so much a joke as it is something someone says before throwing a rock through a car window. “Wouldn’t it be funny if professional dickhead Tom Gleeson won the Gold Logie” seems to be the extent of it, only Gleeson is going around talking about his “legitimate claim” to the prize so that can’t be it. Maybe the joke was just it was a great way to promote Tom Gleeson, which is why we decided not to write anything about his campaign until after the Logies was over.
This whole thing was a joke in the same way as pretty much everything Tom Gleeson does is a joke, which is to say it wasn’t really a joke at all. Gleeson wanted a Gold Logie, and he figured acting like a prick would win him one. And why not? It got him steady TV work once his days as the “ginger ninja” were done. It got him close enough to Charlie Pickering to get the gig as his sidekick on The Weekly. It got him his own show in Hard Quiz. There’s no limit to the heights he’ll climb just so long as he’s never asked to be funny; the Gleeson for PM campaign starts today!
Or, and this is where Gleeson’s attempt to have it every way he can get away with gets really tangled, we can sit back and watch as he alternates between “this was all a joke because I’m a comedian” and “I don’t deserve this, I’m grateful to the fans” in everything he does, from his acceptance speech to this TV Week interview on Instagram. Because even he realises that now that he’s won a much-coveted award*, the comedy prick act is going to tire quite soon and maybe it would be better, strategically, if he was just humbly grateful for a bit. Enjoy Gleeson twisting himself in knots doing that over the next few weeks.
* No really, did you see Amanda Keller’s stony face during Gleeson’s speech?
In which we finally review Rostered On
We’ll say this upfront: the worldwide success of Rostered On is baffling to us. Sure, all sorts of rubbish does well on YouTube, but Netflix? Even 7Mate? What?
Set in Electroworld, an electrical superstore of the Harvey Norman or JB Hi-Fi variety, Rostered On focuses on the working and homes lives of the everyday people who work there. And with gags about awful customers and weird colleagues, it’s certainly relatable. But funny? Er, not so much.
In the pilot and first season (once on YouTube now on Netflix), we meet Shaun, a young father supporting his wife and son who hates his job and dreams of becoming a full-time photographer. Also working in the store is Brett, the sort of arsehole who thinks he’s a thing with the ladies and is forever boasting that he’s going out that evening to “smash rivers of bitches”.
Again, both of these characters are very relatable, but Shaun never has any decent lines and Brett is just a prick who deserves to be castrated. Yeah, he’s that bad.
One of the funniest potential avenues for comedy in any sitcom set in a retail environment is the customers, who as any retail worker knows are all idiots. And true to form, so are the customers of Electoworld. Except these customers are too idiotic to be believable.
One customer doesn’t seem to know how a kettle works. Another complains that his new toaster has burnt his toast, seemingly oblivious to the dial which controls how long the toast stays in the toaster for.
We get what the makers of Rostered On are trying to do with these scenes, but the writing just isn’t good or funny enough. Nor are the performances, which are either under-rehearsed or over-acted. Or just given by people who can’t really act.
Frankly, series 1 is a bit of a slog.
Series 2, which recently premiered on 7Mate last week, is, as you would hope, an improvement. Sort of. All that Netflix and 7Mate cash has certainly resulted in a more professional-looking production, and the acting is a lot better, but the script still needs a lot of work.
Except, this time, the script problems aren’t in the quality of the jokes. It’s the lack of them. Rostered On now seems to have become a sort of dramedy, with more focus on plot and less on funny lines. Even the idiot customers have gone. It’s a rather odd thing. And what’s with Shaun not appearing in episode 2 at all? Isn’t he meant to be the main character?
There are attempts to be funny. Brett is now non-binary, and claiming to be a big hit with the gents, but his lines are exactly as crap as there where when he was straight. Similarly, Bob Franklin’s cameo in the second episode barely raises a laugh. Unless you start thinking about that time he appeared on Get This.
Rostered On is the sort of show that would seem impressive if it had been made by a group of Year 12s but looks frankly embarrassing in the context of Netflix. Even on 7Mate, where other shows on offer include Swift & Shift Couriers, it seems pretty poor. Conclusion: we remain baffled by its continued success.