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Press release time!
Triple the laughs in October, on ABC
Get ready to triple your laughs with three new comedies premiering next month on ABC and ABC iview.
Tuesday, September 19, 2017 — Get ready to triple your laughs with three new comedies premiering next month on ABC and ABC iview.
Fans of comedy legend Shaun Micallef rejoice… Australia’s longest serving caretaker Prime Minister Andrew Dugdale is back in a new series of The Ex-PM. Beloved comics Celia Pacquola and Luke McGregor return to quirky country life in a second season of Rosehaven. And, motherhood and mayhem go hand in hand in mothers’ group comedy The Letdown, starring Alison Bell and Noni Hazlehurst – and based on the Comedy Showroom pilot named Best Television Screenplay at the 2016 AACTA Awards.
ABC Head of Television David Anderson says “We’re lucky here in Australia to have such dynamic and risk-taking comedy talent. It means there is always a sense of freshness and edge in what we get to see. Next month’s line up is no different – Rosehaven, The Letdown and The Ex-PM are a great showcase of Australian comedy at its best. We look forward to sharing triple the laughs with our audiences!”
ABC Head of Comedy Rick Kalowski says “These three series Rosehaven, The Ex-PM and The Letdown – the first a small town charmer, the second a joke-packed political satire, the third an often heartbreaking comedy-drama, from creators/stars both established and new – speak to the ABC’s unceasing commitment to be the home of Australian comedy of every kind. We couldn’t be prouder of all three shows.”
Rosehaven Wednesday 25 October at 9:05pm
Daniel (Luke McGregor) and Emma (Celia Pacquola) are back in a second season of their hit, award-winning Rosehaven. They’re housemates and workmates again and finally both feel like they belong. The question now is whether Rosehaven agrees. Also stars Kris McQuade, Katie Robertson, David Quirk and Sam Cotton. Sundance TV (USA) now co-presents the show with ABC TV, bringing this quintessentially Aussie comedy to the rest of the world.
The Letdown Wednesday 25 October at 9.35pm
The Letdown is the story of Audrey (Alison Bell), a struggling new mum, and the parents group she thinks she doesn’t need. The series proves that being a parent can be both extreme and hilarious. Directed by Trent O’Donnell the show also stars Noni Hazlehurst, Duncan Fellows, Sacha Horler, Leon Ford, Lucy Durack, Celeste Barber, Leah Vandenberg, Xana Tang and Sarah Peirse. Netflix will stream the series globally outside Australia and it will be available on Netflix in Australia after its run on the ABC.
The Ex-PM Thursday 26 October at 8.30pm
Comedy is back on Thursday nights with the return of the hit series The Ex-PM. Retired, third longest serving caretaker Australian Prime Minister, Andrew Dugdale (Shaun Micallef) is called back into the political fold to run in a sudden, ‘must win’ by-election. Also stars Nicki Wendt, Kate Jenkinson, Francis Greenslade, Nicholas Bell, Lucy Honigman, Ming-Zhu Hii, Jackson Tozer and the late, great John Clarke in his final television appearance.
PLEASE NOTE:
The Letdown episode 1 is the original award winning pilot, now starring Duncan Fellows as Jeremy, with 6 brand new episodes to follow.
The original seasons of Rosehaven and The Ex-PM will be available on ABC iview from Wednesday 11 October and Friday 13 October respectively.
Do we really need to point out that two out of three – the least interesting two at that – are international co-productions? Of course not. “We’re lucky here in Australia to have such dynamic and risk-taking comedy talent,” remember? Because comedy series about a quirky small country town and motherhood are such big risks.
And anyway, if we were to suggest that trying to make a comedy for an international audience automatically results in bland, middle-of-the-road material designed to generate not strong feelings either way, anyone sensible reading this could throw back a dozen examples from here and overseas of comedy series this century that have done well the world over while still maintaining their “freshness and edge”.
Just none made by the ABC.
Whither Rebel?
In the wake of Rebel Wilson receiving a record payout as a result of winning her defamation lawsuit against Bauer Media, where does humanity possibly go from here? It’s the size of the payout that’s news-worthy; anyone with eyes to see knew she was going to win the second it was announced it was a jury trial – good luck finding six people in this country who won’t side with a celebrity against a gossip magazine – and it seems the judge figured Wilson’s career was on a massive upswing after Pitch Perfect 2 so why not give her all the money?
The judge accepted without qualification that I had an extremely high reputation and that the damage inflicted on me was substantial.
— Rebel Wilson (@RebelWilson) September 13, 2017
Wilson has since made it perfectly clear that she’s not going to be keeping the cash, instead handing it out to various as yet unspecified groups:
I’m looking forward to helping out some great Australian charities and supporting the Oz film industry with the damages I’ve received.
— Rebel Wilson (@RebelWilson) September 13, 2017
It seems an extremely safe bet that the media – Bauer Media in particular – will be monitoring very closely whether Rebel “most definitely not a serial liar” Wilson follows through on her pledge.
But the most interesting thing here is this tweet:
Today was the end of a long and hard court battle against Bauer Media who viciously tried to take me down with a series of false articles.
— Rebel Wilson (@RebelWilson) September 13, 2017
Specifically the phrase “false articles”. Because the thing is – and we’re totally not legal experts, let’s get that straight, we’re just going on what we’ve read – it’s doesn’t seem to have been the case that Bauer Media were found guilty of making shit up.
In light of this general acceptance Wilson had somewhat rewritten her own history to benefit her career and created mystery around her Hollywood persona, some have argued it was Wilson’s captivating performance in the court room which won the day, rather than the debate about the facts themselves.
But Justice Dixon dismissed the publisher’s arguments revealing Wilson’s background and branding her as a liar was trivial, saying in the judgement: “At the height of the plaintiff’s career, an international career that she had worked to build over 17 years, Bauer Media launched a calculated, baseless and unjustifiable public attack on her reputation.
Rather, while many of their basic facts were true – Wilson altered her age, fabricated much of her history, claimed to be related to Walt Disney despite no concrete evidence for it, and so on – Bauer Media were still wrong to publish articles based on those facts.
In Victoria at least, things can be defamatory even if they’re true. If a major newspaper was to write a cover story on the time Rebel Wilson dropped out of Jenny Craig with the headline REBEL WILSON: STILL FAT, it seems a fairly safe bet that legal trouble would ensue even though it could be argued that the story was technically true.
So the case here wasn’t so much that Bauer Media lied about Wilson, though there does seem to be at least a few areas where some of their facts were sketchy. Rather, it’s that by publishing a version of the truth in the way that they did, they intentionally did damage to her reputation that caused her to lose money. The judge, who swallowed whole Wilson’s legal team’s word for how successful her career was going at the time, established the massive damages payout based on that.
(personally, we would have thought the massive TV flop that was her sitcom Super Fun Night might have damaged her Hollywood career somewhat more than some stories in Woman’s Day. Not to mention between Pitch Perfects 1 and 2 Wilson appeared in a grand total of two films: Pain & Gain and Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, both of which were little more than cameos. If we’d been called to give evidence, we might have said that her career path at the time – two minor roles and a flop TV series over two years – might have suggested that her big pay day in Pitch Perfect 2 was more about the franchise paying big to get her back than the amount of money she could legitimately expect to attract to appear in movies without the words “Pitch Perfect” in the title)
The upshot of all this is, Wilson sued and won over a magazine writing stories about her that were, in a number of ways, technically true. Let’s let that sink in for a moment. You can write a story about Rebel Wilson that is factually correct, and if she thinks the tone of your story is defamatory she can sue you and – based on this result – take you to the cleaners for millions. The precedent has been set that because of Wilson’s line of work, it’s perfectly reasonable for her to “[rewrite] her own history to benefit her career and [create] mystery around her Hollywood persona”; if media organisations have facts that say otherwise, they’d better keep them to themselves.
Of course, many people are going to (rightly) argue that we all know the difference between a story that’s a hit-piece and a legitimate piece of journalism. But that’s not the point here. Wilson was, as previously stated, pretty much a lock to win this case because she’s a much-loved star and gossip magazines are scum; the big pay out is because the stories were supposedly timed to do maximum damage to her career.
But when then is the right time to point out that Wilson’s background is sketchy? If she was an up-and-coming actor or a struggling bit player, these stories could still conceivably prevent her from one day landing a potentially million-dollar role; if she’s ever made a big pay day but those days are behind her, well, actors make comebacks all the time. How are we to know another big paying role wasn’t just around the corner?
In the light of this, it seem fairly safe to suggest that coverage of Rebel Wilson in the Australian press in future will be… spotty. At best. Why risk reporting on her in any way when even the driest facts could be seen as an attack on her right to create mystery around herself? Why take the chance on conducting an interview with someone who’s been given a go-ahead by the courts to rewrite her own history? And what can you safely mention about her now anyway? Not her age, not her family history, and almost certainly not her past career as any mention of it in less than glowing terms could be seen by Wilson as “an attempt to take me down”.
As for us. we won’t be mentioning her again until she does something funny. It could be a long wait.
Nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah
Okay, so we’ve already made our moral objections to Gruen painfully clear. Someone has to: a few days ago we heard an ABC radio host describe Gruen as a show that “hates advertising”. Yeah, it hates advertising so much all it does is show ads. This is a show where a panelist can say with a straight face “future advertising is not false advertising… it’s a clever use of our own imagination” and not get stabbed on live TV. It’s a disgrace.
Something else it also is, is boring. Really, really boring. It’s a 35 minute show where for at least 20 minutes a bunch of tosspots sat around a desk discussing ways to advertise the NBN. It’s a show so boring that when a pathetically poor joke about a NBN commercial slogan is made – something along the lines of “Hey, the real slogan should be ‘Can’t someone else do it?'” – the audience cheers so loudly the show comes to a halt. Maybe they thought Wil Anderson was announcing his resignation.
Look, we all know the formula here. Show a commercial, Anderson makes a dad joke – seriously, lines like “Love the NBN logo, it’s like their coverage – spotty!” are the kind of shit jokes other characters roll their eyes at in shit sitcoms – the panelists throw around buzzwords like “branding problem” and “comprehension issue” to make the audience feel like insiders, and eventually things stagger to the sole other segment this show has, where advertising firms get to advertise themselves by working to some lame comedy brief. We often crap on about how Gruen is one long ad for advertising, but “The Pitch” is a literal ad for the agencies involved; if anyone still gave a fuck about the ABC charter this would get them taken off the air.
Occasionally the show seems dimly aware that they’re promoting one of the nastier and more evil industries in our society. A panelist discussing sales strategies will say something like “In advertising we call it aspiration, but it’s envy”, thus risking the audience’s realisation that yes, this is a show that celebrates an industry based around exploiting a real life Deadly Sin; while discussing an commercial sneering at hipsters Anderson will say “How do you decide, as an industry, on a hate group” and there’ll be just the slightest pause before everyone goes on about how mocking people is all in good fun and they’re really in on the gag and it’s basically celebrating their targets anyway. Oh ho ho ho. We can’t wait until they explain some of the dodgier “No” campaign ads for the gay marriage referendum as “basically celebrating their targets”.
But yeah, mostly it’s just boring. What kind of entertainment are we meant to extract from Wil Anderson saying “I checked when my area is getting the NBN and it’s not until 2019”? That sounds pretty good considering it’s got to go all the way across the Pacific Ocean to his place in LA. Which, we’ve got to assume, is where he’d live the whole year round if he didn’t have to come back here to record Gruen.
Even the one single line you’d expect us to enjoy – Russel Howcroft saying “Someone is finally putting some comedy on air” after a mildly amusing commercial for burgers – only reminded us of how smug and pointless this show really is. Of course he has no idea that comedy – actual decent comedy – was occupying his timeslot just a week earlier, because that comedy was on the ABC and the ABC doesn’t run commercials and commercials are the only thing on television he cares about. It’d be like us making some wry observation about sport: a total waste of everybody’s time.
And then Todd Sampson said with a straight face “It’s not hypocrisy, it’s advertising”. Like there’s any fucking difference.
Comedy on the edge (of the bush)
One of the stand-out cameos in Get Krackin last week was Anne Edmonds as fashion expert Helen Bidou, a near-perfect parody of the sort of TV personality who’d continue to smile inanely and prattle on even as she was being forced into a straightjacket by the sort of mental health workers who presumably no longer exist.
Edmonds specialises in creating grotesque characters and parodies and taking them as far as they can be taken before they become unfunny. Some might say they do become unfunny. There was certainly some debate here at Tumbleweed Towers about that recently. For one of us, Helen Bidou was so exaggerated and awful that she stopped being funny entirely.
So, what to make of The Edge of the Bush, where Edmonds plays a family of mercurial characters with a dark secret in her trademark style. Well, maybe it’ll improve, but one episode in and we’re not exactly hooked. Clearly, whatever happened to split the Watts family apart is so big and complicated that it takes more than 10 minutes to set it up. Which is a bit of a problem when each episode is 10 minutes long and they’re aired a week apart – and when, based on episode 1, they’re not exactly hilarious or full of characters you wish to spend time with.
Also, there’s something really jarring about the way The Edge of the Bush is full of incredibly over-the-top characters but is also a stylistic parody of shows like The Killing and Top of the Lake. Not only does the Scandi noir-esque background music and moody lighting really kill the comedy, it’s hard to deal with crazy comedy characters on top of a dark, twisted plot. It’s like every element of the show has been dialed up to 11; watching this feels exhausting!
We like Edmonds and the way she throws everything she’s got into her creations, but there needs to be more light and shade in The Edge of the Bush. And it’s pity there isn’t because there’s some good stuff in this show. Dusty’s songs about sheep and other outback Australiana are brilliantly – and deliberately – badly written. And the send-ups of callisthenics and the Watts family’s enthusiasm for it are Kath & Kim-esque marvels of suburban parody and choreographical horror.
Perhaps The Edge of the Bush will find its feet in episode 2, but from what we’ve seen, we fear the rest of this series will be more of the same.
A question of Gruen
Ok, so Gruen is back tomorrow night after close to a year away, and what’s changed? Oh that’s right: the world has gone to shit. And here’s a fun fact: it’s all advertising’s fault.
The theory is that the numerous shitful things that have happened over the last year or so – Brexit, the rise of Trump, haters hating at a level even we didn’t think was possible – have largely come about because of forces unleashed by social media. It’s never been easier to spread a whole load of bullshit around onto gullible people… and you can probably guess where we’re going with this.
But it’s a firm fact that the reason social media (which, lets be honest, is really just “the media” these days) has developed the way it has – fake news is fine, hate speech is a-ok, shouting at each other is the way to “nail it”, and so on – is because social media needs to make money. And the way it makes money is through advertising.
Not only does that mean that social media is full of ads, but the way social media works is built around selling you stuff. And because things that outrage people (yet also confirm their ideas of how the world works) are what people click on, social media is designed to encourage the spread of those items. You know, fake news. Dividing people down every fault line possible. Claiming “free speech” every time literal Nazis call for all the evil shit Nazis generally do. Clips from The Weekly. Ok, maybe not that last one.
Obviously it didn’t have to be this way. Social media could have developed in ways that weren’t designed entirely to deliver eyeballs to advertisers. But advertising wanted it this way and they’re the ones with the money when it comes to the media, so here we are: in a shitty place where everyone’s worst instincts are being encouraged while society faces a whole lot of problems advertisers would like us to ignore because a divided population is an outraged population and an outraged population isn’t thinking, which makes them a lot easier to sell stuff to.
Welcome back, Gruen. Please, tell us more about how advertising solves all our problems.
Vale Mad as Hell series VII
Comedy isn’t a competition, but there’s only so many hours in a day so why settle for second best? Hackneyed writers spouting cliches we may very well be, but even we can recognise that Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell is the best Australian comedy of the year.
Again.
Do we even need to write a new one of these posts?
Seven seasons in it remains remarkably consistent, in a way usually only seen in the kind of shouty panel shows that really can’t get any worse. Of course, there are changes if you go looking (especially if you consider Micallef’s previous fake news series Newstopia to be a close relation). Micallef himself has loosened up, while the show has settled down; if it turns out that the first ten minutes or so are just Micallef delivering news jokes to camera, these days he can pull it off – usually by throwing in a few wacky expressions to vary the tone.
It felt like there were slightly less comedy grotesques being interviewed this year, but slightly less slick media players as well. Characters that had been built up to near-regulars last year only made the occasional appearance; at a guess the Kraken was released just the once, and after a few cameos in recent years Micallef’s classic (or is that “classic”) character Milo Kerrigan failed to show at all. There was only the occasional mention of Bill Shorten’s zingers. Nobody had a piano dropped on them.
But there were sketches, often so traditionally cornball their old-fashioned nature was part of the joke. There was Cross-Promotion Corner, which gave younger comedians the chance to tell Micallef to fuck off. And unlike The Weekly, a show we’re constantly amazed has the guts to show its face on the same network as Mad as Hell, there were plenty of actual jokes about the news.
When Micallef gave some long-winded spiel about the state of some topical issue, it wasn’t some fingers-crossed-this-goes-viral-nailing-it presentation of opinions everyone at home already had; it was more often than not a joke about how slippery opinions can be, and how most of the time following our views to their logical conclusion takes us a long way from where we want to be. Or it was just funny. Either one will do.
It seems strange to remember it was only a few years ago that it looked like Mad as Hell was being eased out by the ABC bigwigs. There’s been seven seasons over seven years, but after three seasons in little over a year (seasons 3-5 ran from Feb 2014 to April 2015) it was a full year until season six of Mad as Hell – with 34 episodes of The Weekly in between. If you thought it looked like the ABC was grooming a replacement, you weren’t alone.
At the time it seemed almost reasonable. A blunter, less jokey form of news satire was on the rise, and the form rising fastest was the “nailed it” brand of internet-friendly lightweight news with aggro opinions that former newsreader Charlie Pickering claimed to be a specialist in. Mad as Hell‘s more traditional, less overtly opinionated form of comedy – you know, the type that focused on being funny rather than being right-on – was seemingly out of step with the strident times.
Yet The Weekly was shithouse, failing on even the most basic level to meet the pathetically low standards it set for itself. It’s little more now than a time-filling flop, a show unable to gain traction on any level, full of forgettable bits that fail to go viral as the the funny cast members seem increasingly side-lined. Now-ousted cast member Briggs has a running cameo on Get Krack!n, one of the few new ABC comedies with any excitement about it, while Weekly fixture Tom Gleeson hosts a minor game show even the contestants forget is going to air.
And Mad as Hell? It’s more relevant than ever. Where The Weekly increasingly feels out of touch with anything going on outside a shrinking segment of social media, Micallef’s surrealism nails the off-kilter zeitgeist of 2017 in a way that few news comedies – from any corner of the globe – can currently manage. It’s brilliant television that all involved, including the ABC itself, can be rightly proud of: unlike just about everything else looming on the horizon, its (presumed) return in 2018 can’t come quickly enough.
Vale Utopia series 3
If you’re making a sitcom that’s of a consistently high standard each week, that means you’re doing a good job, right? And Utopia is doing a good job; every episode it makes valid points about how government works (or doesn’t work) and it usually raises a few laughs along the way. So why, after three series, is Utopia leaving us cold?
Problem 1: Utopia is the same every week.
Tony’s got some big project he needs to move on but Jim and Rhonda turn up to make it impossible to do so. Which means major compromises on the project deliverables or a spin campaign about how well it’s going when in fact it’s not even happening, or everyone just sighing and kinda giving up.
Problem 2: All the characters in Utopia are stock characters.
Tony’s the guy in charge who wants to do things. Nat’s his second in command and she also wants to do things. Whereas Jim and Rhonda just turn up and tell them why they can’t do things, like they’re a pair of stuck records. And all the others are either annoying idiots, incompetent, or trying not to appear incompetent by nodding along. If they didn’t have different hair and skin colour it might be hard to tell them apart. Which leads us to…
Problem 3: None of the characters in Utopia have any depth.
What we’re watching every week is a slightly different plot and how some paper-thin characters deal with it. Utopia isn’t one of those shows where each week you get a different plot and because of how things are going in the character’s lives we might see them behave differently according to things they’ve experienced in previous episodes, like, say, in Mad Men or Orange Is the New Black.
This is a show where the reset button has been pressed between episodes, and while that’s worked for lots of comedies from the Warner Brothers cartoons to The Goodies to Get Krackin’, it seems pretty odd, tonally, in the context of a sitcom which in most other respects is in the realistic, single-camera style. Also, it means there’s no chance that any of the plots in the show can be character driven. So, there’s 50% of the show’s opportunities to funny out the window!
Problem 4: Those “modern life is rubbish” subplots.
What’s with how you can’t buy a simple ham sandwich on sliced white bread anymore? And why is coffee so complicated these days? Er, well, last time we had lunch in the CDB, where Utopia is set, you could and it isn’t. So, we didn’t really understand the subplot in episode 6 about how Tony couldn’t get a ham sandwich. We understood the bit in that same episode about how infrastructure was done better in the old days, before privatisation took over and turned everything into rort for property developers, but then, that’s actually true. The idea that office workers are forced to eat a pide or a ban mi baguette or some sushi, instead of a good old simple ham sandwich, for lunch, isn’t. So, they probably shouldn’t have tried to draw parallels there.
Problem 5: Satire on infrastructure isn’t funny in and of itself.
Or to be slightly more accurate, Working Dog haven’t found a way to make a weekly satire on infrastructure funny in and of itself. Plenty of shows have found the funny in infrastructure – Yes Minister, The Games – but then they weren’t always dealing with infrastructure. Sure, Working Dog have got around this flaw with their office obsession of the week sub-plot – a CEO sleepout, a recycling scheme, the new door locks don’t open – something so utterly ridiculous that it prevents everyone at the NBA from doing their jobs – and provides the audience laughs where the infrastructure plots can’t. But it’s still a major flaw in your comedy series if the main point of the show is something that’s never, ever going to be funny. Especially when the B plots start falling flat too. And after three series, they are feeling a bit samey.
So, as much as we hate to kick one of the better Australian sitcoms of recent years into the grass, guys, you might as well leave it there. Don’t worry about giving us a Series 4.
C’mon Girls, You Can Change the World
The verdict is in, and unsurprisingly everyone really loves Get Krack!n. Sure, some of these people doing the loving clearly weren’t watching Kate McLennan on Let Loose Live:
Not long ago, most of us had never heard of Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney; now we can barely imagine Australian comedy without them.
Australian comedy without McLennan saying “I knew a boy once who had a rash on the back of his head and now he’s a raper!”? Inconceivable!
We largely covered our initial impressions of the show here, but after a second viewing… it’s still good! Watch it everyone! Enjoy the one whole week coming up where the ABC has three decent scripted Australian comedies on a Wednesday night!
…
Okay, having done our bit to blindly support quality Australian comedy, we can admit that while Get Krack!n is an excellent show with an extremely high hit/miss ratio jokes-wise and a firm point of view that we don’t see anywhere near often enough on our screens, it is a little uneven in a way that suggests that perhaps the Katering Show style of comedy isn’t ideal when taken to half-hour length.
Obviously, being uneven is baked into the breakfast show format – it’s made up of segments with often whiplash-inducing tonal shifts – and for the most part the show does a good job of making the segments work as individual comedy bits. But not all the segments are equally funny, and when The Katering Show was such a tightly consistent show this seems a little wobbly by comparison. They’ve stretched a ten minute web series into a 25 minute television show and done an excellent job of it, but there are still moments where the gaps show.
What makes this far less of a problem than it otherwise might be is the solid gold interaction between the Kates, playing the same characters as The Katering Show (McLennan is excitable and anxious, McCartney is somewhat less so) here and while McCartney’s “I couldn’t give a fuck” attitude is slightly more puzzling on a proper television show (on The Katering Show it made sense that she was frustrated and bored, because a friend was roping her into a weird web series; an actual television show seems like it would be so much effort to do you’d just say no from the start) it’s funny so just shut up and go with it, okay?
It’s also notable for its attitude towards society, which is a lot more up-to-the-minute than most Australian comedies – Utopia seems to have dissolved into “aren’t these modern foodstuffs crazy?” half the time, and when it wraps up it’ll be replaced with “Hurray for advertising” circa 1999 with Gruen. These are two angry morning television hosts, and you’re never going to die wondering about their opinions about the patriarchy, consumerism, and the way society infantilises and sexualises women.
(on The Katering Show this material often felt like the characters blurting out their real feelings under pressure; here, initially at least, it feels a bit more scripted. It’ll be interesting to see as the series progresses whether things gradually get more frenetic and shambolic on the show resulting in the Kates getting more manic, or whether it all resets at the start of each new episode)
Plus there’s two women of colour in the first episode, which certainly feels like a first in the 21st Century for an Australian comedy that isn’t Black Comedy (or just *a* black comedy).
Considering Australian television used to be built on a rock-solid foundation of taking the piss out of other television shows Get Krack!n‘s swipes at breakfast television, and the language of television itself, are well overdue. Flubbed lines, speaking to the wrong camera, disinterested floor crew, the dangers of boom mikes and tottering around on high heels on a set built on levels are all realistic, but thankfully not the boringly literal realism we’ve seen in a lot of recent comedies. They’re making fun of real life, not trying to recreate it and then slap some jokes on top.
And we really should have put this first: Get Krack!n features some of the most creepily catchy earworm jingles we’ve heard in a long time. We’d happily buy the soundtrack… if we didn’t already have the entire thing stuck in our heads on a permanent loop.
Vale True Story
The final episode of True Story – well, the first series at least; it’s done well enough in the ratings to be the rare Australian commercial comedy hit – was a bit unusual. For a series that’s largely featured all-star Australian comedy casts (the week before had Stephen Curry, Bob Franklin and Rob Sitch), it had no big names and no wide-ranging story. Instead, it featured a pair of New Zealand university students forcing each other to do dares until one of them was standing over a toilet holding a human poo.
The reason why True Story has been one of the comedy highlights of the year is that, unlike a lot of current Australian comedy (The Other Guy comes to mind), the joke wasn’t simply that he had to hold a poo. No, True Story dug deeper: we were told how perfect the poo looked, how the poo made it onto a plate was discussed, the difficulty of forcing yourself to pick up excrement was revealed, and then once the poo was picked up, well… let’s just say squeezing came into the picture. And it turns out getting rid of that poo smell is harder than you might think.
Sure, it was disgusting. But if you’re going to make jokes about bodily waste, then make jokes about it: don’t just leave it sitting there like the simple mention of it is comedy in and of itself. And that’s why True Story has been so much fun each week, even when the story being told doesn’t really build to a big finish or just kind of wanders around; it’s never content to just present a scenario and leave it at that.
Partly that’s a result of the format. Hamish & Andy sit there while regular folks tell their wacky story, so of course Hamish & Andy are going to ask questions and point out angles they think are funny. That’s what happens when people tell stories – and yet, going by the kind of stories we too-often see on our television screens, it’s not something that actually happens when people sit down to write comedy scripts.
It definitely didn’t hurt that the stories were told using a heck of a lot of very funny performers. In a way it was kind of depressing seeing so many big names week in week out; why aren’t they on our screens more often? Mick Molloy might have a successful career doing other stuff, but he’s still a very funny actor – and yet this was the only show that’s actually had him acting since… what, the first season of The Time of Our Lives?
Even the parts with the regular folk telling their stories worked well, in large part because Hamish & Andy are extremely relaxed and confident when it comes to dealing with the general public. It’s easy – a little too easy – to imagine another host slapping down the guy in the final episode who clearly thought he was a bit of a joker (“we do the funny stuff here, mate”), but instead Hamish & Andy were happy to laugh at his lines without letting him run away with the show. Having nothing left to prove plays a part (they’ve got to be the biggest non-stand up comedy stars in the country), but it’s also another way that True Story was a show where being funny was the end goal; it didn’t really matter who got them over the line so long as they made it in the end – then everyone’s a winner.
The true stories in True Story were rarely classically hilarious. Even the best of them (probably the one where Ryan Shelton was a primary school teacher dealing with a grade-A scam artist) didn’t build to great endings or have brilliantly over-the-top situations. But they worked because each episode went into every nook and cranny looking for laughs. There was a cutaway joke in the final episode that was simply “these guy’s mums think they’re off learning stuff at university” – it was a five second laugh, but that’s five more seconds than a lot of recent Australian comedies have served up.
What it boils down to is that this was a series that really just wanted to be funny. It didn’t have to try to seem realistic because the stories actually were real; with that out of the way, they could do all the dumb jokes they wanted to. The stories weren’t great comedy-wise, because well-crafted comedy is almost always going to be funnier than simply retelling something that really happened. But because the focus was on making these funny stories even funnier, then end result really was funny. Wait, what?
Look, the point is that True Story worked because it was trying to be funny. It wasn’t trying to be cool, or realistic, or intelligent, or anything else. And it turns out that when you make “funny” your main goal, sometimes things just work out. Well, for the audience at least. And it doesn’t seem to have hurt Hamish & Andy’s careers any either. Why do we keep making inner city dramedies again?
Extreme re-working: How The Chaser’s Extreme Vetting went from bad idea to good idea in just four episodes
Remember those suggestions that The Chaser would stay with Triple M after Radio Chaser finished up? Well, if by “Triple M” they meant “Austereo’s new podcasting platform Podcast One”, then yes, The Chaser now have a podcast there called Extreme Vetting.
What’s it about? Well, it takes Peter Dutton’s new super ministry and the general theme of surveillance as its premise, and sees The Chaser subjecting potential subversives to interrogations on behalf of the government. Or, to put it another way, it’s The Chaser interviewing some comedians and other media types with a topical high concept slapped on it for…marketing reasons?
Look, fair enough, “The Chaser interviews some people” isn’t a great sales line in a competitive market, but shouldn’t a high concept add value to a show? And we’re not sure this one does…
Episode 1 sees Charles Firth and Dom Knight interview ex-pat stand-up Sarah Kendall, a good comedian with an interesting background, but the interview’s just awful. Kendall either isn’t aware of the secret agent scenario she’s involved in, or can’t be bothered with it, or can’t think of a way to make her participation in it funny. And neither can Firth and Knight. Not that it stops them.
Every couple of minutes the pair stop the interview so they can leave the room and plan tactics for the next stage, like actual cops or ASIO agents would do…except it’s not funny, it just breaks the flow of what could have been an interesting, amusing conversation.
By Episode 2, with John Safran, Firth and Knight have clearly had a re-think and are dialling back a lot on the whole interrogation thing. They interrupt the interview a few times to do their whispering in the corridor bit, but the show’s mostly an amusing chat with Safran. If you haven’t heard about Safran’s book Depends What You Mean by Extremist or want to hear his contemporary take on his infamous stunts with Shane Warne and Ray Martin, or how he put a fatwa on Rove, then it’s worth a listen.
Rob Sitch is the guest in Episode 3, which again is a good interview in which Sitch has lots of interesting things to say about The Late Show, The D-Generation, The Castle and various other projects he’s worked on, with minimal interruptions from The Chaser. It’s a similar story in Episode 4 with Peter Chudd creator James Colley, and if anything, there’s even less of the interrogation stuff.
So, lesson learnt: if you’re going to take an established format and give it a high concept twist, make it worthwhile or ditch it quickly. And after years of The Chaser running less-than-promising concepts into the ground, who knew they could do that?