Imagine, if you will, a fan of Australian comedy. Not all that long ago, this fandom might have kept them pretty busy; these days it only takes a few hours a week to keep up to date. And yet, even with that meager diet it still feels like they’re watching the same thing over and over – because the only comedy that’s left is news-based clip shows, and they’re all using the same clips.
It’d be unfair to direct most of our stink eye on this subject towards Question Everything. They’re at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to news clips. The Cheap Seats gets almost a full week to scour the news from around the world before it goes to air on a Tuesday. Question Everything airs 24 hours later; not a lot of hilarious news happening in that tiny gap.
And this year has been a bumper year for clip show comedy. Twenty-six hour-long episodes of Have You Been Paying Attention? alongside 28 or more episodes of The Cheap Seats doesn’t leave much over for anyone else.
Both those shows clearly worked hard to avoid stepping on each others toes. They’re also different shows in terms of humour. What might have got a quick answer and moving on on HYBPA? might be two minutes worth of riffing on The Cheap Seats. Yes, there were times this year when both shows – coming from the same production company, so presumably sharing at least some resources – used the same clip. So long as the jokes are different, who cares?
Well, for one, the jokes usually aren’t all that different. Someone makes a weird noise on a news report, you’re going to get a lot of jokes about making a weird noise. Of course, it’s possible to take one clip and get two wildly different gags from it, but that usually requires one of the shows to be Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell.
The whole point of clip show comedy is that it’s comedy in bulk, a rapid-fire onslaught of the most obvious jokes. See a funny clip, use the first joke that comes to mind even if it’s barely a joke and guess we’re giving Question Everything the stink eye again over that, and onto the next clip. Do that thirty times a week, you’ve got the start of a show.
There have been plenty of times in recent comedy history where clip shows have clashed. Everyone knows the ways around this kind of conflict. Cast your net wider, come up with smarter jokes – it’s all easier said than done. For one, these things cost money, and the point of a clip show is that it’s meant to be cheap.
Question Everything tries to get around these limits by getting the panel to go on extended riffs about the clips. But if they fully committed to that, then what’s the point of Wil Anderson? So he gets to do the usual gags in between and suddenly the show seems just that little bit staler.
While The Cheap Seats is clearly doing a better job with this kind of material, they’re not resting on their laurels either. They cast their net globally (and not just Across the Ditch) so their material’s more varied. The hosts occasionally pop up in sketches, which adds to the variety. They have running jokes they can pull out to use to make relevant clips funnier. And there’s actual chemistry between Tim and Mel so when the jokes falter the bungling still seems funny.
So The Cheap Seats? Actually working on being funny. Question Everything? They’re acting like they’ve got this all under control. Wil Anderson, a pretty basic collection of news clips, a couple of comedians who’ve brought in some old rope that kind of fits the topics; yeah, that’ll do.
Like we said at the start, it feels like we’re watching the same thing over and over again.
It’s been well over a year since the incoming federal Labor government promised a new cashed up world for the ABC. Okay, so 2023 was always going to be business as usual. But surely 2024 was going to present us with the fruits of that momentous electoral decision? Mo’ money, mo’ programming and all that. Got your hopes up? Time to dive into the 2024 ABC upfronts!
We’re so used to getting less comedy out of the ABC each and every year that we’re not entirely sure how to react to a future that is basically “more of the same”. Remember when the ABC had two news satire shows a year, and then Shaun Micallef quit to open the door for new talent and the ABC replaced Mad as Hell with… nothing? Well now he’s back!
Frankly, the news that Micallef is returning to the ABC in 2024 with Shaun Micallef’s Unnamed Project could only be better if we knew what kind of show he’ll be fronting. But here’s an educated guess:
In the last decade, Shaun Micallef has only made three kinds of programs. There’s serious documentaries on topics he’s interested in. Oh look, he’s also doing one of them for SBS next year in the form of Shaun Micallef’s Origin Odyssey:
A reflective and joyful comedy travelogue where Shaun Micallef – one of Australia’s favourite and most respected comedians – explores the cultural roots of his guests. Through the minutia of international travel, conversation, immersive experience and observational humour we will discover more than expected of our travellers. Developed and produced by Endemol Shine Australia (A Banijay Company) for SBS.
Then there’s comedy shows that mix pre-recorded sketches with live material, which we all know and love and would really like to see more of but he did already make a shitload of episodes of Mad as Hell so who knows.
And then there’s the game shows. Honestly, considering the ABC’s firm editorial commitment to delivering the worst possible result for comedy fans, we’d have our buzzers ready.
Anyway, even we can’t find a way to scowl at the news we’re getting more Fisk. Fisk is great: good job ABC, presumably this has nothing to do with it being a hit on Netflix.
After that, we’re back in the exciting yet extremely familiar world of hoping really hard the ABC has a few winners that they forgot to mention. Here’s what else is coming back:
*Spicks and Specks
*Hard Quiz
*The Weekly with Charlie Pickering
*Gruen
And supposedly a second season of Mother and Son is “in development“. Maybe they’ll develop an angle that’s actually funny this time? Even the ABC’s Chief Content Officer seems to care about a second series for the show more out of duty than anything else:
The numbers were okay, I think we would have liked a bit more, but this is one of the most iconic ABC shows of all time. I want the show to have the respect it deserves and see if we can find an audience across two series. Now, whether it will finance or whether it will creatively develop, I don’t know. But we want to at least give it the best shot, potentially for 2025, but not 2024.
There are also a couple of new comedies:
*White Fever
“Jane (Ra Chapman) is a cocky Korean-Australian adoptee with a love of hairy white guys – the hairier and whiter the better. When her friends call her out for having a white man fetish she sets out to try and reprogram her libido, reignites a connection with childhood friend, Yu Chang (Chris Pang) and stumbles into the process of finding out who she really is.”
Has there ever been a sitcom based around a character’s “quest to find themselves” that’s been funny? Oh wait, My Name is Earl. Okay, we’ll file this under “wait and see”.
*Austin
“When much-loved children’s author Julian Hartswood (Ben Miller, Bridgerton, Death in Paradise) inadvertently causes a social media storm, his career and that of his illustrator wife Ingrid (Sally Phillips, Veep, Bridget Jones’s Diary) appears to be over. That is until Austin (Michael Theo, Love on the Spectrum), the neurodivergent son that Julian never knew existed, turns up out of the blue.”
Time for some tough questions. Is this an Australian comedy? Or just another one of the kind of co-production where it’s basically a UK show that happens to be set here (see Queen of Oz, chunks of Frayed, and most of Spreadsheet)? Two out of the three leads are from the UK, and they’re the parents (well, step-parent in Ingrid’s case) of the third. Is this even set in Australia? All we have to go on is the production information:
A Northern Pictures production for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Major production investment from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in association with Screen Australia, Screen Canberra and ITV Studios which also handles international distribution
So plenty of local money at least. Hopefully they can greenscreen in a visit to Bondi beach at some point.
Despite what television producers like to think, musicals aren’t automatically funny. The joke with Australian Epic is meant to be that hey, we’re making big musicals out of small stories. It’s not a bad joke – but going by the first episode, it’s not good enough.
When it was first announced, Australian Epic was called Stories From Oz. Presumably that’s because the concept was a straight lift from the series Stories From Norway, which aired on SBS here a few years ago. Since then, it looks like the ABC realised they didn’t need to pay royalities for the “musical documentary” concept. Hey presto, new title (and no mention of the original).
We bring it up here not (just) because we’re shitty people, but because the original version works as a comedy in ways this does not. For one, it was the product of a pre-established musical comedy team. Think Norway’s version of Flight of the Conchords, or Hamish & Andy but with guitars. Aunty Donna! Yeah, let’s go with them.
It’s not hard to see how that version would be funny. And the local version is put together by a duo of sorts – The Chaser’s Andrew Hansen and Chris Taylor. But they’re not exactly renowned for their hilarious point of view. Hansen is an extremely talented songwriter, but he turns topical issues into satirical songs rather than just making up crap for the sake of a laugh.
So instead of an established double act messing about, we get a slightly more polished ensemble who bring pretty much nothing pre-existing to the table as far as comedy goes. The joke is that they’re going all in with a big musical about a small subject. Once you get past that, what’s left is a collection of musical sketches that are impressive more for their production values and musical virtuosity than their jokes.
Another strength of the Norwegian version was that it wasn’t afraid to go a little off-book with its adaptation of events for a laugh. While it also featured interviews with people actually involved, the songs often put a weird spin on events. They’d happily go surreal or over-the-top if that’s where the laughs were.
It’s hard to say exactly why the local version doesn’t do this. The first episode is looking at the story of ice skater Steven Bradbury. You know, the guy who won Olympic gold when everyone in front of him fell over. You’d think that’d be prime material for a bit of piss-farting around, but the actual episode? Surprisingly reverential.
The only explanation that comes to hand is that having the co-operation of the the real Bradbury (and his coach, and his parents) left Hansen and Taylor feeling that cheap shots were off the table. In a traditional comedy musical, they could go big and silly with Bradbury’s character. But because this has real interviews with the real people, it’s constantly pulled back to reality.
And each song has to stand on its own. We get the real story, then a song, then it’s back to the real story. They don’t build on each other, or even have much in the way of running jokes. Which is weird, because the whole point of the Bradbury story is that it builds up to a punchline: he won gold because everyone in front of him fell over.
Constantly resetting back to reality limits where the show can go, even if the individual songs are pretty good. Everyone involved is treated with respect, which is what you want in a documentary but a bit of a laugh-killer in a comedy. And the choice of what to turn into a song doesn’t really provide much in the way of insight.
Of course there’s a song on the decision to hang back in the big race. But why is there a full musical number about him needing to get a second medical opinion about a career-ending injury? The whole point of musical numbers is to get at things that lie underneath the surface of the story. Here the songs mostly just illustrate things the documentary side has already explained.
We’re told that Bradbury realised he couldn’t out skate the pack. He knew all too well that people fall over a lot in ice skating, so his best path to victory was to hang back. So his win wasn’t an accident after all! And then there’s a lengthy song that tells us again what we just heard, only in musical form. Good thing it was hilarious oh wait.
But going over old ground is built into this concept. Creating a musical around the joke that anyone would make a musical about recent Australian history isn’t new (see: Keating!). And quasi-comedy docutakes on recent events is… *waves hand in general direction of The Betoota Advocate Presents*.
What Australian Epic ends up being is a show for a): people who really like musical theatre, b): people who really like Australian Story, and c): people who tuned in really hoping to get some comedy.
There’s a scene in Darradong Local Council, Paul Fenech’s latest series for 7Mate, where a barista is obliged to laugh at a feeble joke told to her by Fenech’s character Fox. The woman playing the barista does her best, but it’s clear that she doesn’t think the joke is funny. Wait until she sees the rest of the series…
Yes! Fenech and his repertory company (Angry Anderson, Kevin Taumata, Garry Who, Vince Sorrenti and others) are back with a show which is technically an all-new series but, let’s face it, you could probably slap the titles for Housos on the front of this and some people wouldn’t notice the difference. Because while Darradong Local Council may set itself up to be a satire on why local government is broken, it’s actually just a loose frame on which to hang a series of scenes where moronic characters get into fights, indulge in soft porn and be out-and-proud anti-woke.
There are attempts at satire here – the Mayor (George Kapiniaris), Deputy Mayor (Jon-Bernard Kairouz) and Councillors vote to close down all the local libraries to enable a dodgy Chinese property developer to erect new apartments – but it seems unlikely to go beyond “Hey, this happens in local government sometimes”. As usual with a Paul Fenech show, there are way more important things to do than satire, like fill up a few minutes of airtime with a sex scene or a fight sequence.
The show gets a few decent laughs from the Greens Councillor character, who also votes to close down the libraries because the books aren’t made of hemp. But having him turn up and mention tofu or lentils or whatever it is he’ll get to do each week – in case you haven’t picked this up yet, this is not clever or original satire – will quickly wear thin.
What will be kind of interesting is how the Fox character, who proclaims himself to be a Sovereign Citizen, will develop. Fenech probably intends this character to be an idiot, sucked into dumb Cooker conspiracy theories about vaccines and so forth, but he’ll also likely have his cake and eat it too. Yes, the characters in Darradong Local Council are corrupt, lazy, dumb morons – and sexist, racist and homophobic to boot – but they’re also unlikely heroes, who get away with stuff like theft and up-skirting. And there’ll be no Donald Trump-esque series of court cases at which they’ll get a sort of comeuppance.
Maybe the subplot about the state premier wanting to shut down Darradong’s Chinese-backed property development, so he can build an even worse development, will be funny and interesting? But wait, this is Paul Fenech, so all the potential satire will be drowned in a melee of titillation, shouting and punch-ups.
Of course, after several decades of near-identical Paul Fenech series, no one watching his shows doesn’t love his trademark formula*. Or, at least, that’s the theory. There presumably will come a point where doing the same material in a slightly different setting will wear thin, even amongst Fenech’s rusted-on fanbase. Could this half-arsed local government satire be the series that kills his career?
Ah, who are we kidding? Paul Fenech will never die. See you next year for our review of Darradong Local Council series two.
“We are all interested in the future,” someone once said, “because that is where we shall be spending the rest of our lives”. But what if the future looks really shit? Welcome to the magical world of Australian television’s plans for 2024.
He’s already announced he’ll be back in 2024 – as will Charlie Pickering
In recent weeks the commercial networks and streaming services have been holding their upfronts – the events where they let the media and public know what they have planned for the coming year. The only holdout left is the ABC, which in recent years has been the main focus when it comes to local comedy. But could 2024 be the year that comedy makes its big comeback on ah fuck even we can’t say that with a straight face.
Let’s start with the one network we know will be showing local comedy in 2024: Network Ten:
Returning in 2024:Thank God You’re Here, Have You Been Paying Attention?, The Cheap Seats, The Inspired Unemployed (Impractical) Jokers
New shows: None.
Verdict: Considering the usual approach over the last decade or so is to axe even decent comedy shows, we’re not going to complain when Ten decides to stick with the winners they already have. Must kind of suck to be someone wanting to do comedy outside of Working Dog when the only network that does comedy only seems to want to work with them, but it must kind of suck to be someone wanting to do comedy in Australia in general.
Oh, and RIP the local version of Would I Lie to You?. It hasn’t been confirmed dead or alive, but now that TGYH is back… yeah, it’s dead.
Returning in 2024: Nothing – bad news for We Interrupt This Broadcast.
New shows:The Australian Roast of John Cleese, Outback Comedy Outlaw (7Mate) which we guess is at least somewhat comedy related.
Verdict: Look, comedy goes in and out of style at the commercial networks, and after a few years of half-heartedly giving it a go (remember Australia’s Sexiest Tradie?) the fizzle that was We Interrupt This Broadcast at the start of the year seems to have killed off Seven’s drive to reclaim their Fast Forward-era comedy crown. Daryl Somers is gone; they’re not even bothering with those best-of specials any more. And what happened to Paul Fenech?
(we should probably point out here that comedy is often a relatively last-minute addition to a network’s line-up. It’s cheap, it can be made in a hurry, and it’s not something that gets a lot of pre-launch hype. The overall picture here is pretty grim today, but there’s probably going to be a few surprise comedy arrivals in 2024)
Then there’s the network that doesn’t give a stuff about comedy, which is why they have a lock on Hamish & Andy (just kidding): The Nine Network:
Returning in 2024:Does The Hundred with Andy Lee count? Lego Masters definitely doesn’t.
New Shows: Stephen Fry is hosting a local version of Jeopardy, if that’s your thing.
Verdict: Nine doesn’t do comedy as such – they do entertainment that contains trace elements of comedy. If you laugh at something, great; if you don’t, it doesn’t matter. Somewhat related, there’s a documentary coming up looking back at the AFL Footy Show so hopefully there’ll be a few good lines from Trevor Marmalade someone will cut out and put up on YouTube and save us the trouble of fast forwarding through all the racism and sexism.
And finally (for now), in 2024, Australian commercial television isn’t just the free-to-air networks. Remember Foxtel? They have a streaming arm – Binge – and they’re back to being almost relevant: Foxtel / Binge:
Returning in 2024:Colin From Accounts. Because the first series left so many questions unanswered.
New Shows: Yeah, nah.
Verdict: We can understand not bringing back RocKwiz, and Upright didn’t need its second season so no problem here with not giving it a third, but where’s The Back Side of Television? Or The Last Year of Television? If you have Mitch McTaggart right there hosting your upfronts – and they did – surely you can do him the common decency of giving him a show on your network?
Press release time! And we’ve been waiting for this one:
Get your jazz hands ready as ABC deliversnew musical comedy doco Australian Epicin November.
The ABC is thrilled to announce the ingenious new six-part musical comedy documentary series Australian Epic, where six of Australia’s most defining stories are retold as musicals, will premiere on Wednesday, 8 November at 9pm on ABC TV and ABC iview.
Written by The Chaser’s Chris Taylor and Andrew Hansen, with 36 original songs performed by an ensemble cast of dazzling triple-threats, including Phoenix Jackson Mendoza (Six The Musical), Michelle Brasier (Aunty Donna’s Coffee Café), Fiona Choi (The Family Law), Sami Afuni (Hamilton), Nicholas Kong (Miss Saigon) and Amy Lehpamer (Beautiful: The Carole King Musical), this 6-part extravaganza breathes new life into some of the country’s most colourful stories, by giving them the full musical treatment they’ve always deserved.
Australian Epic swings between interviews with the real-life players and musical numbers that give Taylor and Hansen full rein to put their trademark satirical spin on the material. The stories receiving the complete razzle-dazzle makeover include the unlikely triumph of ice-skater Steven Bradbury, the fairy-tale of the young Tasmanian woman Mary Donaldson, the international meltdown caused by Johnny Depp’s pet dogs, Pistol and Boo, the comedy of errors that befell Melbourne’s cursed Ferris wheel, the saga of Schapelle Corby and the political showdown of the Tampa affair.
Writer and executive producer Chris Taylor says: “Writing comedy songs with Andrew Hansen has always been one of my favourite things in the world to do. So it was really great to reunite with him on this bonkers project, which features some of the best songs we’ve ever written, I think.”
Writer, composer, executive producer and ensemble cast member Andrew Hansen says: “At the same time, it’s also the only show we’ve done that has a heart. We actually wanted some of the songs to be quite moving, especially in the Tampa episode. So, there’s some emotional stuff in there that we finally allowed ourselves to have in our middle age.”
Ahem. It’s obvious to all that our recent “Where’s Stories From Oz?” campaign was the driving force behind getting this finally on air. It’s clearly in no way the result of a scheduling decision that was probably made months ago and the very idea is ludicrous thanks for asking. Was it possibly delayed to avoid comparisons with the non-musical but otherwise similar-sounding The Betoota Advocate Presents? How would we know?
No, we can take the credit for this finally reaching our screens 100%, even if the ABC has changed the title to try and throw everyone off the scent.
Whether we’ll want the credit once it airs remains to be seen.
Question Everything made its triumphant return to the ABC for a third season this week. A third season? Of a show that still can’t figure out how to make its core concept – fake news but comedy! – work? Good thing it’s not our tax dollars paying for this crap oh wait.
Having it back for more than the ABC’s traditional “bare minimum” two seasons suggests that either a): the ABC has decided to make it a regular Wednesday night feature – yes folks, this is the Mad as Hell replacement you’ve been waiting for, or b): the ABC needed a last minute replacement for the supposedly debuting this year Stories From Oz. Where is Stories From Oz anyway?
Sadly, Question Everything is not about that kind of news. Instead, it’s a news-ish panel show where ABC “personalities” and actual funny people get to occasionally make jokes – racists like monster trucks! – in between endless cutaways to the audience or to wide shots or to Jan Fran and Wil Anderson or to anything else that could drag things out.
To be fair, when the second joke of the show is pretty much “democracy… yeah, it’s not working is it?”, you can understand why they might want a bit less comedy and a bit more anything else. Why can’t we just have a strong leader who’ll make all the right decisions for the nation? Can’t see how that could possibly go wrong.
So the format is basically they show a clip, then Anderson picks a panelist to do a scripted bit based on the first half of the clip, then they show the rest of the clip and Jan Fran says something boring. It’s the platonic ideal of a pointless ABC “comedy” series, right down to the part where the panel… answers random questions? Didn’t we just have a show that did that? Is this now going to be a part of every ABC series going forward? Because we’ve got a bunch of questions we’d like the Gruen team to answer on-air.
Like all panel shows, a decent line-up can make the world of difference. Nath Valvo is always good value, so having him on? Good move. And yet, it’s still pointless shit, the kind of nothing timewasting trash that everyone alive today has better things to do than watch.
You’d think that maybe thirty years ago – back when Australia had five TV channels and no functional internet – this kind of show had a place. But you’d be wrong. Even back then this kind of crap didn’t cut it; if you wanted to be funny on TV, you did sketches, wrote a sitcom, or tried to keep variety alive. Panel chat? Leave that to the sports shows.
So what does the ABC have against comedy? Seriously, just look at the “comedy” output from them over the last few months. Mother and Son was a dramedy about a thirtysomething loser who happened to have a wacky mum somewhere in the background. WTFAQ was an answer to the question “what if you wanted to do a sketch show but didn’t want to write any sketches?”. And now Question Everything, which is pretty much Gruen Panel Show with bonus pointless asides about the news.
On the one hand, technically these are all considered comedies in 2023. On the other, they all have big Get Out Of Jail Free cards handy if you were to suggest they weren’t actually funny. Dramedy doesn’t have to be funny! Answering viewer questions is meant to be informative! Question Everything is promoting media literacy! Only not too much, otherwise the viewers might realise it’s shithouse.
None of these shows are cheap to make. Which means the ABC made a conscious decision to spend serious money, not on making actual funny shows, but on this half-baked garbage (the worst kind of garbage – ed). Remember Mad as Hell? Remember how it was funny? People like funny: just look at the way the ABC press department makes sure to call pretty much everything a comedy. And yet the ABC has shown no desire whatsoever to provide audiences with even a half-hearted attempt at following up on Mad as Hell.
Instead we get Question Everything, a show so bad it has Dickie Knee on – but doesn’t let him speak:
Earlier this week this not-exactly-news-type-news was announced: the days of Daryl Somers hosting Seven’s Dancing with the Stars are no more:
“Seven let me know recently that they have signed Chris Brown to the network full-time and amongst his commitments he will be hosting DWTS.”
Not only was it a case of “you know that new guy we hired? Yeah, we hired him to do your job”, but everyone knew about it months earlier:
Industry rumours have been rife for several months that Brown might take to the dance floor alongside Kruger, particularly after both hosted the Logie Awards red carpet.
As we’re of the view that a week old stick of celery would be a better host of anything than Somers, big congrats to Chris Brown for scoring a gig we’ll never watch.
So why mention this? As Daryl himself makes sure to let everyone know:
“I’d like to publicly thank Andrew Backwell and Angus Ross at Seven for their ongoing support and for commissioning Hey Hey It’s 50 Years! in 2021, and the five primetime specials that followed.”
One of the ways television works is (sigh) synergy. Once you’ve landed one high profile gig, it’s a lot easier to get the network to agree to your other projects, because if nothing else they’ll work as cross promotion for that high profile gig we mentioned earlier.
Long story short, Daryl being the face of one of Seven’s local hits meant Seven was a lot more likely to listen when he started ranting on about bringing Hey Hey it’s Saturday back (in clip show form).
And now he’s not, and they don’t have to.
“While I shall miss the fun of working with my Gold Logie buddy Sonia, the quick-witted Todd McKenney and Mark Wilson ‘On The End’, I am now unencumbered to pursue the projects I put on hold during Covid and shall have some exciting news on that score early next year.”
Mother and Son is a great sitcom premise. A single guy in his 30s, in precarious employment – and an even more precarious state when it comes to his love life – is forced to live with his elderly mother, and deal with her stubbornness, erratic moods and encroaching dementia. He can’t leave because who’d look after his mother, and despite her behaviour towards him she doesn’t want him to go. Drop these two characters into any number of situations and the interpersonal tension between these two forced-together people should result in comedy gold.
That’s should result in comedy gold. And we stress the word should because the biggest single problem with this reboot of the classic 80s/90s ABC sitcom Mother and Son is that so much about the way it’s been made seems to be working against it being comedy gold.
Everything about the show looks gorgeous – the sunny weather, the cool local eateries and shops in the on-the-verge-of-being-hip suburb the show’s set in – yet making things feel optimistic and aspirational isn’t how you get laughs. The comedy of Mother and Son comes from the bleak reality of Mother Maggie and Son Arthur’s situation, and the original series, starring Ruth Cracknell and Garry McDonald, with its old-fashioned studio set, and its old-timey musical title sequence, set the tone a lot better.
Also, what was supposed to be funny (or enlightening? Or anything?) about the scene where Maggie (Denise Scott) has a dementia moment, and the audience experiences her brain fuzz and confusion? We know she has dementia, that’s already obvious, and it doesn’t make the show funnier to include this scene, so why is it there? Indeed, lots of the scenes weren’t meant to be funny – the ones which touched on a social issue or built on the romance subplot, say – so why were they there? What’s with the idea in modern sitcoms that tugging at the audiences’ heartstrings is a better thing to do than make the audience laugh?
Sure, Mother and Son did include some decent comic ideas – like Maggie and Arthur (Matt Okine) getting caught up in a racist conspiracy protest, or Maggie’s brief romance with a cactus fanatic – but that didn’t quite make up for the show’s lack of commitment to comedy otherwise.
Only Denise Scott, and Jean Kittson as Maggie’s old nursing friend Heather, brought the big laughs. But then, you’d expect comedy performers of their experience to know how to play a script for maximum laughs. Okine was an okay Arthur, but Scott, when she was given a chance to be funny, was every bit as good as Ruth Cracknell – and that’s not easy.
Had the makers of Mother and Son spent more time coming up with jokes and situations where Maggie could be funny, or even just more sight-gags involving questionable cacti, they might have had a winner on their hands. What we have instead is yet another show that either won’t commit to comedy, or wasn’t funny enough as a comedy to start with. We assume given it’s 2023 it’s the former, but the quality of the comedy that was attempted suggests there was a generous dose of the latter too!
For some reason or another the ABC is currently running ads featuring Dr Karl. You know, the guy who answers all your science questions? Only if you actually listen to his answers, he often doesn’t answer your questions – he just throws out a bunch of quirky facts that are kind of adjacent to whatever question was put to him. Which often makes him useless if you really do want to know something and hello, did someone mention WTFAQ?
Of course not. Nobody is talking about WTFAQ, because for all the care and effort that’s clearly gone into it – plus they named a presenter’s baby Methamphetamine Rules – it’s barely even a television program. What kind of a hook for a series is “people answer viewer questions”? It’s a nothing idea that has resulted in a nothing show. No wonder the ABC is set to do it all over again with the return of Question Everything in a fortnight.
Meanwhile, here’s a real question: what happened to Stories From Oz? We were promised it’d be turning up – finally – some time in 2023. The year is now 4/5ths over, with zero sign of its musical hilarity. From now on, every time some random garbage ABC format is fished out of the bin to fill a hole in the timeslot, we should be asking “where’s Stories From Oz?”. So here goes:
“Where’s Stories From Oz?”
Anyway. At least with Question Everything, you can see a point to maybe half the show… if you squint really hard and they have some decent panelists on that week. Not a great point, not a funny point, but y’know: its a current affairs panel show featuring comedians. It’s a real format.
WTFAQ doesn’t even have that. You know what else it doesn’t have? Comedy. It’s a show that needs to be really funny to justify its existence because otherwise it’s just answering viewer questions. And we all know “answering viewer questions” is utter bullshit because either they’re getting zero questions (so they just make them up) or they’re getting so many questions about everything they can find one to justify any segment they like (so they might as well just make them up). These aren’t questions anyone is really asking about anything: they’re just an excuse to do stuff.
So why aren’t they doing funny stuff? You could argue that being too funny would get in the way of informing people that (checks notes) fish can remember things, holding a gun sideways ruins your aim and a swinging pole in a playground is for swinging on, but you’ve got a whole half hour to fill and we just summarised half the show in ten seconds.
And it’s not like they can’t be funny if they wanted to. Mitch McTaggart from The Back Side of Television was a guest reporter a couple of weeks ago, answering a question we’re not entirely convinced anyone who watches the ABC asked, “Where is Summer Bay supposed to be?”. McTaggart’s answer – well “answer” – was pretty funny. And his reasoning was packed with the sort of obsessive research, mad leaps of logic, and all-round commitment to being as funny as possible as you’d expect from Mitch McTaggart.
If this was a pitch for a series of The Back Side of Television made for the ABC, BRING. IT. ON. Or if this was seeing if the audience likes the odd non-serious questions/non-serious answer segment on WTFAQ then good. But even that poses the question: why make a show that continually treats questions like “what is this weird pole in my local playground for?” seriously? Who is in the production office thinking comedy isn’t the way to go with this material?
It wouldn’t even be hard to do. Giving the hosts actual comedy characters beyond “sulky idiot” or “world-weary adult” would be a start. Coming up with weird tangents or funny angles so the answers went somewhere surprising* wouldn’t hurt. Take things too far!
Sure, at this stage we’re just describing a slightly more realistic Review with Myles Barlow. But that’s still a pretty good pitch for a show in 2023.
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*they kind of did that with the “why can only middle eastern people smell lingering odors on washed plates?” story, which is why that was the most interesting (but not funny) segment this week
