Skit Happens
“Nothing is safe from a Skit Happens parody, when the nations up-and-coming comedians join forces for Network Ten’s first sketch comedy in 12 years. Starring Heath Franklin! Seriously”Dave
“Funny-man Dave O’Neil opens the doors to his crazy life in a half-hour narrative comedy. Expect laughter, tears and the appreciation of not being Dave.”Kinne Tonight
“Comedian Troy Kinne ditches the stress of modern life, bringing hard-working Australians a fast-paced half-hour of laughter.”Drunk History
“Rhys Darby and Stephen Curry pour themselves a drink in the international hit comedy format that takes Australia’s rich, and often surprising history and re-tells it through the words of our most loved comedians and entertainers.”Taboo
“Taboo has broken audience records in its country of origin, Belgium. The premise is as confronting as it is simple. The very funny Harley Breen spends five days and nights with members of a disadvantaged group in society and uses the experience to perform a stand-up routine about them – with the subjects sitting in the front row.”Trial By Kyle
“The toughest cases, biggest celebrities and genuine disputes can only be settled by one man, radio shock jock Kyle Sandilands. As Kyle carefully unravels each case, former The Bachelor Australia star and criminal lawyer Anna Heinrich is on hand to assist in forensically analysing the evidence.”Disgrace!
“The world is full of disgrace and outrage. Shunned politician Sam Dastyari and the team behind Gruen and The Chaser manage the latest outbreak of outrage in a half-hour of opinion, insight and laughs.”Bring Back… Saturday Night
“Rove McManus is on a mission to bring back Saturday night entertainment. A chance to reflect on what Saturday night means to Australia–then and now. Young performers will bring back the best of the past and performers of the past are challenged with reinvention. Sketches, guests, music and nothing but feel good moments as Rove finds the comedy and laughs by breaking down the conventions of entertainment and variety television. Join his quest to reunite Australia’s greatest acts, bands, and television faces in a generation bending live television show.”
Australian Tumbleweeds
Should Barry Humphries shut up and retire?
Barry Humphries has been in the news a lot recently, because of outrage at some comments he made about trans people in an interview with Lloyd Evans for right-wing UK-based magazine The Spectator:
I ask if his biggest crowd-pleaser, Dame Edna Everage, has attracted the attention of trans activists, who are swift to take offence at anything they perceive as transphobic. I take him through their case in detail. They say that more than 40 per cent of trans men and women have attempted or considered suicide and from this they argue that because transphobia is capable of catalysing an act of self-harm it ought to be treated in law as a form of assault. ‘Terrible rat-baggery,’ he says. He calls transgenderism ‘a fashion — how many different kinds of lavatory can you have? And it’s pretty evil when it’s preached to children by crazy teachers’. He recalls provoking a torrent of outrage when he used the word ‘mutilation’ to describe gender-reassignment surgery. ‘They had their genitalia chopped off and tucked in and whatever they had to do. And that aroused a lot of indignation — probably among the people who’d spent a lot of money having it done. But I don’t think I’m right to pontificate. I’m really an actor.’ He proceeds to analyse the psychological frailties of his profession. ‘We’re an uncomfortable mixture of vanity and insecurity. Those two don’t fit comfortably together. But then,’ he says, switching tack, ‘we’re a pretty nice and generous lot too.’
Humphries also had some things to say about Donald Trump in the same interview, which stirred things up further:
I ask about his favourite character, the sybaritic diplomat Sir Les Patterson, whose boorish and sexist conduct carries a powerful echo of Donald Trump. Has the President stolen your act? ‘No, I don’t think so,’ he says. ‘I’m grateful to Trump for stirring up politics. And I won’t be joining any marches against him.’ His hope is to create a new show consisting entirely of Sir Les. ‘He has very fresh visions for England and he’s wonderful to perform because you can say whatever you like.’ Does he see an opportunity in the new climate of puritanism? ‘Yes! An opportunity to cause maximum offence.’
Barry Humphries expressing right-wing views of this type – and left-leaning people being surprised and annoyed about them – isn’t exactly a new thing, and goes back to at least the early 1980’s according to this article on The Australian website:
Writing in The National Times on October 3, 1982, Craig McGregor, for instance, accused Humphries of “racism and sexism and crypto-fascism”. “Humphries’s own personal politics, I assume, is somewhere to the right of Ronald Reagan,” McGregor wrote, citing Humphries’s place on the board of Quadrant magazine as evidence. “Humphries’s is a profoundly reactionary art,” he continued. “It reminds one of nothing so much as the grotesque and despairing cabaret which flourished in Berlin as the Nazis began their terrible climb to power.”
(Somewhat ironic given that the Spectator interview was given to promote the show Barry Humphries’ Weimer Cabaret, which finished up last night at the Barbican in London.)
Where Humphries’ actual politics lies, though, isn’t easy to establish. We summarised it in our review of Anne Pender’s 2011 biography of Humphries, One Man Band:
Less discussed, but just as relevant to an understanding of Humphries and his work, is that he hated the conservative establishment his parents wanted him to be a part of. This led him to rebel at school, university and throughout his life, sometimes on political matters (in 1960 he joined a number of ex-patriot Australians on one of the famous marches from Aldermaston to London organised by the Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament [CND]), but more often by creating provocative comedy about situations which appalled him.
Few Australian commentators seemed to realise that when Humphries made it big in TV in the UK with shows like An Audience with Dame Edna and the series The Dame Edna Experience, a large part of his act was mocking Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The insults Edna handed out to celebrities with the punchline “I mean that in a caring way, I do” were a reference to Thatcher’s claim that she cared about the unemployed whilst all the time her government was slashing the public services which could have helped them. This parody of Thatcher built on the character that Humphries had spent several decades establishing, a character who brilliantly mocked small-minded Australian wowsers, and then became bloated with her own self-importance upon achieving a certain level of success.
And:
Pender argues in her book that Humphries is an anarchist at heart, someone who targets his comedic rage at anyone who deserves it; Humphries, meanwhile, prefers to describe himself as “apolitical”. But for Anne Pender it is Patrick White’s description of Humphries as “a genuine fantastic, wild with fanciful ideas” that is most resonant. Perhaps Humphries’ “fanciful ideas” include a belief that the majority of people will understand the complexity of his satirical targeting, rather than take it as a face value statement of what he thinks.
Which brings us back to the Spectator interview and the reactions it provoked, such as this tweet from podcaster Thomas John Jaspers:
.@Barry_Humphries You are my idol. You broke ground, you broke rules, you pissed off the establishment. You defined Australian culture. You have a lifetime of achievements. And now this is will be your legacy. You’ve become the people you used to make fun of.
Shut up and retire.— Thomas John Jaspers (@thomasjohn86) July 21, 2018
And this from Hannah Gadsby:
Barry Humphries loves those who hold power, hates vulnerable minorities and has completely lost the ability to read the room. Thats not a comedian, thats an irrelevant, inhumane dick biscuit of the highest order.
— Hannah Gadsby (@Hannahgadsby) July 22, 2018
Plus this article on the Daily Review from Luke Buckmaster:
At his best, Barry Humphries is a mesmerising, volcanic comedian who somehow finds a way to tinker on the edge of charm and grotesquery. It is not a question of whether, as the comedian moves into his mid 80’s, he is becoming (or has become) one of the extravagantly feral creations to which his legacy is tied. It is the question of whether there was any difference between him and them in the first place.
And this sketch on The Feed from Jenna Owen and Victoria Zerbst (you remember them from Aaron Chen Tonight):
The common themes? Barry’s wrong, out-of-touch, should shut up, and retire.
And fair enough too, there’s no humour to be found in dismissing the fact that according to a survey transphobia causes large numbers of trans people to self-harm. Or in claiming that transgenderism is “a fashion” when it’s been recorded since ancient times. Or by angsting about unisex toilets when they have a lot of advantages and have been very common in public settings for ages (see Wikipedia for a history of that). Or in blowing-off about “crazy teachers” preaching trans to kids. Perhaps Humphries hasn’t read the studies, such as this, which have suggested that there are lots of positive ways teachers can better support kids who identify as trans or gender diverse. Or perhaps, as Owen and Zerbst suggest, he’s from a generation that didn’t do empathy.
And if trans people want to have surgery, isn’t that their choice? And how does them having surgery harm Humphries or anyone else? Isn’t what harms people – of all identities – the way in which, say, Donald Trump is “stirring up politics”? Something Humphries seems to be in favour of as it will provide him with a bunch of material for a new Les Patterson show. And as funny as Sir Les can be, wouldn’t it be better for the world if Trump was just, you know, a President who wasn’t stirring shit up? It’d be worth sacrificing Humphries’ entire career to get rid of Trump, for sure.
The difficulty with this, though, is that despite Humphries’ recently-expressed views, it’s still possible to watch and enjoy his comedy. No one’s satirised the mindset of the Australian suburbs quite as well as Barry Humphries as Dame Edna or Sandy Stone. And few Australian comedians have demolished the self-serving awfulness of our politicians and leaders quite as well as Barry Humphries as Sir Les Patterson or union leader Lance Boyle.
Go back and watch footage of Humphries’ monologues from the 70s and 80s, or his classic TV shows like An Audience with Dame Edna and The Dame Edna Experience and tell us he’s a crap comedian.
On the other hand, those suggesting he “retire” and has “lost the room” also have a point. Remember Dame Edna’s confusing, bizarre and target-missing appearance on The Project a couple of years ago? The one where Edna was (we think) trying to make a joke about Waleed Aly being a rare example of a non-white person on Australian TV and came across like she was having a go:
At the start of the interview, Edna calls Aly “Little Wally”. Not especially hilarious, although it may come across as bit patronising to Aly if you aren’t aware that Edna’s been getting laughs out of shortening famous peoples’ names since the 1980s.
This was followed by her addressing the studio audience (another Edna trope is to ignore the interviewers and speak directly to the audience), saying “And I have to tell the viewers, that he really does look like this. He does! It’s not a trick of the lights!”. Clearly wondering whether this was an attack on his ethnicity, Aly responded: “I’m just trying to figure out what response you are looking for here.” It was a bit of a weird moment, but largely because Aly didn’t get that it was a reference (a rather oblique one, admittedly) to Aly’s recent Logies nomination, and the media’s reaction to that.
It’s the kind of misfire that Humphries rarely made when he was at the height of his Edna fame several decades ago but is becoming an increasingly common occurrence, especially when he’s improvising (which in TV interviews like that he always is).
The reason for all this is partly age, he’s 84 and has been looking stiff and breathless in public appearance over the past decade. In fact here’s a review of Barry Humphries Weimar Cabaret at the Barbican which suggests that he can’t even remember his lines anymore:
The saddest thing about this production is not the stories of these men who left their homes because of a tyrannical dictator (as Humphries points out with a wink that there are no psychopathic leaders anymore) but Humphries relying on autocue in his 85th year. He’s lost none of the charm and timing that has seen him at the forefront of comedy for the last 50+ years but it is upsetting to see a man who could improvise with the best of them relying on a script.
But it’s also down to a failure of Humphries to engage with current thinking on a variety of issues, such as trans rights and gender fluidity. Instead, Humphries seems happy to stick with the idea that anything that’s mainstream – as pro-trans views have in recent years – is wrong and should be attacked. Which was fair enough when the mainstream was the stifling attitudes prevalent in the Menzies era but is indefensible now when you’re saying that people who aren’t cisgendered are “ratbags” and worse.
It’s not like Humphries is incapable of understanding the issues trans people face, he’s an intelligent person who reads widely and thinks about current issues, so how can he hold such hateful and ridiculous views on trans people?
So, as much as we’ve enjoyed his work over the years, we think it’s time for Humphries’ to take his final bow. And shutting up about issues he can’t be bothered to understand would be a good idea too.
What’s Next For Nanette?
So Nanette‘s a world-wide success, earning rave reviews and gushing think-pieces everywhere you look for weeks online – which is basically decades by old media timescales – while giving Hannah Gadsby the kind of life-altering fame most performers could only dream of. Did anyone really think she was still going to quit?
The thing is with quitting shows – or as they’re more commonly known, farewell tours – is that usually you can only do them once. You’re making a promise to your fans: you should come see this show, because it’s going to be special. And clearly Gadsby delivered on that promise – so much so that nobody with half a brain is surprised she’s now not giving up on comedy at all.
“I said I was quitting, and then if I quit, I’m an idiot, now,” Gadsby responded. “Like, if the show had gone as badly as I’d planned, it would have worked. But now I’m left with a choice: I’ll either be an idiot or a hypocrite. I’ll be a hypocrite.”
And fair enough too.
That said, Nanette was basically a win-win situation for a performer with nothing left to lose. If it sank without trace, so what? She had a decent back-up career going doing arts programming – including a show for the ABC and a Edinburgh live show she’s since cancelled:
Last year Gadsby won every major live comedy award. How do you follow that? You quit. Get serious. Write an art lecture about that massive blind spot in the male gaze. And make it hilarious. This year Gadsby wants to show you how to value what cannot be measured, how to look at art through closed eyes and why we must use our imagination to find all those women who’ve been buried deeper than history is prepared to dig. This year Gadsby’s not joking, and she is so much funnier for it.
And really, Gadsby had enough name recognition that Nanette was probably never going to “flop”. She’s a reasonably well known and well-considered comedian doing an attention-grabbing stand up show about how she’s quitting stand-up; it was a reasonable bet that it wouldn’t be in the bottom 70% of shows on the Australian festival circuit. She was rejecting comedy, comedy hadn’t rejected her.
The real problem is that Gadsby is now famous the English-speaking world over for the kind of act she can’t do again. She can do a personal show; she can do a show that’s not about being funny; she can do a show about sexism and art; she can probably do a show that combines them all. But she can’t do another Nanette, and Nanette is what’s made her famous.
Nanette works because it has a surprise twist. Nanette works because it’s a show by someone telling you what she really thinks on her way out the door. Nanette has an anger and an energy to it that comes from a performer with nothing to lose. It’s a one-time only deal, and that’s before we get into how it was largely the right show at the right time that tapped into a very particular point in the zeitgeist. Gadsby is a good comedian, but if the big social issue of 2020 is lethal heat waves or the return of Stalinism she’s probably not going to be doing Nanette II: It’s Getting Hot in Here.
So here’s the paradox: Hannah Gadsby is coming back to comedy on the back of a success she almost certainly can’t repeat. That’s not a slur on her abilities – Nanette is the kind of success nobody could do twice, because its success is life-changing. Even if you disagree that Nanette was a one-off, clearly she can’t do Nanette again because she’s no longer the person who came up with Nanette.
We’re not saying that her next stand-up show is going to be her talking about her new-found fame… but you know, that’s usually what happens in these situations and it’s all downhill from there. You can’t break though twice, and once you’ve broken through it’s hard to persuade regular people you’re just like they are. Of course she can be outspoken on issues; of course she can do a show looking back on her life before she became famous. But she’s still a famous success doing those things, and the changes everything.
(plus Nanette was in part raging against comedy itself for not letting her tell her story; that’s not really an approach she can try again after this kind of success)
The other option is to try and sustain this moment. She’s already got a book coming out, Ten Steps to Nanette – though exactly when seems to be up in the air, as it was due out a month ago and she’s obviously been a bit busy. You’d have to think the offers from major networks to do something – anything – would be flooding in, and Gadsby’s already done a bit of acting in Please Like Me; is the world ready for Nanette: The Sitcom?
On the personal side of things, she’s spoken out a number of times about how draining performing Nanette is for her; professionally, her decision to stick with comedy (or a form of comedy at least) means taking some time to figure out what’s next makes a lot of sense too. But reportedly Netflix deals are a one-time payment thing: while Gadsby is no doubt making extra cash from the extra live performances of Nanette, she’s not making any more money off her special now that it’s a massive hit.
If she wants to take full advantage of the wave she’s riding, she may have to ride it a little while longer yet.
Pointless without the laughs
The British game show Pointless has been a cult afternoon hit on the ABC for a few years now, delighting retirees and people taking sickies alike with its mix of obscure trivia questions and twee comedy banter. It’s the kind of show we don’t make much of here. We Australians make game shows (featuring ordinary people answering quiz questions for prize money) and panel shows (featuring comedians trying to make us laugh for an appearance fee), and, Have You Been Paying Attention? aside, never the Twain shall meet…until Ten bought the rights to make a local version of Pointless.
Mark Humphries wouldn’t have been our first choice to become this country’s Alexander Armstrong, or anything really, but at least it stops him making more terrible satire. Also, it’s nice to feel like you’ve got a shot at answering most of the questions; all those UK-centric rounds in British Pointless, of the likes of “Chancellors of the Exchequers of the 1990s”* or “Leicester City captains 1970-2015″**, are a bit hard-going if you’re from Adelaide. Whereas Aussie Actresses? That’s more our style. Although, annoyingly, we never found out whether last night’s contestants would have got a pointless answer if they’d gone with our answer of Naomi Watts in Funny Games…because they’ve cut all that out.
Yep, one of things quiz nuts really like about Pointless, the bit where Richard Osman, or Dr Andrew Rochford in this case, runs through what all the different possible answers would have scored, isn’t part of the show – there’s no time. This is a 45-minute quiz show in a 30-minute slot, so it’s bye bye that long list of answers, and bye bye lots of other things too, like one of the teams, and one of the rounds, and some of the questions.
But this is possibly a good thing. Pointless Downunder, as absolutely no one is calling it, is fast and question-focused. There’s no pfaffing around talking to contestant Dave about that hilarious thing that happened when he was working for the NHS, it’s: question, answer, question, answer, ad break, more questions and answers. It’s a format that better suits the timeslot of 6:00pm on a commercial network. And as TV Tonight pointed out the other day:
TEN is banking that most viewers won’t have seen [the British] version
Time will tell whether this will rate as well as Grant Denyer’s Family Feud in that timeslot, but there’s a strategy to get it seen by the viewers that seems to be paying off. Or it’s all going to go tits-up really soon. One of them.
What do we think? We like the fast pace but miss the comedy. Admittedly, after two episodes, Humphries and Rochford haven’t yet had time to build up that back catalogue of in-jokes about the Central African Republic that Armstrong and Osman have, and based on what we’ve seen of them so far, it’s Rochford who’s the funniest of the pair, but who knows? When the main problem the show faces is not getting axed or re-worked with Grant Denyer as host, they’re not concerned about making us laugh. Piss off and watch the British version on iView if you want that.
* Gordon Brown?
** No idea.
Drop the Pilot
Okay, so we were too busy being distracted by Greg Fleet’s latest twitter ruckus to see this coming:
CHANNEL 10 is turning to people power with a Pilot Week of eight new programs set to screen from August 19.
The revolutionary event, to be hosted by Grant Denyer and Angela Bishop, will give Aussie television viewers their biggest say ever in the shows they want to see on air.
And who could resist these winners?
Look at all that comedy! Cheap, shoddy, disposable comedy! Kind of strange there’s no drama pilots being aired in pilot week but hey, guess drama is something Ten still takes semi-seriously. And let’s be honest: at least half of these pilots are one-off ideas either thrown out there to get some buzz or just making up the numbers. “Dave O’Neill’s half hour comedy Dave“? How is that even a real show?
(sure, O’Neill has been a comedy trooper for decades now, but what’s he been publicly attached to that’s been even remotely a hit since he was the one who didn’t become a nationally famous millionaire out of Hughsy, Kate and Dave?)
And it’s a good thing this is almost certainly just a PR stunt rather than a serious attempt to try and widen their program base, because just look at that line-up: half the time if you’re not a worn-out retread then you’re someone flailing around the shallow end and if you’re neither there’s a good chance you’ve leap-frogged ahead of around a hundred vastly more qualified people to get your head on air. Who the hell wants to see Sam Dastyari anywhere ever again?
Also: where’s the women? It’s 2018 – if you’re airing eight pilots and they’re all fronted by men, you’ve made a conscious decision to exclude women. And it’s clearly not on that old chestnut of “we couldn’t find any good enough”, because going by what’s being served up a sock puppet would be over qualified for some of these jobs.
If any of these ideas were really that good, Ten would have given them the green light without making them jump through these attention-seeking hoops. Because that’s all this kind of “event” is – a stunt that has bugger-all to do with deciding which shows make it to air. Remember the ABC’s 2016 Comedy Showroom? The Herald Sun did:
The only other comparable event is ABC’s anthology series Comedy Showroom in 2016, trialling six pilots including The Letdown and Ronny Chieng: International Student.
Remember how success there was based on audience votes? Like fuck it was: Both The Letdown and Ronny Chieng: International Student made it to series because overseas networks stumped up cash to make them, not because of some local online poll. So forget about getting your “biggest say ever”: if the votes go the way of what the programmers want to air, it’ll be hailed as a win for people power, and if the audience somehow votes for that Heath Franklin show the ballots’ll get lost in a warehouse fire by November.
Sure, we’ll be watching them, because we’re idiots who like Australian comedy. The Drunk History knock-off might work, though it’s probably going to just be a Hamish & Andy’s True Story knock off (because that’s kinda just Drunk History without the booze). But the rest? Even if they’re great shows, there’s absolutely nothing about them – apart from maybe nostalgia – to make people tune in (since when have viewers wanted “nothing but feel good moments”?). Which is why they’re being aired as part of “Pilot Week”: without a gimmick they’d sink without trace.
Which doesn’t really suggest they’ve got a future once the gimmick’s over.
Back with the Krack
Press release time!
The Krack Heads Are Back As Kameras Roll On Get Krack!n Season 2
ABC, Screen Australia and Film Victoria today announced that filming has begun in Melbourne on Season 2 of comedy series Get Krack!n – created, written, produced by and starring Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan.
Follow-up to ‘The Kates’ now classic webseries The Katering Show, Get Krack!n Season 1– hailed by critics “the finest satire ever put to air on Australian television” [not The Australian Tumbleweeds] – was a breakout hit, continuing the ABC’s long tradition of fostering new talent and leading the way with world class comedy programming. Get Krack!n also enjoyed the youngest audience profile of any main channel show in 2017.
Now the morning show that made you want to go straight back to bed returns with another 8 x 25’ krackpot episodes. Like the cheap shape-wear adorning their bodies, The Kates bring their ill-fitting brand of hosting back to the chirpy, fresh, bright world of brekky TV.
Despite the loss of a sponsor, the incompetence of the crew, the femaleness of the hosts, and a pretty devastating structural fire, it seems Get Krack!n is back for more apocalypse-dodging content. And no-one is more surprised and fatigued by this fact than the show’s hosts, “trained” “actor” Kate McLennan and “personality-challenged” Kate McCartney.
Season 2 will again feature a kracking line up – returning kast includes Nakkiah Lui, Miranda Tapsell, Anne Edmonds, Michelle Lim Davidson, Adam Briggs, Charlotte Nicdao, Ming-Zhu Hii, Wes Snelling and Dave Thornton. Plus katch a smorgasbord of special guest appearances including: Matt Day, Elaine Crombie, Isaiah Firebrace, John Howard, Genevieve Morris, Michala Banas, Adam Hills, Denise Scott, Zoe Coombs Marr, Angella Dravid, Fiona O’Loughlin, Heidi Arena, Fiona Choi and Justine Clarke.
“We are so eggcited to be back. We can’t wait to be in the studio again, catering to the direct interests of our biggest fans, straight white men aged 18-55″, The Kates said.
ABC Head of Comedy Rick Kalowski said, “Get Krack!n Season 1 drew all four key TV demographics: fans of great satire; young people delighted to learn the ABC existed; angry old guys who just got Facebook; and people who only watch shows that offend them. Get Krack!n Season 2 will give all something to love/find ‘deeply problematic’.”
“The strength and appeal of this satirical series comes from the creative team’s commitment to not only including writers and performers from diverse backgrounds but ensuring that those people have ownership of their stories and experiences,” said Sally Caplan, Head of Production at Screen Australia. “Screen Australia previously supported the team’s online series The Katering Show, and it’s fantastic to see them grow their audience on TV with this new, timely and topical take on morning television.”
Film Victoria CEO Caroline Pitcher said “We welcome ABC’s next exciting installment from Melbourne’s creative all-rounders in Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney. Their unique approach to comedy writing delivers hilarious and unforgettable characters with content that speaks directly to a female audience. We look forward to seeing what the duo has in store for breakfast television this time around.”
Get Krack!n Season 2 will air on ABC TV and iview early in 2019.
Regular readers of this blog will know we’re filing this under good news: while Get Krack!n wasn’t flawless, it was easily one of the comedy highlights of last year and the sharpest scripted ABC comedy series since The Katering Show.
We’re also filing it under surprising news, as – unlike a seemingly endless procession of ABC comedy series that no-one’s excited about – there doesn’t seem to have been any kind of announcement that it was coming back before now. In fact, the Kates seem to have been slightly cautious as far as mentioning exactly what the “new show” they were working on was:
Maybe not the best example there.
So were there behind the scenes ructions? Contracts not signed? Funding issues? The ABC unable to announce a show that wasn’t returning until early 2019 when the ABC itself might not exist in 2019? We have literally zero idea. But we’re still excited that it’s coming back!
Sizzletown the shizzle
The first time we listened to Tony Martin’s talkback radio parody podcast Sizzletown we didn’t know what to make of it. Having followed Martin’s career for about 30 years, his comic voice was very familiar to us…but this was different.
Since Get This (which ended more than 10 years ago now), Tony Martin’s comedy’s been mainly focused on nerd issues, ageing pop culture references and pisstakes of awful media pundits and right-wing commentators. It’s almost like since Get This he’s just carried on doing Get This at every available opportunity – TV appearances, radio and podcast guest spots, books, Logies voiceover work… Which is fine if you like Get This but maybe not so good if you’re more into, say, character comedy, or improvised comedy, or you just want Tony to stop banging on about On The Buses.
And that’s possibly what Sizzletown’s all about. It’s Martin trying something different to much of the comedy he’s done up until this point. Instead of focusing on the craft of writing, of getting the right words in the right order to make the funniest joke possible, he’s decided to take a more improvisational approach to creating comedy, a sort of Barry Humphries as Sandy Stone approach, letting the relentless, rambling stream-of-consciousness – and his occasional corpses – provide the laughs.
It’s an approach that’s appropriate in Sizzletown as talkback callers are mostly rambling nutbags to start with, and all Martin (who plays them) has to do is accentuate that in his (presumably) hours of improvising in a sound-proof booth somewhere.
Noel from Ashburton (episode 3), for example, who likes watching “quaintly-presented murder” programs on TV and has been studying auto-erotic asphyxiation through University of the Third Age, is pure Sandy Stone: “You’ve got to keep up with modern times, don’t you?”
As a break from the callers, there’s interaction between Martin (who also hosts the show, as himself) and his producer Matt Dower (also of Get This) about how the callers know to call at all – it’s a podcast. There’s also the riddle of why Matt only seems to be able to provide three sound effects each week (at least two of them extremely inappropriate).
But for the fans Martin’s more usual type of sketches, Sizzletown often ends with an interview with a Hollywood star and director who somehow agreed to appear. The best of these have been two appearances from the director of The French Connection William Friedkin (Martin again).
What’s great about these – and the rest of the show – is the way in which the mixture of scripted and improvised material is brought together through smart, quick edits that transform what could be a rambling mess into a pacy piece of comedy.
Many podcasts run with the idea of being free to do anything for as long as they like. Sizzletown does that too, but it’s wise enough to reign it in and not outstay its welcome.
Hypothetical Hypotheticals
The Australian’s Diary column had this to say the other day:
Over at Aunty, it looks like a case of goodbye The Checkout, hello Charlie Pickering’s Hypotheticals. Diary hears the ABC is keen to revive the 1980s panel program fronted by Geoffrey Robertson QC to such fascinating effect. But in the hot seat for the project is comedian Charlie Pickering, host of The Weekly. Pickering is himself a former lawyer but several silk robes short of a Queen’s Counsel.
Last week the ABC axed The Checkout on the eve of a new series going into production. About 25 people who were expecting to have half a year’s work are now on the job scrapheap. How rude! But hold on. Diary interrupts to bring you a mid-item correction. The ABC didn’t actually axe The Checkout, the national broadcaster said in a release, it merely placed the program “on hiatus”. How’s this for a quote? “The ABC has decided not to commission a seventh series of The Checkout for 2018-19 at this time,” an ABC spokesman said in doublespeak that would do George Orwell proud. “The programming slate regularly changes for any number of reasons, including the need to strike a balance between new and returning programs for audiences. Putting The Checkout on hiatus does not preclude the program from returning in the future. The ABC is proud of its long association with The Checkout and production company Giant Dwarf, with which it has worked on other programs, such as The Letdown and Growing Up Gracefully.”
So, at the exact moment these black letters hit your retina and zap down the optic nerve into your brain’s comprehension lobes, The Checkout is not coming back. But it may.
The decision caught everyone by surprise. Ratings had been falling but the Checkout presenters, including Craig Reucassel, were all flown up last Sunday for the Logies at the Gold Coast, staying in the QT hotel. So the change of heart seems pretty sudden. Julian Morrow, executive producer and head of Giant Dwarf, was all smiles on the red carpet but blunter after production went down the tubes. “We have tried to be a show that does the core business of the public broadcaster. It’s true The Checkout’s combination of thorough research and creative ways to present consumer information means it is not as low-cost as some ABC programs.” The ABC says it is “definitely not correct” to say Hypotheticals will directly replace The Checkout. “The ABC will announce its upcoming slate of new and returning series in due course,” a spokesman said.
It must be difficult being what is essentially the gossip columnist at The Australian. You’re writing for a Murdoch-owned, right-wing paper – which means Rupe wants you to bash the ABC at every opportunity – but your readers are heavy ABC viewers and listeners, who probably both like The Checkout and remember Geoffrey Robertson’s Hypotheticals with great fondness – what to do? Invent some non-controversy about how one was axed, sorry, put on hiatus, to make way for a revival of the other? Yeah, that’ll do.
Not that TV long-running TV shows haven’t been rested to allow funds to be diverted to other new projects; a famous comedy example from the early 1980’s is how the BBC rested long-running favourite The Goodies to enable The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy to be made. The result: Hitchhikers was huge and The Goodies defected to ITV. There’s an idea for The Checkout, up sticks to Channel 9!
Meanwhile, we can’t be the only ones curious about Charlie Pickering’s Hypotheticals. Will it match up to Geoffrey Robertson’s classic televised conundrums? Which famously forced politicians and activists with well-defined positions to abandon all their principles in the name of some fictional but always realistic scenario? Or will today’s political types be so principle-free they’ll have no principles to abandon?
It’s hard not want Hypotheticals to return with Robertson as the chair rather than Pickering. Robertson has a finer and funnier brain that Pickering, and with his international perspective and many more years of experience would probably make better programs. And it’s not like The Weekly has delivered a punch ever, so what makes anyone think the makers of The Weekly (and we’re assuming it’ll be made by that team) could do that with Hypotheticals?
Maybe it’s because Hypotheticals is the kind of solid format that only someone who really doesn’t know what they’re doing could mess up. It’s easy to stuff up topical satire – it’s a hard genre to get right, what with the having to write and deliver funny material thing – but TV debate? Relatively easy. Just put some nutbags with opposing views into a room and…FIGHT!
What will be key is getting the right nutbags in the room, and crafting a good scenario full of interesting twists and turns for them to debate – something Robertson and his team usually nailed. But can the team from The Weekly? There’s a bit of a difference between, say, setting up a debate about Manus Island and slagging-off Launceston.
Vale Talkin’ ’bout Your Generation 2018
And so Talkin’ ’bout Your Generation 2018 died the way it lived: as a show that was probably too good for Channel Nine, and so didn’t do enough good for Channel Nine. But if the show itself was good – which in its own way it most definitely was – then why did it fail to click?
Let’s state the obvious: putting any kind of quiz show on at 7.30pm on a Monday night is a pretty big gamble. It’s the primest of prime time, the point where commercial networks have trained audiences to expect high stakes reality television, not a load of strange piss-farting about presented by a host gurning away while wearing wacky costumes. The logic of commercial television is that the more expensive the show, the bigger the return on investment; TAYG was too expensive for Nine to put in a crappier timeslot, but a crappier timeslot is exactly what a comedy gameshow needs to succeed.
Not that this version of TAYG didn’t succeed, on creative terms at least – Micallef was as manic as ever, the team captains actually had smoother chemistry than the originals (how strange is it that Amanda Keller was on the original TAYG? She made no impression whatsoever), the games were entertainingly bizarre in a “kids television” way, there were some decent guests on (Tim Rodgers and Aaron Chen in the final episode were two people nobody expected to see on Nine any time soon), and there was enough going on with the questions that if there are any families who still sit down to watch television as a family they would have been able to compete among themselves in a moderately entertaining fashion. There’s something for everyone!
And yet… maybe it was the lengthy run time (no comedy game show needs to go longer than an hour, even with commercials), maybe it was the short series order that meant everyone felt like they had to generate chemistry instantly, maybe it was the general feeling that Channel Nine simply isn’t the place to go for comedy that moves even slightly outside the mainstream, but this revival never quite captured the old magic. Even if that old magic almost certainly only exists in our nostalgia-addled minds.
With Have You Been Paying Attention? currently going gangbusters – this year it would usually rate at least 200,000 viewers more than TAYG, despite screening an hour later – it was no surprise Nine wanted to get in on the comedy game show action, and bringing back a proven success was easily the smartest way to go about it. Micallef is still firing on all cylinders – no Hey Hey it’s Saturday revival here – and the show itself did pretty much everything right that it got right the first time around. And yet, here we are: waving goodbye to a ratings fizzle (one week it came in fourth in its timeslot) that we’d be very surprised to see return.
Still, let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth, which really feels like something they should have turned into a segment on TAYG. We got eight more episodes of one of the more off-the-wall shows in recent Australian television history, and for eight weeks (well, seven) the biggest commercial network in the land put local comedy on in prime time on the biggest night of the week. Sure, it wasn’t a ratings smash – but neither were the last two seasons of the original TAYG, and we all know they were the best ones.
Further Movement at the Station
First, the bad news: according to Fairfax, wog humour is back and it’s broader than ever!
“Why can’t more non-Anglo characters be doctors or lawyers?”
In debates about racial representations on screen, this is a perennial refrain. According to some critics, the blue collar jobs of fictional Mediterranean migrants are gratingly stereotypical (and insufficiently inspiring).
Never mind that a law degree is the archetype of white, middle class respectability. For a new breed of “wog” humorists, such assessments ring hollow.
Don’t worry though, these stereotypes are a-ok – because they’re grounded in fact:
As a general rule, Mediterranean migrants – having fled the deprivations of war-ravaged Europe, while speaking almost no English – did not step into professional jobs upon arriving in Australia. Rather, they worked long hours in factories, shops and restaurants.
This reality informs most Sooshi Mango characters: pensioners obsessed with Chemist Warehouse, for instance, or fathers aghast at the prospect of their children spending $25 at Grill’d. (“You no go anywhere! We make hamboorgar here!”) Occasionally, the racism they endured is re-directed at other ethnic groups. (One old Italian man accuses another motorist of driving “like a Chinese”, oblivious to his own dreadful road skills.) But mostly, it’s channelled into a defiant pride.
We could go on about how outdated stereotypes often result in lazy thinking – which leads to bad comedy – but why bother when the article does that for us:
“It’s raw, blue and dirty,” says ABC’s comedy chief, Rick Kalowski. “But the crassness isn’t a substitution for comedy. It’s always funny.”
Superwog revolves around a teenager and his best friend, struggling to cope with life in the suburbs. It’s something the Saidden brothers can relate to, having attended a “colonial and regimented” elitist private school. Indeed, many of their jokes are at the expense of uptight white people.
Kalowski is rankled by accusations of stereotyping. “There are endless examples of god-awful Australian films that seem custom-built to get five-star reviews or be included in a festival,” he says. “They’re just as stereotypical as so-called ‘wog’ comedy and it’s interesting no one singles them out.”
And we all know what he means by “endless examples”, don’t we. You know, there’s… that film. And the other one. And that one that was on at that festival. Ahhh, you know what we’re talking about, right?
But while there’s still this stereotype of Australian film as this endless parade of upper-middle class wank, it’s no longer all that true. There are no “endless examples”, because those films hardly get made any more. A decade ago you could point to something like Somersault; almost every Australian film this year has starred Shane Jacobson and no-one’s giving him a five-star review.
Of course, for those of us of a certain age, we grew up with wanky Australian films and so they’re a stereotype that has a basis in fact – for us. But you just have to look at the list of Best Film winners at the AACTA Awards over the last decade to see there’s been a serious shift in the kind of films Australians hand out awards to. Red Dog? The Babadook? Lion? Where’s the stereotypes there? For a new generation of comedy fans, those jokes won’t make any sense; most people don’t think about “Australian film” as a thing beyond Chris Hemsworth fighting Cate Blanchett in the last Thor movie.
If you’re going to defend your stereotype-based comedy by claiming there are other stereotypes out there that are getting away with it, it’s probably a good idea to check and see if those other stereotypes are still current outside your own memories. Otherwise people might think what you really mean is nostalgia, and that’s not anywhere near as funny.
*
Speaking of marketing, the one ABC show about consumer affairs that didn’t treat selling shit to idiots as the pinnacle of human civilisation seems to have got the chop:
The ABC has put popular consumer affairs program The Checkout on ice, with executive producer Julian Morrow breaking the news to fans on Friday morning.
Said news being broken in this fashion, which we’d describe as “somewhat salty”
So sustained was the outcry that the ABC had to then explain that the show wasn’t being axed – merely being put on hiatus:
An ABC spokesman confirmed the broadcaster wouldn’t be commissioning a seventh series “at this time”.
“The programming slate regularly changes for any number of reasons, including the need to strike a balance between new and returning programs,” he said. “Putting The Checkout on hiatus does not preclude the program from returning in the future.
“The ABC is proud of its long association with The Checkout and production company Giant Dwarf.”
There are at least two ways to look at this:
A): by stressing the “hiatus” angle, the ABC have made it clear that if the current cuts to the ABC’s budget are sustained – and considering Pauline Hanson seems to have made kicking the national broadcaster a direct path to gaining her party’s support in the senate, it’s hard to see the Liberals letting up even if they hadn’t recently voted to sell the whole ABC off – then programs people actually watch are going to have to be taken off the air. And it’s not like the Liberals can complain, as this is exactly the result they wanted. So by making it clear that this current policy will have consequences, the ABC have let the public know that if they want the ABC to continue in its current form, they have a choice to make at the next election. Well played, ABC!
B): As the ABC is basically run by right-wing types these days – by which we mean either literally card-carrying Liberal supporters, people earning six figure salaries for whom the working class are just the people who used to live in the funky gentrified suburb they now call home, or folks so worried they’ll offend the current government they’re bending over backwards to push the Liberal Party side of things just in case – a show that points out the shonky scams and dodgy nature of corporate Australia was always on thin ice. Who needs consumer affairs when there’s a nightly business news segment anyway? And it’s not like Gruen is going anywhere. Maybe The Checkout should have had Gerry Harvey on each week to give his side of the story just for balance. Boo, ABC, boooooooo.
Or maybe it’s just that, having run for five years, it’s not like The Checkout was a spring chicken. And with Giant Dwarf’s War on Waste seemingly going strong*, it’s not like The Chaser are out of the consumer affairs business just yet. Dammit, if only there was a television program out there to tell us what to think about important issues like these. When’s Screen Time coming back?
*correction: we’ve since been informed that War on Waste is not a Giant Dwarf production and that The Chaser’s Craig Reucassel appears on it as a host-for-hire.
When Things Get Too Serious For Laughter, There’s Always Nanette
Hannah Gadsby’s live show Nanette has been receiving a second round of rave reviews now that it’s available on Netflix, many of them repeating the same few points over and over again because yes, it’s a show that really is shocking and powerful and deeply moving. The sharper of these new round of reviews usually mention at least one of two things: the show intentionally isn’t all that funny (especially in its second half), and it’s also very timely in the age of #metoo. We’d go further; Nanette is very timely, but part of what makes it timely has nothing to do with #metoo – and everything to do with it not being funny.
Nanette is a show that deconstructs comedy – well, a fairly specific kind of performance-based comedy, it’s not like Gadsby spends twenty minutes on single-panel gag cartoons or anything – to reveal that comedy is in many ways the enemy of truth. Comedy, according to Gadsby, is based on creating tension and releasing it, which creates an abusive relationship; you’re making people feel bad so that you can then make them feel good. Worse, when comedians act like they’re telling the truth, they’re really leaving out the truest part of the stories they’re telling – to create a punchline, you have to strip all the nuance out of a story. Crudely put, comedy is bad, and she doesn’t want to have anything more to do with it.
Gadsby is a skilled performer delivering material that’s clearly heartfelt. She’s also telling an audience that came to see a comedy show that what they came to see is bad and they should probably feel bad for being a part of it. You’d think that this might be a tough sell, but Gadsby knows what she’s doing: she also details a number of brutal experiences she’s had at the hands of white men, while pointing out that the white male-dominated art world (and by extension, our world in general) treats anyone who’s not a white male very poorly indeed. It’s not a big leap to conclude that this is the truth that comedy won’t let her say; in the age of #metoo, who wants to stick up for comedy after that?
It’s this idea that now is not the time for comedy – that today, things are simply too serious to be laughed at – that’s the real point where Nanette surfs the zeitgeist. Despite feeling like the natural order of things, this is a fairly recent development: back in the mid-00s, AKA the last time America was ruled by a right-wing despot determined to plunge the world into chaos (gee, it’s almost as if the USA has some long-term structural problems that need to be addressed), two things were different: a): George W Bush had started two legit wars that had killed hundreds of thousands of people, which is something Trump hasn’t yet managed to do, and b): comedy was the last hope of western civilisation.
We exaggerate slightly. But back then The Daily Show and Jon Stewart, along with various other truth-telling comedians and comedy documentary makers, really were a big part of the US push back against Bush Jr. and his cronies. Back then, when things were probably pretty much just as shitty as they are now (two words: Dick Cheney), comedy was seen as a vital way to tell truth to power and a general force for good. Back then, laughter was a way to release all the anger and tension people were carrying around thanks to the general crappiness of the situation they found themselves in. Now, barely a decade later, comedy only makes things worse.
The shift was a gradual one. With Obama in power, the old left-wing comedy scolds had less to scold; the generation that replaced them – your John Olivers and so on – were more about nailing it on smaller issues. Then in the run up to the last US election everyone in comedy spent nine months mocking everything there was to mock about Donald Trump and he became president anyway, which took the wind out of their sails and then some. Now the idea that comedy is going to “nail” anything is pretty much dead; even Saturday Night Live has largely put away their Trump sketches.
And then the years of rumours around Louis CK turned out to be true and he’s one of the first high profile sex creeps taken down by #metoo. Which is another problem for comedy, because CK had been one of the shining lights of progressive stand up, a guy who was seemingly doing things right. We’re not saying that his demise was in any way enough to take down an entire art form, but if you’re a certain kind of progressive comedy fan then his fall definitely casts a pall over the whole thing.
After all that, here comes Nanette – an extremely well-made and powerful piece of theatre that relentlessly demolishes the idea that comedy is anything more than lies that make people laugh under false pretenses. At a time when comedy clearly has no impact on the outside world and some of its biggest practitioners are hypocrites and molestors, is it any wonder Gadsby’s message resonates so strongly?
Let’s not forget, in 2018, the idea that a work of art should be judged on subjective merits is firmly on the way out. Audiences increasingly want art that aligns with their (political) beliefs, and does so in a way that’s both straight-forward and obvious. As comedy is notoriously subjective – what you might find hilarious someone else might not find funny at all – then all comedy is suspect unless its message is firmly on-point.
That’s why Nanette is perfect for our times: it’s a comedy show where Hannah Gadsby gradually discards being funny entirely in favour of getting her message out there in the bluntest possible terms.
And because her message is good, her show is also good. Which is about as blunt as it gets.