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Press release time!

Gruen returns for 2017 with its 99th episode

Friday, August 11, 2017 — THIS IS A PRESS RELEASE TO SELL GRUEN…

There will be grandiose language, hastily gathered quotes and just enough information to sound enticing without actually giving anything away.

Yes, the show that unpicks the dark arts of advertising, branding and spin is back for its 9th season and 99th episode.

We are drowning in more marketing than ever. People are now brands, while brands pretend to be people, emailing you on your birthday and trying to seduce you to ‘join the conversation’. We’re living in a world where the US President is the biggest brand of all, celebrities are “influencers”, influencers are celebrities and words like “influencer” have lost all meaning.

Whether you’re spooling through Gumtree for a second-hand fridge, skipping through a podcast selling you a mattress, or checking the weather on the BOM website – you can’t avoid advertising. It’s as ageless as the airbrushed actor spruiking expensive face gunk. The only anti-venom is understanding how it all works.

Enter host Wil Anderson, Russel Howcroft, Todd Sampson and a trusty team of advertising experts, including veteran panellist Dee Madigan and some brand-new faces. The weekly topical series will drive through new marketing terrain – Amazon in Australia, the NBN and any PR disasters unlucky enough to erupt during the course of the season. Gruen will celebrate the good, the bad and the ugly. Plus, The Pitch returns with a whole new slate of impossible briefs and top agencies to battle it out in the Gruen ring.

Join us as we sneak ads onto the ABC and call bullshit on brands pretending they’re just like us.

Wednesday 13 September, 8.30pm.

Here’s an idea: how about a show that calls bullshit on millionaire ad executives pretending they’re just like us? Because that’s pretty much the only thing that comes to mind every time this disgustingly blatant advertisement for the advertising industry rolls around.

We’re kinda used to press releases being a bullshit ramshackle house of lies, but this kind of crap shack takes things to a whole new level (a second story, if you will). Okay, so how is watching a show that’s nothing more than a squad of millionaires sitting around a table watching commercials and going “mmm, good job” in any way an “anti-venom” for advertising? Does anyone living today believe Gruen explains how advertising works at a level beyond “damn, we’re good”? This is a show that puts on air advertising executives – not people outside the industry who just might have a opinion on advertising that isn’t “fuck we’re great” – and gets them to comment on each others work. What the fuck?

Movie reviews aren’t written by other film-makers. TV critics are, generally speaking, not people who make a living from making television. Football commentators and columnists may have played the game once but they’re usually not current players. So what makes advertising so special that only people currently making millions out of working in advertising get to go on Gruen to talk about how great they are oh wait we just answered our own question and that answer is “fuck off Gruen“.

The real question about who Gruen is made for and why is answered by asking: why isn’t the solution to a problem on this show ever simply “less advertising”?

 

The one where we finally get around to reviewing Almost Midnight

Released on iView at the same time as Goober was romcom Almost Midnight, a six-part series about Dave, a shy entomology student looking to kiss a girl before the end of the year. Described on IMDb as a “black comedy”, it wasn’t really either, which was sort of a relief.

When we meet Dave (Stephen Banham) in episode one, he’s at a friend’s New Years Eve party and it’s heading for the 12.00am – can he find a girl to kiss? Then Jen (Lucy Lehman) walks in, a good-looking confident woman who seems totally perfect for him – she even likes insects – but wait, after an embarrassing moment which has the rest of the guests laughing at Dave’s stupidity, Dave goes off to the bathroom and walks in on Sarah (Danielle Catanzariti), an annoying loud-mouth who’s vomiting in the toilet. Gallantly, Dave holds back her hair, and when the clock strikes midnight Sarah thanks him with a sicky kiss…at which point Jen walks in. D’oh!

In episode two, it’s News Years Eve one year later and Dave and Sarah are together, but only just. Spoilers: let’s just say he doesn’t get to kiss her again. And on it goes, one New Years Eve per episode, where Dave and Sarah inch a little bit closer or a little bit further away from getting together.

It’s fair to say that once the first couple of episodes are out of the way, the romance very much takes over from the comedy as Dave and Sarah look like they’re maybe making some progress towards getting together. Although Dave’s mate Acka (Aaron John Casey), your stock standard dreadlocked, pizza-guzzling, hard-drinking loser, provides a few laughs. And episode four, where Dave decides he’s had enough of New Years Eve parties and spends the night at home with some goon, doesn’t exactly go to plan, which provides us with some pretty well done visual comedy.

Overall, though, Almost Midnight is kind of depressing, as sad-faced Dave mopes his way through various parties in the hope of getting with his dream girl. Is that the element of the show that IMDb thinks is dark? God knows…

A Hard Earned Thirst Needs A Big Cold Beer

Despite our amazingly persistent reputation for “shitting on” just about everything, we’re not intentionally cruel people at Tumbleweeds HQ (also: we are people, plural – there really is more than one person writing this stuff, honest). When a show comes along like Hard Quiz, we know why the ABC has made it and we sympathise with their motives. Yes, the result is garbage and yes, this result could have easily been avoided. But at least they tried to make a good show, at least they-

Oh wait, they gave Tom Gleeson a quiz show. What the fuck?

The ABC is, as we all know, amazingly strapped for cash. They’re also the people who let Spicks & Specks die and replaced it with Randling. So while we understand their need for cheap programming that can run forever, their track record when it comes to creating and maintaining such shows is, we say again, garbage. Anyone remember How Not to Behave? And now we have Hard Quiz, a show even more misbegotten only it’s a quiz so hey, it’s back for a second season. Frankly, we’d prefer Randling.

(fun fact: we find even first rate quiz shows pretty boring. So 1): we’re going to focus here on the host-contestant interaction side of things and 2): quiz show fans should totally ignore every word we say)

We know absolutely nothing about what it’s like to work at the ABC – ok, that’s not strictly true: we know nothing remotely publishable about what it’s like to work at the ABC. But it seems safe to say that management there will often play favourites, and it also seems likely that some comedians would rather not deal with the ABC if they could help it. So there’s almost certainly a very limited pool of people who can get to host a show at the ABC. And in that pool, Tom Gleeson should be roughly seven kilometers away giving a talk to a room full of bored generic middle management types.

Pretty much anything we say these days is going to be read as hating on our subject so it’s really, really tempting to steer into the curve and just let fly. But that wouldn’t be fair: Tom Gleeson has had a solid twenty year career in comedy with regular television appearances on pretty much every network so he must be doing something right. Maybe we should ask Charlie Pickering, he seems to have a pretty good idea what it is.

Let’s just say that if we were looking for a someone to host a quiz show where pretty much the only thing going on that might possibly appeal to people not in love with fucking quiz shows is the host’s banter with the contestants, he would not be on the list. Or near the list. Or allowed to be spoken of by anyone within earshot of the list. In fact, Tom Gleisner wouldn’t be allowed on the list in case someone mis-read it, and Tom Gleinser is an actual good host.

While this just seems like more pointless bile from us, the important word here is “contestants”. If it was a HYBPA? style show with comedians answering questions, then sure, put him out front. In fact, that’s something we’d really, really like to see: Gleeson trying his smarty-pants act in a scenario where professional comedians can fight back hard. It’ll never happen, of course: on his Hard Chat segment things were designed so that he had the upper hand even when he was being insulted – having them bite back eventually became the whole point. Still, we can dream. And Gleeson can do smarm.

But with regular folk Gleeson can’t really do his usual act – at least, not at a level that generates actual humour. He can make a few cracks here and there, but after you’ve seen maybe half of one episode even that loses its edge. Oh no, he was mean about regional New South Wales! He pulled a face during an embarrassing anecdote! Hey, isn’t Tony Barber still looking for work?

Much as they can take a joke and Gleeson is good with a quip, the contestants are still regular folk who can’t compare snark-wise with a seasoned professional: while it’s “all in good fun”, anything remotely mean is going to feel really unpleasant. As we said before, Gleeson has been on television for close to twenty years, so he knows the score: the Gleeson on Hard Quiz is a much cuddlier, friendlier version of the snarky jerk he usually plays, and that’s totally the right move for this show.

Unfortunately, that means there’s absolutely no reason why he’s hosting this show. Whatever success Gleeson has today comes from his work on The Weekly, and all he does on The Weekly is act like a jerk. The unique selling point of Hard Quiz is that it’s a generic low-stakes nerdy quiz show hosted by a guy who’s going to be a jerk to the contestants, only he can’t really be a jerk to the contestants because the contestants aren’t arrogant smart-arse know-it-alls looking to be taken down a peg but regular folks who think they know a lot about a mildly obscure topic. This week one of them was an expert on Friends, for God’s sake.

So why is he hosting this show when the format doesn’t let him do the one thing he’s good at doing? Why isn’t the ABC worried that mis-casting him as a cuddly game show host is going to, as they say, “damage the brand” that he’s worked so hard on with The Weekly? Because no-one aside from us gives a shit: it’s a quiz show on the ABC.

It’s going to rate moderately well because ABC viewers love quiz shows, and while it’s not going to do better than that because it’s hosted by Tom Gleeson and not Wil Anderson or Adam Hills, no-one cares because everything else the ABC has tried has been a horrible disaster (see every other show mentioned here). It’s a show you put to air when you’ve given up and Gleeson is the host you hire because he’s already hanging around the office.

Enjoy.

The one where we finally get around to reviewing Goober

If like us, you were too busy last Christmas/New Year to watch TV, you might have forgotten about the three series of comedy shorts launched on iView at the end of December. Goober, Almost Midnight and Lost in Pronunciation are all 6 x 5-minute narrative comedies funded by the ABC and the South Australian Film Corporation, and…we really ought to have reviewed them by now.

Goober is the story of Harry (Brendan Williams), an over-friendly Uber driver on the autism spectrum who’s trying to work out how to ask out Wendy (Ashton Malcolm), who works at his favourite ice cream shop. Every episode starts with Harry on the phone to his Dad (Shane Jacobson), asking for advice, before picking up some customers. Harry, acutely aware that friendliness is one of the things they will rate him on, tries to strike up a conversation with his passengers, except it often goes a bit wrong, and the reviews aren’t always complimentary. Cue Harry at the ice cream shop, trying to chat up Wendy and consoling himself with a strawberry sundae.

But the sentimental scenes involving Wendy and Harry’s Dad aside, Goober relies on the comedy of awkwardness and anxiety. A bit like The Office, except laughing at the awful things that came out of David Brent’s mouth worked because he was a dickhead who could presumably change his ways if he tried. In Goober, Harry has autism and that’s just how he is. Also, he is trying.

Either way, it’s hard to laugh at someone with a disability when all the gags are about them doing things because of their disability. Anyone of a certain age may remember feeling similar when watching Mother & Son, where the main character had dementia and most of the laughs were about her forgetting things. Or, to quote a friend of this blog on whether Fawlty Towers is funny: “I can’t laugh at it because Basil’s clearly mentally ill.”

Perhaps this is where Goober‘s sentimental scenes come in, to deflect from that fact that 90% of the attempts at humour are “Autistic guy says something awful”. The other 10% of the gags are the reviews Harry gets from his customers – which are pretty funny – although not funny enough to make this a hilarious show.

If you don’t mind a bit of sentiment in your comedy, check out episode 5, About A Boy, where Harry has to drive a shy child to a birthday party. It’s very sweet. But if you find it hard to enjoy a comedy that tries to get laughs by punching down – and as sweet as this show can be, it is punching down – then Goober isn’t for you.

Shock Twist: Garbage Comedian is Garbage Human

Remember when Chris Lilley was funny? Yeah, us neither. Yet there’s always room to fall further, as he’s revealed with his latest “release”:

It seems that for some literally incomprehensible reason Lilley thought now was a good time for this, when clearly “never” was a much more logical release date.

(yes, we know the original clip dates from years back. Why Lilley thought now was the right time to put this on his Instagram account is the big, big question)

This being 2017, everyone was extremely quick to inform Lilley that he was at best being a complete arsehole and at worse a total fucking racist who thinks making jokes about a specific dead child is a good idea, at which point the offending clip was taken down and Lilley started blocking anyone having a swipe at him. Thank god for screenshots:

Seriously, even as people who’ve been calling out Lilley for being a terrible comedian for years, we just can’t get our head around this. Does Lilley live in some kind of gilded castle cut off from all human concerns, so isolated from the world around him that he thinks this kind of thing is somehow a good idea? Or is he just a fuck?

Those ten year anniversary celebrations for Summer Heights High in September are going to be a lot more interesting than they were shaping up to be a few months ago…

Where’s Briggs: A Mystery Solved

Remember when The Weekly constantly promoted Briggs as a core cast member but hardly ever put him to air? Remember how boring it was when we’d ask week after week “where’s Briggs?”? Mystery solved:

Which, we’d all have to agree, is something of a step up from appearing for fifteen seconds in the middle of some endless Charlie Pickering rant.

(not pictured in the “NBA of comedy”: anyone else from The Weekly)

While this is clearly awesome news for Briggs, as far as our favourite punching bag The Weekly goes… not so much. After all, they clearly had a world-class comedy writer there and couldn’t be bothered putting him to air for weeks at a time because Tom Gleeson needed that time for Hard Chat. Nobody else there is heading overseas to work with the creator of The Simpsons; the cast member they valued the least is the one the creator of the most influential comedy series in the world wants to work with.

So congratulations Briggs! Just another example of local talent needing to head overseas to get the opportunities that just aren’t available here. Like the opportunity to be funny.

Vale Here Come the Habibs season 2

Well, this was a waste of time. Australia has a strong track record of putting to air sitcoms made by people who’ve never actually seen a sitcom, and this was another one of those. Here’s an idea: when somebody in management decides to give a locally made sitcom a go, maybe go ahead and make a sitcom, not a random collection of events that fizzle out after half an hour. That way, when you go back to head office and say “nup, didn’t work”, at least you actually tried.

So why make this show? Here’s our best guess: Australian commercial networks have pretty much nailed down the only kind of local drama they’re going to make, and that’s a bland milkshake featuring a little bit of everything. You’ve seen television, you know what we mean – those shows that are basically light dramas but with characters that could almost be in a sitcom, or shows with a comedy set-up but characters with “real issues”, or… whatever. Feel-good television. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll hardly need to pay attention.

The only difference between those bland, already-forgotten dramedies and Here Come the Habibs is that Habibs ran for half an hour, and so was clearly “a comedy” despite never bothering to come up with a truly funny line or memorable situation. If it had worked it would have been cheaper than a drama (because they go for a full hour) and yet still a decent ratings grabber if they put it on against one hour dramas and filled in the back half with old episodes of The Big Bang Theory or something. Yet another genius move from the guys who brought you three weeks of a televised obstacle course.

What other explanation is there? No, seriously: what other explanation is there? Because it’s not like this was a show created and put to air by people with a love for comedy – if it was, they might have bothered to make it funny. And who out there is demanding the return of local sitcoms to our television screens? Not even we bother fighting that fight any more, and we’re the only people left who care about Australian television comedy on a regular basis.

Here Come the Habibs was ignored by pretty much everyone from the start because pretty much everyone knew from the start that this wasn’t a show based around the idea of entertaining viewers. A charitable explanation for its existence is that Nine wanted to experiment with a new (well, old) format; a plausible explanation was that they figured a sitcom built around various ethnic stereotypes would stir up enough media coverage to make it worth their while no matter what the quality of the finished product.

And what about that finished product? A sitcom where the laughs were meant to come from “oh no, two groups of people who hate each other now have to deal with each other”, only they forgot to come up with a way to keep the two groups together. Having “different” people move in next door may have worked in the UK in the 70s when houses were piled on top of each other and there was still a vague sense of community drifting around the place, but millionaires have high fences and big gardens for a reason; in 2017 who the fuck would have even known the Habibs had moved in?

That wouldn’t have mattered if the scripts had shown some spark or originality, but having a final episode based around a pair of sham weddings was a helpful reminder that the only storyline the writers seemed all that interested in was the dullest one of all: the one involving the boring-as-fuck young lovers. It’s depressingly easy to imagine the kind of cynical television executive who watched The Office and came away thinking “yeah, the romance was what people were really tuning in for”, but a decade on we’d hoped they’d all have died from cocaine-induced head explosions.

Look, despite our ranty reputations, here at Tumbleweeds HQ we’re all 100% fine with shows not being comedies. What we’re not fine with are shows that make a few casual hand-waving gestures towards being comedies and then devote most of their time and exceedingly casual effort to being something else entirely. Like shit.

Let’s Get Krack!n

So part of Team Tumbleweeds crawled out from behind their stockpile of old Ned and You Can’t Stop the Murders DVDs and went outside to see some live comedy. Well, by “live” we mean the preview at Melbourne’s ACMI of two (the first two?) episodes of the highly anticipated new show from Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney, AKA the Kates behind The Katering Show, Get Krack!n.

It’s not really fair to review a show so far out from airing – we were told it’ll be out soon, but we’re figuring maybe September or October? – so we’ll keep our judgement largely to ourselves for now. And also because watching a television comedy on a big screen in a cinema is kind of weird, especially a show like this one – but more on that in a moment.

The scenario is basically The Katering Show 2.0, right down to a handful of references early on to The Katering Show (yes, continuity nerds, they are playing the same characters, only we were told there’d be no cooking segments after the one in the first episode so all those classic cheese jokes are done): The Kates have moved up in the world and are now hosting a morning show (that supposedly airs at 3am here so it can be a mid-morning show in the US) in their own unique fashion. Is this a chat show parody where everything goes wrong? Yes. Yes it is.

The first episode put in some extra effort to establish the scenario, making it slightly closer to your standard bungled chat show comedy, while the second had a bit more of the usual angsty dynamic between the Kates and so felt a touch more Katering Show. But the big difference here is that, as each episode runs close to half an hour, they’ve brought in guests for various segments. There’s cameos too – Briggs and Sam Simmons make brief but memorable appearances – which also opens out the show a bit.

There was a strong positive reaction from the crowd on the night, which is as you’d expect: the show’s good. How good was a little hard for us to judge though. For one thing, it’s a show with a lot of jokes waiting for the audience to stumble across – details in the set design, the ticker across the bottom of the screen, etc – so there’s funny stuff going on that didn’t get the big laughs it deserved.

It’s also a show set on a cheesy generic talk show set which on the big screen looked, well… cheesy and generic. Fortunately, pretty much everyone is going to watch it on a TV screen or computer monitor, where we’re guessing it’ll look spot-on. Then again, some comedy pixelation was probably even more effective on the big screen – it definitely got huge laughs (including from us).

And also – and this really could be just us – a lot of the Kates’ appeal comedy-wise is that they’re very good at doing small comedy: expressions of boredom and frustration, low stakes fumbling that reveals the yawning abyss beneath modern life and so on. It’s comedy that works best one-on-one up close: watching it in a big crowd didn’t do some of the harsher lines any favours.

There was also a Q&A afterwards in which the two exhausted-seeming (we were sitting up the back so we couldn’t really tell but it sounded like they’d been working like crazy over the last few months) Kates’ talked a fair bit about stuff like how they felt they couldn’t tell any stories that weren’t theirs to tell so they brought in contributing writers for that kind of thing and how unless a character really needed to be a man they cast a woman and they had some trouble getting used to doing a three camera sitcom because their previous experiences with those kind of shows (titles mentioned: The Big Bite, Hamish & Andy, Live From Planet Earth, Let Loose Live) had left them just a little gunshy.

Also, if you’re a dude and you want to compliment them on their show, maybe compliment them on their show, not say “wow, you’re really funny” because after a while that starts to sound pretty dickish

Vale Radio Chaser

It’s not often this blog writes a vale for a Chaser show that’s largely positive, so strap yourselves in… Radio Chaser, which has been airing on Triple M Sydney for the past 12 weeks and ended on Friday, has actually been pretty good. We’re not talking “set the world on fire” – this is a show on Triple M, after all – but it’s been fun to listen to the highlights podcasts none-the-less.

Featuring a revolving door of Chaser members, associates and guests – Charles Firth, Dom Knight, Andrew Hansen, Rhys Muldoon, Mark Humphries, Chris Taylor, Chas Licciardello, Kirsten Drysdale, Wil Anderson, Kevin Rudd and many more – and impressive number of topical (and quickly written and produced) sketches, this has been a step up from the traditional Triple M fare.

Not since Get This, The Sweetest Plum, or, to go back even further into the commercial radio comedy archives, Martin/Molloy and The D-Generation, have commercial radio listeners been able to listen to a show which re-works but also sends up the conventions of the genre.

End-of-show awards given to idiots in the news? Radio Chaser did them, although in a much funnier way than your bog-standard breakfast crew. Ditto the show’s Cat’s Pyjamas or Cat’s Piss segment, which cunningly cast a Hot or Not-type eye on the day’s news and was always amusing.

If you’re a regular listener to the Ms, you’ll be aware of the network’s Music Check Up campaign, where the public’s being asked for its views on their playlist, i.e. do you like “classic” Triple M or do you want to hear newer music too? Cue a Radio Chaser phone-in where listeners are asked to identify the classic song: “Is it Mozart, Haydn or AC/DC?”. The answer was Mozart. Get it? Classic Triple M… It was much funnier when they did it. Although not quite as funny as the number of people who called in to give their answers. (Maybe Triple M should consider playing the actual classics?)

A couple of years ago, the Game Changers: Radio podcast spoke to Mick Molloy and Tony Martin (separately) and wondered why their incredibly successful 90’s radio show hasn’t been replicated. The conclusion was, roughly speaking, that to produce a daily show featuring original comedy sketches and amusing chat required too many resources. Yet, it’s a format that keeps popping up every couple of years and resulting in good shows, so shouldn’t there be more of this kind of program?

There have been suggestions that Radio Chaser will return, although not in the 11am-1pm time slot it’s occupied for the last 12 weeks. Let’s hope so, it’s been a good listen.

Utopian principles

If there’s a utopia for Australian comedy, it’s not Utopia series 3. The third series of a sitcom should build on past successes – and Utopia’s previous series were largely successful – but also give us, the audience, something new. Based on last night’s episode of Utopia, there’s nothing new for us to see here. It’s the same as it ever was.

Is not giving the audience anything new making a wider point, here? Because things never really change in government, then neither should the fundamentals of Utopia as a television series?

No. Utopia is meant to be entertainment, and audiences stop watching sitcoms if the jokes and situations are pretty much the same every week.

In last night’s episode, we saw how a project came to a halt because our friends at the NBA had to satisfy the needs of every Tom, Diane and Hassan before they could start work. Meanwhile, the team got so wrapped up in a team building scheme – an NBA’s Got Talent competition – that things got a bit out of control and the fire brigade had to be called.

The talent competition was funny, shonky cabaret acts are always funny, but we’ve seen this kind of thing on Utopia before. Speaking truth to power and gently mocking the follies of us humans? That’s every previous episode of Utopia ever.

We like Working Dog; 30+ years into their careers they’re still funny and still making good shows. And writing about what government does with our money is a good thing, but the aim of Utopia is (or should be) to make a comedy that people will watch every week, not to catalogue every possible way that governments could waste our taxes.

Utopia is a good show, but it seems there’s only so much you can say about nation building. And for this third series to work, some changes needed to be made to the show to allow new types of stories to be told and new types of laughs to be generated. But they weren’t. So, this feels like the end of the line for Utopia, which isn’t good just one episode into a new series.

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