Australian Tumbleweeds
It’s Like Putting Dracula in Charge of the Blood Bank
Press release time!
From the 20 sketch comedy teams selected as Fresh Blood’s Class of 2017, four will now receive $75,000 each to produce a half-hour pilot to premiere on ABC iview in 2018.
The four projects are Be Your Own Boss created by Becky Lucas and Cameron James; animation Koala Man created by Michael Cusack; The Angus Project created by Nina Oyama and Angus Thompson; and Why Are You Like This created by Naomi Higgins, Mark Samual Bonanno and Humyara Mahbub.
Fresh Blood is the highly successful joint initiative between ABC and Screen Australia created in 2013 to unearth a new generation of comedic talent. Previous recipients have included Aunty Donna, Fancy Boy and Skit Box.
In March 2017, 20 teams from hundreds of applications were selected to create 3 x 3-5min sketches. All 60 sketches are now available on ABC COMEDY on iview. Plus ABC will also broadcast a ‘Best of Fresh Blood’ three-part series on ABC COMEDY on Tuesday 18 January at 9.30pm, hosted by Wil Anderson.
In December 2017, the 20 teams participated in an exclusive workshop led by industry representatives to learn the skills required to build a sustainable career. Each team was subsequently invited to submit ideas for half-hour comedy pilots, and from those submissions four teams have been selected for production funding.
All four pilots will be delivered by June 2018 and will premiere on ABC COMEDY in the second half of the year. ABC and Screen Australia hope to take one of these four pilots to a full series in 2019.
ABC Director of Television, David Anderson said: “The ABC has long been the home of comedy and innovative content, consistently delivering fresh programming for Australian audiences. Together with Screen Australia, our Fresh Blood initiative continues to demonstrate a commitment to nurturing Australia’s next generation of creative talent, giving new voices the opportunity to shine, with the possibility of a series commission.”
Sally Caplan, Head of Production at Screen Australia said: “There is no shortage of comedy talent in Australia and we are incredibly grateful to ABC iview for providing a premium online platform for these Fresh Blood voices to be heard. We’re thrilled that this program has attracted so many projects that are female driven and display such diversity, and I would like to offer my congratulations to the four teams who are being given the enviable opportunity to create a pilot based on the strength of their outstanding series pitches.”
The four pilots that will go into production are:
BE YOUR OWN BOSS
30 mins
Created by Becky Lucas, Cameron James
Synopsis A mockumentary series that dips into the lives and struggles of several desperate couples that are living the Australian Dream – to be your own boss.KOALA MAN
30 mins
Created by Michael Cusack
Synopsis Koala Man is about a local suburban superhero with no special powers but a strong and burning passion to snuff out petty crime and bring order to the community.THE ANGUS PROJECT
30 mins
Producer Craig Anderson
Created by Nina Oyama and Angus Thompson
Synopsis Angus, a hard partying guy with cerebral palsy and his reckless carer Erika, get up to no good in a conservative country town.WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS
30 mins
Created by Naomi Higgins, Mark Samual Bonanno, Humyara Mahbub
Synopsis Why Are You Like This is a sharp, dialogue driven comedy that is unforgivingly harsh. Best friends Penny and Mia inadvertently dissect the dark side of human nature – premises that are often taboo – all the while blissfully ignorant of how many people they upset.
Are these the four shows we thought were the best of the current Fresh Blood crop? Uh, no?
Okay, to be honest of these four we’ve only seen one – Why Are You Like This, which we thought was… well, read for yourself:
Two annoying millennial women housesit for a third woman who’s gone off to do housebuilding work in Africa for a charity. The taller and more dominant of the millennial woman, who constantly bullies, chides and one-ups the shorter millennial woman, claims she is better than the one doing housebuilding in Africa and can make lots of money online by selling her poo to perverts. So, she does, making $80,000. In the third episode, the two millennial women start talking about cum and what it looks like, which leads to a sequence in which they perfect a recipe for fake cum. None of this is funny.
We’re slightly surprised Kiki and Kitty didn’t get up – it certainly seemed to be getting a bit of press, and was one out of two of the ones we have seen (the other being Let’s Break ’em Up!) that seemed worthwhile.
[edit – Kiki and Kitty were getting good press because they weren’t part of Fresh Blood. Seems we got our various late-2017 ABC online comedy initiatives mixed up, sorry. We should have realised something was up when we were saying nice things about two Fresh Blood entrants.]
But when you’re up against a series about a crap superhero and a hard-partying guy with cerebral palsy it’s always going to be an uphill struggle to get laughs.
As for the line “There is no shortage of comedy talent in Australia”… yeah, we’d beg to differ there.
With nowhere currently available to actually train comedy talents or give them real work experience on television, all Fresh Blood is currently doing is giving a lot of people with nothing but their own conviction that they’re funny some “much needed” exposure.
And now, it seems, $75,000.
A Fresh Blood(bath)
In our previous blog, we wrote about the launch of ABC Comedy, reviewed some of the new batch of Fresh Blood shows now available on iView and promised to review more Fresh Blood next time. Well, promise kept; here’s our thoughts on more of this year’s Fresh Blood…
Why Are You Like This?
Two annoying millennial women housesit for a third woman who’s gone off to do housebuilding work in Africa for a charity. The taller and more dominant of the millennial woman, who constantly bullies, chides and one-ups the shorter millennial woman, claims she is better than the one doing housebuilding in Africa and can make lots of money online by selling her poo to perverts. So, she does, making $80,000. In the third episode, the two millennial women start talking about cum and what it looks like, which leads to a sequence in which they perfect a recipe for fake cum. None of this is funny.
1800 Success
Aaron Chen and Jonathon Lo win some money at the pub, spend it, then spend more than they won, then find themselves in a lot of debt. So, they concoct various schemes to get out of debt. This would probably be funnier if it was shorter, as there isn’t enough good material to stretch across three nine-minute episodes.
Freudian Nip
Freudian Nip is the all-female comedy troupe who made up much of the supporting cast of Aaron Chen Tonight. As with 1800 Success, some good material is stretched very thin.
The Big Day
Laura Hughes plays three characters who are all participating in the same wedding. This reminded us a lot of The Edge of the Bush, in that all the main characters are narcissists turned up to 11. And while there’s plenty of comic potential in extreme narcissists, none was found here. This was just annoying.
No One Suspected The Cat
A group of comedians, including David Collins, Rebecca De Unamuno and Carlo Ritchie, improvise sketches in a sound studio, which are then animated. Sometimes the animations make the sketches funnier, most of the time they don’t add anything at all. It doesn’t help that the sketches themselves are fairly average.
Headswapsies
Two young scientists (Mitch McTaggart and Djovan Caro) swap heads, then have trouble regaining their basic motor skills. This largely visual comedy owes some debt to Mr Bean and Woodley in that the central character(s) are child-like adults who constantly find themselves in bizarre situations, not always of their own making. Unfortunately, the situations in Headswapsies aren’t quite as clever or unpredictable as those in better visual comedies. When the two scientists go to a science showcase and find themselves surrounded by dangerous chemicals and equipment…gee, we wonder what will happen? To be fair, we didn’t predict that one chemical reaction would cause a swastika to appear. Although on the other hand, we also didn’t predict that the shot wouldn’t then cut to an obviously Jewish character looking angry. So, this wasn’t an entirely predictable show.
Let’s Break ‘em Up!
In the spirit of equality, Nath Valvo has decided it’s time for all couples to prove their relationship worthy…
Made before last week’s same-sex marriage vote, this sees Nath Valvo (The Shambles) dragging heterosexual couples off the streets and into a TV studio, where he asks them questions about their relationship. If the couples get the answers wrong, they’ll be forced to break up. We enjoyed this one. Valvo’s an engaging and amusing host, and the tatty set and background models raise plenty of laughs. Especially the male model, who just stands there looking gormless.
Along with Kiki and Kitty, Let’s Break ‘em Up! is the only half-decent Fresh Blood show we’ve seen so far, which begs the question… have we reached the bottom of the comedy talent barrel?
Shock twist: yes we have.
With nowhere currently available to actually train comedy talents or give them real work experience on television, all Fresh Blood is currently doing is giving a lot of people with nothing but their own conviction that they’re funny some “much needed” exposure. Which is bad because a): they suck, and soon give up on comedy, and b): anyone watching gets the impression that Australian comedy sucks, and they also give up on (Australian) comedy.
The ABC clearly has zero interest in developing real comedy talent – they just want cheap programming they can throw on air to look like they’re promoting local talent, with zero interest in nurturing them to the point where they’re actually good at their job. If they uncover fully formed talent, great! Only they found all those people in series one and never gave them a show.
Offering exposure without training is like a concert hall having an open mic night – everybody knows those things almost never reveal any decent talent. Unless the ABC wants to start up a regular sketch show where all this fresh talent can learn how to do more than gurn at a camera, it’s time to realise they can’t get any more blood from this stone.
There will be Fresh Blood
Recently, there was an exciting announcement. The ABC said it was creating a new channel dedicated entirely to comedy, called ABC Comedy, on which they’d be airing a brand-new comedy tonight show, Tonightly with Tom Ballard. And, they’d be releasing heaps of new short-form comedy shows from new talent on iView under the Fresh Blood banner. Good news, right? Everyone wants a laugh during these troubled times.
Then we watched it…
Look, we want to like new things. We’re even prepared to give Tonightly a couple of weeks to find its feet before we review it, but, overall, ABC Comedy is a bit half-arsed.
What was their launch program, the first show on their new channel? An episode of Spicks & Specks from 2008, followed by repeats of Upper Middle Bogan. Way to set the tone, guys.
So, a bit unimpressed by the line-up, we switched over to iView to check out the new series of Fresh Blood. And again, we really wanted this to be good. Because in an ideal world, Fresh Blood would uncover some amazing up-and-coming talent, give them space to experiment and develop their craft, and pave the way to that talent making an amazing full-length sitcom or sketch show.
Sadly, what it’s actually produced is a variety of projects that covers the full spectrum of bad, from the merely dull or bland, to the out-and-out thoroughly shithouse. Here are some thoughts on some of the shows we’ve managed to watch:
Kiki and Kitty
Probably the best of the bunch, this high concept comedy from Black Comedy’s Nakkiah Lui is about up-and-coming lawyer Kiki (Lui), whose life is ruined (or possibly improved) by Kitty (Elaine Crombie), Kiki’s vagina in human form. As the outrageous Kitty goads Kiki into doing things she’s never done, there are a few laughs to be had. That high concept’s probably going to wear thin after a series of this, though.
#CelesteChallengeAccepted
Comedian Celeste Barber (The Letdown) is a huge hit on Instagram, where her daily posts, requested by fans, see her take the piss out of super-sexy modelling shots. Typically, these involve Barber imitating the pose of a rake-thin, expensively-dressed and impossibly hot starlet, by recreating it with her normal-bodied curves whilst wearing clothes purchased from Target.
Unfortunately, though, this attempt to bring the concept to TV isn’t quite as funny. Recreating a Kylie Jenner make-up tutorial sounds like it could funny, but it turns out to be about as dull as an actual Kylie Jenner make-up tutorial…which wasn’t quite the clever twist we’ve come to expect from Celeste Barber’s work. Not even slightly.
The Chinaboy Show
We had high hopes when it was announced that YouTube star John Luc, aka Mychonny, would be transferring to TV, but his videos for Fresh Blood look like some of his poorer online efforts. Luc’s at his funniest when he’s making a satirical point, but in these videos, it’s just bad wigs and facial hair, and stupid Asian stereotypes.
Aussie Rangers
In this series, a bunch of semi-incompetent national park rangers find themselves with a fight on their hands when the park is threatened with closure. From what we’ve seen so far, this isn’t particularly funny, so we don’t care if they save the park or not.
Virgin Bush
Stand-up Neel Kolhatkar grew up in the city, and like many Australians has never been to the outback. So, in this series, off he goes, camera crew in tow, to discover “the real Australia”. Along the way, he meets sheep shearers and other bush residents, does a bit of Louis Theroux-style reportage, then comes back to town and does some stand-up about what he’s seen. This is an okay show, if fairly unexciting. (Although if you like David Bowie’s Let’s Dance you do get the see the pub where they shot the video clip.)
Other People’s Problems
Inner-city creative type Florence wants to help people, just like her housemate Ann does. Ann’s a paramedic, saving lives on a daily basis, so Florence comes up with a scheme to be just as great as Ann: she starts a business trying to solve other people’s problems. Let’s just file this one under twee. Or, to put it another way, it’s about as hilarious as any other program described as “charming” in a media release.
Tiger Cops
This is a parody of 1980’s Hong Kong action movies. We have no idea why Screen Australia funded this when it is literally the six-billionth parody of Hong Kong action movies made in this country.
We will review the rest of Fresh Blood soon. Yes, we are masochists.
The Shifting Sando
Press release time!
Comedy Series Sando welcomes a new Sando
Tuesday, December 5, 2017 — ABC, Screen Australia and Create NSW advise that Genevieve Morris has been unable to continue filming her lead role in the forthcoming ABC TV comedy Sando. Production of the six part series continues with acclaimed actress Sacha Horler (The Moodys, The Letdown, The Dressmaker) stepping into the title role.
Sando’s Producer Chloe Rickard, of Jungle Entertainment, explains: “Genevieve has unfortunately had to withdraw from the show for health reasons. As a friend and longstanding collaborator of Jungle, our thoughts are always with her and we wish her well with her recovery.”
ABC Head of Comedy Rick Kalowski said: “It’s been very sad to see Genevieve, a superb comedienne as well as a colleague and friend of many years, have to leave the show, and all of us wish her the very best. I’m incredibly grateful to Sacha Horler, one of the country’s most brilliant actors, for stepping into Sando, which will be her first TV series lead role. The part of Vicky ‘Sando’ Sandringham has been a hugely coveted one and ABC audiences will be blown away by Sacha’s take on the role.”
Sando will film until the end of the year in Sydney and air on ABC TV and ABC iview in 2018.
This is awful news for Genevieve Morris, and we hope she has a speedy recovery.
Sacha Horler is someone you probably know best from a string of Australian dramas – she first came to notice as the female lead in the movie Praise, and she was in CrashBurn, Love My Way, Offspring and Crownies – but she’s also been in Black Comedy so it’s not like she has zero comedy chops.
Fingers crossed the rest of the production goes off without a hitch, and that the show wasn’t so tailored specifically to Morris’ comedy that Horler can’t make the lead role her own.
Vale The Ex-PM season 2
It’s difficult to pin down exactly why season 2 of The Ex-PM didn’t explode like a comedy bouncing bomb, unleashing a tidal wave of comedy that swept away all before it. It really should have: Shaun Micallef is Shaun Micallef, the rest of the cast weren’t too shabby either, the set-up was a lot tighter after the wobbly wanderings of season one and the whole package was, as they say in wrestling, the total package. Concept-wise, it’s five stars from us.
The word that came to mind upon watching the finished product was “polished”. The final episode wrapped up all the mysteries nicely, gave everyone a few decent comedy moments, had a solid political point that we can all get behind and threw in a rousing speech from Dugdale that ended with him holding a V for Vendetta mask in a very funny, out of almost nowhere pop culture reference. Not to mention you can’t go wrong with the tried-and-true end credit “here’s where they all ended up” bit.
(plus putting “For John” in the credits did bring a tear to the eye. John Clarke wasn’t a huge part of this show, but it was always a joy to see him scheming away)
And yet while the end result was definitely good, it probably should have been better. It was hard not to come away feeling that while the show had a great cast, it never really took full advantage of them. For one thing, Micallef was usually playing it straight; why? Okay, because he looks like a leading man and the show was structured to have him as the seemingly rational center around which craziness revolved-
-well no; obviously the initial idea back in season one was to have his biographer as the sane one while Dugdale and family would all be off-kilter. But when you have Micallef facing off against an unknown actor who is good but not Micallef-level good, it’s not surprising that the focus swiftly shifted to making him the center of things.
But having him largely playing the straight man was a waste of one of the funniest performers on Australian television, while having him play a character somewhat out of the loop – he was surrounded by various schemers manipulating him even when he had his own agenda – meant that he wasn’t driving the plot. This kind of thing worked on Frontline because while Mike Moore was a dim bulb, he was the whole focus of the show: here while the aim was to get Dugdale elected, which often meant having him do and say as little as possible.
We’ve mentioned before that we’re big fans of Micallef’s previous sitcom, Welcher & Welcher, and in part that’s because there Micallef got the structure right: he played the central character whose schemes and scams drove the story, while his grounded wife (Robyn Butler) was the foil and his sidekick (Francis Greenslade) aided and abetted him. But in The Ex-PM he played a largely straight character at the mercy of others, a man who was funny but not stand-out funny in a story that had plenty of good lines and funny characters but not all that many classic situations.
Look, a Micallef-led sitcom is always going to be in the top three comedy events of the year simply because he’s a very funny man with great taste in collaborators. If the ABC announced that another three seasons of The Ex-PM had already been booked in, there’d be no complaints from us. But compared with Micallef’s other output, this was a solid B+. And there aren’t enough people capable of making A-grade material around for us to be fully happy with that.
The Letdown
Press release time!
Friday, December 1, 2017 — The ABC today revealed a diverse and unmissable line up for the first half of 2018, including a variety of new programming across all genres, Australian premieres and the return of audience favourites. This complements the impressive Comedy, Entertainment, Indigenous, Arts and Children’s 2018 programming already announced.
[…a bunch of stuff not relevant here…]
By popular demand, Julia Zemiro’s Home Delivery and You Can’t Ask That are back on screens in 2018, delivering more unscripted, personal and bold moments for ABC audiences. Comedy favourites, Gruen, Mad as Hell and Hard Quiz are back to inform and challenge audiences again in 2018. And, 2018 sees lifestyle favourite Gardening Australia blossom into a new, hour long format on Friday nights, kicking off on January 26th – giving Australians more of what they love.
Well, that was pretty gosh darn disappointing. Seriously, we expected at least a couple of new comedy titles to be part of this announcement – especially as the “already announced” comedy* barely seemed enough to keep the all-new ABC Comedy channel from falling off the dial.
(calling Hard Quiz a “comedy favourite” is definitely stretching things more than a little too)
While the ABC usually sits on a few titles that are due later in the year, off the top of our heads there’s not a lot of decent stuff that really could be coming up. The Chaser seem to have given up on comedy entirely (at least on the ABC), while most of the decent sitcoms (Utopia, The Ex-PM) have run their course and won’t be back. Get Krack!n should be returning, but it’d have been nice to have that confirmed.
Oh yeah, there’s also this:
Paul McDermott returns to ABC to host new quiz show Think Tank
Friday, December 1, 2017 — What do tram drivers know about Ancient History?
What do medieval scholars know about Pop Trivia?
What do educational psychologists know about the Animal Kingdom?
Welcome to Think Tank…Hosted by grandmaster Paul McDermott, Think Tank is an exciting new nightly quiz show at 6pm on ABC TV. Each episode sees three contestants go head to head, pitting their general knowledge and their general luck against each other. To win the game, they need to pass five, challenging rounds. Helping or maybe hindering them in their pursuit of game show glory, is the Think Tank.
The Think Tank features eight relatively ordinary Australians with an extra-ordinary love of trivia and general knowledge. The eight form a ‘repository of wisdom’ from which our contestants on Think Tank can draw.
But be warned…Our Think Tankers – like Australia itself – are made up of a diverse mob of people plucked from all walks of life. They are there to help but sometimes they get it wrong.
What happens then? Do you trust your instincts or trust the masses? Do you tag along with popular opinion or strike out on your own? The excitement, drama and brain-twisting fun of Think Tank comes in these moments of interaction between our contestants and the Think Tankers.
The ringmaster for this cavalcade of mind-expanding madness will be the shy, self-effacing Paul McDermott.
“Australia is about to meet eight wonderfully funny, warm and intelligent people,” McDermott remarks. “Oh, and I’ll be there too, The Marvellous Mr Me! How could anyone resist?”
This is game show with a difference, one the whole family can enjoy. Join us for the battle of brains, the thrill of victory, the hilarity of defeat. Come for the competition, witness the wonder, meet the Think Tankers and who knows – you might just learn a thing or two.
“[It’s a] game show with a difference, one the whole family can enjoy”. Unlike all those adults-only after-dark game shows clogging up our airwaves, of course.
(ok, it’ll probably be a passable time-filler in a timeslot where quiz show fans can find it and everyone else can pretend it’s not on. If only we could do the same for “comedy favourite” Hard Quiz)
*this list consists of Squinters, Sando, and Back in Very Small Business. It remains unclear whether they’ll air on the main ABC channel or ABC Comedy
Childproof is great. Here’s why we think it got rejected
Tony Martin and Sarina Rowell spent three years trying to sell Childproof, their sitcom about a childfree couple, but were told it was too niche an idea, and that only those without children could possibly relate to it.
That sounds ridiculous, right? There are heaps of people out there who’ve chosen not to have kids, and even those with kids remember what life was like before they became parents. What’s not to relate to?
Also, why do you need to be able to “relate to” a show? It’s a sitcom, you only need to find it funny.
Now that Martin and Rowell have turned the unproduced scripts of Childproof into an audio sitcom, and released them as podcasts, whatever the reasons that no one wanted to make the show were, one thing’s for sure: they look ridiculous. Within days of release, Childproof went to #2 in the Australian podcast charts, so clearly quite a few people can relate to it. Also, it’s a really funny show.
The cast, which includes Martin as Ian, Geraldine Quinn as his wife Jennifer, and Roz Hammond, Andrew McClelland, Damian Cowell, Lachy Hulme and others in a variety of roles, do a great job of bringing what is a TV script to life in audio only. And with production by Matt “The Pots and Pans” Dower (Get This) and Jay Mueller (producer of The TEAM Effort and Triple M Melbourne’s The Hot Breakfast), plus Pete Smith reading out the opening and closing credits, Childproof sounds as good as a podcast sitcom can.
So, great cast, great production, great script. What’s not to like?
Okay, some of the gags, having been written for TV, are never going to be as hilarious in audio only. For example, there’s a running joke about how whenever Ian arrives at the commercial radio station he works at, the poster advertising the breakfast team is being removed and replaced by a poster for a new but strikingly similar breakfast team. It’d be hilarious on TV, as a recurring background gag, but it works less well when Mueller is reading it out in the form of stage directions.
Happily, though, most of the laughs in the script are in the dialogue, and they work very well here. Ian’s description of a Scandinavian murder mystery that he and Jennifer are watching doesn’t need visuals to be hilarious, nor does the horrific party scene where Ian and Jennifer have to deal with the smug parents of small children telling them they’re unfulfilled or “must hate kids”.
So, we come back to the question of why this never got made for TV in the first place. Here’s our theory: Australian TV, right now, really hates anything that has a strong point of view. So, anything that might alienate the sort of people who watch TV is out. Right out. And, unfortunately for Childproof, that includes any program featuring characters who are proudly different from the norm.
That scene where Ian and Jennifer have to justify their childfree life? There’s one of them at every party attended by middle-aged couples. On one side, there’s the childfree couple, happily talking about how they enjoy late nights in front of DVD boxsets. On the other side, there’s everyone else: the sleep-deprived parents of young kids with no time for hobbies of their own and no energy left to tolerate their friends who still drink and enjoy life.
And, weirdly, when those parents sit down in front of the TV, what they want to watch isn’t a comedy they’re going to find challenging to watch.
Perhaps that explains The Letdown: no one would ever commission it because it’s funny, but they might because it’s “relatable” to enough people.
Are You Free?
In case you missed SBS’s Privatise Now: The Feed’s End of Year Special, here’s all you need to know: it was a showcase for Mark Humphries. You know Mark Humphries, right? He came out of nowhere to be one of the smug guys on WTF!, then became one of the smug guys on The Roast, and for the last few years he’s been one of the smug guys on The Feed. If you’ve ever wanted to be trapped in a hall of mirrors where smugness is reflected back at you so many times it’s impossible to tell where performance ends and reality begins but we’re going to guess a Sydney private school has something to do with it, dive right in.
That said, the show itself wasn’t half bad, and not just because it had a joke about “how do you get a cinema all to yourself? Just find one showing a new release Australian film” – it also had another joke where Marc Fennell was interviewing himself and asked “You’ve been hosting The Feed for five years… when do you think people are going to start watching?” C’mon, jokes about how the Australian media is shit are always going to find a good home here.
But Humphries… what’s going on there? It’s so weird that he’s had a career stretching back close to a decade now, because his entire act is that “fake newsreader” thing that Charlie Pickering does only without the extremely thin layer of humanity that Pickering has leveraged into becoming the outraged voice of a disinterested generation or whatever the fuck he tells himself at night. Or even that “fake newsreader” thing that Shaun Micallef’s been doing only he’s literally a comedy genius who can get laughs by lifting an eyebrow whereas Humphries just looks like a real estate agent who’d combust if exposed to direct sunlight.
Clearly being a fake newsreader is working out for Humphries because that’s pretty much all he’s ever done. But the trick to making the fake newsreader character work is you have to show a glimpse of something real under the smarm – and that something adds depth to your character. Pickering has a bunch of fake outrage that… well, it’s not actually believable, but as he’s often covering stories that are legitimately outrageous it works well enough. Micallef is trying to go along with the insanity he’s reporting on but he never quite manages it – and again, he’s usually reporting on insane stories so it all hangs together.
But Humphries is just smug. He’s doubling down on a characteristic a regular newsreader already has. There’s no comedy angle to his performance beyond “Ha ha, I’m even more arrogant and smug than the rest of these arrogantly smug smug arrogant jerks”. Not that there’s really any room for a comedy angle in his performance, seeing as he’s the front man for the kind of topical news humour that made shows like Hungry Beast into the kind of hit that wasn’t in any way a hit and has since made The Feed into a show where even the on-air cast are making jokes about nobody watching it.
So rather than playing an actual comedy character, on The Feed he’s mostly there to present but not distract from jokes designed largely to congratulate the viewer for having the kind of political views that in theory make the jokes funny: on this special he presented jokes that were more along the lines of “I don’t know who that Ray Martin guy is, but he shows promise” and an extended sketch about how Malcolm Turnbull made a shithouse basketball shot. Wait, they’re the same kind of joke.
Still, at least those involved were willing to burn bridges, what with that joke about The Chaser’s ever expanding cast and “Tugger” the sports commentator, who was basically a slightly more articulate version of Micallef’s old Milo Kerrigan character. After all, in-jokes about other comedians are always a great move when it comes to forging a career in Australian comedy.
Just look how well it’s worked out for us.
Vale Aaron Chen Tonight
So, Aaron Chen Tonight ended last week. Tucked away on late night ABC2, it was a show that was easily missed, which is a shame as it’s been one of the most interesting new comedies for years.
Filmed in a real-life comedy room in Sydney, this started out as a shonky local take on US-style tonight shows – complete with opening monologue, guest stars on the couch and interjections from regulars – mixed with sketches and filmed segments. And with a lot of the material clearly written in the days leading up to the show, it had a real seat-of-their-pants vibe to it. In fact, it’s probably the closest we’ve had to a new version of The Late Show or an Aussie Saturday Night Live – raw, anarchic and a bit weird. What’s not to like?
Except…and, sorry, here comes the but…it wasn’t very funny. Because whereas The Late Show cast had worked together for years and were pretty good at writing decent material in a short amount of time, and whereas Saturday Night Live has always employed a crack team of writers who can churn out good material in mere hours, Aaron Chen Tonight had neither of these. Sure, the cast had an obvious rapport and a shared approach to comedy, but they didn’t have a lot of experience of making this sort of show. And most of the time it felt like their material was the sort of stuff they could get away with in a small club, but wouldn’t be material they’d perform at MICF or in Edinburgh…which means it wasn’t really good enough for TV either.
To be fair to Aaron Chen Tonight, it was very deliberately on ABC2 where almost no one was watching, and by the end of its run it looked like it was starting to find its feet, but now it’s ended. Possibly for good. Which is a shame, as a few more weeks could have resulted in something really good.
When Lorne Michaels pitched Saturday Night Live to NBC, an executive asked him “How long do you think it will take to get good?”. Michaels replied, “About six weeks”. “I’ll tune in in week 6”, said the executive. Which is all very well if you’ve got more than six weeks, and it’s 1975 when executives had huge budgets and less worries, but not so good if you’re Aaron Chen Tonight.
We’d like to see this show come back – it’s got enough promise to justify a second series – but we’d also like to see it better and more topical. In a week when Australia voted for gay marriage and got into the World Cup, it would have been nice to see these referenced in Chen’s material, rather than the cold weather which Sydney was enduring at the time the show was filmed. If this is supposed to be a US-style tonight show, shouldn’t it be topical? Sure, Australia mostly sucks at topical comedy, but on a freewheeling show Aaron Chen Tonight anything might work.