Australian Tumbleweeds
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.
Rebel Outside The Law
We’re not sure which is funnier: this news item, or the fact a whole bunch of people sent it to us:
Actress Rebel Wilson is suing a glossy magazine publisher over a series of articles she says defamed her.
Wilson, a comedian and actress who has starred in blockbusters including Bridesmaids and Pitch Perfect, says print and online articles in Woman’s Day, The Australian Women’s Weekly, NW and OK Magazine made her out to be a serial liar.
According to a writ filed in the Victorian Supreme Court, Wilson says her reputation and credit has suffered, and she has been humiliated and embarrassed.
But what horrible lies could they have published that could have caused her such distress?
Wilson says the stories last year accused her of lying about her age and her background, using a fake name and creating stories to make it in Hollywood.
Ah.
Now, at first you might be thinking “hang on a second, haven’t all those stories been, you know… proven? Rebel did change her name between school and Hollywood (it seems at school she went by Melanie Elizabeth Bownds), she did “forget” to tell Hollywood that her actual age was six years older than what she claimed (going so far as to say Rose Byrne was in an “older group” of actresses when Byrne is actually a year younger than her), and once you start leaving years out of your past then the stories about your awesome past fairly quickly stop adding up.
It’s not even like it’s hard to figure out: the article says “As a girl, Wilson was studious and, at 17, she was voted an Australian Youth Ambassador and sent to South Africa to represent her country”… but if her publicised birthday is correct she would have been 17 in 2003, the year Wikipedia says “she moved to New York after winning the ATYP International scholarship”. Busy girl.
But on closer inspection – and asking some people who know more about this stuff than we do – it seems likely that her case relies more on the way they revealed these facts than the fact that they’re, you know, facts. To wit: it’s one thing to say she told lies – we all do that. It’s another to suggest she’s some kind of serial liar.
Which we for one would obviously never do: as Rebel herself has pointed out , the “Australian system” is the real villain here.
John: Have you heard of this thing called Tall Poppy Syndrome?
Rebel: Yes.
John: Is that a real thing? Is that something that –
Rebel: That is a very, very real thing, which is one of the reasons why I wanted to come live and work in America. So what it is, it’s a cultural phenomenon. It’s where if you get too good or too successful in Australia, so if you’re a poppy and you grow too tall, essentially, people want to cut you down. [laughs]
Craig: Really?
Rebel: Like yes, that’s what happened to me in Australia. So I was on all these different television shows and people like, she’s had a go, let someone else. And I’m like, what do you mean? I’m now like experienced. I’m now like really experienced. I’m now ready to go the next step and have my own movies, or maybe. And the Australian system is like, no, you think you’re so good now, why don’t you go and be unemployed. And I’m like, no.
Damn Australian system, always forcing the “really experienced” into unemployment.
Supposedly if Wilson can prove malice – that the magazines in question told those stories about her in an attempt to damage her career – then she may have a case even if the stories they told are all 100% true. It seems that intentionally setting out to cause harm to someone’s career is enough to win this kind of case.
Presumably she’ll be suing whoever let her go ahead with Super Fun Night next.
Meeting the (Kind-Of) Mavericks
Of some interest to comedy lovers has been the ABC arts series Meet the Mavericks, five half-hour conversations between five pairs of “mavericks”. The second program saw Magda Szubanski (Fast Forward, Kath & Kim) speak with UK artist Grayson Perry, while last week it was comedy-musician Tim Minchin (Matilda) gabbing with Late Night Live’s Phillip Adams. In the final episode, which aired last night, John Safran (Race Relations, Sunday Night Safran) and British journalist and author Jon Ronson, played pool and talked in the top room of a pub.
Of the three episodes of Meet the Mavericks featuring comedians, Safran vs Ronson was probably the best. The two have met several times already, have similar backgrounds, and have had fairly similar careers, each known for spending time with people with strange and extreme views, and for delving into areas that few others do.
Minchin and Adams also had a number of similarities, and their chat spent a lot of time talking about comedy, the arts, offensiveness, pushing boundaries and the Australian cultural scene.
Even the least comedy-focused conversation, Szubanski and Perry, which spent much of its time on gender, identity and self-confidence, was pretty interesting. There are worse ways to spend half-an-hour than watching Meet the Mavericks.
Not that there aren’t negatives about this show. As people interested in comedy, we’d far rather have seen a more comedy-focused discussion. Maybe something along the lines of A Quiet Word with…, although that would have required an interviewer and a bit more planning and money, whereas Meet the Mavericks clearly had a budget of about $5 and was shot in half a day.
We weren’t expecting Meet the Mavericks to be like Kerry O’Brien’s interviews with Paul Keating, but, and this is getting a bit off topic, is this really the best the ABC’s arts department can do? Are they that cash-strapped that all they can afford to do is to set up some cameras in Philip Adams’ front room and hope for the best?
There Can Be Only One… oh wait, hang on a second
Now more than ever, Australian comedy is built around winners and losers. No, this isn’t some convoluted lead-in to a discussion about the Logies: pretty much the only thing of interest to be said there is that The Project won stuff while The Weekly, aka the ABC’s attempt to clone The Project right down to hiring a former host and cast members, won nothing. Which is pretty much what you’d expect from a popularity contest.
Trouble is, over the last few years the ABC seem to have been going out of their way to turn their comedy department into a popularity contest. First we had two years of Fresh Blood online, now Comedy Showcase is – supposedly, because Lord amercy do we have our suspicions about this one – a contest to find a pilot the ABC can throw money at. It’s almost as if they don’t have anyone there who can make a programming decision.
But of course, at the end of the day a decision is going to be made by someone at the ABC as to which shows are going to go to series and which ones are going in the bin. And without making the voting process transparent – as in, actually collecting and tallying up votes and then letting us know the results of that tally – people (us) will always suspect that the “competition” is just a promotional device and the end result is rigged as fuck.
Which why we raised an eyebrow when the Fresh Blood winners were… well, we’re guessing they were announced at the ABC 2016 upfronts, but this seems to be the only place that actually mentioned the winners:
In the Fresh Blood initiative with Screen Australia, two pilots will proceed to a full series: one from Skit Box , the Sydney-based trio of comedians Adele Vuko, Sarah Bishop and Greta Lee Jackson, the other the Melbourne collective Fancy Boy.
This result seemed a little odd because we, and pretty much everyone we know, figured Aunty Donna was easily the funniest of the five finalists. But before we could do much more than hoist an eyebrow at this somewhat suspicious-smelling series of events, all was revealed:
Hey there Australia! We like you, and you like us… we think. So it’s with great joy to announce our first local commission! Melbourne based sketch comedy group Aunty Donna. Aunty Donna will be making an excellent web series for our Not For TV platform.
This will be the first of several original Australian projects that Comedy Central will develop as part of Not For TV. Not For TV is Comedy Central’s platform for unique and fresh comedy and has birthed shows such as Broad City. We’re looking for the next hot potato, and we think the hottest potatoes (among many hot potatoes) here in Australia land right now are Aunty Donna.
First video? Right here.
This is pretty much the best of all possible worlds. The cream of the crop – that’d be Aunty Donna – are, um, creamed off by a commercial network; the up-and-comers now have a chance to hone their skills on the national broadcaster. One of the bigger problems with Australian television comedy over the last twenty years or so has been that once an act has had a run on the ABC there’s nowhere for them to move on to. This kind of thing, especially if it takes off, could be a solution to that.
It doesn’t hurt that Aunty Donna are pretty damn funny too.
Vale The Weekly season two
We’re just going to come right out and say it: The Weekly taking on Clarke & Dawe was perhaps the funniest thing we’ve seen on television this year. Not that the sketch itself was funny: oh no no no no no no fuck no. It was utterly pointless at best and bewildering at worst – so your typical Weekly fare really.
Seriously, what was the point? To show that Charlie Pickering and Tom Gleeson could do what Clarke and Dawe do – that is, be funny – if they really wanted to but they’d rather take a barely metaphorical shit on their viewers instead? Or did Pickering and Gleeson decide that enough was enough and someone had to finally step up and explain in laborious detail to the general public exactly what it is that Clarke & Dawe have been doing every week for the last 25 years? Fucked if we know: we’re pretty sure they didn’t know either.
No, what made the opening of the final episode of this season of The Weekly hilarious was the sheer cluelessness of it all. Clarke & Dawe may not be to everyone’s taste but they make a point, it’s usually a funny point, and then they piss off. Which is three things more than The Weekly has managed to do over 34 weeks. Way too often on The Weekly their idea of comedy seems to be “explaining things”: if that was an actual real approach to comedy then your third grade teacher would be touring with Hughsey as her support act.
What makes this so painful is that it seems – to us at least – kind of obvious that the writers of The Weekly know they suck. Why else would so much of their material be the kind of self-parody designed to say “don’t bother trying to tell us we suck, we’ve already made all those jokes ourselves”? The Clarke & Dawe bit literally stopped in the middle so they could let us know it wasn’t a parody but a tribute; arse-covering one, comedy zero.
So why did it all go so wrong? Why couldn’t The Weekly actually deliver on the promise of being a halfway decent news satire? Here’s a clue: it was put together by people who thought we really needed thirty-four weeks of Tom Gleeson.
That’s not a bitchy comment – well, it is, but it’s not just a bitchy comment. We’ve just had thirty four episodes plus an end-of-year special of a show built around three cast members, and out of those three all three were doing the exact same thing every episode. Shaun Micallef turns up out of nowhere in the final five seconds to dismiss the whole show as “left-wing drivel” and gets the biggest laughs of the entire series: maybe that’s a sign that you need to hire funnier people?
The Weekly had a lot of flaws – seriously, have you got all day? Buy us lunch and we promise we won’t shut up – but one of the big ones was that it never quite figured out how to make being weekly work. Part of why The Daily Show works is that it’s a show that’s on daily; doing four episodes a week means audiences are just that little bit more forgiving of a format that’s largely just a guy ranting while jokes are flashed up behind him. Only being on the air once a week makes you more of an event. One guy doing a couple Project-level monologues and an interview while his two sidekicks do the same segment each week? Non-event.
We ask again: why were there only ever two correspondents? Mad as Hell has a cast of six, not counting host Micallef, and those six often play two or more characters. Sure, Mad as Hell has sketches and fake ads and so on, but it also has a bunch of characters sitting across the desk from Micallef having a chat… you know, just like The Weekly does. Only funny.
It’s not that Gleeson and Flanagan’s segments were entirely lacking in comedic potential either. It’s that they were roughly the same premise every week: Gleeson would make some counter-intuitive argument (or worse, talk about his popularity), Flanagan would explain how some part of society was nutty. Week after week. For thirty-four weeks.
When The Weekly returned in 2016 basically unchanged from its 2015 form, it had the stench of death about it. Not because it was a terrible show at the end of 2015 – as lightweight news it was perfectly serviceable; it only sucked if you expected it to be funny or take a stand on anything even slightly controversial – but because there was clearly room for improvement and yet no improvements had been made.
Did anyone really think the core appeal of The Weekly was the fact it was Charlie Pickering, Tom Gleeson and Kitty Flanagan? That power-packed trio held together by the raw power of Pickering’s willingness to laugh at their jokes and… well, Gleeson and Flanagan almost never worked together on the show, did they? Seems slightly odd.
Pickering they couldn’t lose, though they really should have; charm, wit and righteous anger are what a Daily Show knockoff needs in a host, not smug self-satisfaction and the occasional deadpan stare. But even if you didn’t want to ditch Tom Gleeson, why wouldn’t you bring in a new comedian or two just to vary things a little? Did Charlie Pickering really cost that much to hire that they couldn’t afford another cast member?
It doesn’t really matter now, whatever happens with The Weekly. Pickering ended the show by shouting “we’ll be back!”, but he didn’t rule out in pog form. After two seasons of the same old, any major changes would look like desperation; smaller changes won’t be enough to save it.
… though by “save it” we mean turn it into something watchable, which almost certainly isn’t something the ABC is all that worried about. Charlie Pickering is a personality and they’re all about the personalities at Aunty these days. Well, that and shows they can put on for months at a time and just forget about.
And if there’s ever been an ABC show you can forget about, it’s The Weekly.
Talking Pictures with Mr Rabbit and the Bearded Lady
If you’ve ever wondered what Judith Lucy gets up to when she’s not touring the country, then may we direct you to Mr Rabbit and the Bearded Lady, a podcast focusing on “movies and the fine art of conversation”. It’s an irregularly released podcast – sometimes more than a month goes by without an episode – but it’s one to look forward to, as Judith (she’s the Bearded Lady) and “Mr Rabbit” (we’ve no idea who he is!), know their stuff when it comes to movies and TV, care about the mediums, and are interesting and funny to boot.
A discussion of Woody Allen’s Irrational Man is peppered with references to Allen’s previous films, and why many of his recent ones have been disappointments (not to mention how hard it is to watch any of them these days without thinking about his private life, alleged or otherwise). Similarly, the pair’s review of Bridge of Spies discusses how fascinating the real-life story is, and what a great director of beautiful-looking, slick films Steven Spielberg is, but also why neither of those things made this an amazing film.
If you’ve ever thought that critics on TV or radio, or those writing for big publications or websites, weren’t going into enough detail about the production they’re reviewing, or giving enough context about key personnel, or should’ve had a few drinks beforehand, then this is the podcast for you. Lucy and Mr Rabbit really love cinema, they’re film nerds, and they talk about cinema like they’re in a pub discussing their favourite thing in the world. This often leads to some tangents, but they’re always interesting ones, and even with these and Lucy’s trademark acerbic remarks about anything that trips her trigger, this is a very economical program, with the runtime for most episodes being somewhere between 30-45 minutes – the perfect length for your journey home from work.
The segment where Lucy tries to summarise the latest episode of Nashville in one minute doesn’t quite doesn’t do it for us (or presumably for anyone who isn’t a fan of that program) but we’re warming to What Can’t Mendo Do?, a regular feature discussing the many and varied roles of Ben Mendelsohn – truly Australia’s answer to Kevin Bacon. It’s certainly introduced us to some lesser-known films Aussie flicks.
Basically, if like film (and TV, and comedy, and drinking), then you’ll enjoy this. Especially the pair’s vale to beloved Balaclava video shop Video Vision at the end of episode 9.
Comedy Showroom 2: Surrealism vs a Loser vs an Ageing Rebel
In this the second of our blogs about Comedy Showroom, the ABC’s pilot season, we look at the final three programs. The episodes are going to air at 9:00pm on Wednesdays on ABC while all six episodes of the series are now available on iView. You can read our blog about the first three shows here.
The Future of Expensive
Who’s Involved? Eddie Perfect (Offspring, Shane Warne: The Musical) wrote the script and the music and plays the lead role. Matthew Saville (Please Like Me, We Can Be Heroes) is the director.
What’s It About? Eddie is an inner city stay at home Dad who lives in a nice house and seems to spend his time looking after his two-year-old daughter and doing DIY while his wife works. According to this article on TV Tonight, Eddie’s a musician, although there’s very little evidence in the pilot that he has any kind of career, apart from maybe the scene where Paul Kelly turns up to sing a song while Eddie’s building a deck. In fact, it’s almost like they forgot to set up the fact that Eddie plays gigs at night, or whatever he does, and just thought it would be funny for Paul Kelly to turn up and play for a bit. Er, okay…
Is It Funny? No, it’s just weird. And badly done weird at that. There are various scenes where the show tries to get laughs based on heightened realism or bizarre surrealism, but it just doesn’t work. The first scene ends with Eddie being chased out of the local park and one of the people chasing him being knocked down by a taco truck. Later, when Eddie has to take his daughter to a friend’s birthday party, Eddie complains that the birthday boy is a little shit, yet we never meet the boy. The closest we get is meeting the boy’s Mum, who takes the present Eddie’s bought and smashes it up. There’s an implication that she does this because her son would just end up breaking it, but that’s never made clear. It’s just basically a 30-something woman smashing up a wrapped gift box while Eddie doesn’t really react. Also, is Eddie some kind of sociopath? Or is his wife? Or are all the characters?
Should It Get A Series? Not on the basis of this, it shouldn’t. This show really needs to work out what it wants to be and how it’s trying to get laughs. Is it a dramedy or a piece of avant-garde surrealism? Or an unwanted revival of whatever style of program Ally McBeal was, but with sociopaths.
Bleak
Who’s Involved? This is written by Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan (The Katering Show), with Kate McLennan in the lead role of Anna. Also in the cast are McCartney as Anna’s boss, Jean Kittson (Let The Blood Run Free, Kittson Fahey) as Anna’s Mum and Shane Bourne (City Homicide, Hey! Hey! It’s Saturday, Are You Being Served?) as Anna’s Dad. Kate McCartney is the director.
What’s It About? Based on McCartney and McLennan’s web series of the same name, this is about what happens when graphic designer Anna loses her job and her boyfriend on the same day, and realises she’s a friendless, directionless loser whose only choice is to move back in with parents who are, at best, indifferent to her.
Is It Funny? Sort of. It’s hard not to feel sorry for Anna, who, while fairly annoying, doesn’t really deserve this. And it’s here the problem lies: it’s hard to laugh at the various quite funny things that happen because it keeps cutting to Anna’s heartbroken face. As the series develops it will probably get funnier, but, as the title says, things are pretty bleak in episode 1.
Should It Get A Series? Maybe. As we said above, 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. The cast includes a number of great comedy actors, with fabulous timing – Jean Kittson as Anna’s drunk/indifferent Mum especially – and McLennan and McCartney can always be relied upon to get laughs. However, we felt the visual scenes could have been better written and directed – the scene where Anna steals bubbly, champagne flutes and a cheese platter from her parent’s kitchen should have been a lot funnier, for example. Also, Anna’s going to need to start winning at some point, or this will just feel like it’s about laughing at a loser.
Moonman
Who’s Involved? Lawrence Mooney (Dirty Laundry Live, stand-up) plays the title role and is credited with additional material while Scott Taylor (Neighbours, Home & Away) wrote the script. Ian Smith (Neighbours, Prisoner) plays Lawrence’s colleague Ian, and the show’s directed by Clayton Jacobson (Kenny).
What’s It About? When we meet Lawrence he’s being arrested for drunk driving in a golf cart as part of a celebrity golf day bet gone wrong. But it turns out that Lawrence isn’t actually much of a celebrity, he’s a midnight-to-dawn DJ on Soft FM, he’s in his 40’s, and his heavy drinking, partying ways have clearly taken their toll. But on the plus side, maybe, his girlfriend’s pregnant and he’s starting to realise that he needs to straighten out his life and get a job he finds more satisfying. Can he do it?
Is It Funny? A bit. Lawrence Mooney’s a funny guy, and Ian Smith (Lawrence’s sort of sidekick and foil) is a good character actor, but the script really lets things down. Maybe it’s because most of the show’s set at night in either the seedy radio station or near the dodgy kebab van Lawrence frequents, but it just reminds us a lot of Roy Hollsdotter Live, a bleak but fairly realistic telling of the what show business at the mildly-successful-but-this-won’t-last end is like. There are many moments that could have been a lot funnier if they’d been better written and directed, but most of the time this is a pretty downbeat show.
Should It Get A Series? Maybe. We can imagine a series where Lawrence, having quit his job at the radio station, tries his hand at various day jobs and fails. And although this pilot’s not amazingly funny, it’s well-enough executed to suggest it could have a series in it. We’re not sure how Ian’s going to fit in, though, what with Lawrence not having to work with him anymore, and the pair hating each other. Maybe they’ll move in together and it will get all The Odd Couple?