Australian Tumbleweeds
Ronny Chieng on The Daily Show – and other Aussies on American late night TV
If you’ve ever wanted to break into American late night TV, but were worried it would never happen because you’re not American, then there’s some good news: not being American doesn’t seem to be a problem anymore.
The very British John Oliver is all over HBO with his investigative news comedy show Last Week Tonight, Englishman James Corden just took over the very late slot from Scotsman Craig Ferguson, and South African comedian Trevor Noah was the unlikely replacement when Jon Stewart left The Daily Show. Yes, all the barriers have been broken down in late night. (Unless you’re a woman.)
The revamped Daily Show brought with it a number of new correspondents, as many of the old guard had also left, including veteran husband-and-wife team Jason Jones and Samantha Bee. One of the new faces greeting was Australian Ronny Chieng.
If you’ve not heard of Chieng, it felt like he was right on the verge of becoming a household name in Australia. In addition to his comedy festival shows, he’d appeared in ABC2’s Little Britain riff This Is Littleton, SBS’s Legally Brown, and Peter Helliar’s It’s a Date. The sort of shows that give way to a radio show or a fill-in spot on The Project.
Getting a gig on The Daily Show, a show that is firmly cemented internationally as the gold standard of news comedy, is no small thing, and Chieng is the first Australian to even come close.
And yes, we’re including Dan Ilic, who was famously fired from Al Jazeera earlier this year when he was caught using studio equipment to make himself a Daily Show audition.
As a side note, it’s interesting how much traction Ilic got for that story (articles about his firing appeared in Mumbrella, TV Tonight, Pedestrian and even The Australian). Especially considering that, given how The Daily Show audition process actually works, this might not have been the epic coronation it first appeared. According to every correspondent who’s managed to score a gig on the show, including Al Madrigal, Jessica Williams, Hasan Minaj and Ronny Chieng himself, the actual audition process goes like this: you submit a tape, and then if they like the tap, they call you in to the studio to do a desk piece and a greenscreen piece. Ilic was, according to the reports, asked by the producers to submit a tape, but clearly nothing eventuated. We can’t really fault Ilic for riding the wave of publicity that he got. After all, “Comedian auditions for Daily Show” sounds far more impressive than “Comedian sends mail to popular show”.
But we digress.
Chieng isn’t the only Australian to crack the late night Comedy Central late night slot. When The Colbert Report ended, its replacement was The Nightly Show, a “minority”-themed news show that focused on the systemic oppression of minorities in America. The show, which took a very long time to find its own voice but seems to have finally settled into a consistent and enjoyable rhythm, often features three guests talking the issues of the day with host Larry Wilmore. To make up the numbers, there’s a rotating roster of the show’s writers who get on-air time, from former Daily Show showrunner Rory Albanese to head writer Robin Thede to the show’s obvious breakout star Mike Yard.
And yet there seemed to be zero fanfare when Australian comedian David Smithyman first appeared on The Nightly Show. Partly because The Nightly Show took more than a commercial break to find its feet and nobody bothered sticking around, but also because nobody had heard of David Smithyman. It actually took us literally hours of googling to find out what his name was, and we’d seen all the episodes he was in.
Smithyman was an odd one. With a weird accent we wouldn’t have picked as Australian if they hadn’t flagged it upfront, and a strange energy that didn’t seem at ease plugged into the “We now cross to gay Santa Clause”/”Joining us now is a divorced squirrel” format the show enjoys. He now seems to have disappeared from the show. Whether this is because he’s scored a writing gig on Fresh Off the Boat, or whether he was just quietly disappeared from the show (wherefore art thou, Shenaz Treasury?), it’s not clear. But it’s very strange the way Australia, so keen to embrace and promote and cheer for and then turn against any Australian who makes it big overseas, completely missed Smithyman.
But the parade was certainly held for Chieng, followed by a patient wait for Chieng to actually make an appearance.
The show was quick to introduce the other two hires Roy Wood Jr and Desi Lydic, but took its time with Chieng. It could be strategic, but it’s more likely practical: Chieng appears to have had a number of long-standing tour commitments to fulfill, and has been frequently tweeting from around the world in the month-and-a-half since the show returned to air.
His first appearance was a strange to-camera tech piece that riffed on the idea that Chieng just wanted his father to love him. Following that, as well as a brief cameo in a correspondent-heavy sketch, Chieng’s next proper appearance was the traditional Daily Show field report.
The premise of the report was that Chieng, a foreigner, has been told that the USA’s voting system is the best in the world, and is all gung ho and excitable during interviews with experts, until he finds out that the system is actually fucked. It’s as standard a Daily Show field report as is possible, which is probably a good thing. Proving that he can fulfill the standard remit of the correspondent is a smart move this early on, and watching him dry hump an outdated, overpriced voting machine (“For $6000, I expect to be able to fuck it”) certainly got a laugh out of us.
The most interesting thing about that report – at least, from our perspective – is that there was no mention of Chieng being Australian. In fact, there was no mention of it in his other appearance either, which is strange because that’s usually the first thing they do. Trevor Noah is getting a lot of quality mileage out of his South African heritage, and even Jason Jones and Samantha Bee would exploit the fact that they’re from Canada if an outsider perspective was needed to make a gag work.
What they did emphasise was Chieng’s actual heritage. He may have started his career in Australia, but Chieng was born in Malaysia, a fact that is underscored in this field report. To be fair, the joke in question – Chieng mocking of the electoral office using a 56k dialup modem, something his “grandmother in Malaysia” wouldn’t even use – would not have worked if he’d mentioned Australia. Sure, disfavourably comparing any country’s internet to Australia’s woeful network is funny, but Americans don’t know that. Malaysia having superior internet is funnier for reasons that should be self-evident. (Racism. The reason is racism.)
It will be interesting to see if they ever mention the Australian connection. Chieng is The Daily Show’s first Asian correspondent, and with shows increasingly pressured to show diversity (and diversity beyond the white-black dynamic that often shuts out Latinos and Asians), there’s a lot more to be gained from drawing a line under the Malaysian connection. They can probably get away with it, too. Unless you’re the Sherlock Holmes of linguistics, able to tell from the slight lilt of the vowel which part of the Southern Hemisphere you spent you early 20s in, nobody’s going to be scratching their head wondering why they’re not making bloomin’ onion jokes.
(References to Bloomin’ Onions – a dish served at the US chain Outback Steakhouse –are the staple go-to Australian reference for Americans, like “lucky charms” when they’re talking about the Irish. Even high-minded comedy shows like The Daily Show still favour gags about countries that need to be explained to the people they’re actually about.)
So Australia hasn’t quite planted a flag in the US late-night expat invasion just yet, so we should perhaps be gracious and give Malaysia some credit for its coup. This is the Asian Century, after all.
Adam Hills Does Not Want To Kill Anyone
So first Adam Hills tweeted this:
Australia would send a better message to the world if we just hung Pauline Hanson from the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
— Adam Hills (@adamhillscomedy) November 15, 2015
And now he’s said this:
It occurred to me that if we dangled Pauline Hanson alongside the French flag, perhaps it would let Muslims around the world know we don’t blame them for the atrocities of an organisation that claims to represent them.
In my head I saw Miss Hanson in a harness, maybe a trapeze, looking comically chastened, suspended below a girder. I thought it was a funny image, so I tweeted this: “Australia would send a better message to the world if we just hung Pauline Hanson from the Sydney Harbour Bridge”
I committed a mortal sin of twitter – sending a tweet and not being clear about what you mean.
About an hour later I checked twitter and was surprised by the outrage. I mentioned it to my wife, who replied that perhaps people thought I wanted Pauline Hanson executed by having her hanged from the Bridge.
In time I have come to realise that the word “hung”, although technically not the same as the word “hanged”, still puts the same image in people’s heads. For that I apologise. I was in no way suggesting Pauline Hanson should be executed.
Angry at being told off by most of twitter, and my wife, I returned to the scene like a dog to its vomit. I tried to clarify that I meant “hung” like dirty laundry, not “hanged” like a criminal. I tried to reinforce that I don’t think Pauline Hanson’s views represent the majority of Australians. I tried to make the image more and more absurd, to reinforce that I was both joking, and not at all advocating someone’s death.
None of it helped.
So here is what I do not think: I do not think Pauline Hanson, or anyone, should be executed, and hanged from any Australian icon, let alone the Sydney Harbour Bridge. I do not condone violence against women. I do not support the shitheads that call themselves ISIS.
And earlier this year we said this:
See, we’re starting to think the loveable Hills we were getting for all those years on Australian television was the act, and the shouty angry guy who seems just a little too scary for comfort is the real deal. Free from the confines of being the safe pair of hands on Spicks and Specks, it might just be that he’s letting the mask slip to show a guy we’re kind of glad is currently half a world away.
Personally, we would have gone with “dangled”.
A Quick Two Words on Tropfest
As you no doubt know by now, this year’s Tropfest short film festival has been cancelled:
Popular short film festival Tropfest has been cancelled after 23 years with founder John Polson saying it may be due to a “terrible and irresponsible mismanagement” of funds.
Billed as the world’s largest festival of its kind, Tropfest attracts hundreds of entries and is watched by thousands every year and was due to take place on December 6.
“It is devastating for me to announce today that Tropfest will not be taking place as scheduled in [Sydney’s] Centennial Park this year,” Mr Polson said in a statement.
Usually we wouldn’t care in the slightest – and not just because, thanks to loads of people wailing and gnashing their teeth, it looks like the massively successful international festival will probably be bailed out – as short film is not really our thing. Or anyone else’s outside of Tropfest, going by the number of “without Tropfest, Australian short film is doomed” messages swirling around social media and those portions of the press that benefit financially from Tropfest.
But c’mon guys, Tropfest is where a lot of Australian television’s biggest comedy types got their big break. Paul Fenech! Adam Zwar and Jason Gann! Austen Tayshus! Matilda Brown! Abe Forsythe! Okay, most of them were already working hard before Tropfest gave them a boost – or in the case of Brown, she was Bryan Brown’s daughter – but, you know… Tropfest!
And there’s all the big name comedy cameos! Last year’s winner Granny Smith starred Steve Vizard! And we were too depressed to do any further research there.
Then there’s the way that, more often than not, the winner is basically just a firmly average comedy sketch that just happens to have cost tens of thousands of dollars to film. Which does tend to reinforce the biggest problem with Australian film and television comedy these days: the idea that the script comes last. Coming up with a twist ending isn’t good writing; spending eight minutes telling one shitty joke is worse.
Despite Tropfest having an outsized impact on the shape of Australian comedy over the last decade or so, we’re pretty confident that the impact has been all bad. The people it made into successes were either going to make it anyway or didn’t deserve the attention; that whole “every film must feature one item” gimmick and the way it demanded all rights to the entrants’ films made it seem just a little like the whole event was more about promoting the Tropfest brand rather than the film-makers themselves.
So our quick two words on Tropfest? You can probably guess.
The unlikeable Ex-PM
Recent episodes of The Ex-PM have seen a shift away from plots which rely on the audience believing that Andrew Dugdale was once Prime Minister (as we pointed out in our first review of the series, this is difficult), to plots which rely on the audience believing that Andrew Dugdale is some guy who’s very well known (much easier to buy). It’s a subtle shift, but a good one.
Gone are the heavy-handed political references that didn’t work as…um…satire? Was that the intention behind the scene where Dugdale’s at a primary school reading My Pet Goat while back at home toy planes were crashing in to his chimney? We don’t know. Anyway, now The Ex-PM is more about plots that any rich and/or famous person could be in, which makes it a lot easier to file Dugdale as an unlikeable idiot with lots of money, and enjoy the laughs generated from him getting in to a variety of absurd and/or sticky situations.
There’s a lesson here for anyone writing a sitcom – you can make a change mid-series and still write the series you intended. Or, to posit another theory about this subtle shift: playing to your strengths in comedy is always a good idea. And if you’re Micallef this means weird/absurd characters and plenty of them, and an over-the-top performance from him…which should be pretty funny in the final episode where he’s held hostage by the Russian mafia.
Best Aussie sitcom of the year? Yeah, probably.
And Not a Housos Movie in Sight
What’s that you say? We’re experiencing a golden age of Australian cinematic comedy? This we had to see for ourselves – and so we spent our Saturday watching not one but two Australian feature-length comedy films currently screening in cinemas. Shouldn’t the non-awaited third film in Paul Fenech’s Housos trilogy be out by now as well? Guess you can have too much of a good thing.
To be fair, The Dressmaker probably doesn’t exactly count as a “comedy” – we sure didn’t laugh much – but it is a prime example of the kind of broad-strokes comedy material that used to dominate Australian cinema right up until The Castle was actually funny. If you’re lucky you got Muriel’s Wedding; if you weren’t, you got Welcome to Woop Woop. Either way the general feeling was of watching a comedy made by people who were the kind of loud dickheads you ran away from at dinner parties.
The Dressmaker (which stars Kate Winslet as a French-trained Aussie dressmaker who returns to her 50s-era shithole small town to wreak revenge on the local freaks by… making dresses) is actually not half bad as a movie – that’d be largely thanks to a bunch of good performances and a story that, in a rarity for Australian film, actually keeps moving forward – but as a comedy we’re back to the collection of grotesques that our film-makers (as opposed to comedians) think are sure-fire laugh getters.
For fuck’s sake, this movie actually features an evil hunchback who gets his komedy kumuppance because once he starts running he can’t stop. Plus Shane Bourne plays a drug-rapist. And Hugo Weaving plays the local cop who also wears a full matador outfit because he’s flamboyant. Tonally it’s all over the shop which kind of works dramatically but as a comedy it’s a big old mess. It’ll probably be the biggest locally made hit of the year: no-one ever seems to go broke making comedy for people who need to be told when and where to laugh.
Now Add Honey, on the other hand, is made by people who actually have a decent recent track record in comedy: Robyn Butler and Wayne Hope, aka Gristmill, the team behind The Librarians and Upper Middle Bogan. The premise here is kind of involved; the short version is that a surprise family reunion goes wrong when L.A. glam stage mother Beth (Portia de Rossi) is arrested for drug possession, leaving her sister, down-to-earth but high-strung lawyer Caroline (Butler), stuck with Beth’s daughter, teenage international superstar Honey (Lucy Fry). Much fish-out-of-water hijinks ensue.
It’s a fairly straightforward premise but the film stumbles around for a while putting everything in place. There’s a third sister (Lucy Durack) and her engagement subplot that goes nowhere but does provide an excuse to have Hamish Blake (who plays her fiancée) in the film; Caroline’s husband is sleeping in the spare room and spending nights “at the office” but she’s too busy to notice; her older daughter has both teen problems and teen sass while her younger one is obsessed with the “Monkey Girl” character that’s made Honey a star. Plus Angus Sampson is a sleazy paparazzi lurking in the bushes outside. If that sounds kind of crowded, that’s because it is.
Gristmill’s sitcoms have all tended to have strong premises which were largely ignored in favour of character-based work. But in a sitcom you have the time to explore your characters; here with such a large cast pretty much everyone ends up having some big motivation that’s kind of glossed over. Caroline is yet another of Butler’s trademark stressed-out characters, if not as hyper-ventilating as the one she played in The Librarians. Yet despite her stressed-out nature being exactly the kind of issue we expect to be solved in a movie, here the cause is touched on once (she brought up her sisters after their mother’s death) and never dealt with. In another kind of movie this matter-of-fact approach would be praise-worthy – what’s done is done and we have to move forward in our lives – but in a comedy it feels like a thread left dangling.
Culture-clash stories are a comedy staple because no-one needs to think much about what’s happening and so all the effort can be put into the jokes. She’s from L.A., they’re from Melbourne, in the end she makes their lives a bit more glamorous and they bring her a bit more down to earth. But here we get a third act that’s all about the dangers of sexualising children (Beth wants Honey to transition out of kid’s entertainment via a sleazy music video and sexy photo shoot while Caroline does not approve) and why society says some kinds of bodies are fine to look at while others are seen as gross. It’s slightly funnier than it sounds, promise.
Teenagers acting sexy when they’re not prepared for the consequences – which here would be “Angus Sampson” – is a real issue, but it’s not an issue that is unique to glammed-up L.A. TV stars. So there’s really two stories here that only kind of overlap: how do you deal with a movie star in your suburban home, and how do you deal with a teen who’s under pressure to be overtly sexual before she’s ready for it. You could make a decent comedy out of either one; cramming them both into 100 minutes results in a bit of a mess.
Presumably the idea was meant to be that a): things would start out as a family dealing with this alien creature dropped into their midst, b): eventually they’d realise she was just like them then c): discover she had her own big problem she was dealing with and they’d band together to help her out. But there’s so much crammed into the first and second acts – we didn’t even mention the drug rehab stuff, or the failed marriage stuff, or the “you kissed the boy I liked” stuff, or Honey’s US agent, or Angus Sampson in the bushes, or the TV celebrity chef – that it all gets a little muddled. And a muddled story is the enemy of comedy – or at least, a guy that owes comedy money.
That said, unlike The Dressmaker this does contain a number of actually funny scenes. Butler can do “exasperated” in her sleep and get laughs, Blake is a constant scene-stealer (to be fair to everyone else, all he has to do in every scene he’s in is get laughs) and everyone else is extremely good at both the drama and the comedy. Well, maybe not Sampson, but he’s stuck playing a cartoon character. And Fry is playing a character that has to go from a broadly drawn caricature to a a real-life scared girl, which would be a big ask for anyone so it’s no big surprise that her scenes can be a bit all over the place.
Taken alongside The Dressmaker, we have here the two extremes of Australian movie comedy: one is a movie that works as a movie but isn’t all that funny, the other is funnier but doesn’t really hold together as a movie. Being funny is the hard part, but Australian comedians who stumble out the gate never get a second chance to make a film so we never get to see if they have a really good film in them.
Sadly, despite having some decent laughs, Now Add Honey just isn’t that good a film.
Freedom Is The Only Way, Yeah
Press release time!
Planet America Special
Airs Friday, November 6 at 9pm (AEDT) on ABC News 24
Wednesday, November 4, 2015 — As Barack Obama’s time in the White House comes to an end, a billionaire businessman and a doctor who separated conjoined twins are the frontrunners to become the Republican Party’s Presidential nominee.
Clearly it’s time for the team from Planet America to explain what on earth is going on!
With one year until Americans elect their next president, join The Chaser’s Chas Licciardello and the ABC’s John Barron for a recap of the race so far, and the election ahead.
Top Democrat and Republican campaign strategists and local experts join Chas and John to preview the battle for the White House in 2016.
Join the conversation: #PlanetAmerica
The Planet America special airs on Friday, November 6 at 9pm (AEDT) on ABC News 24 and a new weekly series of the show kicks off in early 2016.
Okay, it’s hardly hilarious news – Planet America was a little too dry for our tastes last US election cycle – but Chas is regularly the funniest and sharpest member of The Chaser and having him basically be an internet-capable Dickie Knee on Media Circus is a bit of a waste.
And who knows? With Donald Trump firming as a legit candidate and the rest of the pack trying to out-nutzo him, they should have plenty of material to work with.
Krabby Patties at the Krusty Krab
Recently one of our personal acquaintances took us aside to have a quiet word. “Listen, Team Tumbleweeds,” he said, “I’m fine with you having a go at Josh Thomas and Chris Lilley and those guys – but when you start taking swings at Annabel Crabb, you’ve stepped over the line.”
It took us a minute to realise what he was talking about:
If a show is dragging your whole schedule down, you don’t wait until the last episode to replace it, especially if the replacement is the staggeringly ineffectual sop to our politicians’ collective ego Kitchen Cabinet.
Which, let’s be honest, is pretty mild all things considered.
But as the conversation continued, it turned out that our chum’s actual problem with our comment was that – in their view – we’d wandered outside of our remit. In this guy’s opinion it’s fine for us to kick the beejesus out of any show we like, just so long as our target is at least trying to be a comedy. And Kitchen Cabinet, for all its immeasurable faults, has never claimed it was trying to be funny.
Fair enough, we said – well, actually, what we said was more along the lines of “if Australian television criticism was anything more than, to coin a phrase, a conga-line of suckholes, then we wouldn’t have to say anything because everyone else would have kicked the head off this disgusting and disgraceful sack of politician-pandering puke years ago”.
But after we finished shouting, we also had a counter argument: Kitchen Cabinet might not be comedy per se, but it is a prime example of one of the less tasteful aspects of Australian “satire”: sucking up to the people they’re meant to be taking down.
This has been one of our pet peeves for a while now:
If The Chaser were doing their jobs properly, no politician would want to go within a hundred miles of their studios – and they wouldn’t let them in even if they did. Because when they have politicians on the show, they’re showing them as being in on the joke. The politicians then are simply making fun of themselves, telling us that “hey, we’re just like you” – and then they go back to telling us how we should live our lives and we’re supposed to go back to letting them.
An oft-repeated story about the old Martin / Molloy radio show says that at one stage, when Tony Martin and Mick Molloy were riding the Liberal party hard over their attempts to de-unionise the docks, they were asked to have prime mover behind the anti-worker push Peter Reith on “for balance”. Supposedly, Mick said fine, but that he’d have only one question for Reith: “why are you such a cunt?”. And he was going to keep asking it until he got an answer.
That’s pretty funny: it’s also the level of respect our politicians all too often deserve.
Fortunately, as The Chaser have increasingly abandoned politics for media commentary, getting politicians involved in comedy “for balance” has largely died out. The idea of presenting audiences with an actual real-life politician on Mad as Hell is crazy; for all its flaws, The Weekly has largely stuck to interviewing non-political figures.
But who are we kidding? It’s more than likely that the reason why we’re not having politicians jammed into every remotely topical comedy show on the ABC is because they now have an entire show* where they can demonstrate that, despite spending every waking moment looking for a way to fuck over the general public, they’re really just average knockabout blokes who like a barbie like the rest of us. So selling off government services to their mates for bargain prices then quitting to take a job with those self same mates is Aussie as, right?
Meanwhile out in the real world, what our politicians are like as people is so amazingly irrelevant to anything related to the actual concerns of ABC viewers that the existence of Kitchen Cabinet can only be considered to be a direct insult to every man, woman and child in the land. These are people voted in to do a job, and that job is not “enjoy smashed avocado in their salad”. The policies they advocate and their ability to execute those policies are the only things of relevance when it comes to these power-mad bastards: if you’re going to do a television show about their private lives, it had better be Real Housewives of Melbourne-level debauched or stop wasting our time.
Of course, everyone already knows this. That’s why Kitchen Cabinet is hosted by the Marieke Hardy of political coverage: someone with nice hair and a fetching line in flowery dresses (cardies an optional extra) who is really quite good at pointing out that our politicians are really kind of cuddly once you take the time to get to know them. Unless you’re the people who don’t get to be on television but do get to be fucked over – then politics can be very harsh indeed. But why take our word for it?
This insidious spread of propaganda, soft interviews with hard-line politicians who wield enormous power over the lives of the most vulnerable, is sold as a fun, light-hearted look into the lives of the people we elect. But this taxpayer-funded sycophantic date with power will end up making us all sick. It completely dumbs down debate and again re-ingrains the perception that politicians are just like us, while the people their policies hurt, aren’t. They are the others who don’t dine with famous journalists on television.
So yeah, Kitchen Cabinet: we’re letting it off lightly when you think about it.
*you really don’t want us to get started on Q&A
AACTA-ing up
The nominees for the 2016 AACTA Awards were announced yesterday, and the comedy and light entertainment nominees aren’t bad at all…
AACTA AWARD FOR BEST CHILDREN’S TELEVISION SERIES
- LITTLE LUNCH – Robyn Butler, Wayne Hope – ABC3
- THE NEW ADVENTURES OF FIGARO PHO – Daniel Fill, Frank Verheggen, Luke Jurevicius – ABC3
- NOWHERE BOYS SERIES 2 – Beth Frey – ABC3
- READY FOR THIS – Darren Dale, Miranda Dear, Joanna Werner – ABC3
AACTA AWARD FOR BEST TELEVISION COMEDY SERIES
- DANGER 5 SERIES 2 – Kate Croser, Dario Russo – SBS
- SAMMY J & RANDY IN RICKETTS LANE – Donna Andrews, Stu Connolly – ABC
- SHAUN MICALLEF’S MAD AS HELL – Shaun Micallef, Peter Beck – ABC
- UTOPIA – Michael Hirsh, Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner, Rob Sitch – ABC
AACTA AWARD FOR BEST LIGHT ENTERTAINMENT TELEVISION SERIES
- DIRTY LAUNDRY LIVE – Tarni James, Peter Lawler, Rachel Millar, Richard Kelly – ABC
- JUDITH LUCY IS ALL WOMAN – Anna Bateman, Judith Lucy – ABC
- JULIA ZEMIRO’S HOME DELIVERY – Damian Davis, Polly Connolly, Nick Murray – ABC
- THE WEEKLY WITH CHARLIE PICKERING – Charlie Pickering, Kevin Whyte, Chris Walker, Frank Bruzzese – ABC
AACTA AWARD FOR BEST PERFORMANCE IN A TELEVISION COMEDY
- Nathan Lovejoy – SAMMY J & RANDY IN RICKETTS LANE – ABC
- Celia Pacquola – UTOPIA – ABC
- Randy – SAMMY J & RANDY IN RICKETTS LANE – ABC
- Emily Taheny – SHAUN MICALLEF’S MAD AS HELL – ABC
AACTA AWARD FOR BEST DIRECTION IN A TELEVISION LIGHT ENTERTAINMENT OR REALITY SERIES
- HIPSTERS Episode 1 – What Is A Hipster? – Seth Larney – SBS2
- JUDITH LUCY IS ALL WOMAN Episode 2 – Hanky Panky – Anna Bateman – ABC
- JULIA ZEMIRO’S HOME DELIVERY – Episode 7 – Waleed Aly – Damian Davis – ABC
- KITCHEN CABINET – Episode 7 – Clive Palmer – Stamatia Maroupas – ABC
AACTA AWARD FOR BEST SCREENPLAY IN TELEVISION
- DEADLINE GALLIPOLI Part 1 – Jacquelin Perske, Shaun Grant – FOXTEL – Showcase
- PETER ALLEN – NOT THE BOY NEXT DOOR Episode 2 – Michael Miller – Seven Network
- THE PRINCIPAL Episode 1 – Kristen Dunphy – SBS
- UTOPIA Episode 1 – A Fresh Start – Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner, Rob Sitch – ABC
AACTA AWARD FOR BEST EDITING IN TELEVISION
- DEADLINE GALLIPOLI Part 1 – Martin Connor, Dany Cooper ASE – FOXTEL – Showcase
- LITTLE LUNCH Episode 5 – The Top of the Fireman’s Pole – Annabelle Johnson – ABC3
- PETER ALLEN – NOT THE BOY NEXT DOOR – Episode 1 – Deborah Peart ASE – Seven Network
- REDFERN NOW – PROMISE ME – Nicholas Holmes ASE – ABC
AACTA AWARD FOR BEST LEAD ACTRESS
- Robyn Butler – NOW ADD HONEY
- Ningali Lawford-Wolf – LAST CAB TO DARWIN
- Charlize Theron – MAD MAX: FURY ROAD
- Kate Winslet – THE DRESSMAKER
Not a nomination for Please Like Me in sight! (Although given it won an award last year, its absence here may simply be because the current series missed the eligibility period.)
The results for Best TV Comedy and Best Light Entertainment Series should be interesting as the nominees for both include what are (in our opinion) the best shows for the past year or so. A number of those nominated in these categories have a realistic chance of winning, but we’re pretty interested in how The Weekly fares. It may have “nailed it” according to many online commentators, but will AACTA agree?
Other interesting nominees include Rickett’s Lane’s Randy for Best Performance in a TV Comedy. Anyone else glad they didn’t have the AACTA Awards when Hey! Hey! It’s Saturday and its hilarious puppet characters was on air?
And finally, good luck to Robyn Butler who’s up against two Hollywood stars and one of the country’s most acclaimed actresses. Maybe she’ll pull it off Jackie Weaver style? It could happen…
Change or Die
So it seems How Not to Behave has been bumped for its final episode:
What appears to be the final episode of How Not to Behave will air at 10pm on ABC this week.
The show has made way for the return of Kitchen Cabinet this Wednesday.
Meanwhile, the final five episodes of Open Slather have been reduced to half an hour:
A Foxtel spokesperson recently confirmed to TV Tonight, “We’re finishing this season of Open Slather with five new half hour specials 7.30pm Sundays on The Comedy Channel.”
What do these two things have in common? On the surface, bugger-all: How Not to Behave getting the boot is most likely a victim of the ABC’s programming departments inability to figure out how a calendar works – or just the wash-up from that mysterious period earlier in the year when the ABC ran out of new Agony episodes and ran repeats in prime time for a couple of weeks. If a show is dragging your whole schedule down, you don’t wait until the last episode to replace it, especially if the replacement is the staggeringly ineffectual sop to our politicians’ collective ego Kitchen Cabinet.
Meanwhile, Open Slather‘s bad case of shrinkage is, we’re reliably if anonymously told, due to the producers having blown their budget rather than someone at Foxtel trying to yank them off-air Kerry Packer style. And while the show has had zero impact ratings-wise, it seems pretty much all involved see it as a form of loss leader, with Foxtel planning more comedy – perhaps aimed more at the people who actually subscribe to pay TV, rather than mainstream viewers who might like the idea of old Full Frontal cast members doing sketch comedy but sure aren’t going to pay for it – in 2016.
But given the kind of closer examination only bored comedy bloggers are inclined to give, there does seem to be a common thread linking these two shows. No, not the fact that nobody’s still watching them, though that’s a side effect of what we’re talking about: the fact that from the first episode on, these shows never changed.
For a few years now – since the nightmare that was all twenty-seven pre-recorded episodes of Randling, at least – we’ve been griping that one of the bigger problems with Australian comedy has been the lack of long-running shows: when everything on the ABC is in six- or eight-week pre-recorded chunks, the only chance the creators get to figure out what’s working and what’s not is when it’s all over. Yes, this is probably why the ABC gives pretty much everything two series (or looked at another way, one twelve-part series spread over a year or so); that’s still a lot different from making a show week in week out and reacting to what the audience is responding to.
Both of these shows promised to be a response to that, as a return to week-in, week-out program making where – in theory at least – things could be tweaked as the creatives saw what worked and what didn’t. Open Slather would run for 20 weeks, How Not to Behave 15: after they both started with firmly below-par episodes, surely that was more than enough time to improve?
Yeah, nah.
To be fair, Open Slather did sack around 70% of their writing staff a few episodes in, but did you notice much of a difference? Us neither. Presumably because the guys they sacked weren’t getting anything on the air anyway. But for a show that basically staked its whole reason for existing on breakout comedy characters – you know, the characters that start small, are embraced by viewers and end up becoming icons – they never really seemed to try that hard to figure out what their audience was responding to. Here’s a tip: 60 Minutes parodies don’t really work when no-one under 60 watches 60 Minutes.
As for How Not to Behave, no-one on the production side seemed to care enough about that show to even watch it as it went to air, because if they did they might have noticed some core problems – such as, what was the point of the show in the first place? Why did it have a guest speakers on? Why did those speakers always seem to have wandered in from a dull ABC radio segment? Was the show meant to be a serious guide to living life, or a parody of one? And either way, why wasn’t it a lot funnier?
It’s not like we were totally surprised by this turn of events. Producers being given the kind of opportunities many comedians would kill for and doing fuck-all with them has been a part of the Australian landscape since the days when Comedy Inc was given twenty hour-long episodes a year to play with and gave us a stuttering Thomas the Tank Engine. But just because you’re following a long-standing Australian comedy tradition doesn’t make it right.
And yeah, we know the argument that you get one shot with your audience and if they don’t like you, that’s it. No doubt that’s true. And yet every year we see reality shows that somehow manage to build an audience week after week; if people keep coming back and telling their friends to watch fucking reality television, imagine how many more people you could attract that way if your show was actually funny?
Both of these shows have rightly been dismissed before they finished – that “As some viewers have noticed…” line in the TV Tonight coverage of Open Slather‘s shrinkage is as close to a sick burn as David Knox gets – because for all the effort they put in both these shows might as well have gone into repeats from week two. They started off badly and they showed no desire to improve; no-one who wasn’t pulling a pay check from the producers is going to spend a single solitary second missing them.
Aussie As
Press release time!
Okay, it’s not quite press release time because we didn’t get the press release, but thanks to the diligence of TV Tonight we can let you know about this:
Local sketch comedy welcomes a new contender this week with the premiere of Australia, Get It Up Ya! on C31 Melbourne.
The production, partly by a grant from the Community Broadcasting Foundation, is also the end result of a successful crowdfunding campaign on Pozible campaign.
It is described as “A ground-breaking show in the comedy / travel / lifestyle/ current affairs / political / news / wildlife / bush-tucker genre with twice your maximum daily intake of great Aussie characters.”
The absurdist-style sketch has filmed around the country from Tasmania to Western Australia.
Narrated by Claire Hooper it is written and performed by Andy Matthews, Bec Petraitis, Matt Stewart and Alasdair Tremblay-Birchall.
Based on the trailer over at TV Tonight, this could – like pretty much every sketch comedy ever – go either way. “Australian characters” usually sets alarm bells ringing, but it’s not like there haven’t been decent laughs mined out of Aussie stereotypes within living memory. Considering the bush-tucker genre currently sits on 100% success – Wallaby Jack and Russel Coight having both, as they say, “nailed it” – fingers crossed that they maintain that strike rate.
But why take our wishy-washy and unformed opinion on it – it starts tonight at 9pm on C31 for those in the Melbourne broadcast area, and for those outside of it (or watching Have You Been Paying Attention?) it’ll also be turning up on the C31’s Stupid Old Channel on YouTube.