Australian Tumbleweeds
Tonight is not the night – The worst Australian topical comedies and tonight shows
When Tonightly with Tom Ballard was axed last year, Australia not only lost a show which was delivering a solid half-hour of interesting, passionate and funny topical comedy four nights a week but it a lost a show which had been allowed to be itself.
So often, TV executives take a bunch of people who’ve never worked together, tell them what kind of show to make, and then interfere constantly while they try to produce something decent within the constraints they’ve been given. And Tonightly… so obviously wasn’t that.
It was a show which came from people who shared similar ideals and were given free rein to come up with whatever they wanted as long as it was nominally of interest to young-ish viewers – and topical. What resulted was sometimes a mess, sometimes needed a bit more work, but usually had a spark of originality, difference or just sheer anger at the state of things, that made it must-watch viewing. For people of all ages.
Rarely do we see that sort of flawed but charming and occasionally hard-hitting comedy program on TV these days. So often we’re served up bland rip-offs of US tonight shows, or topical programs that are about as challenging to our political and corporate overlords as a fawning News Limited editorial about how great the Liberal party are.
And with Rove McManus returning to television with Saturday Night Rove in a couple of weeks, that glorious Australian tradition looks set to continue. Although being Rove, he’ll at least produce something that’s watchable. Something you can’t accuse these shows of being…
Let’s get this out of the way first…for all its faults, Hey! Hey! It’s Saturday was once a ground-breaking and much-loved show. Seriously, what a great idea to turn a free-wheeling Saturday morning kids’ show into something the whole family could watch on a Saturday evening. Celebrity guests! Bands! Novelty acts! Whacky sound effects! They even adapted the puppet characters’ dialogue to give the adults something to laugh at.
The problem was, the show had at its centre an ego-driven host/producer, barely able to disguise his contempt for most of humanity. And as the years marched by and social attitudes changed, that host/producer – and the show itself – resolutely stuck to its guns by continuing to hold the attitude that men were men, women got the piss ripped out of them, and the LGBT+ community and ethnics were pretty funny too.
This just about worked throughout the 80s and 90s, but by the time Hey! Hey!… came back for some specials in 2009, this really became a problem. Especially when the show doubled down by booking a blackface act.
Acceptable in 2009, apparently
Global outrage and disgust duly followed. Something that Channel 9 sort of repeated two years later with Ben Elton’s Live From Planet Earth, a show so notoriously terrible that its name has become a punchline far funnier than anything the show ever aired.
And who would have guessed it? Ben Elton had successfully toured Australia many times with his stand-up show and had written many much-loved shows, including The Young Ones and Blackadder. Surely, this couldn’t fail?
So what was it that caused Live From Planet Earth to lose half a million viewers through its first episode? Was it Elton’s patronising ratings announcement at the start of the show? Was his re-hashing of some of his so-so old stand-up material? Was it the schoolgirl characters, talking about their lives on the internet in a way which only a middle-aged man would think they talked, followed by the middle-aged male writer of that sketch, Ben Elton, saying “hopefully we’ll be hearing more of their philosophy of life as the series progresses”?
Maybe it was Elton’s routine about using natural yoghurt to cure thrush? Or maybe – and this definitely killed it for us – it was the female bodybuilder character played by an overweight man. Seriously, you do not go to an ad break on something as bad and misguided as that.
Oh my God, what is this?
But we’re being kind. Twitter, as we recall, was rather less forgiving. Ditto the critics. And in its second week, the show started with less than half a million viewers and lost about a third of them by the end. (And the schoolgirls were back!)
As for week three… Well, the show went out later than scheduled because of extended news bulletins reporting on the Christchurch earthquake and opened with Elton’s solemn message that he hoped no one thought it would be inappropriate to do the show as planned following the terrible tragedy. Oddly enough, Australia wasn’t in the mood for his terrible program and less than 200,000 viewers tuned in. Live From Planet Earth was axed the next day.
Live comedy shows, it seems, is something Australian television isn’t very good at. 2005’s Let Loose Live, less notorious than Live From Planet Earth, but even more short-lived – it lasted just two episodes – was supposed to be a local answer to Saturday Night Live, complete with cold open, weekly guest host, studio sketches and a big cast.
And in one sense, it was an authentically a local version of Saturday Night Live: a lot of the material was cliched and crap. An early sketch in the show was about young ethnic drivers hooning around in a muscle car. Later, guest host William McInnes did his ventriloquist act, except he couldn’t conceal his mouth movements. Then there was something about an IT guy in an office (played by Sammy J) and the IT guy was, wait for it, a bit nerdy… the first episode’s on YouTube if you can be bothered.
What might have saved the show (or at least made it a bit interesting) was some topical material, something SNL does often and pretty well. So, where in Let Loose Live were the potshots at the government? Where was the satire? Guys, John Howard had been in office for almost a decade at this point, and he’d recently sent our troops off to an ill-advised and unpopular war. IT’S NOT LIKE THERE WASN’T MATERIAL!!! Good grief, even Ben Elton managed a few cracks at Julia Gillard.
But if you think the lesson learnt from Let Loose Live and Live From Planet Earth is that Australia shouldn’t attempt live topical comedy shows and that pre-recorded, satire-focused shows might have a better success rate, then may we remind you of Wednesday Night Fever, a show so out-of-the-blocks crap that we’re just going to share this from our review of the first episode:
Where the wheels totally came off this blunt nothing of a show was in the writing, which never failed to sniff out an opportunity to make cheap, obvious shots at cheap, obvious targets. Making a joke that Ruby Rose looks like a boy? In 2013? What the fuck was that all about? [Regular character] Justice has a “mother” who’s a man? Wow, those crazy feminists, right guys? And why was Julie Bishop stumbling around blindly in the utterly baffling and seemingly endless “Downton Abbott”? Oh right, she’s entirely defined by the “fact” she has a bung eye. The promos for this show said nothing was sacred. Seems that meant having Julia Gillard sing “I was asked if Tim was gay – have you ever seen Thérèse?” Jesus wept.
Wow, Ben Elton’s female bodybuilder sketch seemed like a good idea compared to that.
Downton Abbott
But Wednesday Night Fever (which lasted for just seven episodes) didn’t just take obvious potshots, it did gutter humour too. Swearwords as punchlines? Yep, it had plenty of those. Crude and idiotic humour? Present and correct, madam. So, instead of pointing out that Clive Palmer was an awful businessman involved in various dodgy dealings, we were treated to jokes about his weight. Yes, nothing was sacred on this show!
The only bright spot in the whole Wednesday Night Fever affair was when Crikey gained access to the show’s writer’s Google group (which they’d failed to password protect) and reported that the sketches that had been rejected from the show were even less funny and even more lowbrow, sexist and racist than the ones that did make it to air. Crikey also claimed at one stage (they later took this down from their site) that one writer had proposed a “Prince Philip in blackface” sketch.
There are no words.
Except, it seems, someone liked this short-lived show, as it later went on to win an AWGIE in the Comedy – Sketch or Light Entertainment category, beating This Is Littleton, How Green Was My Cactus and Legally Brown.
And what does this tell us? It tells us that people in the industry are not nearly critical enough when it comes to judging shows, for one. How else to explain the fact that The Roast managed to rack up hundreds of episodes, under several different names, on at least four different online and broadcast channels, over a five-year period? Or that star of the show Mark Humphries has managed to get work since then?
Still in work, it seems
At the time, we were baffled. And we still are. This was a news satire show that never managed to satirise the news. Or even parody it. Where were the wacky news reporter characters? Where were the odd interviewees? Where were the sketches where they poked fun at those in power? To be fair, The Roast wasn’t quite as bad as Wednesday Night Fever, with its crude humour and its ‘Clive Palmer = fat’ jokes, but it wasn’t exactly a satirical powerhouse either. Get laughs out of something awful a public figure said, like the time Myer boss Bernie Brooks said a levy to fund disability care would mean less people spent money shopping? Nah. Instead, The Roast sent one of their reporters around stealing money from people on behalf of the retail giant. Hilarious!
It was the kind of comedy that a bunch of privileged white guys who don’t really have any worries in the world do, rather than the sort of comedy that people who find 90% of what politicians say outrageous and awful do. And it came from the mind of Charles Firth, who’d done exactly the same thing a decade ago as part of The Chaser, a group we should mention in this article as the people who started a particular type of rot in Australia satire: satire that doesn’t really care about the issues.
The Chaser’s War on Everything, lest we forget, wasn’t really a satire show. It was a pranks show involving public figures. What exactly was the satirical point behind the APEC sketch, for example? ‘Ha ha the security’s a bit flawed?’ Turns it out it wasn’t, as the team got caught. Oh well. At least they satirised the hell out of cancer with that Make a Realistic Wish sketch.
But seriously, The Chaser’s War on Everything and various subsequent shows the team did ended-up being the kinds of comedies that politicians sort of embraced – and even voluntarily participated in. And that’s never a good look for a satire show. Satirical comedy should avoid interaction with actual politicians so it’s always free to give it to them when they deserve it. And that’s something The Chaser team have never understood. For them, it’s great because the politicians are on the show, joining in their silly japes. And it doesn’t matter to them that by having politicians on their shows, they’re making those politicians look like good sports, rather than doing their jobs as political comedians and calling politicians out when they deserve it.
It’s one of the many problems with The Weekly with Charlie Pickering, a show that’s become so feeble in its approach that it’s barely bothering to even be topical anymore. Pickering still occasionally fronts a piece about something bad happening in the world, but it’s something we mostly know about already because better outlets have already covered it better.
The Weekly is basically a magazine show that’s on late enough at night to include swearing. In topical satire terms, it just sort of hums along like a mild case of tinnitus. But, hey, at least you got that tinnitus by listening to good music and interesting podcasts. The Weekly as we pointed out recently, doesn’t even seem to get talked about anymore. It’s just there. Presumably because after Australian comedy’s experience making some of the above, it’s the best option there is. Hey, at least people are prepared to tune in for it. Who cares if it’s a bit crap?
Humming along like a mild case of tinnitus
And while this article has mainly looked at shows which were obviously, short-livedly awful, it’s the shows that plod on forever that are kind of the real problem. The shows that are safe, inoffensive and unoriginal, the shows that people are prepared to tune in for, but mainly so they can kill some time. Shows like The Weekly, that no one would miss if they didn’t exist, and that no one need ever have invented.
The Drama Builds
For years we’ve been complaining that Australian comedies keep trying to get more dramatic. But what about the flipside? No, not that crap “romantic comedy” starring Eddie Izzard that was nominated for a Tumblie last year: what about the Australian dramas trying to muscle in on comedy’s turf?
The muscling in comes pretty close to literal in the ABC’s Les Norton, starring Alexander Bertrand as a walking Chesty Bond advertisement prowling around the one side of half of one street the producers could afford to recreate of 80s-era Kings Cross. He’s a bouncer-slash-enforcer for the local crime boss (David Wenham), though the crimes are more along the lines of wacky capers than brutal murders – and with Rebel Wilson heavily promoted as one of the leads, it seems highly unlikely that her “demise” at the end of last week’s episode is going to stick.
Crime is pretty much the only genre Australia makes enough of to be able to take a variety of approaches to, which means even this is part of a long, if not all that healthy, tradition (anyone remember Marcus Graham’s Good Guys, Bad Guys? The ABC’s crooked cop joke-free sitcom Bad Cop Bad Cop?). What comedy there is here is meant to come from the characters and plot twists rather than one-liners, which is a refreshing change from the norm in Australian sitcoms, and because there’s an actual story going on (the series is based on the novels by Robert G Barrett) things keep moving along even when the laughs aren’t there.
So this is worth a look then? Eh, kind of. While it’s a step up from Underbelly, this kind of romp really needs a lot more energy to be worthwhile, and a few good performances can’t make up for the fact that a lot of the other performances are a bit average. Not being familiar with the novels it’s hard to know, but it seems like a lot of the rough edges have been sanded off here too; aside from Les himself, nothing here really feels all that distinctive or memorable, and there’s no sense at all of “the Cross” being more than a few shop fronts and a back alley.
Then again, there’s bound to be a lot more Rebel Wilson in this moving forward. You’ve been warned.
*
With Andrew (“I worked with Steve Vizard on Full Frontal among many other things”) Knight being partly responsible for the original SeaChange, the series had decent comedy credentials from the start. Not only did it get in first with a local version of the then-and-now popular genre of “city type moves to the wacky country” a la Northern Exposure, it did a decent job of being both dramatic enough to lure in regular viewers (mostly thanks to the will-they-or-won’t-they sexual tension with Diver Dan) and funny enough thanks to the wacky locals to be a real hit.
And now it’s back! Only now it’s twenty years later and on Channel Nine with around half the original cast and filmed in a different state. It’s a bit harder to judge with this one after a first episode, but it definitely felt like a lot of gears were being stripped trying to get the engine started here. Which is a problem with a series who’s big selling point was (and is) the idea of escaping the hustle and bustle for a simpler life.
Also, where’s the laughs? SeaChange was never a gag machine but the comedy was always there, while so far here all that remains is the faint outline. There are characters (mostly returning ones) that are clearly meant to be seen as funny, but… yeah, nah. The spark isn’t here yet, and it’s not exactly sure that this version of SeaChange even wants to bring it back.
Despite what some would have you believe, good comedy isn’t about being gentle. There has to be some edge in there, a surprising insight or cutting take somewhere to get a laugh out of an audience. This doesn’t seem to want to be much more than a soothing bath of nostalgia, and while that’s hardly surprising in a reboot – even Sigrid Thornton occupies a very different space in the national psyche than she did twenty years ago – it’s pretty much the enemy of good comedy.
It’s always possible this will find a way to poke fun at the past and find comedy in present-day Pearl Bay, but unlike Les Norton – which if nothing else has fully integrated the comedy side of proceedings into the drama from day one – this hasn’t even set out a case for being considered funny yet. It’s perfectly possible that, unlike the original series, this will be happy drifting along on a cloud of twee nostalgia and bland no-stakes drama.
And we’ve already got Rosehaven for that.
Situation Unfunny: The Worst Australian Sitcoms
Let’s be honest: last week we took it easy on sketch comedy. After all, Australia used to be good at it: for decades our skill at sketch comedy was regularly held up by the experts (TV critics who hated comedy) as world class. And they weren’t entirely wrong either – Shaun Micallef’s sketch shows were legitimately brilliant, and a chunk of the 80s and 90s sketch shows still hold up today.
But we’re not talking about sketch comedy now.
There’s been no point in living memory where you could seriously claim Australia makes decent sitcoms. Partly that’s because they’re hard to make and we just don’t make very many of them; mostly that’s because the ones we do make are shit. There’s plenty of excuses why, and back in the 20th century they may have even made sense. When our shoddy local product was being compared to US sitcoms, the problem was that we didn’t make enough episodes to work out the kinks and didn’t have enough writers to create a polished product; when we were being compared to the UK it was that our sitcoms didn’t start out on radio where the (smaller team of) writers could, again, work out the problems holding the comedy back.
Remind us: how many years did Hey, Dad..! run for?
The correct answer is “too many”
So by the time the 21st century rolled around, everyone had their excuses ready. And they were going to need them. Oh sure, when Kath & Kim was firing on all barrels sitcom was king – so kingly in fact that hardly anyone else bothered making them – but after that, well… let’s just say that we were able to come up with a list of rock-solid 21st century shockers without having to resort to Mr Black, Here Come the Habibs, The Wizards of Aus or (shudder) Bogan Pride.
Let’s start out with an easy one: Sando. The hilarious tale of a crap furniture outlet maven trying to win back her only slightly less crap family’s love, this was designed as a showcase for Genevieve Morris, who then had to withdraw from the show for health reasons. Good to see those reasons (she’s currently in remission according to wikipedia) haven’t prevented her from continuing to appear in a range of recent comedy series, including the most recent run of Squinters… which we’ll get to in a moment. Sacha Horler stepped up for the lead role and promptly spent six weeks struggling to bring to life a character parodying something that had died out in the real world a decade earlier on a show seemingly designed to connect with the members of “mainstream Australia” by sneering at them. It shed almost half its audience during those six weeks; we’re surprised anyone stuck around at all.
At the other extreme – time wise at least – remember Flat Chat? This particular shocker (from the dark ages of 2001) is memorably largely for Jean Kitson wheeling out another performance so big it was visible from space as a snob forced to live in her own stables when her husband dies and her mansion is bought by a cashed-up bogan. The long and proud tradition of our commercial networks when it comes to producing sitcoms too broad to appeal to comedy snobs yet too shit to appeal to people who like to laugh is too often ignored… much like Flat Chat itself.
Just to drag this list off down a third direction, The Urban Monkey with Murray Foote was a series of five minute mockumentary episodes in which Sam Simmons stood around repeating words and doing what was then known as “animal whimsy” – pointing out weird shit about animals and so on. This kind of short yet still somehow drawn out format is another mainstay of bad Australian sitcoms, giving performers just enough time to be irritating without providing enough scope for their painfulness to end up somewhere amusing. Basically, if there’s a sitcom format, Australia has been rubbish at it; let’s move on.
Oh wait, we spoke too soon. Squinters is yet another sitcom that’s barely a sitcom – rather, as we’ve pointed out seemingly every single time we’ve mentioned it, it’s a sketch show where all the sketches are the same. And unfortunately, by “same” we mean “variations on those awful restaurant sketches Fast Forward used to do” where two people sit down, talk to each other for a while, and then it ends without a joke – or a point – having been established. It’s a sitcom where the situation is “driving to and from work”, which might possibly work if it was “two funny people are driving to and from work”. It’s Australia; we don’t have two funny people left.
Which is as good a segue as any into The Letdown, which is only here because the ABC continues to insist that it’s a sitcom and not what it looks like to anyone with eyes to see: a half hour drama based around the kind of observations that’re mistaken for comedy by people who don’t really like to laugh. There are plenty of jokes to be made around the idea that being a new mum is tough, but they require a cast and crew looking to make jokes, not the kind of show that has new parents gasping “finally someone’s telling our side of the story” like nobody’s ever pointed out that crying babies are crap before.
Drinking a cup of green putty through a straw? Hilarious!
Of course, we wouldn’t have shows like The Letdown without Please Like Me, the trailblazing series that put Australia on the map labelled “DRAMA-INFUSED COMEDY”. You’d think a sitcom that ended every single series with the death (or near death) of yet another semi-core character might have taken a lump or two in the reviews but no – everyone was too busy calling a show about twenty-somethings where nobody seemed to have a real job or money worries “realistic” to stop and consider that maybe all the death, emotional pain, and Josh Thomas picking up hot guys despite whatever the hell was going on with his hair was more about presenting an emo fantasy of youth than anything designed to entertain an audience. Not that it had one in this country but hey, overseas funding is the only thing keeping Australian sitcoms going so who cares if they’re funding shows nobody here wants to watch.
How to Stay Married was and very possibly still is Peter Helliar’s latest salvo in his forever war to convince the Australian public that he’s putting the rom back into com. Unfortunately, the aimless I Love You Too and the merely forgettable It’s a Date pretty much seem to have exhausted everything Helliar has to say on the subject of love and relationships – they’re tough, right guys? – and so this show revolves around a wife reluctantly back at work and a husband reluctantly staying at home in a hilarious inversion of The Way Things Should Be. Also hilariously inverted here: the idea that sitcoms should be funny.
You may recall we mentioned last week that The Wedge is one of the worst sketch comedies of this century. Mark Loves Sharon was a spin-off from that damp cough of a series, featuring Jason Gann’s “breakout character” Mark Wary, disgraced sports star and… that’s about it. So yeah, why not give six episodes over to a mockumentary about Wary and his dirtbag mates hanging out at his tacky mansion? Please don’t give us actual reasons why not, we’ve seen the show and we already have plenty.
The first episode of The Other Guy revolved around series creator and lead actor Matt Okine’s character trying to deal with a piss-stained mattress that was possibly some kind of metaphor for how his romantic life had fallen apart. Unfortunately, like so many of the series on this list, absolutely nothing funny was done with this idea. If there’s any advice we could give Australian sitcom writers, it’d be this: it’s not enough just to have a funny idea – you have to do something funny with it. So many of these shows have halfway decent premises but then seem to think their job is done. It’s not: a funny premise is funny for about thirty seconds and then you need to start doing funny things with it if you want to keep the audience laughing. Well, unless you’re writing The Other Guy, because that had a whole lot of other problems on top of the bad writing. Second series starts later this year!
Ha ha ha men are so gross
And then there’s Laid. What more can we say about the first ever comedy to combine sex and death that we didn’t say across the tens of thousands of words we wasted here trying to express just how bad this show was as it first aired? Here’s something: creator, writer, and star of numerous Green Guide feature articles Marieke Hardy is now in her second highly celebrated year running the internationally acclaimed Melbourne Writers Festival despite writing a sitcom that spent an entire episode making jokes about the female lead’s attempts to rape a man she’d drugged into unconsciousness. We’d say those gags about creating a splint for his limp dick with paddle pop sticks haven’t aged well, but they weren’t exactly funny at the time.
The real problem with Australian sitcoms has always been two fold: we don’t make enough of them to come up with a great one through sheer weight of numbers, and our system of television production doesn’t give talented people enough opportunities to get good at a complicated job like telling a funny story that goes for half an hour. The same goes for actors too: we have plenty of decent stand-up comics with funny personas, but the number of funny actors in this country are… well, once you go past the cast of Mad as Hell the rest are probably on a plane to Hollywood as you read this.
Sitcoms come from television cultures that value a wide range of specific types of being funny – funny writers, funny performers, funny creators. Australia requires anyone wanting to be funny to be funny at pretty much everything at once because it’s a lot cheaper to get a show produced when the writers and actors share a paycheck. Very, very few people can pull that off at a decent level: if you can, you can make a whole lot more money somewhere where they actually make comedy.
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.