Australian Tumbleweeds
Putting the X back into 10
We don’t usually pay much attention to the commercial networks when they announce their line-ups for the coming year because it’s been a long time since any of them were intentionally in the comedy business. But Ten just released some details of their 2018 slate, and… eh, let’s just dive right in:
RETURNING
MasterChef (including Gordon Ramsay and Nigella Lawson as guests)
The Bachelor
The Bachelorette
Gogglebox
I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here! (first clue: “Two Aussie icons in the middle of Australia’s biggest feud)
Survivor: Champions v Contenders (high-profile sportspeople and entertainers versus “ordinary” Aussies)
KFC Big Bash League
Rebel Women’s Big Bash League
Gogglebox
Have You Been Paying Attention?
Bondi Rescue
The Project
Cram
Family Feud
The Living Room
Shark Tank
Neighbours
Todd Sampson’s Body Hack 2.0
Studio 10
Of course Cram! is returning: despite being shithouse, they probably filmed 80 episodes over a weekend.
UNCERTAIN
Offspring
Sisters
The Wrong Girl
Bondi Vet
AKA “every show on Ten that costs money to make”. But it’s the new shows that are of real interest to us:
Blind Date: Australia had a version of Blind Date in the late 1960s, and that format was later adapted to Perfect Match – a hit on Ten in the ’80s. Now, the network will launch a fresh season of Blind Date, based on the UK game show of the same name. Hosted by Julia Morris, each episode features a single person quizzing three potential partners. “It’s an old school studio entertainment show.”
Are there four words better at draining all the romance out of a room than “hosted by Julia Morris”? Just don’t tell anyone at Ten about Tinder.
How to Stay Married: Lisa McCune and Peter Helliar star in this drama about a couple, stuck in a rut after 12 years of marriage. Just as he is made redundant, she returns to work for the first time since their children were born.
Far be it for us to give advice to the Australian entertainment industry, but this whole “Peter Helliar, modern master of love” thing he’s been peddling with I Love You Too and It’s a Date and now this? No-one out in the real world is buying it. We barely bought Helliar as Straunchie: trying to pretend (with an extended version of that firmly average episode of It’s a Date he starred in) that he’s got any more insight into matters of the heart than your average tin of dog food is funnier than anything he’s said in the last fifteen years.
Hughesy, We Have a Problem: The former Project and Before the Game co-host is back on Ten. Each week, guest comedians and entertainers try to solve “everyday problems”, from infidelity to fights over the remote.
Presumably every solution involves getting angry.
Russell Coight’s All Aussie Adventures: Scheduled to air this year, but filming took longer than expected. Made by Working Dog Productions, it stars Glenn Robbins as the accident-prone outdoorsman.
This might actually be funny. Which means the cosmic balance must be maintained, and so we also have:
Street Smart: A half-hour scripted comedy, about a gang of inept criminals, starring Tahir Bilgic and Rob Shehadie. “It has a proper multicultural cast, and it’s written by Tahir and Rob – you can hear their voices [in the writing]. People will be inclined to compare it to Here Come the Habibs!, but it feels very different.”
In that it’s being screened on Channel Ten.
Look, at least they’re trying new things. And by new things we mean that everything “new” mentioned here is either a revival, hosted by someone with a twenty year career, a reworking of something from another network, or a revival hosted by someone with a twenty year career. Did we mention we usually ignore the commercial networks when they announce their line-ups for the coming year?
One Crazy Summer… plus two more
Ben Elton’s something of a strange figure in Australian comedy, in that despite living here off-and-on for the last twenty years he’s never actually become part of Australian comedy. He’s set books here, he’s made one rapidly cancelled television program here, but otherwise he’s generally avoided the panel shows, comedy game shows, radio chats, newspaper columns, stand-up performances and so on that make up the Australian “comedy scene”. It’s hard not to have the opinion that for Elton, Australia is where he lives, not where he works. Which is probably why Three Summers, his Aussie-as big screen debut as an Aussie film-maker, seems a little bit… odd.
To be fair, some of that strangeness comes from the fact that it’s an unashamedly mainstream Australian comedy in 2017; it’s been a very long time since we saw an Australian comedy that wasn’t about characters we were meant to be laughing at, not with – and when we did get a local comedy that was all about having a rollicking good time it was almost always shithouse. So while we might have a bunch of negative things to say, the closest thing to Three Summers we’ve seen lately was Spin Out so if we were grading like against like it’d be five stars no worries. Put another way, Three Summers contains actual jokes, some of which are actually funny; that’s not something we can afford to laugh at.
Oh right, the story: every year in rural West Australia a folk festival is held. People come from all around to camp out and listen to various kinds of folk music. Some of these people are thinly sketched one-joke characters, others – most notably an Irish pub singer and the theremin playing soloist whose slow burn romance is the heart of the film – are thinly sketched one-joke characters who get more screen time. Over the course of three summers people learn (that racism is bad), they grow (into people who don’t like intolerance), and occasionally they turn up to a concert where a band of Afghani refguees give an opening spiel that’s basically “we come to you from a violent place with no music, a brutal land where freedom is a foreign concept. We call it hell, but it’s not our homeland – it’s an Australian detention centre!” Take that, Thatcher… uh, Turnbull.
Mainstream Australian comedy films aren’t usually associated with political activism, though The Castle famously references Mabo and Crackerjack was designed to demonstrate that Australia didn’t have to be a country where the old were pitted against the young. By the way, how Aussie is this film? It only stars Magda Szubanski, Michael Caton, Deborah Mailman, Peter Rowsthorn, Jacqueline McKenzie and John Waters. It’s almost as if Elton had something to prove.
Anyway, this is extremely right-on in a very leftie way. Sure, on some level most Australians know that the way we treat asylum seekers is barbaric, the rift between white and Aboriginal Australia is pretty deep, and old people are racist as all hell, but usually our movies are too busy going on about how hot incest is to have time to bluntly spell out our social ills again and again and again. Elton is an old, old hand at comedy so he knows to mix the preaching in with a bunch of jokes – some of which are actually not bad – but this is still a film with a lot to get off its chest. It’s almost kinda sorta justified story-wise thanks to being set at a folk festival packed with greenies, but it’s still hammer-subtle at the best of times.
Aside from that… actually, it’s really hard to look aside from that, because everything else here is extremely forgettable. The romance is stock standard, the characters are all cliches, their development is utterly predictable, the three summers gimmick is a bit uneven (the first summer takes up more than half the film) and while the film’s best jokes are at the expense of right-on attitudes those same attitudes lead to some fairly blunt moments that are well meaning but not exactly understated.
And by that we mean, this is a film where Michael Caton plays an old racist who ends up doing an traditional Aboriginal dance to express his solidarity with the Stolen Generation. And yet this is still probably the funniest Australian film of the year. Because it’s the only Australian comedy film of the year! Sorry, that one where the teen boy and his dad both compete to bone the same quirky stranger doesn’t count.
Cram it with Walnuts, Ugly!
“Welcome to Cram!, the only quiz show in the entire world where the players get the answers before they’re asked the question” – well, apart from every other quiz show ever made, because if quiz shows only asked people questions they didn’t already have the answers to then the contestants would never get any answers right. And with that basic misunderstanding of the very nature of quiz shows, Cram! was off and running.
Unfortunately no-one bothered to check which direction it was running in and so it promptly went directly off a cliff. At least the basic idea was both straightforward and not completely hopeless: two teams, three people per team, they each get shown a short video and then have to try and remember as much from it as possible. “It sounds easy, right,” says Helliar, “well, in theory, it should be”. Way to build suspense there, Pete.
Here’s how bad Cram! was: it’s a quiz show with an exclamation mark in the title. Not a question mark, which would actually make sense because the very basis of quiz shows is asking endless questions, but an exclamation mark because yeah! Excitement! Thrills! Peter Helliar! Wait, that can’t be right…
The only reason we’re cutting this awful, awful show even the slightest bit of slack is because despite being clearly rubbish on pretty much every level they did manage to get one bit right: they figured out a way to get the people at home involved. We hate comedy quiz shows here for all manner of reasons, but one of the big ones is that we’re lazy sods who want our shows to entertain us with as little effort as possible on our part. Quiz show fans, on the other hand, like to take part in their viewing. Yeah, because work is so much fun lets do even more of it in our limited time off, right?
Have You Been Paying Attention? works because it’s fast, funny, and is based on current affairs so quiz show fans can test themselves against the contestants; in theory by showing both contestants and home viewers the same videoes in Cram, the people at home can also play along when it comes to answering questions about the video. Trouble is, if the rest of the show is a boring trudge through a self-congratulatory swamp, nobody in their right mind will want to watch long enough to find out they can play along. Welcome to the debut episode of Cram!.
Here’s a question Cram! didn’t get around to asking: has Peter Helliar ever hosted a successful show? Sure, he’s been involved in various forgettable sports-related shows – Before the Game, The Bounce, The Trophy Room – and there’s been that extremely long stretch where he appeared behind and slightly to the left of Rove (Rove, the Rove-produced The Project) – but aside from being a good mate to Rove and liking sport, what exactly are his qualifications for hosting a prime-time game show? The ability to say “Cram!” three dozen times without throwing up on himself?
And why do these comedy quiz shows still think it’s a good idea to have “banter” before the questions? Again, we point at HYBPA? – there they power through the pre-quiz banter as quickly as possible (at this stage it’s little more than “nobody dead? Let’s begin”) and then occasionally ask the contestants stuff in between questions if there’s anything interesting to ask. Here’s there’s a good minute or so of people answering the gripping question “anyone here ever flown on a plane?” Sure, Woodley got to make a 90 year old contortionist joke (“I wanted to be a contortionist but I could never get into it”), but when that kind of material is the funniest thing on offer why are you making a quiz show?
All the usual, played out elements were on offer: rounds that mean nothing, “cryptic images” as a way to select topics, endless host prattle, people laughing at nothing, endless cutaways to other people laughing at “jokes”, pointless “intense” lighting, idle musing on exactly when Talkin’ ’bout Your Generation will be airing in 2018… okay, the last one was probably just us.
Suffice to say that even with an endless and completely inexplicable bit about a horse that said “baa” instead of “neigh”, there was nothing on offer in Cram! that made it stand out in any way from any other totally forgettable comedy game show of the last decade or two. Even All-Star Family Feud is more memorable, and that’s just Family Feud with people we don’t recognise.
Launching a new game show with barely a month left in the ratings isn’t exactly a vote of confidence in any aspect of the show. Even for something that presumably cost around $4.95 to make this was dire: the contestants went in as people audiences weren’t excited about and left pretty much the same way, the host is a proven dud who delivered roughly the same performance that’s sunk every other show he’s ever hosted (again, where is the solo success Peter Hellier can point to as justification for ever getting work again?) and the format was slow, dull and almost completely without charm.
Cheer up Woodley, it’ll all be over soon.
Kennedy Molloy – Anything could happen
It’s always a safe bet that a show introducing itself with “this could go anywhere” isn’t going to deliver, and so it is – so far – with Kennedy Molloy.
Having said that, Kennedy Molloy has a lot of good things going for it. Jane Kennedy and Mick Molloy have been doing radio, comedy and radio comedy for three decades, and have always been part of successful, well-liked programs. The D-Generation, Martin/Molloy and The Hot Breakfast were ratings smashes, and so anticipated has Kennedy Molloy been that the show’s podcast is already in the iTunes top 10 – how many radio shows do that after first week?
Problem is, Kennedy Molloy is also like a lot of other radio shows out there: two people having a gab about what’s in the papers, what’s on the telly and what happened to them last night. And while we get that a lot of people seem to like that kind of thing, in radio terms it’s about as cookie cutter as you can get. Are fans of Jane Kennedy and Mick Molloy, who grew up with The D-Generation, Martin/Molloy and The Late Show – shows which really pushed the boundaries of what you’d expect of breakfast radio, drivetime radio or late night live comedy – really going to be satisfied with that?
Currently, the vibe of Kennedy Molloy is “Hughsie and Kate but far less annoying”. And if that’s as far as the show goes when it comes to standing out in the marketplace, then they might as well not even bother.
But that’s probably not going to happen.
Triple M Melbourne’s Hot Breakfast, the show Mick Molloy left to do Kennedy Molloy, was always enlivened, nay, made listenable, by Mick’s personal take on the well-worn tropes of commercial radio, so a better Kennedy Molloy is likely.
It’s also probably not fair to judge a show which is only a week or so old. And is quite deliberately warming itself up in Melbourne only before going national next year.
One thing is certain, though: Kennedy and Molloy are going to need to personalise their show. Play to their strengths as comedians and radio personalities and do the kind of radio that the likes of Hughsie and Kate, and the various other guy/girl radio combos around the nation, wouldn’t do.
Can they do it? Sure they can. Will they do it? We’ll have to wait and see.
Rebrand of the Hand
Friday afternoon is usually the time when governments and large organisations announce bad news in the hope that the media and the general public – already halfway out the door for the weekend – will fail to give it their full attention. So having this story leak out of the ABC late last week doesn’t exactly bode well:
ABC are getting serious about comedy with the announcement today of a new suite of content and a channel re-brand for ABC2.
With a slew of content across the main channel, the new re-branded ABC2, podcasts, radio and online, ABC is launching their new venture with ABC Comedy.
“ABC2 needed an identity and direction so it meant something,” ABC’s Director of Television David Anderson told HuffPost Australia.
“We were looking at what we’re well known for — news and current affairs, Australian drama, children’s programming and telling Australian stories — but we’re also known for great Australian comedy. So we thought, why don’t we make ABC2 into ABC Comedy?”
Starting December 4 the channel will convert at 7:30pm each night from ABC Kids to ABC Comedy, with an increase in content, as well as a new digital strategy across the board.
Is this a good thing for Australian comedy? Here’s a clue: when television networks invest big in an area they want to dominate in – say, with a high profile drama series or big sporting event – do they put it on a minor digital channel? If you’re thinking of saying “but the idea is that viewers will follow the shows they want to watch”, don’t: if that was an actual thing that happened, we’d have already seen it happen a thousand times. No-one thought Channel Ten was trying to boost the ratings of Neighbours when they put it onto a digital channel, and nobody seriously thinks the ABC is trying to boost Australian comedy here. Heck, even the Herald Sun found a guy who thinks it’s “an odd move”.
And in case you think we’re being a bit harsh:
New series of returning favourites will also be appearing on the main channel with more of ‘Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell’, ‘Gruen’ and ‘The Weekly with Charlie Pickering’.
So the comedy shows that rate well will remain on the main channel: everything else might end up carted off to the wrong side of the tracks. Sounds like the Wednesday night comedy line-up could end up as a Wednesday night comedy timeslot – let’s say 8.30pm – with God only knows what filling out the rest of the night.
That’s not to say this ghettoisation of the ABC’s comedy output is doomed to be a total disaster for Australian comedy. It’s perfectly possible that, freed of the constraints of having to please the rusted-on ABC audience, the new channel could commission a range of shows that we’d otherwise miss out on, leading to ground-breaking new material that audiences might actually want to seek out on a channel they otherwise would never watch. Or not:
One of the flagship programs ABC Comedy will launch with is ‘Tonightly with Tom Ballard’ which will air weeknights at 9, and streamed in full on ABC iView and YouTube.
The show, filmed at ABC Ultimo, will feature live interviews, sketches, reviews and the daily headlines as Tom Ballard and his team Greta Lee-Jackson, Greg Larsen and Bridie Connell tackle everything from news, culture and entertainment “armed with nothing but jokes”.
So it’s The Feed, only not as high-profile.
We don’t even have to read between the lines to see that this new channel will be a dumping ground for a vast range of second run material from overseas*, the occasional new local sitcom that will vanish without trace**, and a bunch of iView material broadcast to fill in the gaps*** (and don’t forget there’ll be “Stand-up comedy — lots of it, including Melbourne Comedy Festival Gala, opening night supershow and The Great Debate.). That’s because it’s pretty much exactly what ABC2 was originally doing seven years ago, only then the ABC wasn’t possibly**** scraping all the comedy off their main channel to make it happen.
And just how well did that work out for ABC2? Can a revival of Back Seat Drivers be far off?
*the official ABC press release says “there [sic] a plethora of premium international titles to launch the ABC COMEDY channel including: Game Face, Catastrophe S3, Episodes S4&5, Murder in Successville, Inside Amy Schumer S3&4 and every weeknight a chance to enjoy Never Mind the Buzzcocks, The Office, 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation. 2018 titles include Fleabag S1, Plebs S3, Asian Provocateur, and Idiot Sitter S1, with more to come.”
**the official ABC press release doesn’t actually mention ANY new local content for the new ABC Comedy channel aside from Ballard’s tonight show – everything new is… well, read for yourself: “The laughs will continue on the ABC’s main channel, with a raft of returning favourites in 2018 including Gruen, Shaun Micallef’s Mad As Hell, The Weekly with Charlie Pickering, Black Comedy and the Melbourne International Comedy Festival 2018 in addition to new series from some of Australia’s best. Squinters stars Tim Minchin plus a stellar ensemble cast including Jacki Weaver. It follows five car-loads of Sydney commuters squinting into the sun and riffing on their days. Sando is a new family comedy that follows the trials of lovable larrikin Victoria ‘Sando’ Sandringham. Don Angel (Wayne Hope) returns in Back in Very Small Business. And Corey White’s Road Map to Paradise tackles the big issues of the day and aims to solve them—with a laugh or two—in 15 minutes!”
***Uh, what does these shows have to do with the new channel? They all sound like iView only series: “Lovers of snackable short form comedy will enjoy six all new Australian ABC COMEDY series available on iview from December 4. These include Nakkiah Lui’s new series Kiki and Kitty; #CelesteChallengeAccepted from comedian and Instagram star Celeste Barber; The Chinaboy Show from YouTube sensation John Luc (aka MyChonny); Neel Kolhatkar’s Virgin Bush; the charming Other People’s Problems; new Indigenous comedy Aussie Rangers; plus the next series of When TV Was Awesome as well as 60 new bite-sized films from the new batch of Fresh Blood teams.”
****So basically the ABC is making a channel no-one watches even more niche almost entirely as a rebranding exercise – they’re not even going to make the stupid but committed move of pushing all their local scripted comedy content (which currently sounds extremely dire, by the way) over there. Once again the ABC reveals their fondness for promoting things using the word “comedy” without actually putting in the effort to make any.
Getting Back With Your Ex
For a man so consistently hilarious, it’s a little surprising that Shaun Micallef has never quite cracked the secret of sitcom success. Welcher & Welcher has its defenders – ironically, they don’t include Micallef himself – but it’s generally seen as more miss than hit, while the first season of The Ex-PM never really scaled the humour heights that Mad as Hell has made its home. For a performer who’s tried (and generally been pretty good at) just about every form of comedy there is (aside from stand-up)… what gives?
The answer lies in the first episode of the second season of The Ex-PM, which is handy as this is meant to be a review of that show. While the first season was largely about the titular former PM Andrew Dugdale (Micallef) puttering around at a loose end while his family and various sycophants fluttered around him like moths to an extremely small flame, this time around there’s been an injection of narrative: Dugdale has been asked to stand in a by-election for a safe seat, which is so safe no possible amount of bungling could tip it the other way. Ahem. Laughs ensue, along with various hints that something more sinister is going on, as the whole gang ups stumps for the rural electorate (which looks a lot in parts like the industrial areas out the back of Micallef’s home suburb of Williamstown).
Probably the most startling moment was the appearance of the recently deceased John Clarke – actually in the flesh and not only appearing over video, as he did in the first series. Reportedly he passed away only a few days after he finished filming his scenes in April: he’s as funny as ever, but it’s still going to take a little bit of adjusting before we can really get around to laughing at him here. But his scenes also reveal why Micallef’s sitcoms haven’t really taken off (with the possible exception of Welcher & Welcher, because… well, read on).
One of the many, many reasons why John Clarke’s death was a massive loss to Australian comedy is that he was easily the best comedic performer around who you could always rely on not to steal the show. Well, he always stole the show – c’mon, it’s John Clarke – but his performances were always low-key, assured, and unshowy. He was a brilliant performer who was also a safe pair of hands, which is why he often showed up across from performers who rarely let other big guns in the room: he could hold his own without overshadowing the star.
On another, initially unrelated point, Micallef really does seem to be a big fan of screwball comedy. His favoured pace for delivering dialogue is “rapid-fire” (the dialogue itself can usually be filed under “snappy”) and if the jokes aren’t coming fast enough that just means there’s room to squeeze a few more into the gaps. Which is all well and good: lord knows Australian comedy needs more practitioners whose knowledge of the genre goes beyond a few episodes of The Office.
The thing is though, screwball comedy doesn’t necessarily throw everything at the wall at once. Many of the best-loved examples basically involve two people firing lines at each other. And while Micallef tried this with some success in Mr & Mrs Murder, nobody watched it and he hasn’t worked with Kat Stewart since, which is a massive shame. Going all out works perfectly well on Mad as Hell because it’s a screwball comedy with the audience as Micallef’s partner. He can spin jokes and pull faces to his hearts content because we don’t have to do anything but keep watching to keep up: when he does it in a sitcom he really needs to be facing off against an equal.
The Ex-PM has a great cast, but none of them really work as consistent foils for Micallef. Nicholas Bell has a more low-key kind of energy; when he goes big it often feels like an act. Francis Greenslade is basically Robin to Micallef’s Batman; they might go about things differently but they always feel like they’re working towards the same end. But John Clarke is a performer who can stand up to Micallef – he’s just as naturally funny but in a very different way, and there’s a useful comedic tension in their (all too brief) back-and-forths.
(the same thing happened in Welcher & Welcher, where Robyn Butler made for a perfect counterpoint to Micallef’s buffoonery. For a long time Micallef was pretty much the only male Australian television comic who seemed comfortable working opposite women as equals: we wish he’d do more of it)
Unfortunately Clarke is just one member of a large cast on The Ex-PM, and while the constant flurry of activity is no doubt meant to be part of the appeal, it wouldn’t hurt to slow things down a little. Then again, the reveal of having the political tour bus be just a regular public transport bus – complete with someone pushing the button to get off at the next stop – was as good a joke as any we’ve seen locally this year. Maybe we should be satisfied with what we’ve got.
Rosehaven and The Letdown – back for more
It would be fair to say that tonight’s new Wednesday night sitcom double bill of Rosehaven followed by The Letdown didn’t initially excite us. We found the first series of Rosehaven a bit patchy, and we really disliked the pilot of The Letdown when it aired last year as part of Comedy Showroom, yet both seem fresher and improved after their hiatus.
The best bits of Rosehaven series one, were when Emma (Celia Pacquola) and Daniel (Luke McGregor) talked shit and played pointless, stupid pranks on each other. Less good, although kind of important in a sitcom, were the plots and other characters, which most of the time weren’t particularly funny.
Having perhaps realised where their show’s strength lay, writers and stars Pacquola and McGregor seem to have included more scenes where they can play off each other in this series, which means more laughs, although the other characters in the show are still way less funny than they are.
Daniel’s Mum Barbara (Kris McQuade) is sometimes funny, but mostly she’s there to be a scary authority figure, and when she does have a funny line it’s played so dry that the gag doesn’t quite work. As for Daniel’s girlfriend Grace (Katie Robertson), she just seems like the sort of generic girlfriend character that we thought we’d seen the last of in 90s sitcoms. It doesn’t help that we’ve only seen Grace via Skype so far this series, but even so, there’s little in the way of personality or comic potential there.
Mrs Marsh (Noela Foxcroft), McCallum Real Estate’s elderly receptionist, usually says something bizarrely funny, she only has about two lines per episode, so she’s no comic saviour. And while some of the guest or occasional roles in Rosehaven raise a laugh, that’s not quite enough for us. Seriously, this is a sitcom, everything about it should be trying to be funny.
The Letdown, on the other, seems more the kind of sitcom where pretty much all the characters have the potential to be funny. The show’s two main characters, new mother Audrey (Alison Bell) and 12-week-old Stevie, aside, it has a range of amusing supporting players, including the attendees at the local new mothers group, Audrey’s horrified childless friends, her self-indulgent mother and a local drug dealer she keeps running into.
And if you thought the first episode of The Letdown was a little different to the one which aired last year during Comedy Showroom, you’re right. The scenes involving Audrey’s husband Jeremy have been re-shot, as the role is now being played by Duncan Fellows.
Particularly worth noting is the scene where Audrey and Jeremy try to have sex for the first time since Stevie’s birth, but Stevie keeps crying, putting them both off. In the pilot this was a fairly short scene, and far less funny. Now, it’s really funny, and goes on for ages – it’s probably the highlight of the show.
It’s always good to see a show work to improve things and make them funnier. And having gone in not liking The Letdown, we think there are reasons to be optimistic about the rest of the series.
Short film and why it’s never funny
On this blog, we often try to work out why certain shows or genres are or aren’t funny. So, if we had to vote for the genre least likely to generate laughs we’d probably go for short film.*
The basic problem with short films doing comedy is that the sort of people who make short films, generally speaking, aren’t comedians or comedy writers; they’re people who want to make serious feature films and are only making a short film as a showcase. Which means that while many short films are billed as comedies, they’re not really comedies, more quirky dramas. And we all know how hilarious they are.
So, let’s just say that whenever we’re presented with a short film that’s described as “comedy” we don’t go into it with much optimism that it will be hilarious. Especially if the synopsis also includes the words “dark” and “drama”.
…Which brings us to the award-winning and internationally screened short film Kharisma, which recently appeared in the comedy category of ABC iView. We decided to take a look; here are some thoughts…
In comedy terms, Kharisma starts off okay. We see a series of auditions from child performers, who range from “funny because they’re so precocious” to “funny because they’re terrible”. Then Kam, the man running the auditions, becomes rather excited by Mary, a girl doing some reasonably-risqué-dancing-for-her-age. “Please tell us it’s not heading there”, we thought, reports about the antics of Harvey Weinstein fresh in our minds.
The final child to audition is Kharisma, a mousey, bespectacled bundle of energy wearing colourful feathers and doing an African tribal dance kinda act. “No”, says Kam. Then, “See you at home for dinner”.
Cut to dinner, a bleak affair where Kharisma and her Mum Karen wait for Kam to join them at the table before they start eating. Home is just another show Kam’s in charge of, it seems, and it isn’t allowed start until he’s there.
Then Mary arrives, for extra rehearsal. Another opportunity for Kam to remind Kharisma that she’s not good enough to be in his show, and for the director of Kharisma to imply that Kam’s a paedophile. **
Spoilers, but he isn’t. He’s just really, really into nurturing new child talent. Which is a relief, although he’s still an arsehole. And why does he tie his wife to the bed each night, and then just go to sleep leaving her there? Weird.
We won’t spoil the end, as it’s kind of sweet, but nothing funny happens. In fact, nothing funny happens in Kharisma after the first scene with all the terrible auditions, which makes this film about 10% comedy at best. But, that’s the short film genre. Comedy means something different here, and it’s “there’s at least one moment you might laugh at”.
Kharisma is a good short film overall – well made, engrossing, good performances and a nice twist at the end – we just don’t think it should have been labelled comedy. And that goes for anything else that’s not trying to be funny at least 50% of the time.
* That or theatre. Oh man, the comedy you get at the theatre… Jokes either so up themselves or so lame that they could only raise laughs from an audience of people who want to be seen to get the joke. You know the type.
** To be fair, Kharisma was made about 4 years ago, well before the Harvey Weinstein scandal, but still…
Vale Get Krack!n
If you had to think of a single word to describe Australian television comedy – and that word was legally required to be complimentary – you couldn’t go far wrong with “polished”. Whatever the many, many many, many many many flaws with our nation’s comedy output, one thing it pretty much always manages to do is look like something put together by a crack team of very competent straight-faced professionals.
This is, of course, literal fucking death when it comes to comedy. Decent comedy has a bit of life to it, whether it’s the writers occasionally wandering off to amuse themselves or performances that go off in a direction you might not expect. Polished comedy can be great, but if there’s not a rough edge or surprise turn in there to let us know we’re watching something made by humans all you’ve got is one of those “hilarious” comedy ads from Gruen.
And it’s been a long time since Australian television saw a comedy with as much life to it as Get Krack!n. It wasn’t a particularly even show – though in what’s probably a plus, at Casa Del Tumbleweeds we couldn’t quite agree on which episodes were the duds – but when the structure was a bit shaky there was always plenty of golden moments and when the individual jokes were a bit iffy there was often a strong through-line that held it all together.
Just as importantly, it was a comedy getting laughs out of material that Australian television comedy hardly ever goes near. Rarely does the ABC deign to put on a show that dares to point out that hey, regular average not-that-bad Australian life is still often a bit shit for many people (especially women); it’s been a very long time since we’ve had a comedy series point out that television is largely focused on making us feel worse so they can sell us crap.
Not everything worked, and sometimes it didn’t work in odd ways. Take that seemingly endless segment where the Kates were asked to literally eat shit for Reconciliation. In theory it was funny (well, “funny”) because the Kates were so keen to do the right thing they’d do the worst thing; in practice there’s an Aboriginal person asking white people to eat his shit. What are we laughing at here?
But it was a show that would try that kind of thing, which is worth applauding in and of itself. Usually in Australian comedy by the time someone gets a TV show they’ve had their anger – and most of their personality – hammered out of them (or they’ve lived a life so focused on getting on TV there was never a personality there to begin with); there was never a moment’s doubt that Get Krack!n was coming from a place that was pretty goddamn angry at a whole lot of stuff. So even when the end result was a bit shaky there was a fire burning there we really don’t see enough of on our screens, especially in comedy.
There was plenty of more traditional elements to laugh at too – they never seemed to find an end to the funny ways to point out the cliches of television production, and as a double act The Kates are definitely up there with Australia’s all time greats. The rare times they made fun of themselves for doing their jobs “properly” (like the disaster episode, where they alternated between panic, despair, and glee at the boost their ratings would get from their coverage) were always entertaining too: the baseline of Kate McLennan being over-committed while Kate McCartney was often actively disengaged (a hold over from The Katering Show) was harder to plausibly sustain as hosts of an actual (if clearly shit) morning show, but it meant that when they broke out of those roles it was often a comedy highlight.
Get Krack!n wasn’t the most finely polished comedy on Australian television, and we’re not talking about the many jokes about how shoddy the show’s production values were. But it was a comedy made by people who had something very pissed off to say and they weren’t going to let anyone stop them from saying it. We could do with a lot more like it.
Ten Years On: The Silence Around Summer Heights High
As you read this, it’s exactly ten years since Chris Lilley’s Summer Heights High first aired on ABC television. Running from September 5th to October 24th in 2007, it was a ratings smash – one and a half million Australians tuned in for the final episode – that made Chris Lilley a household name and led to two spin-off series. It was also an international success, airing in both the UK (on BBC Three) and the USA (HBO) pulling in numerous glowing reviews from across the nation. Lilley went on to win a Silver Logie for his work in Summer Heights High, and the show itself won the Logie for Most Outstanding Comedy Program. It’s easily the biggest success story in Australian comedy of the 21st Century: so where’s the celebration?
Oh that’s right: Chris Lilley is now a creepy racist. A backlash that began with his 2011 series Angry Boys has slowly gathered steam until in 2017 his Summer Heights High spin-off Jonah from Tonga was withdrawn from New Zealand’s Maori Television for ““perpetuat[ing] negative stereotypes of Pacific people”. Not to be diverted from a career path built on “saying the unsayable” that he’s been committed to since at least 2004, Lilley then went on to post an already extremely dubious clip from Angry Boys titled “squashed n**ga” three days after a Northern Territory* (*edit, it was actually Western Australia) court case involving a man who ran over an aboriginal child. It’s probably a touch difficult to celebrate today a comedian who two months ago was being called by Briggs “an out of touch classic Australian racist”.
And yet the media silence around this major anniversary still seems a little odd. Summer Heights High was a massive achievement, and if its star and creator has gone off the boil in recent years… well, there are plenty of critics around with loads of experience talking about a classic hit from someone who’s now mostly churning out rubbish. On the flip side, a few months ago everyone was wiling to line up to give him a good kicking for being a shit: where are the anniversary stories pointing out that Summer Heights High is now actually kind of embarrassing?
We already know the answer: Summer Heights High‘s reputation as a classic is untouchable. Go through every recent story about how Chris Lilley is now a creepy racist: every one either avoids mentioning Summer Heights High or suggests that while he used to be good he’s well past his prime. Summer Heights High is the reason why anyone cares about Chris Lilley in 2017: it has to be untouchable because otherwise the story isn’t “decent comedian goes off the rails and we’re woke enough to point it out” but “shit comedian always was shit”.
And yet, if you actually watch Summer Heights High, it’s exactly as problematic (and as unfunny) as his later works. Just compare Ja’mie in SHH to her debut in We Can Be Heroes: first time around, she was part of a double act with her put-upon mum, with the comedy coming in part from the way her selfish, demanding attitude had a clear victim (who’d made a rod for her own back by indulging Ja’mie’s every whim). But in Summer Heights High, she’s just a bitch with a bitchy support group wandering around coming up with increasingly “shocking” schemes (taking a lesbian to the school dance, organising a fake AIDS fundraiser to secretly pay for an expensive school formal). Reviews at the time made sure to constantly praise Lilley’s realism…because high status seventeen year-old girls are always dating twelve year-old boys like Ja’mie does in SHH.
Meanwhile, high school drama teacher Mr G is trying to get rid of his down syndrome sidekick by placing a turd in a classroom and blaming him for it. And while Lilley might have had some of the nuances of an awkward posturing 13 year old boy down pat, Jonah still embodied all the usual cliches about Islanders. Ha ha, he’s a disruptive vandal! Watch out for his scary violent dad! Child abuse allegations!
Right from the start, Chris Lilley has always been a one note performer. His best work is the first time you discover him, because all his work is pretty much the same. That said, his sketches as Mr G on Big Bite were easily the best thing on that series, and they still hold up today – mostly because it was short segments where he had to get to the point in a minute or two. Everything since then has been Lilley doing the exact same thing over a longer and longer time frame: how many hours now has he spent exploring the character of Ja’mie King? For a character with no supporting cast and no real character beyond “she’s kind of a self-centered bitch”, spending three television series – including a six part solo series – playing her suggests a startling lack of artistic ambition.
That’s not to say Lilley isn’t good at what he does – it’s that what he does is create a comedy character, dress up as a comedy character, put on a comedy character voice, and then refuse to do anything funny with the character. Jonah’s character arc is always the same: he’s a loveable knockabout prankster who annoys the grown-ups, only to slowly get in over his head as his pranks turn out to have consequences and oh no now he’s in real trouble. Remember when he was an armed robber in Jonah From Tonga and it wasn’t played for laughs? Chris Lilley is a serious artist, and he wants you to take him seriously.
Which leads to one of the more awkward questions no-one seems to want to answer about Summer Heights High: so what exactly is the joke? In Summer Heights High Lilley plays a): a teenage girl, b): a gay cliche, c): an Islander. Two out of the three characters are monsters; the third is a clueless idiot we’re meant to grow to pity. If the joke is meant to be based on the characters themselves – they’re awful people behaving awfully – why couldn’t an actual young woman and an Islander play Ja’mie and Jonah? And if the joke is that a white man is playing these characters… what’s funny about that?
And yet all the controversy has fallen on his later, identical, shows. To be fair, that’s partly because Jonah From Tonga was the show stirring up the fuss earlier this year. But all of Chris Lilley’s solo work has the exact same issues, because – as previously mentioned – it’s all exactly the same. He’s a skilled mimic who thinks mimicking women, minorities, and teenagers is intrinsically hilarious. Summer Heights High was just the first time a wide audience saw what he was up to. And they loved it.
*Look at the “controversies” listed on Wikipedia:
The series is renowned for its controversial portrayal of such issues as mental disabilities, homosexuality, sexual abuse and racism. Even before Summer Heights High aired, some community groups complained about a “rape joke” and Mr G’s inappropriate “touching” of a boy with Down syndrome.[17]
The Herald Sun reported that parents and some teachers have considered the possibility that the show is influencing children to misbehave at school. Students were reportedly imitating Jonah and Ja’mie, repeating lines that were bullying, racist and homophobic.[18] Education Union branch president Mary Bluett stated in response that the show was “clearly tongue-in-cheek“.[19]
After episode three, in which a character called Annabel dies after taking ecstasy, the family of Annabel Catt, a girl who died taking drugs at the 2007 Good Vibrations Festival in Sydney, complained that the program had been lampooning Annabel’s death.[17] The ABC apologised to the family, stating that the situation was purely coincidental and assured them that the filming of the episode in question had been completed eleven days before her daughter’s death. The ABC thereafter began to display a message before each episode stating that there is no link between the series’ characters and people in real life.[17]
Where’s the controversy that Jonah in Summer Heights High was a blackface character? Let’s say it again: every single problem people have with Jonah in Jonah From Tonga is present in Summer Heights High. And yet, where’s the controversy? In fact, when reviewers bring it up – which they do, in a sign that they’re fully aware of how it looks – it’s to reassure viewers that no, this isn’t blackface but a sharply observed character:
the barely literate, troublemaking Jonah is something else again — there is nothing exaggerated about the performance, in which Lilley perfectly embodies all the brutal tics and awkward evasions of a mixed-up 13-year-old boy. And though he’s a bit of a foulmouthed bully, Jonah is the only one of the three leads you are asked to like; he gives the series the heart without which it would otherwise expire.
Played by a white man with his face painted black.
The reason why Summer Heights High is untouchable is obvious: even the people happy to throw Chris Lilley under a bus today want to defend it. This supposedly savage takedown of Lilley from a few months ago lays out the score:
When I first saw We Can Be Heroes I thought “yes, this guy gets it: it all can be skewered”. With Summer Heights High he seemed to reach another plateau: “Mr G is Mrs Clements!” I thought, while high-schoolers a nation over said variations of the same. He was an enviable mimic, and one whose comedy was steeped in the dry pathos of a form that had gone from Spinal Tap, to Working Dog, to David Brent, and beyond.
That dry mockumentary style gave the character’s a weighted authenticity that would otherwise be absent. It’s not racist, you’d tell yourself. Jonah is fleshed out: look at this moment when he is sad about failing school. If Lilley was truly racist, Jonah wouldn’t be depicted as vulnerable. This is funny, we said, but it’s sincere.
Friends, God help you if you laugh at the same things as a 14 year old when you are anything but. God help you if you can’t peer through the fog of nostalgia at a cultural artefact and admit to yourself “gee, that’s actually a little bit shit, and a lot problematic.”
And yet this is exactly what happens in this article: Summer Heights High is mentioned as being his older, funnier stuff, and then the writer goes on to slam Angry Boys and Jonah from Tonga for all the exact same problems SHH has. All Chris Lilley’s series are the same: all of them are based around the idea that a white guy pretending to be a cliched parody of a minority is funny – by which we mean awkward, annoying and embarrassing, because they’re the reactions Lilley strives for rather than anything approaching amusement – in and of itself. But because one and a half million Australians thought Summer Heights High was pretty hilarious back in 2007 and don’t want to have their past challenged, their memories become our critical standard.
So Summer Heights High remains untouchable, despite being as deeply problematic – and generally unfunny – as anything else Chris Lilley has done. It can’t be celebrated, because all the problems in his later, more easily disparaged work are on full display. It can’t be dismissed, because that would be saying that big, big audience was wrong to like it in the first place.
And we couldn’t say that now, could we?