Australian Tumbleweeds

Australia's most opinionated blog about comedy.

Now Junior, Behave Yourself

A comedy game show pitched as “A show where we attempt to find out why we do the weird things that we do” is doomed to fail. Digging down into people’s weird behaviour is a great way to find comedy. A game show is, nine times out of ten, not.

And so it proves to be with Behave Yourself, Seven’s latest attempt to remind people that they used to be the home of Australian comedy back before they aired shows like The White Room and Double Take. The concept is simple: three teams of two people each – usually a comedian and a celebrity, though Shane Warne and Kate Langbroek are also teamed up – play the kind of generic “comedy” game show games we all hoped we’d seen the last of around the turn of the century.

The show isn’t all “Here, put on this helmet for the chance to maybe smell a bottled fart!” though. There’s also “guess which one of our contestants has a thing for feet!” It’s the kind of comedy gold that leaves a green ring on your finger. And when it does get down to more traditional and possibly entertaining questions there’s usually just enough stilted banter to kill the humour stone dead.

A big problem is that there’s zero chemistry between contestants – some awkward quasi-flirting in the opening minutes sets the tone there – and while the idea of having “teams” on comedy game shows is loved by producers because it means they can get celebrities on to bring in viewers then pair them with comedians to keep the viewers laughing, in practice it means two strangers stuck together failing to be funny or charming. Remember Randling? God, we hope not.

The pacing is also way, way off. Have You Been Paying Attention? has taught us that the two things a comedy game show needs in Australia – because we lack the kind of raconteurs who can tell the funny stories that often keep UK comedy game shows afloat – is speed. Power through those jokes, people! Behave Yourself, on the other hand, lingers at the crime time and time again.

Big comedy set pieces (again, fart helmet) are comedy death the second they stop being funny, because there’s no quick way to get out of them if they don’t work. And these don’t work, in large part because there’s no chemistry between the guests and so no sense that we’re watching friends muck about. If you’re going to call your show Behave Yourself you need some actual wacky behaviour in there somewhere, but by putting celebrities with images to protect on you guarantee nothing of the sort.

Talkin’ ’bout Your Generation (the other local gold standard for this kind of show) took its time building up to big wacky stunts, and then made sure that each of the team captains was distinct enough as a comedy character for there to be laughs simply from seeing them deal with what they were up against. Aside from him telling us he’s on alllll the dating apps, what’s Shane Warne’s comedy character? For that matter, what’s Kate Langbroek’s?

Of course, almost all comedy game shows get off to a bumpy start, but these days good luck finding a network willing to ride it out. And the damn thing has to look like there’s potential there in the first place: HYBPA? may have started out rough but Working Dog had a solid track record of panel comedy so sticking with it seemed like a reasonable move.

(that said, this bog-standard article from News Corp going on about how viewers viciously turned on Behave Yourself on social media is a wank. Viewers viciously turn on everything on social media)

Behave Yourself? With a cast of generic chancers, a host who’s a smiling Chesty Bond manikin dipped in bum fluff, and a set-up that requires ten words to explain – which for a comedy is five too many (“what happened in the news” and “which generation is best” are good: “A show where we attempt to find out why we do the weird things that we do” is bad) – this show arrived with a tag on its toe.

When the Fever Breaks

Remember Fever Pitch? The ABC’s marginally-hyped new “live comedy sports show” that was… well, let’s let the press release explain:

Nicole Livingstone and Tegan Higginbotham to host new live comedy sport show on ABC

Wednesday, May 24, 2017 — Olympic champion and media all-rounder Nicole Livingstone and comedian Tegan Higginbotham have joined forces on Fever Pitch, a new one-hour live comedy sport panel show which will premiere on Friday, June 30 at 6pm (AEST) on ABC and ABC iview.

(you can find the rest of our thrilling coverage here)

One thing we’re sure you don’t remember is watching it last week, because it never went to air. So what happened? Well, a disastrous string of pre-launch bungles almost certainly didn’t help: first a wacky comedy press release was sent out then redacted, then the team were given a dry run during a minor soccer match only to discover that sports fans don’t enjoy comedians making fun of them and their hobby:

“Like many fans, FFA is disappointed with some aspects of the ABC’s broadcast of the Sydney FC v Liverpool FC match last night,” A-League’s official twitter account tweeted.

We’ve since heard – from someone who read it in The Herald-Sun – that Fever Pitch has been dumped. Well, kinda: the ABC now has a new and very similar-sounding show titled The Sidelinders lined up for debut later this month. In fact, we’d go so far as to say it’s going to be the exact same show – it definitely features the exact same hosts:

Look for it July 21st at 6pm.

Laying Down the Law

You may have noticed we’re three weeks into the second season of The Family Law and we still haven’t managed to review it. But more likely you haven’t: while even high profile Australian television struggles to get attention these days, The Family Law, AKA the only Australian comedy SBS will be broadcasting this year, has barely caused a ripple.

And why should it? As the generally heart-warming, proudly representational and only mildly amusing story of a young Benjamin Law and the wacky antics of his now-divorced Queensland family, it’s the kind of show where describing it as “normal people leading normal lives” is a positive. Take this review from (ugh) Mamamia:

The importance of The Family Law being broadcast on Australian screens cannot be understated. 90 per cent of it’s cast is Asian-Australian. The theme of divorce is front and centre. But more than that, it’s interesting, brilliantly scripted and entertaining.

When The Family Law writers sit down to plot their character’s arcs, motivations and words they have one main mandate. They’ll make you laugh, but only after they’ve punched you in the stomach with sadness.

An important show that’ll punch you in the stomach with sadness – sounds hilarious!

We should probably stress here that we’re not saying The Family Law is a bad show. It’s a bland show, which requires a few more letters. But is that necessarily a bad thing? After all, bland has become the default setting for Australian comedy across the board over the last few years – so much so that we’d suggest that if you wanted to make a comedy that could possibly offend someone either pitch it as a segment on The Footy Show or just give up. Maybe just go straight to giving up.

It wasn’t always this way. There’s a reason why this largely comedy-focused website has a category titled “OUTRAGE”: newspapers and radio going nuts over some supposedly offensive show or another used to be par for the course in Australian comedy. It was all bullshit, of course: while Chris Lilley’s blatant racism was repeatedly glossed over and Hey Hey it’s Saturday‘s blackface horror was dismissed as a bit of fun by News Corp newspapers, they went predictably berserk every time an ABC series threatened to tackle a topic more hard-hitting than “old people are excellent”.

The high water mark of all this was The Chaser’s “Make A Realistic Wish Foundation” sketch, which was the increasingly rare combination of a show actually doing something in bad taste while being a show that people were actually watching at the time. Then again, the list of people being outraged included Catherine Deveny, who was later sacked by The Age for making a joke about an underage television personality getting laid at the Logies, so swings and roundabouts there.

Was Australian comedy really all that outrageous? Of course not. Wil Anderson insulting Liberal politicians is about as boringly predictable as comedy gets. But did all this coverage – and let’s stress that almost all of this coverage came as part of News Corp’s forever war on the ABC – make it seem like Australian comedy had some edge to it? Well… maybe. And so the people behind the people who run Australian comedy decided that edge had to go.

Of course, these were and are the same people who were fine with putting shit like this to air just a few years ago so excuse us if we don’t assign the purest of motives to their decision.

It’s taken Maori Television’s full board to yank Jonah from Tonga from its schedule.

The spin-off mockumentary show follows white comedian Chris Lilley as he plays 14-year-old Tongan boy Jonah Takalua.

Lilley, an Australian, insists the show was provocative satire rather than racist comedy.

“Provocative satire” you say. Like caging “rangas” in soccer nets and making them eat dog shit? And this was the kind of comedy that wasn’t outrageous in Australia, so imagine the kind of stuff that did stir up trouble… you know, like the time Shaun Micallef made a joke about making a joke about Weary Dunlop.

Anyway, while it’s safe to say that the specifics of outrage are something of a moving target – we’re all certainly very excited about the comedy of 2030 focusing on the appalling way the people of fifteen years ago openly read blogs on the internet – the general nature of outrage has all but vanished from our televisions as far as comedy is concerned. When they come to make another series of Shock Horror Auntie in 2030, they’re going to have nothing to put to air.

Why this has happened is up for debate; while we’d certainly love to go with evil executives at the ABC stamping out all controversy in an attempt to placate News Corp and their political masters, it’s at least as likely that with the audience for free-to-air television dwindling they’re just too worried about losing any more viewers to risk pissing off anyone. If you want to be outraged, the internet has all the material you need and more: television is now where people go to avoid all that kind of thing.

And so we end up here, with perfectly reasonable and yet perfectly forgettable shows like The Family Law. Are we saying it needs to be hard-hitting and offensive? Obviously not: it’s just not that kind of show. But without someone somewhere doing something even mildly edgy on Australian television, a show like The Family Law just fades into the background along with everything (Offspring? Love Child? The Wrong Girl?) else.

A well-crafted lightweight family sitcom like this one should be a refresher course between more challenging series. When everything on the air is pitched at the same “meh” level – was anyone ever surprised by anything on The Weekly? – then you’re left with a rolling tide of programming that just washes over viewers without once ever being memorable.

Which is a long way of saying we haven’t written much about The Family Law because we can’t remember anything we’d want to say.

Let’s get this Democratic Party jumping

Sometimes, a good thing should be left well alone. Sammy J’s Playground Politics was a razor-sharp series of five-minute sketches satirising federal politics via the medium of a Play School parody. It was also really funny. Then it came back a month ago as part of a series of 15-minute shows, Sammy J’s Democratic Party. In our review of episode 1, we pointed out a few faults with the show but were generally impressed. But now, 4 more episodes later, that list of faults is growing and we wish Sammy J would go back to just doing Playground Politics. It really is the best thing in this series.

The first problem with the show is its high concept. Hey look, Sammy J’s in a bunker under Parliament House and he can run amok! Tee hee, he’s got a periscope and can spy on the pollies, and look, he’s just spotted the Liberals sorting out their latest factional dispute by having a fight in some of those inflatable sumo wrestler costumes.

Okay, that idea is kind of funny – and unlike, say, The Chaser’s super long Election Desk concept, the periscope premise can be used for a number of different jokes (not to mention the fact that said premise can be re-worked into a PA system, and be used for even more jokes) – but it’s not quite up there with the quality of the OUTRAGE episode of Playground Politics in Democratic Party episode 2. Go watch it now, it’s great!

Then there are the Robert Menzies interviews, with Sammy J trying to get answers out of a cardboard cut-out of the former Prime Minister who speaks like a uni student who’s overdosed on internet memes. Having not minded this conceit in episode 1, we now absolutely loathe it. It’s not that we’re against stupid gags but there is an art to doing them, and the art is to take quite clever or well-conceived gags and dress them up as stupid. Something these sketches are not doing; they’re just taking stupid gags and doing them stupidly. Or to put it another way: when you’re left wondering whether you were wrong about The Weekly’s Hard Chat sketches because they don’t seem so bad in comparison, there’s some bad comedy going down.

On a positive note, Democratic Party isn’t often one of those sketch shows that wheels out the same, increasingly-tired-looking, characters each week. The not hugely hilarious Constitutional Cops have only been on the show twice, and the bushrangers with modern problems are also used sparingly. The nice thing about this show is that the Menzies interviews aside, it’s generally trying to keep things as fresh and funny as possible.

The parliamentary sports team coach sketch in episode 5 was a spot-on parody of football press conferences. And it’s been impressive how many very topical gags have made it into intricate and clever sketches, such as the Playground Politics ones, which were probably conceived and written many months ago. Many comedians wouldn’t go to that trouble once they’d finalised a script.

Despite the Menzies interviews and a number of other weak sketches, Sammy J’s Democratic Party is still worth watching. But it would be even more worth watching if they’d just stuck to what worked, or had worked harder on some of their other material.

Why is Mad as Hell So Good?

Okay, so Mad as Hell is back and it’s as brilliant as ever. What more do you need to know? The first episode back seemed slightly more desk-focused than previously – it felt like around ten minutes of Shaun talking before they cut to something else – but when the material’s this good who cares? Five thumbs up from us, would watch again until the end of time.

But then we got to thinking. Sure, Mad as Hell is funny. But what makes it a better show than a show like the surprisingly also funny The Front Bar? You know, the sports-related… oh great, everyone’s stopped reading. It’s an AFL-based show where Mick Molloy, Sam Pang and Some Footy Expert sit at a fake pub bar and talk shit. It’s pretty good.

Anyway, the point being: we’re always being told that comedy is subjective and personal, so if one show makes you laugh and another doesn’t then the one that made you laugh is automatically better comedy and that’s the end of that. Clearly the fact that people laugh at Dave Hughes puts paid to that theory (sorry Dave). But then how to put one form of comedy ahead of another?

In theory a better comparison here would be with The Weekly, but c’mon: The Weekly isn’t really trying to do the same thing as Mad as Hell. At least by comparing it to The Front Bar, we’re comparing two shows that have being funny in common – while both Mad as Hell and The Weekly feature men in suits behind desks talking about news clips, The Weekly never tries to do more than one thing at a time. It has two regular guests, both of whom play “themselves” and have firmly defined topics of conversation, it has serious interviews with actual people, and when Pickering makes fun of the news he does so in a straightforward fashion – no wordplay, lots of sarcasm, not much irony – with a firm focus on education. You know how most news satire shows, Mad as Hell included, will briefly explain a news story to set up their jokes? The Weekly is all set-up, no joke.

So the first comparison is form: The Front Bar works because they picked the right guys to sit around talking shit. That’s all the show is – the comedy there comes simply from letting the right guys go on and on about a subject they can get laughs out of.

Mad as Hell is a much more complicated product. There’s rants, news reports, jokes about news clips, fake interviews with comedy characters, running jokes, pop culture references, TV parodies, silly wigs and costumes, and on and on. There’s simply a lot more to watch and take in, and that’s before we get onto the wide range of comedy characters that turn up opposite Micallef.

There’s also a much wider range of jokes on Mad as Hell. Sometimes a comedy character will appear just for one joke or line before vanishing, and that joke could just be their name, how they look, or something they say. Mad as Hell will have a serious political observation made by someone in a bizarre outfit; silly things will be said by the suit-wearing and seemingly respectable host. If they can fit a joke in on top of another joke, they’ll do it.

While The Front Bar will use clips and props to get laughs, it’s all pretty straightforward stuff. The comedy is character-based too, but it’s the characters of the hosts – we laugh because we know who they are and why they act the way they do. If Mick’s team gets a drubbing, which they seem to do a lot, there’ll be jokes about that and they’ll work in a good-natured ribbing kind of way because it’s clear that Mick can give as good as he gets. These are funny guys and The Front Bar is giving you the chance to hang out with them.

(that’s not to say Shaun Micallef isn’t funny, obviously. But Micallef is clearly performing in a way that Mick Molloy and Sam Pang on The Front Bar aren’t. For some people, that’s what makes one show better than the other: as both shows’ hosts’ are clearly excellent at their jobs, it all boils down to personal taste)

The one area where The Front Bar has a natural advantage is pacing. A lot of the show is just people talking shit; if things get boring, more often than not someone will know to hurry it up. Mad as Hell is a more manufactured product – they’re obviously not making it up as they go along – so there’s a bit more skill involved in keeping it all on track, especially as the show itself is built around a wide range of jokes that all require different approaches to get maximum laughs.

And yet they manage it. Some jokes require a build up to work, others are at their funniest if they slip by almost un-noticed. Micallef can sell a joke with an expression; other times they’ll signal that they know a joke is corny as hell but they wanted to go with it anyway because why not?

Look, both these shows – no, not you The Weekly – are very funny. But The Front Bar is funny because it features a couple of funny guys having fun messing about; Mad as Hell is funny because it features a bunch of funny guys and a whole lot of various kinds of jokes presented with the skill to ensure that most of them are deployed for maximum effectiveness.

You might not like Micallef or find his show funny, but you’ve got to appreciate the craftsmanship. And also, it’s really funny; what the hell is wrong with you?

 

 

Doing Circle Work

File this under guardedly good news:

After months of rumours, Triple M has confirmed that longtime friends and comedy colleagues Mick Molloy and Jane Kennedy will host a national drive show in 2018.

On the one hand, hurrah! Mick is funny, Jane is also funny, and they’ve both been working in radio long enough to remember – and hopefully aspire to – the good old days when radio comedy involved actually making comedy rather than just taking talkback calls for 90 seconds between tracks.

On the other hand, which is currently slapping us in the face telling us to wake up to ourselves, we’re talking about commercial radio in 2018 – and drive time radio at that. Of course it’s going to be talkback-heavy, there’s zero chance of scripted sketches, and the selling point here is less “remember those guys you used to laugh at back in the late 80s” and more “He’s a guy! She’s a girl! Contrasting view points! Stuff about kids and commuter traffic and the footy and cooking! Like Hughsie and Kate for people who can’t stand Hughsie and Kate!”

“I can’t wait to get back to my natural habitat on the drive shift. I imagine the show will be a lot like my usual conversations with Jane minus a couple of good bottles of vino,” Mick said.

Jane says she’s rapt to be working with Mick again. “…I can’t think of anyone better to do Drive with. Plus Micky’s usual excuse of sleeping through the alarm won’t wash anymore!”

The show’ll be airing nationwide from early 2018. So probably less AFL material than we’re currently used to from Mick.

Why Are Articles On The Death Of Australian Comedy Such An Easy Sell?

The end of SBS Comedy’s online branch has sent shockwaves through… well, mostly SBS Comedy. We’ve already mentioned Jazz Twemlow’s hard-hitting take on why satire sucks – short version, it keeps firing Jazz Twemlow – and now we’ve been pointed towards Alice Frazer’s fairly despairing overview of Australian comedy as a whole:

Maybe Australia’s just not funny enough as a country to be allowed a flourishing comedy industry.

No argument here!

Well, maybe just a tiny one: what exactly is the definition of “flourishing”? Because sure, we’d all love to return to the days of Fast Forward and The Comedy Company, but HYBPA? runs half the year, the ABC shows thirty weeks or more of news satire (okay, more than half of that is The Weekly, but it’s still technically “comedy”) plus a steady stream of sitcoms, and even Channel Nine is back in the sitcom business with Here Come the Habibs. Things could definitely be better, but it’s not like it was a decade ago when Spicks & Specks and Chris Lilley were pretty much all the Australian comedy we were getting on television.

Of course, television isn’t the be-all and end-all of comedy. Movie comedy here is pretty much dead, likewise radio, and the stand-up scene is, depending on who you listen to, either full of ground-level excitement or slowly dying as everyone focuses all their attention on the major yearly festivals and ignores stand-up for the other eleven months of the year. But then again, there’s YouTube and “The Internet” giving performers big breaks, so let’s just say it’s probably all evened out… only now nobody is making any money, just like every other form of the creative arts in the 21st century.

The unpleasant truth is, as a country, we don’t seem to like comedy very much.

And yet comedians Hamish & Andy’s latest show was the fifth-highest rating television program nationwide for the second week running. So maybe we do like some kinds of comedy?

As a nation we don’t look after our comedy. After a while, however much we talk up our love for a laugh, it starts to seem suspiciously like maybe we aren’t really that into it.

As consumers of comedy, the idea that we have to “look after” Australian comedy is a bit of a worry. It’s not our job to safeguard Dave Hughes’ career; in fact, it’s nobody’s job. If an audience isn’t laughing and you think “maybe [they] aren’t really into it”, that sounds a lot like blaming your audience for not realising how funny you are. Let us know how that works out for you.

There’s a bunch more here like this:

There’s a weird helplessness that seems apparent in the refusal of Australian industry to give enough time and space to make projects work – when support can make the difference between success and failure, it’s often held back. There’s a wait-and-see attitude coupled with a total unwillingness to actually wait and or see.

(wait, doesn’t the ABC give pretty much everything two seasons automatically? Didn’t SBS Comedy online run for three years?)

And this:

Part of the problem might be Australia’s unwillingness to look at itself. Really interesting comedy has to come from truth, and we have a deep unwillingness to really acknowledge a lot of the reality of our country, from the atrocities of Manus Island to the fact that we’re not really as live-and-let-live as we pretend to be.

(wait, do you really want to be the comedian who goes out there with a tight five on how funny Manus Island is?)

But it seems the real problem being discussed here is this:

This is anecdotal of course, but it’s hard to get people out of the house to watch live comedy shows. We just don’t seem to have that culture that exists in, for example, the UK where people consider a comedy show as one of their default options for a night out. This is a problem, because dying repeatedly in front of generous audiences (who are willing to roll the dice in the hope of seeing something extraordinary, or truly enjoy a night of watching noble failure in the pursuit of laughs) is the best training ground for good comedy, and without that grass-roots market for taking risks on comedy, why would we expect people to take chances with their time or money on supporting Australian television or film comedy?

And there’s the rub. If your definition of “a flourishing comedy industry” is “a wide range of live comedy venues that pay money” then sure, things are in the toilet: they’ve been in the toilet for years. Australia is a big country with a small sports-mad population and long daylight hours featuring generally excellent weather so getting people to go out to a dive bar to hear someone tell jokes is always going to be an uphill struggle. Especially as your advertising pitch seems to be “leave the house for the chance to see a bunch of shithouse try-hards fail at their job because they need the experience if they’re ever going to grow”.

Australian comedians are kind of fortunate in that, because we live in an English-speaking nation with a largely western culture, they have easy access to the biggest and richest global market for entertainment. There are more opportunities in the UK than here; there are more opportunities in the US than the UK. The flip side of that is that all this overseas comedy also has easy access to our market, which means that Australian comedians are competing with a large chunk of the world when they try to make Australians laugh. Making hard-hitting comedy that examines the underpinnings of Western Society has international appeal so you’re competing with the world’s best; in contrast, overseas acts aren’t really offering many dumb jokes about the footy delivered in a nasal whine.

So when you say:

Really good comedy leaves us checking our own heads for dicks, and as a society we don’t seem to have a taste for that.

Good news: thanks to being fluent in English, you can focus your career on another society where they do appreciate that kind of comedy. Speaking entirely based on a whole lot of not much, we’re guessing that the percentage of people who want to go out and see live comedy that may not work and might call the audience dickheads (or various other “hard truths”) is a consistent but fairly small number across the globe. In a small country like Australia, the numbers aren’t enough to sustain a decent* live comedy circuit: in the UK and USA, they are.

And as for this:

Work together to support some interesting projects til they become sure bets, because it’s a sure bet that our industry isn’t taking risks any more

You might want to focus your ire on the overseas networks that seem to be funding pretty much all of the ABC’s scripted comedy output these days – you know, the networks who don’t actually come from our risk-adverse, comedy-disliking culture.

The fact is that Australian comedy has always been a tough sell. We’re a small country, so even the best at getting laughs have had to hustle to stay in work. Remember when Shaun Micallef was on breakfast radio? The Chaser are doing radio now too; Dave Hughes’s stand-up career was built on the back of radio and television appearances, likewise Wil Anderson’s. And people often have to diversify their material if they want to keep working: Mick Molloy didn’t become a “sports comedian” until two decades into his career, while Chris Lilley kept on making the same show until demand dried up.

Hell, even Carl Barron made a crap movie. If having that in cinemas doesn’t show our national commitment to comedy, what will?

 

 

*to be fair, Rodney Rude and Kevin “Bloody” Wilson seemed to do pretty well with what we do have.

 

 

 

 

Vale The Weekly season three

So last week’s episode of The Weekly opened with Charlie Pickering sitting behind his desk solemnly informing us that yes, while terrorism had cast a dark cloud over the week’s events the only correct way for us to move forward as a nation was to move forward as a nation or some such.

“It’s been a full-on week. Terror attacks around the world, and earlier this week one just a few kilometers from our studio. But what do we do? Maybe we could not let them take credit for shit… because all they want is attention.” – Charlie Pickering

Or just maybe, you could not begin your comedy television show with a “serious” segment about how serious terrorism is because all that does is give them fucking attention?

“This is Australia: don’t try to out-dickhead us” – the end of Pickering’s hilarious opening rant

But to be fair, Pickering’s let-hope-this-goes-viral-as-a-rallying-cry-against-terrorism speech wasn’t rubbish because it was actively bad: it was rubbish because it wasn’t about anything beyond putting Pickering’s head on camera. It said in a serious voice that… terrorism is bad? And we should stand against it using… the power of various national quirks? “Terrorists are dickheads but guess what: we’re even bigger dickheads!” Hey, dickhead: speak for yourself.

We’ve gone on and on and on this year about the various problems we have with The Weekly. None of that has changed because the show itself doesn’t change because change would require The Weekly to be a show that was made by people who cared about making decent television.

Each week The Weekly is ten minutes or so of Pickering talking over recent news footage with the occasional almost-joke mixed in, a segment where Tom Gleeson demonstrates the hard limit to his style of comedy, maybe one segment where Kitty Flanagan makes the show almost watchable, an interview we forget while it’s happening, Gleeson is back doing another interview where he lobs softball insults at people and we’re back again next week with a promise that Briggs – remember him, the indigenous member of the team who’s in all the promo photos but who for totally non-racist reasons only gets one-quarter of the air time – will be back. Why not just show repeats? They’d be slightly cheaper.

But surely this consistency in the face of a changing world is a sign that they’re doing something right? We’re going to stop you right there for a quick update from living concerned emoji Jazz Twemlow:

Four years later, and it seems the brief for the majority of satirical content is that it has to be shareable, nail something, and travel far online. The problem here is that this can drive satire into the pathology of imagining the shares you’ll get, and working backwards from there. Unfortunately what gets shares is, more often than not, a simplistic approach to one’s rivals: arrogant ridicule, laughing at how racist someone is, pointing out someone’s stupidity. It’s simplicity, and it works, especially when appealing to people whose attitudes are now expressed largely in 140-character chunks of boiled-down, thinking devoid of nuance.

And we look forward to Twemlow scurrying back to that kind of material if he ever gets another job in comedy. Good luck with that considering he also said this:

I’m sorry, but 61 million Americans and roughly 15 million Brits can’t all be racists, but that’s not a popular, or even permissible, thing for a satirist to say.

Yeah, defending racists! Truth to power, Jazz!

The thing is, this approach to “satire” is currently yesterday’s news. Websites are no longer sharing around “nailed it!” clips of “ultimate takedowns”, because unlike the situation eight months ago, their audiences now largely realise that kind of thing is useless feel-good pap. Thanks to the daily nightmare that is President Trump, people – or at least, the left-leaning people who used to pounce on “nailed it” clips – have a vague sense that shit? It just got real.

For these people, a comedian going nuts over some issue just doesn’t do it any more: they either want serious content on an issue, or they want funny stuff to distract them from the serious content on an issue that their friends keep sending them. People want The Handmaid’s Tale, not Inside Amy Schumer. The internet has, as it always does, moved on. Jazz Twemlow is out of a job.

For three years The Weekly has been built around the idea that if Charlie Pickering can nail a topic, that clip will be shared around online and drive traffic back to The Weekly. This was never a particularly good idea: all it really did was drive traffic to sites where clips from The Weekly occasionally appeared, because even at the best of times no-one thought “hey, this clip from The Weekly is so good I want to track down the rest of the show”. But now it doesn’t even do that. And hey, for once you don’t have to take our word for it:

The show is built so strongly around that viral content model it almost seems fair to ask: if a segment on The Weekly didn’t go viral, did it even really happen?

Junkee recently shared The Weekly’s take on the Cooper’s Brewery-marriage equality scandal, and earlier this year the program’s Make Australia Second segment received a modest amount of attention. But there’s been a marked drop in viral content since the first two years of the program.

So The Weekly is fucked. Don’t worry though, because as is traditional Pickering ended the final show of the year with… well, first it ended with an extended promo for Hard Quiz, a show as essential as a holographic toilet.

But then came Pickering telling us that “the other exciting bit of news [there was a first bit?] that we have is, we’ll be back to wrap up the year with The Yearly in December, and we’ll be back for season four of The Weekly in 2018 ladies and gentlemen!”

Is there any other program on Australian television that feels the need to announce its return a year out from its return date? How pathetically insecure does Pickering look shouting out that his show will be back before it has even ended? Is there anyone – anyone at all – so fearful of a future without The Weekly that they cannot go literally one single second without the knowledge that The Weekly will return to our television screens?

We briefly speculated among ourselves that perhaps Pickering announces the return of The Weekly in forty-odd weeks time each year in an attempt to force the ABC to commit to its return: “Hey guys, it’d look pretty bad if you didn’t follow up on that rock-solid commitment we told everyone you’d made…”

But a more likely scenario is that Pickering doesn’t want to give anyone else the glory of announcing the return of his show with his name in the title: not for him the tradition of letting his bosses at the ABC announce his show’s return when they announce the return of all those other shows that keep on coming back. No, it’s The Weekly With Charlie Pickering and Charlie Pickering gets to announce when The Weekly With Charlie Pickering is coming back and it’s always coming back because it’s hosted by Charlie Pickering.

Hey, remember this:

“Someone asked me about my old job, The Project, and asked why I left,” [Pickering] ranted into the microphone. “I just couldn’t watch the news any more.  It never changes: bad theatre by poor actors every night in perpetuity, it’s always the same.”

What would drive a man who felt this way to put his name on a show like The Weekly? What could keep him coming back week after week for over three years? What could force him to not only keep on making this show, but announce he’d be back to do it all again next year before this year’s series had even finished?

See you in 2018, Briggs.

 

Up Top for The Letdown

Press release time!

From Award Winning Comedy Showroom Pilot to Full Series THE LETDOWN starts production

Friday, June 16, 2017 — Production has commenced on the six-part comedy series The Letdown, for ABC in Australia and Netflix internationally with funding support from Screen Australia in association with Create NSW. ABC will broadcast the series in Australia on TV and iview. Netflix will stream the series internationally outside of Australia, and it will be available on Netflix in Australia after its run on ABC.

Produced by Giant Dwarf and co-written by Sarah Scheller and Alison Bell, who also stars, The Letdown was one of six Comedy Showroom pilots which aired last year on ABC TV as part of a joint initiative with Screen Australia.

With the pilot episode receiving the 2016 AACTA Award for Best Screenplay in Television, the series continues with the developing friendships and lives of a mother’s group thrown together through the circumstance of timing. Audrey (Alison Bell) navigates the steep learning curve of motherhood as she deals with sleeplessness, shifting relationship dynamics, her issues with her own mother and her husband’s career ambitions. They say it takes a tribe to raise a child, but these days obliging tribes are hard to come by – so perhaps this unlikely group of women (and one fella) is as good as it gets.

With a stellar cast including Alison Bell, Duncan Fellows, Sacha Horler, Leon Ford, Lucy Durack, Celeste Barber, Leah Vandenberg, Xana Tang, Sarah Peirse and Noni Hazelhurst, The Letdown proves that being a parent can be both extreme and hilarious.

Creators and writers Sarah Scheller and Alison Bell, said: “We are thrilled to be working with the ABC and Netflix on a full series of The Letdown. We’ve learned that making a TV show is actually not unlike motherhood… floods of tears, bursts of love and unhinged hormonal meltdowns – all in the name of comedy.”

ABC Head of Comedy Rick Kalowski said: “From the moment The Letdown’s pilot went out as part of our Comedy Showroom, it was clear the show had struck a chord with its brilliant blend of laughs and heartbreak – the very stuff early parenthood is made of. It is an absolute thrill to partner with Netflix on an ABC Comedy for the first time, and to bring this series to the rest of the world.”

Mike Cowap, Investment Manager Multiplatform at Screen Australia said: “Sarah Scheller and Alison Bell firmly established themselves as bold new voices with this darkly funny concept created as a pilot for our joint ABC initiative Comedy Showroom, demonstrating the appetite for a full series. We’re thrilled that this uniquely Australian story will be seen both at home and abroad through Netflix.”

Sophia Zachariou, Director, Sector Investment at Create NSW, said: “Encouraging female voices in comedy is a key focus for Create NSW and we are proud to be supporting this important next step in the careers of Sarah and Alison, whose original and darkly hilarious comic sensibility was so brilliantly showcased in The Letdown. I can’t wait to see what they will unleash across an entire series!”

Production Credits: A Giant Dwarf production for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation with funding from Screen Australia in association with Create NSW. Executive Producer Julian Morrow. Produced by Martin Robertson. ABC Executive Producers Rick Kalowski and Rebecca Anderson. Directed by Trent O’Donnell. Written by Sarah Scheller and Alison Bell.

 

We weren’t overly impressed with The Letdown in pilot form but hey, there were definitely worse pilots being aired on Comedy Showroom. Whatever happened to the part where the audience would pick which shows got made?

And good to see overseas money – thanks Netflix! – once again deciding what we see on our ABC. Did four years of Please Like Me fizzling in the ratings teach us nothing?

The International Brigade

The stand-out pilot in last year’s Comedy Showcase was undoubtedly Ronny Chieng International Student, in which first-year Malaysian law student Ronny falls in with a group of fellow Asian students and local girl Asher, and together they try to navigate their way through a minefield of crazy lecturers, equally crazy students, and Aussie traditions they know nothing about. Happily, the first two episodes have been as funny as the pilot was, and on this evidence, this will be a memorable and hilarious series.

Joining the established group of residents at International House is douchey-but-loveable American student Craig, who after almost destroying their shared accommodation with his mega party in episode 1 has quickly been assimilated into the group.

What we particularly like about this series is that every character, from relatively important ones like Craig to the aggressive guy in the IT shop or Professor Dale’s ex-wife Joy-Anne, have well-defined, laugh-generating personalities and dialogue. Even student administrator Mrs Ford, who could simply have been written as a stock standard, world-weary authority figure, is instead a hilarious creation, endlessly flipping through her folder containing the student rulebook, each page of which is encased in its own individual plastic pocket and annotated with a Post-It note.

Compare this to the supporting characters in many other recent ABC sitcoms, from Please Like Me to Chris Lilley’s various shows, who had almost no defining characteristics. Writing comedy is about getting the details right, and it’s no wonder this is a much funnier series.

This series, written as it is by a Malaysian and an Australia, also gives us the rare opportunity to laugh at both ourselves and other cultures in a way that doesn’t disrespect either. This isn’t like Jonah From Tonga, where the joke – whatever it was – seemed to be on non-white Australians. In Ronny Chieng International Student the joke is on everyone. And in a world where people are demanding both dignity and equal rights for all and the right to insult whoever they want, this is the only Australian sitcom that we can think of that’s achieved both. Which is a huge achievement.

Australian Tumbleweeds is Australia's most opinionated blog about comedy.
Back To Top