Australian Tumbleweeds
He Only Comes But Once a Year
What is there to say about The Yearly that we didn’t already say time and time and time again about The Weekly? Bugger all, which is the problem: we tuned in hoping they might have at least tweaked the format – considering they stole it wholesale from The Daily Show – but, well, more fool us. Really, we should have known better: it’s not like The Weekly ever looked like a show anyone was putting any effort into.
Yeah yeah whatever; no doubt everyone on The Weekly – and The Yearly – works really really hard to bring us a television show. A television show that in its most recent form feels like its only reason for existing was that Charlie Pickering wanted to gush over Harrison Ford and he could only get an interview if they had a television show to play it on. You put a Cecil the Lion joke in your opening credits? Sure, it’s a year in review, but with a year’s worth of news to make fun of you decide to go with Cecil the Lion?
While we’re here, here’s a quick guide to whether you’re watching / reading / absorbing shit Australian political satire: they’re going on about Tony Abbott eating an onion. Sure, it’s weird that he bit into an onion, but that’s all it is: weird. “Oh look, our PM did something crazy!” And then you’re done. And when that’s the only joke there is to be made about a bit of footage, well… you’ve got to leave something for breakfast television and Facebook, don’t you.
But that’s The Weekly for you. A weekly schedule is a punishing one, but when all you’re doing is coming up with five minutes worth of political jokes a week, surely you can stop and think “hey, maybe we don’t have to go for the broadest, cheapest, most obvious gag every single time”. Then again, when you have the comedy big gun that is Charlie Pickering’s gurning, maybe you can afford to let the writing slide.
Still, at least now we got the Bali 9 coverage the show refused to deliver when it was on air during the actual Bali 9 saga. And wasn’t that slam at Brendan Cowell worth the wait! Yep, even after half a year The Weekly / Yearly refuses to have anything worthwhile or interesting to say about the world around us. We left out funny because some things go without saying.
And yet, occasionally there were glimpses of actual comedy. Kitty Flanagan’s segment about cooking in the washing machine had nothing to do with anything news-worthy yet was a comedic highlight, which once again underlined the grim fact that The Weekly is a news satire where the news jokes suck.
Usually around here is where we’d go spare over an end-of-year news parody show running an interview with Harrison Ford to promote a new Star Wars movie, because… well, you go back and look at all those elements and try to explain to us how they’re meant to fit together. But fuck it: The Weekly is clearly just a lightweight nothing show that can’t even fill an hour with jokes given a whole year to play with, so why not have a celebrity interview in there for no reason past “he plays Han Solo!”
The thing that really burns our toast about The Weekly isn’t that it’s both lightweight and pissweak: there’s always going to be room for that kind of viewing, especially if it’s done on the cheap, and with only three cast members The Weekly has to be relatively cheap no matter how many backroom hangers-on are signing on. It’s the way the ABC continues to pretend it’s something – anything – more than junk TV.
The Weekly is the kind of thing that should be on at 11pm at night, or 6pm, or any time that isn’t prime time. And it should be on five (ok, maybe four) nights a week, so its shitty tossed-off jokes at least can be topical. Pretending this half-arsed, half-baked show for half-wits is any kind of grand statement on the news or the state of the nation is nothing but an insult, no matter how many times yoof websites post clips of Pickering flailing about under the caption “NAILED IT”.
And there’s another twenty weeks of this smug, self-congratulatory smirk of a show ahead. Merry Christmas everybody!
Vale Please Like Me series 3
So, everyone’s fave mumblecore relationship drama has finally come to an end and… wait, what? They’re still trying to sell Please Like Me as a comedy? Oh, fuck off.
The problem with throwing your hands up and admitting defeat with Please Like Me – and by that we mean writing a review that says “hey look, it might not be about much but it’s a decent-enough take at the aimlessness of being in your early twenties and as that kind of low-stakes relationship drama it’s actually pretty well made”, which we almost ended up doing at a couple of points this series – is that even by those standards this show is a fucking tram smash. It’s a realistic look at millennial lifestyles, you say? So why is Josh making a living running a whimsical snack truck in a park?
On its own Josh’s snack truck is hardly a fatal flaw, even if it is the kind of hipster doofus crap that sets our teeth on edge. But it’s not on its own. Either Please Like Me is an actual sitcom, or it’s a twee dramedy that’s more about being a lightweight yet feels-heavy soapie than anything else. Which seems to be the tack many of its fans are on board with, even though it’s the equivalent of saying Friends would have been a much better show if there hadn’t been any jokes in it.
Josh running a snack truck works in a sitcom if it’s used as the basis for a bunch of jokes. Josh running a snack truck works in a lightweight soapie if there’s a subplot about, say, Josh trying to make a living from stupid schemes or Josh being stuck in crap jobs or something. But in Please Like Me the snack cart is… just there, like it’s funny or a telling detail or symbolising something in and of itself. None of which is the case; it’s the set-up to a joke, not the punchline. And that’s the one thing that hasn’t changed across three series of this show – it’s just lazy.
Before the angry mob of, what – a dozen Josh Thomas fans Australia-wide? – comes at us with knives in hand, let’s quickly stress what isn’t lazy about Please Like Me: for one thing, the direction is always top notch. If you’re the kind of television critic who’s impressed by an Australian television show that looks halfway decent… which would be all of them… then it’s no wonder you’ve been loving this.
The performances are all generally decent too. Even Thomas, who in a completely different show could be quite effective playing “Josh”. He’d be a guest star who fucks over one of the leads and is generally a hateful human being, but it’s possible to imagine him being funny if placed in a context that actually worked for his character comedy-wise. You know, like how Thomas’ entire television career comes from the way he was used as a punchline for Shaun Micallef’s jokes in Talkin’ ’bout Your Generation.
And on a cursory glance even the material seems like it should be funny. Talking about “outie” vaginas at Christmas lunch? Josh deciding to broaden his sexual horizons with an online random who just shows up at his house? A home-made video where a dog destroys a cardboard city? A show that actually wanted to make a fist of entertaining its viewers could have done a lot with that kind of thing.
But Please Like Me never seals the deal. It’s so committed to a half-baked idea of what “realism” means in a television show that it never takes that last couple of steps to come up with scenes that do anything more than just lie there. The first episode of this season was Josh trying to get Arnold to sleep with him. Then they slept together. Then Arnold was weird about it. Then they got over it. Just because things are things that happen in real life doesn’t mean you have to make a television show about them.
Look, we get it. There are a lot of people who want to see stories they can relate to on television and Please Like Me is trying to do that. But is the bar really set so low that “showing someone going to have an abortion” is in and of itself enough reason to throw praise at a television series in 2015? Does anyone else remember that when Homer Simpson said “it’s funny because it’s true”, it was a joke about how being funny actually requires more than straightforward observation?
It’s not like Please Like Me actually does anything with its big dramatic plots either. Much like the comedy, the writers – which would be Josh Thomas – seem to think merely coming up with things that are “dramatic” or “funny” is all they have to do to create scenes that are “dramatic” or “funny”. That’s not to say the dialogue isn’t realistic; that is to say that people having a realistic chat in an abortion clinic isn’t decent television unless there’s something more going on. And in Please Like Me, there never is.
Over and over and over again it presents the viewer with scenarios that are “dramatic” or “funny” and then fails to do anything with them. Because the show presents everything on the same stilted, inert level the dialogue always “works” – it feels like the kind of clumsy, awkward thing people actually say. But there’s nothing going on behind it. The drama isn’t dramatic, the comedy isn’t funny. The viewer has to do all the work to engage with the show – instead of making the effort to stylise its elements to create drama or comedy, it provides the raw materials and expects you to imagine the rest – and it’s just not worth it.
While we’re shoveling dirt over Please Like Me because it seems pretty clear to all concerned that it’s not coming back (after the ratings it got this year, how could the ABC even show it with a straight face?), is having your characters occasionally say “we’re growing up” enough to make up for the fact that no, they’re really the same shitty self-absorbed people they were back in series one? Please Like Me is like spending a whole lot of time with really convincing shouty look-at-us-we’re-so-cool people you wouldn’t want to have a table next to at a restaurant.
And worse, it’s a show that expects us to feel all warm and happy towards it because in a bunch of episodes it shows us two people – Josh and Arnold – constantly making out because they’re in love. Seriously? Did nobody tell Thomas that seeing two people constantly making out because they’re in love gives most people the shits? There’s like, maybe thirty seconds max of “aww, they’re in love” and then it’s “get a room” and then it’s “great, now I feel like shit because I don’t have what they’re having, just fuck off”. Wasn’t the comedy in this show meant to come from Josh being kind of awful?
You know what makes us happy? Laughter. Not twee greeting card sentiment about the value of friendship – we have actual friends for that. It used to just be a shitty joke that people watched Friends instead of having them; now it’s the kind of thing that gets people writing stuff like this with a straight face:
Everyone on Please Like Me cares about each other so much that sometimes they don’t know what to do with all of their feelings. They tease each other to death, but their mockery comes from affection, first and foremost. Their shared barbs, insecurities, and senses of humor create co-dependencies, which can either soothe or fracture the group depending on the day. But this intimacy, for better or for worse, is exactly what makes Please Like Me so good.
It’s lucky they care for each other so much, because going by the ratings the rest of Australia could not give a single solitary fuck.
Vale Sunday Night Safran
There haven’t been many radio shows like Sunday Night Safran in this country, or indeed anywhere else. National broadcasters tend not to keep shows on air for a decade that sound like they should be on community radio, or a niche-interest podcast.
And while factual programming on Triple J has always spent a fair bit of its time trying to sound cool (tune in to Hack and it’s amazing how un-cool a bunch of people in their 20’s can sound) John Safran and Father Bob showed that it’s possible to make a youth-oriented program about religion and politics that isn’t patronising or dull. Why they’ve worked as a double act since 2005 is that they have a unique voice, or, to be more precise, two unique voices. Often arguing with each other.
Safran’s was that of the whiney, Jewish comedian and contrarian who gave platforms to white supremacists and was obsessed with conspiracy theories and why people believe things. Tagging along for the ride was Father Bob Maguire, well-known in Melbourne for decades as a man who believes passionately in helping the poor. Once on Sunday Night Safran he told Richard Dawkins that he agreed with him, although it ultimately turned out it was more the Catholic establishment he was against.
Why or whether we should believe and what people believe has been at the heart of every religious program ever, but what was clever about Sunday Night Safran was that we didn’t notice that such worthy or intelligent matters were being discussed. And let’s face it, it was kinda hard to recognise this as an intellectual program as Bob and John bickered, or lisped, or didn’t speak in to the mic properly, or interviewed a man who’d turned himself in to a lizard. Oh yeah, and there was that time they did a pre-record with Alexander Downer, and he was kind of boring and patronising, so John inhaled some helium and spoke over the top of the interview as it played. It’s fair to suggest that no other religion or politics show has ever done that. Or ever will again.
We’re going to miss Sunday Night Safran, AKA the best Australian podcast you used to be able to download on a Monday. Few shows talked to so many interesting people about serious issues in a funny way. Oh, and Safran’s riff on the show that Triple J will replace them with, a program about sex and relationships, was pretty spot-on (along with the Downer interview it’s in their last episode, which aired on Sunday). What was that we were saying before about factual programs on Triple J sounding deeply un-cool?
Vote now in the Tumblies 2015!
Voting is now open in the Australian Tumbleweeds Awards 2015!
Now in its 10th “amazing” year, the Australian Tumbleweeds hails the failures (and occasional successes) of this nation’s comic talent.
Your online voting form can be found here: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/tumblies2015
You have until midnight at the end of Friday 8th January 2016 to vote. Please only vote once. Full rules and instructions can be found with the voting form – please read the rules carefully!
The winners will be announced on or about Australia Day 2016.
As always, the official hashtag is #tumblies.
We’re Just Going to Leave This Here
Press release time!
MEDIA RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
FIRST-LOOK IMAGE RELEASED FOR NEW AUSTRALIAN BLACK COMEDY ‘DOWN UNDER’, WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY ABE FORSYTHE
3 December, 2015: The first image for filmmaker Abe Forsythe’s second feature film, DOWN UNDER, has just been released.
A black comedy set during the aftermath of the Cronulla riots, DOWN UNDER is the story of two carloads of hotheads from both sides of the fight destined to collide. Sincere, though misguided, intent gives way to farcical ineptitude as this hilarious yet poignant story of ignorance, fear and kebab-cravings unfolds, and what was meant to be a retaliation mission turns into something neither side could have imagined.
Deliberately and provocatively confronting racism head on, director Abe Forsythe, who is also responsible for writing the film’s screenplay, has taken a balanced look at the ridiculous side of a serious subject. “There is nothing more satisfying than getting people to laugh at something they feel like they shouldn’t be laughing at. Comedy is the best way to say something meaningful,” he says.
This first-look image introduces characters from both sides of the story, men with so much in common, divided by an arbitrary hatred. Forsythe says: “Obviously if you’re setting a film during the Cronulla riot, racism is one of the major themes you find yourself exploring. However, racism here is a behavioural by-product of these characters wanting to belong to something, to feel like they are in control.”
As we approach the 10th anniversary of the shameful event which has been cemented in our nation’s history, DOWN UNDER is a timely reminder that will provoke wider discussions on identity and acceptance.
DOWN UNDER will release in cinemas in 2016, distributed by STUDIOCANAL Australia.
DOWN UNDER stars Lincoln Younes (Hiding, Love Child Season 2), Rahel Romahn (Underbelly: The Golden Mile, The Combination), Damon Herriman(The Water Diviner, The Little Death, Justified), Michael Denkha (The Combination, Stealth), Fayssal Bazzi (Crownies, Cedar Boys),Alexander England (Gods Of Egypt, Power Games: The Packer-Murdoch Story),Justin Rosniak (Animal Kingdom), Harriet Dyer (Love Child, Janet King) and introduces Christopher Bunton. It also features Josh McConville, Dylan Young, Christiaan Van Vuuren, Anthony Taufa along with Marshall Napier (The Water Horse, Babe) and David Field (Last Cab To Darwin, The Rover, Chopper).
Presented by Screen Australia, DOWN UNDER is a Wild Eddie Production, in association with El Guapo Films and Emu Creek Pictures, produced in conjunction with STUDIOCANAL. Written and directed by Abe Forsythe, produced by Jodi Matterson and executive produced by Greg McLean.
As fans of Chris Morris’ Four Lions – which tackled equally touchy material – we’re not going to dismiss this out of hand.
Oh wait, it’s written and directed by Abe Forsythe. The man who made Brass Eye, Jam and Nathan Barley up against the director of Ned and series two of Laid? Who also wrote for Double Take, Comedy Inc. and The Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting?
We’re sorry we said anything.
Vale Open Slather
In a recent episode of podcast The Little Dum Dum Club featuring Open Slather cast member Demi Lardner, the Foxtel sketch series was described as being on break. We’re pretty sure that was a joke, but no one laughed. Presumably in the Australian comedy industry you need to be an optimist to get by.
The final episode of Open Slather aired quietly a few weeks ago, and despite the many twists and turns in its production history it ended how it started out: crap. It may have had a cast of much-loved veterans and promising newcomers, an experienced production team and a commercial TV budget, but the series never quite jelled.
Was it that slightly grainy, vaguely film-stock look they applied to the vision? (You know, the one that’s been ruining TV sketch shows since the early noughties.)
Was it the characters written to be a hit that didn’t quite work so they still persisted with them right ‘til the end anyway? (Hello that gay fitness guru who calls everyone “fatties”!).
Was it the sketches about contemporary life and online culture that felt like off-cuts from This Is Littleton?
Was it the by-numbers parodies of TV shows that possibly air on either Fox 8 or Arena (and frankly, who can tell the difference)?
Put it this way, we got more laughs out of Gina Reilly’s guest role on Please Like Me than we did her appearance in Open Slather. And Please Like Me’s co-written by Josh Thomas!
The only thing that could have saved Open Slather would have been an original vision. Something that wasn’t a few concepts from 1989 rehashed and reheated for 2015. The sketch shows that have had an impact in recent years, such Inside Amy Schumer and Australia’s own Mad As Hell, have all felt like personal, original visions of their creators and stars. Open Slather? It felt manufactured, old-fashioned and pretty much everything else that’s the opposite of what good sketch comedy should be.
The Future is Now
Press release time!
Actually, it’s a pretty big press release, as the ABC has just announced a hefty chunk of what they’ll be coughing up in 2016. So let’s focus on the comedy bits:
First this:
ABC iview will continue to lead the way with a range of digital-first exclusives, including the second series of the highly inappropriate and hilarious YouTube hit, The Katering Show. You Can’t Ask That will pose the awkward questions you’ve always wanted to ask but never could; and from WA’s up-and-coming online stars Mad Kids, a comedy about a group of reporters at DAFUQ?, the hottest thing in non-mainstream, cross platform news.
Then this:
We also have a hilarious line-up of funny and entertaining programming for 2016.
Comedian Luke McGregor takes us on an embarrassingly honest and humorous look at sex in Luke Warm Sex; he’ll also pair up with Celia Pacquola to star in Rosehaven, a new comedy series filmed in rural Tasmania.
The ABC Comedy Showroom brings together some of Australia’s best comedic talent – including Eddie Perfect, Ronnie Chieng, Lawrence Mooney, Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan – for six new pilots, each the first episodes of a brand new sitcom. Audiences will get to vote on the episodes they’d like to see as a full series.
There are new seasons of firm favourites including Black Comedy, Upper Middle Bogan, Soul Mates, Shaun Micallef’s Mad As Hell, The Weekly with Charlie Pickering and Julia Zemiro’s Home Delivery.
Two shows with Luke McGregor? Guess with Utopia and Dirty Laundry Live nowhere to be seen the ABC has to keep the McGregor levels up somehow. Oh, and there’s also this:
the hit series Stop Laughing… This Is Series returns to more deeply explore how humour, laughter and comedy have been integral to our national identity.
On the one hand, it’s nice to see that someone, maybe, agreed with us that three hours isn’t sufficient to tell the history of Australian comedy. But actually, we’re guessing that after editing the interviews so heavily for the first show they realised they had more than enough offcuts to piece together a whole new series. Get ready to compare and contrast haircuts and backgrounds between both series!
So, to begin an overly extended conclusion, what’s notable here is what’s not mentioned. No Gruen? No Chaser? But as they’re usually sprung upon us towards the end of the year, we’re going to pencil them in anyway.
And where’s the big flashy exciting items? Even last year they had “Shaun Micallef sitcom!” to get people excited, and before that there was “Chris Lilley’s Back!”, “Spicks & Specks is back!”, “Denton is back!”, and you get the idea. Yes, they pretty much always fizzled out, but that wasn’t the point – they sounded exciting (to a general audience) and drew attention to the comedy line-up as a whole.
But there’s literally nothing here to get anyone not already fully invested in comedy paying attention. Seriously, when you’re leading off your comedy line-up with not one but two shows featuring Luke McGregor – who is very funny but is yet to become an established draw – you’re not doing much to get the general public excited about comedy in 2016.
Also, bad news for all those First Blood contestants: looks like the “real” ABC has ignored all their hard work and gone ahead with their own comedy contest. Note: “Audiences will get to vote on the episodes they’d like to see as a full series” does in no way imply that any of the pilots will actually get a full series.
But the big stand out is the return (for an unprecedented third season) of Upper Middle Bogan. Gee, aside from Shaun Micallef’s Ex-PM (which does not seem to be returning), has the current head of scripted ABC comedy actually developed any scripted ABC comedy (as opposed to picking up former ABC2 series) during his reign? In fact, doesn’t the return of a show that – if rumours are correct – he definitively said would not be returning on his watch put his position under something of a shadow? Not that his co-workers were casting shade his way at a recent public function that we definitely didn’t attend.
Otherwise, once the thrill of seeing potentially interesting new shows has passed, we’re once again left with the sight of the ABC doing their best to make a tight budget stretch. Panel shows are out (thank fuck); a host wandering around talking to unpaid guests and extras is in. It’s a safe line-up at a time when television audiences are declining: by failing to either rope in some actual big names or come up with anything really exciting, it’s a little too much like the worst of all worlds.
Don’t Mess With Your Ex
Shaun Micallef’s The Ex-PM finished up last week, going out the way it lived – as a half hour sitcom. Which made it a bit of an oddity on Australian television in 2015, as the days when the ABC’s head of scripted comedy was willing to make (or with the funding to make) sitcoms that aimed for a wide audience seem to be over. The Moodys and Upper Middle Bogan are out: a whole bunch of niche shows initially meant for ABC2 are in. And next year when the ABC2 surplus has gone? Hey, you’ll still have The Weekly.
This kind of left The Ex-PM in limbo. While Micallef himself has become one of this country’s towering greats as far as comedy’s concerned, that’s largely come about because he’s sat still and done something people can understand – news satire, AKA the one kind of comedy the ABC does like to keep around – for five seasons and counting. Micallef’s sense of humour has always been just a little offbeat for a nation that’s made Dave Hughes a star: it helps a lot when his kind of comedy is put into a container that people feel comfortable with.
But in Australia 2015, a sitcom isn’t really that container. Hard as it is to grasp for hard-core comedy fans such as ourselves, it seems sitcoms are edgy stuff for Australian audiences these days. The last two sitcoms that actually hit big would be Kath & Kim and Summer Heights High – both of which tackled material that’s about as mainstream-audience-friendly as you can get.
Shaun Micallef playing a former PM might seem like similar sure-fire stuff at first glance, but with Shaun Micallef in the lead we were never going to get some kind of broad strokes At Home With Julia cartoon. What we did get ended up taking a little time to settle in: Micallef had clearly put in a bit of thought as to what an actual former Prime Minister would be like, whereas much of the audience just wanted to see him play some stuffy old duffer constantly being brought low by a squad of dimwits. Which is what we eventually got.
Part of the reason for the death of the Aussie sitcom is that a sitcom’s biggest strength is the audience’s familiarity with the characters. When a sitcom only has a handful of episodes to establish itself, that strength is gone: every scene with a character becomes a scene re-introducing us to them. It’s still possible to get laughs in that situation but it’s definitely a lot harder, especially if you’ve filmed all the episodes first so you’re not even getting audience feedback to guide you. No wonder people make dramedies instead: at least there if no-one laughs you can pretend you were being serious.
With Micallef – or the”Shaun Micallef” that we know from television – that’s not a problem. Shaun Micallef has been on our screens on various shows for so long now that we know what to expect: a slightly officious, slightly overconfident patrician figure who’s good on the double takes as the real world refuses to conform to his beliefs. So a show built around him titled The Ex-PM should have been perfect, right?
Thing is, Micallef – the real one – seems to have gone into this sitcom deciding to play an actual character rather than just “himself”. And suddenly we’re back to square one, only worse: now the audience has to get their heads around “Shaun Micallef” not acting entirely like we expect him to. To make the worst possible comparison, it’d be like having Daryl Somers turn up in a sitcom playing a comedy character that wasn’t different enough from his established persona for viewers to have a clean break (this is why Robin Williams made all those dramas), and yet not similar enough to his established persona for viewers to immediately relax.
These are all minor quibbles: the show found its feet quickly, delivered laughs promptly, gave us a chance to see John Clarke doing what he does best, reminded us that Lachie Hulme can be pretty funny when he’s not playing Kerry Packer, and ended up our favourite sitcom of the year (sorry Utopia). But it goes to show that making good television relies on a whole lot of things, and time – which Australian television never seems to have enough of – is perhaps the most important thing of all.
Oh wait, How Not to Behave got fifteen weeks and was shit from start to finish. Forget we said anything.
Wil Anderson: Legacy Hire
The latest series of Gruen wrapped up last week after yet another ratings triumph:
Gruen has ended a stellar run on ABC winning its timeslot again with 948,000 viewers. The show has never dipped below 900,000 all season (last week’s 897,000 was eventually adjusted to 900,000). Host Wil Anderson gave no indication if the show would return in 2016 -fingers xd.
Obviously our fingers are held in a slightly different fashion, given our long-running fondness for the series.
What is there left to say about the Gruen series of programs that we haven’t already groaned out while lying on the floor of a grimy pub toilet splattered in our own vomit? You all know the drill: we complain that they’re nothing but advertising for the very idea of advertising presented by a comedy knob fronting a panel largely comprised of sweaty advertising shills and soulless mercenaries that’s then edited into near-incoherency with a side serve of audience cutaways to convince you that somewhere someone remotely human found this crap funny. And then it rates its pants off.
Otherwise, we don’t have all that much to say, which is why we didn’t say much of anything at the time. Gruen has been totally fucking inert remarkably consistent since it first began, and while it’s perfectly effective as blatant propaganda for the advertising industry and is fairly obviously in breach of ABC guidelines, as comedy it leaves more than a little to be desired. Which is probably the point, as playing on your desires is what advertising is all about.
Pretty much the only interesting thing we did think about during this year’s run is the way that Wil Anderson’s now no longer part of the Australian comedy scene. Hurrah! But seriously: much like fellow one-time ABC stalwart Adam Hills, Anderson now spends much of his time working on his career overseas, safe in the knowledge that he can wander back here when he feels the need and Australia will welcome him with open arms. He’s no longer in the “building” stage of his career here – all he has to do is maintain what he’s already got, while putting the real effort in elsewhere.
Sometimes this approach works, sometimes it doesn’t. Hills seems set enough in the UK that his lack of television work here isn’t a problem, while one-time talk show star Rove McManus seems to have returned from the US for good – to a radio gig alongside the star of the Bachelorette, no less – which goes to show that the rest of the world often really doesn’t give a shit. Anderson’s focusing on the US, which doesn’t seem like a country that actually needs “Wil Anderson”. but as he’s working on his stand-up the increased opportunities over there presumably make it worthwhile even if he doesn’t hit the big time.
And let’s be honest: after this year’s ratings bonanza – figures which would have been disappointing only a few years ago but is officially “amazing” for a Wednesday night ABC comedy now that the network’s fucked up that goldmine – Gruen is never going to go away. Anderson can slave away on the US stand-up circuit, or dick around on a banana lounge by the pool in Heyfield. It doesn’t matter: he’s got a steady income that doesn’t require him to do a great deal more than turn up and read shit jokes off the autocue.
Imagine if some actually funny Australian had that kind of professional security? Imagine if some halfway decent Australian comedian had that gig and spent the rest of the year working on riskier comedy right here, able to try new and different stuff safe in the knowledge that even if their idea tanked they’d still be able to make a decent living? Imagine if your tax dollars weren’t going to fund Wil Anderson’s dream of hearing laughter in an American accent?
Of course, comedy – and life – doesn’t work that way. What he does with his money is 100% his business; as the host of a hit show, he doesn’t owe us a thing once the cameras stop rolling.
He doesn’t seem to owe us much when the cameras are rolling either, come to think of it.