Australian Tumbleweeds
Don’t Quit Your Desk Job
With a comedy team as long-running as The Chaser, it’s important for us to stake out our positions before discussing their latest effort. It’s not simply enough to say “they peaked with The Hamster Wheel” (though that’s true): something like The Checkout may not be a 100% traditional Chaser product, but it’s a better show for what it is than The Chaser’s Media Circus, which is a lot more slap-dash and sloppy. And then there’s the way their election shows, while arguably the thing they’re best known for – they’ve certainly been doing them the longest – are usually some of their weaker efforts and… ah, screw it: The Chaser’s Election Desk was pretty disappointing.
Partly that’s because of the stunts. Look, we know some people find the stunts funny: if you’re one of them, feel free to skip to the next paragraph. For us, while it’s clear they add a bit of action to a show that would otherwise be 90% voice-over over news clips, they remain pretty pointless. “Let’s try to get Malcolm Turnbull to stand next to a cardboard Tony Abbott!” O-kaay… well, that didn’t really work. Nice joke about how the cardboard version is as animated as the real one though.
Oops, maybe keep on skipping down, stunt-lovers. The problem with the stunts even when they work is that these days they don’t really tell us much about the politicians involved. People who love to suspect the ABC of left-wing bias, rejoice! The stunt involving Bill Shorten and a rat seemed far less dangerous to his media image than the one where Malcolm Turnbull was meant to catch a toppling Chas. Sure, having your photo taken with a rat is bad; having a photo of someone falling on you is worse. And the cardboard Tony Abbott one wasn’t great for Turnbull either. So having him refuse to participate doesn’t mean he’s a spoilsport: it means he (and those around him) are media savvy – just as Shorten and Tanya Plibersek were media savvy when they did get involved.
Actually, that bias question is a good one – not because the show itself was biased, but because maybe it should have been. In today’s fragmented media landscape blah blah blah zzzzzz. Oh right: the days when everyone would watch a channel and so the channel had to be “fair and balanced” are pretty much over. There’s enough media diversity out there now that you can watch (or get your news from) a source that pretty much fits your personal preferences, which means that for most viewers a goodly chunk of The Chaser’s Media Desk was making jokes that were never going to work.
Just listen to the audience reactions. These aren’t political junkies looking to laugh at the craziness of it all: these are people with a point of view who expect the jokes to reflect their point of view. Exactly what the point of view is, remains a mystery… well, until a joke about Bill Shorten lands with a clunk while slagging off Tony Abbott gets the big laughs. It’s no wonder the best material was the stuff about the election coverage rather than the politicians; Chas and Andrew Hansen making fun of the media has been The Chaser’s strongest card for a number of years now, and it’s good to have them back doing it here.
But why have another election comedy series from The Chaser anyway? Through sheer good luck Mad as Hell has been on to give the election the respect it deserves – ten minutes or so of material a week on a show happily making jokes about loads of other stuff as well. And waiting in the wings are at least two more election-themed shows, John Safran’s The Goddam Election! and Sammy J’s Playground Politics. They might turn out to be crap, but with much of The Chaser’s election material looking a bit stale after 15 years of elections, well… even something a bit crap might look better.
Election comedy is bungled photo ops, bungled interviews and bungled policy statements: either those laughs are super-obvious (“ha, this politician is making a fool of themselves!”) or you’re in the very murky waters that are “having to explain the set-up for your joke”. And there was a lot of that in this. When you’re opening your show with jokes about how the media coverage has been calling this the most boring election ever, you know you’re not working a comedy goldmine.
Plus, okay, c’mon: “Can we bring up the seat of Lyons” followed by a picture of a lion? And then another picture? This is a joke for a shoddy-looking show full of comedy bungling: it isn’t a joke that’s going to work when your show is built around the fact you’ve been able to build and staff a massive desk. Also, it’s just not a very good joke.
Which brings us to yet another one of our hobby-horses as far as The Chaser goes: where are the characters? No, we don’t expect them to start bunging on funny voices and wearing nutty costumes (though come to think of it…). But for years now they’ve done perfectly serviceable yet somewhat flavourless jobs when it comes to hosting: they say scripted jokes, they do pranks, and they’re all – with the exceptions of Chas and Hansen – basically interchangeable. There’s no such thing as a “Julian Morrow” line on The Chaser: everything they say can pretty much be said by anyone else on the team.
That’s always been, if not a problem, then at least a failing with The Chaser; personality is one of the things that makes a joke funnier. But they could at least counter it in the past by being “The Chaser”: five (occasionally six) guys who were an on-air comedy team. They may have all had the one voice, but it was their voice. The personality they lacked in their individual on-air performances came through in the show as a whole.
But increasingly now The Chaser have brought in a bunch of fresh faces, all of which present on-air with the same lack of personality as the core team. Instead of a show built around a tight core (yes, we know they’ve always had behind-the-scenes writers and there’s eight people listed under “additional writing and research” here: still, it’s the people on-air are the ones who are meant to give life to the lines that are written) that were “The Chaser”, now we have the five – well, four – core members plus another seven people giving the same identically snarky line-readings to the same jokes.
The performances lack individuality; the show itself feels like a product where they could plug anyone in to read the gags. We’re not saying they’re bad performers; we’re saying they’re not actually giving a performance. Worse, every time someone new starts talking, there’s a second or two of confusion: “wait, this guy’s a host as well?”. It really drains the show of energy for no real gain… unless they’re trying to make a joke (“So many experts! All sounding the same!”), in which case it’s not really worth the effort.
The result is a show where it seems anyone could be a member of The Chaser on-air, because whatever their behind-the-scenes contributions, being a member of The Chaser on-air only seems to involve the ability to read an autocue. Own a suit? You could be a member of The Chaser!
Which is the joke behind the big desk. Did anyone really find that big desk funny? They sure won’t after weeks of it being there and not getting any funnier!
All The Hughes That’s Fit To Print
It’s fair to say our expectations weren’t exactly high for Hughes the Boss?, Dave Hughes’ half hour comedy special that aired on Channel Nine last night. But somehow we managed to fool ourselves into thinking that it had to be something more than chunks of Hughes’ stand-up about his family intercut with home movies featuring his family.
It wasn’t.
Given enough time and social success, pretty much every stand-up comedian eventually starts doing material about how their family is a nightmare, their kids are shits and their partner hates them for condemning them to this living hell. It’s not funny and it’s not really meant to be funny: it’s what well-established comics do when they’ve been around long enough to have a rusted-on fanbase who are going through the same kind of shit. “He’s saying what we’re all thinking!” The audience isn’t there to laugh at funny observations: they’re there to laugh in relief that their own horrible thoughts about their shitty kids are being said out loud by someone else.
But what about the rest of us? How are we supposed to act when watching a television show where a stand-up comedian does a bit on how his dog is so dumb it doesn’t know how to use a doggy door, followed by home video footage of that comedian trying to get the clearly uncomprehending dog to use the doggy door? What to do when seeing Hughes flip a coin while his two older (but still under five, God help him) children watch, then tell the girl that the boy won and stare dumbfounded as she bursts into tears? Then after the commercial break he repeats the experiment, tells the boy the girl won and the boy bursts into tears?
For parents, this kind of thing is “yeah, kids are shits… but you gotta love ’em.” For everyone else, it’s “yeah, kids are shits.” For Hughes, a loveable Aussie knockabout larrikin who’s been in the public eye for so long it seems churlish to wonder exactly what it is he does that makes him so essential to the fabric of society considering his current material seems to be basically “my kids are self-centered sooks and I’d love to abandon them in the outback”, this kind of material is found money. But why do a TV special?
The stand-up material wasn’t great, but as previously mentioned, it’s got an audience who hopefully have already forgotten what happened when those Japanese parents abandoned their kid in the wild. Plus Hughsie has a daily commercial radio gig plus a weekly slot on the AFL Footy Show: he still does plenty of stand-up comedy but it’s hard to see him as a stand-up comedian, if you get the distinction. So he doesn’t need to do a show like this to advertise his act, and he doesn’t need a show like this to advertise himself.
What he does seem to need this show for is to prove to people that he’s for real. He tells a joke about his kids, then we get a clip showing that he wasn’t making it up. Hughsie is telling it like it is: small children are messy and selfish. Who knew?
A more cynical viewer might think this kind of show exists solely to defend the Hughsie empire from the one area where it’s vulnerable. Hughsie is quick with the one-liners and on The Footy Show he’s perfectly serviceable – no-one doubts for a second that he’s interested in the footy, or that he can be funny about the footy. But the kind of jokes he’s cracking about his family are the kind of jokes anyone can make. Kids are annoying? A million public transport users say NO SHIT. So he’s got to provide some proof. He’s got to actually point at some real kids and say “look, this is what I’m talking about right here.”
Or, you know, he could come up with some different material.
Mind-goggling: We try to work out why Gogglebox Australia is popular
Reality TV shows are taking jobs from actors, writers, designers, etc. – it’s a view you hear expressed fairly regularly by people who work as actors, writers, designers, etc. And while it’s hard to argue against this, and we have a great deal of sympathy for those trying to get scripted shows to air in a tough climate, or trying to earn money through their creative endeavors, the popularity of reality shows suggests that many of the scripted shows that do make it to air may not be to the public’s taste. How else to explain the good ratings, the award wins and enduring popularity of these shows?
[SIDEBAR. Okay, there’s one fairly obvious explanation: reality’s dirt cheap and scripted costs a fortune in comparison. Yet, even that argument doesn’t make sense: we can name plenty of scripted shows that have had series after series, and we can also name a number of reality shows that fail to rate and get the chop. So, let’s leave that one aside for the moment.]
Gogglebox Australia, which ended a couple of weeks ago, is returning for a fourth series later this year. Four series. That’s three more series than other recent-ish shows about TV – TV Burp and The Joy of Sets – both of which were scripted and fronted by professional, experienced funny people. And yet a show which is basically ordinary folk gabbing on while they watch TV gets a Logie and the scripted shows get the can. That doesn’t seem right, even when you take into account that TV Burp and The Joy of Sets weren’t exactly amazing TV.
For one thing, Gogglebox Australia isn’t that funny and is actually quite dull. Take the final episode of series three: when the various couples, pairs, and families had to watch something ridiculous and easy-to-take-the-piss-out-of, like cringe-fest dating show Kiss Bang Love, or bizarre dressage spectacular The Queen’s 90th Birthday Celebration. Watching their commentaries, it was like being part of all those great nights you’ve had with family or friends, laughing at a stupid TV show. But when the Gogglebox-ers had to react to The Feed’s Baby Boomers vs Gen Y debate, or Waleed Aly’s editorial on The Project about milk prices, it was like being on Twitter during a dull episode of Q&A. Or when you’re listening to school kids give their opinions on some political issue, and you realise they’re just passing off the views of their parents as their own because they’ve never really thought about it. (And neither have their parents, for that matter.)
What makes good and/or funny TV criticism is when the critic has something funny or interesting to say. Something that hasn’t occurred to you before, or something that’s been put into words which perfectly sum up what you’d been thinking. Or to put it another way, the critic was really engaging with whatever they’d been watching, and had been able to articulate precisely why a show did or didn’t work.
Do the people on Gogglebox do any of these things? Not really. In fact, they’re pretty much on-par with the majority of the callers to talkback radio, in that they consistently fail to critique what they’re discussing effectively. So, why are they so popular? Well, sadly, it’s the fact that those on Gogglebox Australia don’t know much or think much about what they’re watching that makes their views of interest to viewers en masse. Most people don’t think deeply about TV, nor do they want to, so a program that requires more than a passing knowledge of the subject is a turn off (The Joy of Sets). As is one that requires a shared sense of humour with those who’ve written it (TV Burp and The Joy of Sets).
In this country, it’s generally accepted that tall poppies are bad. If you’re someone who knows enough about a subject to make gags about it, you’re a tall poppy. Which means that people who know very little, and aren’t particularly funny, are exactly the sort of people you want to see in your home. No wonder Gogglebox Australia is admired and adored throughout the land.
Hughsie Loses It
Press release time!
HUGHES THE BOSS?
MONDAY, JUNE 6, 2016 AT 9.45PM ON CHANNEL NINE
Take a rare look behind the curtain of the chaotic life of funnyman Dave Hughes on Hughes The Boss? on Monday, June 6, at 9.45pm after The Voice on Channel Nine.
In a half-hour special, for the first time on Australian TV, Hughes delivers a side-splitting comedy routine intercut with scenes from his home life with wife Holly and three kids, Rafferty, Sadie and Tess.
See the inspiration behind the punchlines as he juggles looking after three kids under five with a successful career. There is no sugar-coating as Hughes deals with toddler tantrums, pretend tea parties and an untrainable dog.
A natural and unmistakably Australian comic, Hughes’ laconic style thinly disguises one of the fastest comic minds this country has ever seen. He has built a multi-faceted media career, launching him from pure comedian to radio and television star.
Hughes, along with co-host Kate Langbroek, drives the nation home on KIIS FM radio. He joined The AFL Footy Show in 2015 and was the host of Australia’s Got Talent on Channel Nine earlier this year. Hughes is currently touring his comedy show Sweet around the country.
Hughes cuts straight to the bone with his stand-up routine, joking about being a dad and husband in a way that many will find themselves nodding and chuckling along to. The routine shows Hughes in his element, riffing off the engaged crowd as each joke lands with bursts of laughter.
HUGHES THE BOSS?
MONDAY, JUNE 6, AT 9.45PM AFTER THE VOICE ON CHANNEL NINE
#9HughesTheBoss
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Watch live on your mobile or catch up later at 9Now.com.au
Anyone else get the feeling after lines like “The routine shows Hughes in his element, riffing off the engaged crowd as each joke lands with bursts of laughter” that they don’t actually need to watch the show? Anyone get the feeling after lines like “Hughes the Boss? Monday, June 6, at 9.45pm on Channel Nine” that they don’t actually need to watch the show?
Far be it for us to suggest this this was part of Hughes’ contract for appearing on the AFL Footy Show and Nine are burning it off by airing it after a reality show that is notorious for ending whenever the heck it feels like it. IT’S AUSTRALIAN COMEDY ON A COMMERCIAL NETWORK: pretty much by definition this is A Good Thing.
That said, it’s a bit of a shame that Hughsie has firmly moved on from his hair-trigger days as a angriiiiiiiiii nutbag. Then the press release could have read “see the inspiration behind the punchlines – and the punch ons!” Lines like “There is no sugar-coating as Hughes deals with toddler tantrums, pretend tea parties and an untrainable dog” would be far more enticing if there was a chance Hughsie would solve all those problems – and more – with graphic hard-core violence.
But now the only physical damage done on the night will be when our sides split from laughing too hard! Aww yeah, laughing with Hughsie while sinking some tinnies and talking ’bout the footy and being Aussie as while quietly dying inside – sounds bloody bonza to us, mate.
Wait ’till Tomorrow
There’s a lot of funny stuff on the internet. The internet is well known for its sense of humour. But the internet is also really, really good at distilling things down to their bare essentials, as will no doubt be confirmed in a few years time when the internet is nothing but a collection of amusing sound effects and flashing images. That’s why… ah, let’s let Vox explain as they try to explain meme de jour “dat boi”:
Essentially, dat boi is funny because he’s random. For one, it’s a frog riding a unicycle. He’s also called a “boi,” which he is clearly not, but he can pull off the name because he just looks so damn calm and confident on that unicycle. And to top it off, everyone seems really excited to see him (“o shit waddup!”), even though there’s no reason to be that excited for a silly frog. So if you take dat boi and put him in other random situations, it’s hilarious.
If that still doesn’t make sense to you, consider how big of a role randomness plays in comedy. Some of the best-known jokes (“Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side!”) are effective because they play with our expectations to catch us off guard, and we deal with that with laughter. (Yeah, yeah. Vox just explained jokes. Whatever.) A frog on a unicycle called “dat boi” is just an extension of that.
But even if you don’t find any of this funny, it is clear that much of the internet does.
Sure, we may be out-of-touch losers who’ve read more articles explaining dat boi than we’ve seen people actually using it, but we sure do know our random comedy. And this is where it leads: a picture of a frog riding a unicycle.
To be honest, we’re fine with that. Random LOL stuff is just as valid a form of comedy as any other: our problem with it over the years has been the way most of the people getting up to it seem to think spending minutes at a time dicking around is a great way to entertain and amuse. Fuck that: next time you’re faced with a stand-up spouting a bunch of animal whimsy expecting to get laughs because he’s “maintained his childhood sense of wonder” or somesuch, just think of dat boi and how a bad drawing of a frog did the same thing so much better.
Then again, maybe we could have just said all this with an image too:
All of this is to say that dat boi represents the way human-to-human communication and even joke telling is changing. It’s no longer just about having a comedian stand on a stage and spill his routine, or gathering around the living room and making knock-knock jokes. Nowadays it’s okay to take a simple image and slap some text on it, and if it’s funny enough to a lot of young people, it just might become an enormous viral hit.
Oh shit waddup indeed.
Fancy Fest
In news that will surprise no-one – mostly because it seems to have been announced then ignored months ago – sketch comedy group Fancy Boy were one of the big winners out of the ABC’s Fresh Blood program:
ABC has a new sketch comedy series in production, Fancy Boy, which was part of the Fresh Blood iview initiative.
The six-part series, produced by December Media in association with Checkpoint Media and Fancy Boy TV, commenced production in Melbourne this week.
It features writer / performers John Campbell, Stuart Daulman, Greg Larsen, Henry Stone and Jonathan Schuster, joined by Anne Edmonds. The iview series also included guest appearances by names such as Luke McGregor, Celia Pacquola and Ronny Chieng.
A press release describes Fancy Boy as living somewhere between the moody and the downright dark: “The show finds comedy in the stranger corners of suburbia: in the couple whose communication breakdown leads to a kidnap; in the artist who loses everything over his obsession with fart sounds; in the mum who struggles to accept her missing teen back into the family, mainly because he returns with a full beard and a foreign accent.”
Due to premiere later this year on ABC, it will also get a run on NBC-Universal’s SVOD comedy platform Seeso.
Ah, co-productions. Where would be we without them? Watching a lot less Please Like Me, for starters.
We really wish we were more surprised by this result, especially as we were only mildly impressed with Fancy Boys’ Fresh Blood effort:
So while this isn’t always kicking goals, it’s doing a decent job of serving up fresh jokes even when it keeps returning to various set-ups. We’d still rather that some – most – of the sketches were one-offs (having the shit-in-the-sink set-up turn into one of those “exasperated lead is the only person who can see the obvious” sketches so beloved of The Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting was a big let down, even for a sketch that started out with someone shitting in a sink), but if you have to keep going back to sketches this is the way to do it.
But as Blind Freddy could see that the ABC’s online comedy department was only ever going to be interested in sketch material because sketch material is what works online, the news that a fairly average sketch show got the nod (twice, if Skit Box really did also get the green light) is no surprise at all.
That’s why we’ve been so anti the ABC’s current fondness for selecting comedy programs by competition. You know what, guys? Sometimes it’s okay to say “we’re only interested in sketch shows at the moment”. We’d also prefer you to say “we’ve got enough series featuring vaguely arrogant white guys in their 20s killing time before their advertising careers take off”, but that’s up to you. You’re the people running the network: you’re allowed to pick what types of shows you want to put to air. Especially when quotes like this reveal a natural talent for getting laughs:
ABC’s Head of Entertainment, Jon Casimir, said “Fancy Boy made their name as a transgressive and weird live act, willing to go to places others wouldn’t. But what really marks their work is not just the boldness of their intent, it’s the heart and insight that underpins it. Fancy Boy sketches make you laugh but surprisingly, they also make you feel.”
We’ll leave it up to you to guess what we’re currently feeling.
The fact is, when you need a two year-long public competition to give Fancy Boy six episodes, it looks a little too much like everyone involved is more interested in covering their arse than presenting the viewers with a product that management can stand behind. And from the way Fancy Boy hammered a handful of uninspired ideas into the ground in their Fresh Blood pilot, who can blame management for wanting to have their excuses ready?
Of course, Fancy Boy are all up-and-comers, so there’s still a good chance that their actual sketch show is going to be a tightly focused effort packed with ideas and not some endlessly meandering snore-fest involving a gaggle of forgettable reoccurring characters and one-laugh ideas dragged out across three or four segments. But they’re not all up-and-comers, are they? While the new guys get to do most of the heavy lifting, both their original Fresh Blood sketches and their longer second round pilot have featured more established names – most notably Luke McGregor.
So wait, let’s get this straight: the winner of the ABC’s totally random, let-the-best-show-win online comedy competition was a): a trad sketch show that was b): featuring a comedian already appearing in two separate ABC shows in 2016? Why exactly did they need to spend two years running a public competition to get that result?
Clip Joint
Over the last decade or so, Australia has failed to develop an international – or even local – reputation for quality cinematic comedy. Could Down Under be the film to change that? Has Australian comedy finally moved beyond ethnic stereotypes and bogans doing stupid shit?
Oh well, there’s always cutting edge comedy on the small screen, right?
Ha ha, it’s funny because they’ve got a long desk and the elections been going for so long! Only they’re not actually starting until the election’s halfway over, so… yeah.
It’s no wonder we’re constantly being accused of living in the past…
Ok, so “unseen” Roger Explosion isn’t all that different from good old regular “seen” Roger Explosion, mostly because Roger Explosion was designed to be a reoccurring sketch on Full Frontal. One dimensional characters, repetitive jokes, hammy performances, and nothing to say about how we currently live our lives.
And yet somehow it’s still a whole lot funnier than 95% of current Australian comedy. Who would have thought it?
Bleak House
The most surprising of the six sitcoms in the ABC’s Comedy Showroom pilot season, for us, was Bleak, Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney’s show focusing on all-round loser Anna’s forced return to her weird family home. What surprised us most about Bleak was that it was such a contrast to their smash hit, The Katering Show. Allow us to explain…
The Katering Show showed its makers had a real understanding of the medium they were making comedy for: online. To keep viewers’ attentions on platforms like YouTube, narrative comedies need to be fast, and consistently really funny. The Kates achieved this in The Katering Show by throwing everything they had at it comedically; they didn’t just do gags about food trends and parodies of cooking shows, they gave their characters a solid dynamic (two frenemies on the edge of a breakdown) which they could exploit comically. It worked brilliantly.
But while the character dynamics in Bleak are equally well-drawn, particularly Anna’s parents and brother (how did they get to where they are in life?!), in the medium of a full-length sitcom, well, in this pilot at least, these well-drawn characters didn’t generate as many laughs as The Katering Show. Why? To answer that, let’s step back a bit…
The Comedy Showroom pilot Bleak wasn’t bad by any means – for us it was one of the better shows in this series – it’s just that we’d put it in the “could do better” category. Could it be that McLennan and McCartney’s strength is writing sketch rather than sitcom?
This theory is kind of borne out if you watch Bleak: The Web Series, the online predecessor to the Comedy Showroom pilot. Episode 1 (duration: 6:32) is basically a short version of that pilot, centered around Anna’s return to the family home, and her strained re-acquaintance with her parents and brother. It’s a pretty good short-form piece of comedy, and we think it really works.
Subsequent episodes in the web series go beyond what we saw in the ABC pilot, and we see Anna trying to party through the break-up with her boyfriend, and re-connecting with her odd family. In one very funny and strangely moving scene, Anna and her Dad bond over rodent control, and we discover why he’s so keen on documentaries about Nazi death camps.
Maybe the problem here is one of tone? It’s fine in sketch comedy if the tone is funny but unrelentingly dark, but in a half-hour sitcom there need to be some lighter scenes to break things up a bit. These were lacking in the half-hour version of Bleak.
As we said in our original review of the Comedy Showroom pilot:
this will have to become a lot funnier fairly quickly to justify taking this to a full series, but there are good indications that it could do so.
Based on it, and the web series, there’s definitely a lot of potential for this show. And if Jean Kittson and Shane Bourne can’t be in it, Denise Scott and Dennis Coad (who play Anna’s parents in the web series) would make brilliant parents. Fingers crossed we get to see more of Bleak.
Winners & Losers
It’s been a big week in Australian comedy, as sports reporters say… only they say “sport” instead of “Australian comedy” thus rendering this opening sentence pretty much useless. And having set the tone for this post, let’s move on:
WINNER: Gristmill and Little Lunch, at least according to this press release:
Little Lunch returns with a special trick or treat or two …..
Friday, May 20, 2016 — The hugely successful Australian children’s series, Little Lunch, will commence filming 2 x 30’ Halloween and Christmas specials for ABC3 in Melbourne next week.
Based on the popular books, written by Danny Katz and illustrated by Mitch Vane, and adapted by Gristmill Productions, both new episodes will feature all original cast members including; Rory (Flynn Curry), Atticus (Joshua Sitch), Battie (Oisin O’Leary), Melanie (Madison Lu), Debra-Jo (Faith Seci), Tamara (Olivia Deeble) and Heidi Arena (The Librarians, Nowhere Boys and Heidi’s Kitchen) as Mrs Gonsha.
Both stories will be written by Gristmill’s Robyn Butler, who will also make her directorial debut shooting the Christmas special. Tim Bartley will direct the Halloween episode.
Producers Butler and Hope say, “We missed the kids, we missed the school, but mostly we missed the cheese sticks. It will be great to be reunited with all of them.”
Little Lunch wasn’t exactly to our taste – which is only to be expected really, what with us being old farts and so on – but Gristmill generally do good work (let’s just forget Now Add Honey, shall we?), so anything that keeps them in work is good news.
LOSER: Dirty Laundry Live:
ONE of the wittiest shows on Australian TV has been axed.
The ABC panel quiz show Dirty Laundry Live won’t be returning for a fourth season.
The show’s host, Lawrence Mooney, dropped the bombshell on Hit105’s Stav, Abby & Osher this morning.
“Dirty Laundry Live has been officially axed,” Mooney said on the breakfast radio show.
“This is the first time I’ve said it publicly. I’m OK, I’m fine … It is not coming back on the ABC.”
This isn’t the world’s biggest surprise – it hadn’t been listed as one of the ABC comedies coming back for 2016 – but it’s still a bit of a sour note. After all, if various budgetary restrictions mean we must have panel shows, then Dirty Laundry Live was pretty much the best we could hope for: usually funny, occasionally informative and with solid chemistry between the regulars, it was the kind of show the ABC should have been able to keep running tucked away somewhere.
But as usual, that kind of thinking is avoiding the harsh realities of the world in which we live:
@declanf Same people who tried to axe ‘Mad as Hell’. They need the money to make more ‘How Not to Behave’.
— Tony Martin (@mrtonymartin) May 20, 2016
LOSER: Ben Pobjie:
Oh ho ho, see what we did there? But no, this is actual bad news: as part of their recent round of budget cuts, Fairfax have cut Pobjie’s daily television review spot. While obviously we’d have preferred someone else to be doing that coverage, Pobjie was better than nothing (and, when his word count forced him to be pithy, usually got to the point) and any major media outlet cutting back their daily television coverage is bad news as far as we’re concerned. Plus being sacked – well, being shunted over to The Green Guide, which really just means staving off unemployment for a year at most – as part of budget cuts sucks in general.
SIDEBAR: it seems clear that, as someone who we can’t quite remember already pointed out somewhere else, Fairfax is rapidly moving towards a two-tier model of journalism: a handful of “big names” at the top whose jobs are safe because supposedly they’re writers that people go to Fairfax to read, and then a bunch of badly paid newbies generating everything else that makes Fairfax look like a media organisation and not a joke.
The trouble with this hollowing-out is that it’s being driven by the same people who’ve been driving Fairfax into the ground for years, and so their judgement as to what constitutes their core readership is dubious at best. They sacked (though his Sunday column is still going for now) Leaping Larry L, for fucks sake:
Filed my last Sat. column for The Age. Budget cuts got me. Applied for 1st supermarket shelf-stacker job. Finally finding vocational niche
— Leaping Larry L (@LeapingLarryL) May 20, 2016
What makes them think we’re going to keep buying their paper now?
LOSER: The Australian Tumbleweeds Blog:
Well, in a way we’re a winner, because recently the fine folk at the I Love Green Guide Letters podcast had Ben Pobjie on as a guest, and for around five minutes or so the topic of discussion was, well, us.
If you want to listen to their take on us, it starts at around the 25 minute mark – though you really should listen to the whole thing, if only to discover that Pobjie is quite confident of his headline-writing ability and the surprising news that Game of Thrones just might be a sequel to Taken.
Also it’s true, we really did say a nice thing (for us) about Dilruk that one time:
the main laughs come from the short interactions between bastard boss Borkman and his subordinate Michael (played by Little Dum Dum Club favourite Dilruk Jayasinha)
As for what Pobjie had to say about us… look, we’re not going to argue with “I’ve got Eric on side, so fuck those guys”. We will argue with us being “some very frustrated young men”, if only because we’ve been doing this for a decade and so clearly our (wasted) youth is long behind us (also: not all of us are men).
But Pobjie does do a decent job of defending himself against our regular accusations that he writes good reviews of Australian comedy shows in the hope that they’ll then employ him, by which we mean he points out that as employment strategies go that approach is probably “the worst way ever” to get a job in Australian television. We’ll leave it up to you to decide if this means we’re wrong as to his eventual goals or just that he’s going about it the wrong way.
And we feel for Pobjie when he says that it’s weird when people won’t just let you disagree with them about a television show – they have to assume you have some kind of “weird, ulterior motive” for having a contrary opinion. Like, we don’t know… assuming the writers are “very frustrated young men”?
Anyway, we answered all this when Pobjie said the exact same stuff back in 2011:
As for this bit from a fictional Angry Boys hater:
”You don’t really like that show. You think you like it because you’ve been hoodwinked by media hype and it’s politically correct and you think this is the sort of show you’re supposed to like. But actually, you hate it, like me, because it’s a bad show, so how could you not hate it?”
Yeah, we’d hate that too. And we’ve actually argued against that kind of lazy criticism before, so clearly Pobjie wasn’t talking about us with that crack, right?
Our completely unfounded and somewhat needy paranoia aside, we don’t doubt for a single solitary second that Angry Boys fans enjoy the show. We’d just like them to explain why without falling back on cliches that are wobbly at best and untrue at worst.
After all, we’re not talking about having a chat with people down the office about a television show. We’re talking about professionals writing thought-out pieces for major newspapers. Pobjie is totally right to say arguing over television is pointless and ugly – when you’re doing it down the pub. When you’re actually writing about television, it’s your job.
Not that Pobjie would agree. This is his final argument:
It’s only TV, after all – it’s important but it doesn’t matter.
An attitude which can be reasonably extended to cover roughly 85% of Western Civilisation and 99% of issues covered in The Age. So this is a man who’s just written that the sole reason for him being in the paper “doesn’t matter”? Sorry, we didn’t realise we were reading his farewell column.
The really telling bit is when Pobjie says we hate everything “except Shaun Micallef”. Sure, he’s wrong – shit, our last review of Mad as Hell was literally part of a post praising Have You Been Paying Attention? – but that fact that we clearly do like some things kind of sinks the whole “ooh, don’t read those guys, they’re just haters who hate everything”. boat.
Seriously, for haters we sure do seem to like a bunch of stuff. In the last few months alone we’ve given the thumbs up to The Katering Show, Aunty Doona, and the Ronnie Cheung episode of Comedy Showcase alongside usual suspects Mad as Hell, HYBPA? and the work of Clarke & Dawe. The problem seems to be that, unlike the vast majority of Australian TV critics, we tend to point out that a lot of what we’re being served up isn’t as good as those shows. Which, let’s be honest, isn’t news: good luck finding anyone who’ll tell you with a straight face that The Weekly is as good as Mad as Hell, for example.
We all know that every single show on television is the result of weeks of hard work and effort from human beings who are desperately trying their best. We also all know that sometimes the end result is rubbish, and sometimes that’s because the people responsible clearly set out to create rubbish in the first place. Who benefits from pretending otherwise?
The Weekend Shift: The sitcom of the online persona of Lee Lin Chin
Over the years, there have been less surprising media revelations than the one that Lee Lin Chin doesn’t write her own tweets and that her hilarious media persona is, to be blunt, fiction. According to Benjamin Law’s article published last year on The Monthly, her tweets are written for her by Chris Leben, one of the writers of The Feed, the show which has done much to establish the cult of Chin through having her on to make regular cameo appearances.
…the official Twitter account that bears her name and is written in her Feed character’s voice. It has amassed more than 42,000 followers on the back of such tweets as “There’s no point in acting your age. If I did I wouldn’t be at the pub right now with two 25 year old models” and “I’m going to the Logies for the first time tonight, which one of the @HomeandAwayTV boys is most likely to put out?”
Or, at the height of the Bronwyn Bishop expenses scandal: “Seems like parliament needs a new fashionable lady. Guess my time has come #LeeLinforSpeaker”.
In real life, Chin doesn’t even have a mobile phone (“I see it no less than the potential destroyer of human civilisation,” she tells me) let alone use Twitter. Instead, Leben manages the account and composes most of the tweets – some of which are based on things Chin has told him. He says Chin approves everything he writes. Later, when I ask her to confirm this, she widens her eyes at him.
Now with more than double the 42,000 followers she had six months ago when the above article was published, Chin, or Chin’s online persona, is now the star of The Weekend Shift, a sitcom pilot available on SBS On Demand. And if you’re already raising a sceptical eyebrow at the idea that you can base a sitcom on some tweets, then read on to have your scepticism confirmed.
Set in the SBS newsroom, The Weekend Shift centres on producer Nick and his team, and their trials and tribulations in getting a bulletin to air. When one of the show’s reporters annoys the government with a badly-phrased tweet, Nick pulls a potentially Walkley Award-winning exclusive story because it might annoy the government, then orders social media manager and office arsehole Craven to take over everyone’s Twitter accounts, and has to convince the difficult Ms Chin to apologise for the tweet on air. Oh, and the building’s security guards are on some kind of OH&S drive, and there are some new recycling bins.
All of the above sounds potentially quite funny – a satire on government interfering with the freedom of the media, parody of social media, hyper-real media bigwig behaving badly and getting what she wants, office bullshit about bins and health and safety – except it isn’t. There aren’t many laughs to be had with “government leans on the media” unless you’re John Clarke it seems, plus the whole Lee Lin Chin persona thing when you boil it down, is basically “LOLZ a serious newsreader type actually spends all day in the pub and is obsessed with weird clothes”. A comic conceit that may fire in 140 characters, but in this sitcom at least, doesn’t even getting going before it’s become tiresome.
As for the bins and OH&S stuff, Utopia does that so much better. Largely because it threads those types of plots throughout the show, making them increasingly ridiculous and hilarious as the episode progresses, rather than abandoning them after a couple of scenes.
Which just leaves the social media parody plot as the bit where The Weekend Shift gets its time to shine. But wait, that plot is basically an office bully tweeting out offensive things from his colleagues’ accounts against their wishes, i.e. making it look like they’re quoting from Hitler. And then…the Hitler quote gets re-tweeted by Cory Bernardi! A joke which lands with such a thud that a BOOM TISH might as well have been overlaid.
Oh, and speaking of comedy sound editing, the show ends with some harrowing news footage which has been overlaid with “Yakety Sax” (the song which accompanied Benny Hill’s chase sequences) accidentally going to air. OH NOS!!! And yet, that too isn’t funny. It just left us wondering if anyone under 30, presumably the target audience for this nonsense, has ever seen a Benny Hill chase sequence.
Except that, wait, there’s a chance to redeem this show comically! As the credits roll, we see Charlie Pickering and Tom Gleeson dissecting the Yakety Sax incident on The Weekly, followed by Lee Lin Chin’s reaction to their commentary. It’s probably the funniest thing in the show, but it doesn’t save it. It’s more that it’s what many of us have been thinking for ages.
Conclusion: despite a small number of good things, this is a sloppy and wrong-headed idea for a sitcom. And largely feels like a kind of branding exercise for The Feed or the Lee Lin Chin Twitter account or SBS, or some combination of the three, gone way too long. We could maybe overlook the bad scripting and the crap gags if Lee Lin Chin herself was a brilliant, hilarious comedic performer, but she can’t act and has next to no comic timing. Something that doesn’t matter in the context of the parody Twitter account she’s lent her name to, and can be overlooked in her cameo appearances on The Feed (it could even be argued it makes them funnier) but does absolutely matter if she’s the lead performer. Great lead performers can take a mediocre script and make it great, but mediocre performers? No hope. You can’t base a 25-minute sitcom around one of them.