Australian Tumbleweeds
The Circus is Back in Town
So The Chaser’s Media Circus returned last week, and we had nothing to say about it. Well, actually we did: compared to the stodgy, plodding panel show we recalled from last year it was a snappy, pacy – even, dare we say, funny – slice of political comedy that used the game show angle to (mostly) move things forward and pile on the jokes. So of course, we decided to wait a week in case it all fell apart.
That’s not (entirely) bastardly behaviour on our part: this kind of political comedy is slightly more reliant on the week’s news than, say, The Weekly, and with nine months or so of news to work with for the first episode it wasn’t surprising at all that the first episode was serving up gold. But could they maintain that level of quality? Why not wait a week and find out?
Of course, a week in which a serving Prime Minister was dumped isn’t exactly going to be short of material, but we’ll be buggered if we’re going to wait around for a third week. So we squinted hard, tried to filter out the way 99% of the jokes were about the spill (the other 1% were fat jokes about Kim Beasley), and focused on the substance of the show. Kinda.
The big problem with Media Circus last year was that – like every other panel show ever – it was labouring under the impression that we actually wanted to hear from the panellists. So we’re pleased to report that the couch waffle has been cut back to the occasional quip or one-sentence insight. And extended segments on media guff – Manufactured Outrage was this week’s topic – was a return to the golden days of The Hamster Wheel’s worthy attempts to educate as well as amuse. As for using old news clips… well, fine, so long as they’re interesting. Having Chris Bath talk about burping on live television… well, not so much.
The game show bits remain the weak point, which is a problem as they’re the core rationale for the show. All the usual problems apply: the results don’t matter so the games have to be funny, but telling the same joke twice doesn’t work so having both teams do the same game is a dud 50% of the time. Fortunately they seem to have upped the number of games that directly pit the teams against each other, so those segments aren’t always lethal.
Generally speaking, this year’s Media Circus feels like there’s been a bit more work put into each episode than last year’s model. But while it doesn’t have last year’s air of exhaustion, it still feels like a bit of a mess. The scripted segments – again, a firm highlight – riff on various aspects of the local media, but the games are just the usual comedy game show stuff poking fun at the news. They sort of fit together in that they both involve “the news”, but one has real insights to offer; the other is just “guess which news stories we cut up to make this funny sentence”.
We’ve said it before, but the big problem facing television – and especially comedy – is that the internet is now the go-to place for lightweight crap. Making fun of the week in politics? Unless you’re able to go smarter or deeper than twitter, you’re wasting everybody’s time. So while the scripted parts of Media Circus remain strong, the game show part?
Keep Slathering It On
Remember Open Slather? The show that was going to revitalise Australian sketch comedy by harking back to the golden age of the late 80s and… well, that was pretty much it. But the late 80s! When comedy was funny! Not all the quasi-racist material mind you, and a lot of the stuff about women looks a bit iffy now, and the celebrity parodies can be a little basic and a lot of the really successful characters you probably couldn’t get away with today, but yeah… Open Slather.
It’s a sign of just how compelling this particular Foxtel sketch comedy show has been that we didn’t even realise it had gone on a break after its tenth episode. But the good news is, it’s back! Having sacked most of its writers during the course of the first series, we were pretty interested to see if narrowing down the staff to the ever-reliable core of Dave O’Neil and his buddies would lead to any noticeable uptick in quality on-screen.
Of course that didn’t happen, but it is fair to say that Open Slather 2.0 comes across as a far more solid effort than their first stab at it. Not funny, we have to stress – “solid”. Gone for the most part are the bizarrely unfunny sketches (remember “Rack”) that left us scratching our heads; gone also are a lot of the more blatant attempts to create “sure-fire” comedy characters. The TV show parodies have been scaled back a bit too, though you’re never going to kill off that Liz Hayes 60 Minutes one.
What’s left – aside from more jokes involving guys in suits of armour because they rented them for a Game of Thrones parody way back in ep one and they might as well get their money’s worth – is the kind of blandly competent sketches that have put Australian sketch comedy in its grave. A sketch about a hip restaurant’s overly complicated ordering system! A sketch about a guy at a job interview who doesn’t want to get hired! A sketch about separated parents who use their child as a weapon! Actually, that’s a series of sketches. That idea does not get funnier with repetition.
Occasionally things move out of a comfort zone firmly established in 1991. A sketch where a man is murdered in fairly gruesome fashion for writing on a whiteboard with a permanent marker is slightly unpleasant; Guru Steve’s surf karate course opens episode 12 because it’s almost kind of funny. And an extended sketch where Marg Downey is a daggy loser on Dancing With the Stars is the kind of thing she was doing 30 years ago with the D-Generation.
But for the most part this feels firmly like the thrill has gone. All that’s left is a bunch of professionals getting the job done. They’re still doing those Glenn Robbins roadside drug testing sketches, only now Robbins literally walks out of the sketch halfway through and lets the new guys finish things off.
There’s a lesson in there somewhere.
Ray Badran not such a bad man?
Obvious statement: Sometimes the media don’t pick up on the right angle when they report a story. That was almost certainly the case when OUTRAGE occurred at this year’s MICF about a “rape joke” told by stand-up Ray Badran.
Badran told the joke at the Crab Lab comedy room to an audience which included a gender studies and law student called Ceceila Devlin. As reported in The Age Devlin objected to the gag and slid under her table to make a silent protest. Badran, upon seeing Devlin was under the table, asked her what her problem was. The exchange ended with Badran saying “Good on you for taking a stand, but you’re a piece of shit and I hope you die”.
A straight up case of a male comedian getting over-sensitive when called on his perceived right to make jokes about rape? Not quite, although that seemed to be the angle the media and those on social media were running with. But wait, why are we bringing this up again? We blogged about it at the time, haven’t we all moved on? Again, not quite…
Last month Justin Hamilton interviewed Badran for his Can You Take This Photo Please? podcast; that interview has shone a new light on the story. Badran, you may remember, was largely silent after the story blew up (and became the second highest trending story in the country after the Germanwings plane crash in the French Alps). And although his management issued a statement, he declined to be interviewed by the broadcast media. To our knowledge, his interview on Can You Take This Photo Please? is his first of any length detailing his side of the story. Sound interesting? Read on…
Badran starts to discuss the controversy about 51 minutes in to the podcast. Here’s a summary of what he said:
- The Crab Lab comedy room is usually free entry but on the night in question there was a cover charge. This, he says brought in a difference audience who’d never seen comedy before.
- There were only about 30 people at Crab Lab that evening and the atmosphere in the room wasn’t great overall: the gig also over-running and “everyone was dying”. Not helping matters, he says, was a vocal female audience member (Devlin) who’d been heckling the acts all evening.
- The material he did that night, including the “rape joke”, had been well honed in both the United States and Australia throughout the previous year. He’d recently performed it in Sydney in front of Chris Rock and The Chaser (both of whom praised the offensive gag). Badran estimates approximately 50,000 people had heard the gag before this gig, pointing out that its acceptability and comic value had been decided by consensus: “I’m not going to keep doing material that isn’t working”.
- The joke isn’t actually about rape but about stereotypes in comedy, and the butt of the joke is him. It’s as follows:
“If you’re black you can do jokes about being black, if you’re gay you can do jokes about being gay…so I’m not sure if you can tell just by looking at me but…I can do rape jokes.”
- When Devlin slid under her table he wasn’t sure what was happening as she’d done it without explanation. His initial thought was that she was drunk. When he tried to engage her, her response was to yell at him “You think rape is funny?!”. Badran found her comment hard to deal with. Then the situation suddenly escalated as other audience members started to defend him, yelling at Devlin to leave: “Get out, what are you doing at comedy?!” Badran and Devlin kept yelling at each other, and he admits his final words to her before leaving the room were as reported: that he thought it was great that she was taking a stand, but he thought she was a piece of shit and he hoped she died. He admits that neither of them had a mature or intelligent exchange with each other!
- After the gig, the guy who’d invited Devlin to Crab Lab that evening approached Badran and apologised for her behaviour. He said she hadn’t been to comedy before and gets easily offended.
- The next day Badran found he was being tweeted at by a small number of feminist activists, who’d read an account of the gig posted by Devlin on Reddit.
- As well as being a student and activist, Devlin, it turned out, was an aspiring writer, and she was effective at quickly getting various media on board. The Age published a story about the incident, while Devlin wrote a piece on Mamamia and also appeared on Triple J’s Hack.
- Badran’s take on why Devlin did this is that she felt humiliated about having been ostracised on the night by the rest of the audience, and that she wanted revenge on him and was interested in self-promotion.
- Badran admits that his management were also trying to play the media, to dampen down the flames. A Triple J insider fed them information on which comedians Hack were going to ask to appear on the show; this enabled them to prevent more than 20 comedians from appearing on the show by phoning them before Hack
- After Devlin wrote her piece for Mamamia, three different writers for that website contacted Badran to apologise saying they knew the story was being misreported (one had seen Badran perform the joke before, another was friends with someone who’d been at the gig and knew the context). In the end one of them interviewed Badran for Mamamia, but the eventual story was spiked by editors over concerns that it would get the site’s female readership offside.
- Apart from being subject to a lot of abuse and trolling on Twitter, both Badran and his mother received online threats. And while the controversy was ongoing someone sent a Facebook message to Badran’s girlfriend claiming she was sleeping with him (this was untrue).
- Badran found the incident difficult to cope with and he’s since seen a counsellor to deal with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder-type symptoms.
Listening to Badran’s account, it’s clear that he’s no angel and that he dealt with Devlin’s heckling badly. And while Devlin and the activists who joined her had their hearts in the right place, they were off target with their protest and seem to have been prepared to spin the story to get media coverage. As for the media, it seemed to accept that spin without question, electing simply to fan the flames in the name of clickbait. It didn’t seem to matter to them that the joke wasn’t about rape or that this was basically an argument at a small gig that got way out of hand. They also seem to have missed the opportunity to provoke OUTRAGE over what looks like an actual rape joke, told at the same gig. From Devlin’s Mamamia article:
During the course of the show, however, several jokes were also centred around violence against women – including a zinger that went something like “you know it’s been a good night when you wake up with a fistful of hair and a dirty shovel.”
Presumably whoever told that gag was saved from days of being slated in the media by the fact that they didn’t get into a slanging match with the Devlin.
Devlin in telling her story to as many people as she could, was trying to raise awareness of the way in which rape and misogyny are often trivialised. It’s a laudable aim and the topic is worth further discussion, but it doesn’t help victims of rape and misogyny if the issue is misreported. We can only hope that somehow, somewhere, this story did something positive for anti-rape and anti-misogyny causes. It sure did bugger all to improve society’s understanding of comedy.
Gruen Gruen Gruen Gruen. Gruen?
“Lauren, isn’t that stretching credibility?” That was the moment we gave up on Gruen for 2015 (we made it a whole ten minutes in – gold star for us). Wil Anderson and the panel were talking about a pet food commercial involving warring street gangs that joined forces to save a dog, this issue of credibility came up and… it wasn’t a joke.
That’s always been the problem with Gruen: it happily makes fun of commercials – and news, pop culture, whatever – but it always does so from inside the tent. They’ll run a bit mocking a sportsman for all his endorsement deals because “he’s already got enough money” and why not; our question is, where’s the bit pointing out that pretty much everyone in advertising is massively overpaid and the two regulars on the panel are also raking in fat cash from other gigs (TV host, board member, etc)?
Oh that’s right: this is the show that sells advertising to the public. They might throw individual ads under the bus, but mocking the very concept of advertising, let alone the people who make it – seriously guys, did you have to specify “inner-city hipster” when getting in the two ad dudes for “The Pitch” segment – is never an option. Even when it’s literally the only thing worth saying about advertising.
That’s not to say that how advertising works isn’t an interesting topic. And making fun of advertising can be entertaining too. But since day one Gruen has been all about working with the ad agencies, which means that “how advertising works” is always going to assume that it does work, and that making fun of ads is always going to come with the assumption that only some ads are worth laughing at.
If you don’t care about any of that, Gruen still grates. How many cuts to the audience laughing-and-or-applauding do we need? None. The correct answer is none. But if they didn’t have those cutaways then they couldn’t edit the crap out of the answers to make sure there was absolutely no flow to the conversational back-and-forth. Or have room to shoe-horn in Anderson’s quippy quips. God forbid we missed out on any of them.
But it’s that insiders point-of-view that’s the real comedy killer each and every week. It’s as if they made a show focusing on politics where the panel were all sitting politicians, or a show about the environment where the panel were all from the mining industry, or a show about comedy where the panel were all working comedians. Which sounds like a great idea – they’d be experts! – until you think about the way they’d be very careful about what they said because when the cameras stop rolling comedy is the world where they make their living.
[there’s also the well-known fact that a lot of comedians seem to have somewhat shit taste in comedy; for every stand-up who’s good at pointing out acts worth seeing there’s at least three who just big up their mates]
Yet Gruen keeps on keeping on, putting ads on the ABC while being one giant ad for how great advertising is. It’s the kind of show that history will stare at in slack-jawed amazement, a Black and White Minstrel Show for rampant capitalism and naked greed. “They really made a show that treated shitful commercials with awe and respect?” our descendants will gawp from their hover-toilets. “The government-funded television network made a show promoting something only available on other networks?”
And if they don’t understand that, fuck knows how we’re going to explain the success of Wil Anderson to them.
That Was Pissweak That Was pt.2
If you’ve ever seriously wondered why television critics in this country are respected by no-one – even as television criticism around the English-speaking world enters some kind of magical golden age of relevancy thanks to the irresistible rise of the recap – may we quote Debi Enker on The Weekly:
“Through four months on air, the show has really started to strut its stuff. The scope of its interest has been broad and its focus sharp.”
The only way you could write this with a straight face is if you had spent the last four months a): not watching The Weekly and also b): completely avoiding the internet. The scope of The Weekly‘s interest has been “what is the internet talking about this week?”; its focus has been “get Pickering to cover a news story then say something smart-arse at the end of every third sentence.”
And then oh dear God there’s this:
“Pickering’s approach has led to criticism that the show is preachy, that he’s taking a finger-wagging tone and lecturing to his audience. Phooey to that. The obvious models here, Jon Stewart and John Oliver, don’t seem to incite comparable objections when they spotlight issues or express persuasively argued opinions. Often, they’re cheered. It’s as though foreigners are allowed that licence, but some of us get stroppy when locals do likewise, as though, heaven forbid, they’ve got tickets on themselves. Surely the criteria should be: is it a significant subject? Has it been capably covered? And, given the satirical bent of the show, has it been presented with some wit?”
Is it a significant subject? What, like that lion the US dentist shot?
Has it been capably covered? Well yeah – considering the coverage consists entirely of running other shows’ news clips.
Has it been presented with some wit? No. C’mon, seriously? No.
There are many reasons behind the problems with The Weekly – the budget, the talent, the need to avoid pissing anyone off – but the end result is that it’s not funny. Compare it to an episode of Mad as Hell, we dare you. It’s lightweight news coverage at best, and at worst it features Tom Gleeson trying to pretend that the “joke” with his segment is that it’s amazingly popular. The only way that joke is an actual joke is if his segment is unpopular. And even then that joke might work once; when you’re making it for three months straight, maybe the reason you’re unpopular is that you aren’t all that funny.
And because it’s lightweight news coverage (that is to say, news coverage that involves no actual original reporting), it’s built around a guy telling us stuff. So why do people say The Weekly is preachy? Because it features Charlie Pickering ACTUALLY PREACHING TO THE AUDIENCE. (We’d use “lecturing” rather than “preaching”, but same difference.) Blaming mentally ill people for gun violence is bad: an extended segment in a comedy show where all you’re doing is pointing out that blaming mentally ill people for gun violence is bad? That’s worse.
Put another way, you know how every other fake news comedy show has had a joke “rant” segment, from Saturday Night Live to The Late Show to CNNNN to Mad as Hell? That’s because the idea of a news reader giving his or her opinion on an issue is funny.
And yet The Weekly was built around doing this comedy idea completely straight. It’s just straight and fairly shallow current affairs coverage with a couple of snarky lines thrown in. And even in 2015 the ABC has an entire news department doing this stuff better.
Meanwhile, Helen Razer tells it like it is for The Saturday Paper:
we cannot blame Pickering entirely for a program whose aims exceed its execution. We must also blame funding, which can only buy analysis reheated from that week’s internet buffet instead of fresh, hot jolts. Working to a tight deadline and budget, writers are forced to let shaky cynicism substitute for knowledge. This program, very clearly derived from John Oliver’s impeccably researched Last Week Tonight, never had its high hopes costed. It aims to bring us informed irreverence. What it actually offers is something more like a vanity newsletter written by an underpaid youth worker.
Razer, being no fan of the trivial – see roughly 80% of her commentary on pop culture and the internet, which can be boiled down to “why are people paying attention to this crap when the real problem of entrenched financial inequality goes ignored” – gives The Weekly the thumbs down in large part because of its dismissive cynicism:
With a few exceptions, notably a timely report on proposed funding cuts to the cost-effective Custody Notification Service, Pickering has led a program that tailors news to a single punchline and conclusion. To wit: it’s all fucked.
Which is a little odd, because the version of The Weekly we were watching was desperately trying to make serious points week in week out. The previously mentioned segment on the way the media demonises the mentally ill wasn’t based around “shaky cynicism” or concluding “it’s all fucked”. True, many of the news jokes being made on the show did come from that easy point-of-view. But the problem wasn’t that it served up a “single punchline and conclusion” – it was that too often it didn’t serve up any punchline at all.
Rather than cynically dismissing issues for the sake of a laugh – which we might have actually enjoyed – time and again segments ended with a straight-faced Pickering looking down the barrel of the camera telling us that the situation he’d just outlined simply wasn’t good enough.
If only he’d done a report on his own show.
Well, This Is a New Low
Ok @mscott, if you won't let me be on #qanda, how about the Chaser? Put in a good word?
— Ben Pobjie (@benpobjie) September 8, 2015
If you don’t see why this kind of thing coming from a professional television critic is a problem – and it’s a firmly established pattern of behaviour now – then chances are you’re part of the problem.
That Was Pissweak That Was pt.1
It’s easy to forget how charming Mad as Hell is in its refusal to assume it’ll be invited back next year until you hear Charlie Pickering say “Welcome to the final episode of series one of The Weekly“. Series one? Forgive us if we’re wrong, but at the time of writing the ABC hasn’t announced a series two of this slightly less funny version of Behind the News; maybe hold off on announcing your Thousand Year Comedy Reich just a little longer.
If there’s one thing to be grateful to The Weekly for, we’re yet to think of it. Oh wait: remember how we used to have to put up with a steady trickle of dickheads repetitively asking “Why doesn’t Australia have its own version of The Daily Show?” And now we know why: because if we did, it would be The Weekly. And The Weekly was shit.
We’ve covered most of the reasons why it was shit over the last twenty weeks and for a show that ran twenty weeks it was remarkably consistent; remember in the lead-up to the launch we were expected to swallow this:
The Weekly also comes with a flexible format, meaning the structure can feature multiple or single topics.
“That was part of the deal. I said ‘I want a format that I’m allowed to throw out on any given week if the best thing to do is something else.’ The ABC have been very supportive of that. Obviously we have to do a version of the format so that people know what it is, before we start messing with it too much,” he continues.
Unfortunately, it seemed that the “something else” it was best to do was Mad as Hell, so instead we got the exact same show every week for 20 weeks. Did they ever mess with the format? They did a musical number once, guess that probably blew a few minds down at the chuckle hut.
So yeah, The Weekly had problems. It was hosted by a fake newsreader turned real newsreader then back into a fake newsreader so whenever he got on his high horse – which he was contractually obliged to at least once every episode – he had zero moral authority to back his outrage up. Also: not funny.
Its approach to the news was to first make all the obvious news gags, then run longer segments based on the idea that some issues were too serious to make the obvious news gags about. Unfortunately there was often no real difference between the topics worth laughing at and the topics we were meant to take seriously, which left the show looking unpleasantly opportunistic. Also: not funny.
Cheap is often a good thing when it comes to comedy – expensive flashy visuals are never funnier than shoddy cheap ones – but The Weekly felt cheap in all the wrong ways. The format was ripped off from The Daily Show and Last Week Tonight, which wasn’t a great start; the cast consisted of a host and two regulars plus some occasional foreign correspondents, which left things way too predictable; much of the half hour involved Pickering talking over news footage, which might not have felt like low budget television if the jokes had been any good; worst of all, Pickering’s material was basic and the targets obvious. He might have “nailed it” according to the kind of yoof websites that like their views parroted back at them, but if you were looking for laughs rather than social media talking points you were shit out of luck. Also: not fucking funny.
The whole show felt like they were cutting corners, only we never got to see where the money they were saving went. Was Pickering himself really that expensive to lure away from commercial television? And this poverty reached all the way down to the targets they chose to go after. Week in week out The Weekly focused on issues that were clearly one-sided and then made sure they came down hard on the side everybody sensible agreed with. You name an issue its audience was on board with, and The Weekly let them know they were 100% right to hold those views.
But hang on a second, what about this:
Merits of the report aside, even running a segment like this in the current political environment is a laudably ballsy move.
No. Halal certification is a dog-whistle issue the government is paying attention to because it’s a soft target to shore up its base. There’s zero overlap between people who give a shit about it and ABC viewers in general, let alone anyone watching The Weekly. It’s the equivalent of The Daily Telegraph running a story “exposing” the sordid truth behind the chai lattes being served in inner-city hipster dens; you do it to rile up people who already agree with you. Which makes The Weekly pretty much the same as those politicians pandering to the people up in arms about halal certification that they mocked.
Imagination, we’re constantly told, is free. If that’s the case, why did The Weekly show so little of it? Pretty much all the media coverage of the show – which we’ll be getting to in part 2 of our Weekly wrap-up – made sure to note it was run on the smell of an oily rag compared to its US equivalents. But the problem wasn’t just that a lot of the jokes being made were obvious and predictable; it was that the targets chosen to make those jokes about were obvious and predictable.
Sure, any news satire show has to work with the news at hand. But The Weekly made a big noise about going behind the surface of the news to examine the bigger issues, the ongoing dramas. So why did they just tell us stuff we already knew? C’mon: Racism is bad? Sexism is bad? Mocking the mentally ill is bad? Shooting a lion while on a hunting trip is bad?
We’re not saying they should have tried to argue those things were good – though it might have actually been funny and thought-provoking if they’d tried. We’re saying that a good news satire show should make its audience laugh and if it can’t manage that – seriously, was there a single bit on The Weekly that attracted any attention at all for being funny? Did anyone ever laugh at it, or was its audience entirely made up of people who think the correct response to a great joke is applause? – it should at least make them think.
For shows like The Daily Show and Last Week Tonight, that’s easy to do: they’re aimed at a relatively narrow pay TV audience so they’re able to go really hard on the issues – and they get both laughs and fans because of the strength of their convictions. The Weekly, being on a free-to-air network, can’t go that hard for fear of losing viewers. And convictions? Pickering seems too pleased with how things have worked out for himself to go out on a limb for anyone else.
There are ways around this problem: both The Hamster Wheel and Mad as Hell managed it by being smart and funny, but either one of the two would do. Making the obvious jokes about politicians can work as long as the jokes are funny; being authentically insightful about the way Australia works might not be hilarious, but as long as you offer new information it’s going to be interesting. And yet The Weekly decided to do neither. It just played it safe week in week out.
There are plenty of actual tough issues out there in Australia, ones where there really are two (or more) sides to the story and the bad guys just might be the people who watch the ABC. There are plenty of stupid politicians, lying media outlets and shonky business practises ripe for the piss-taking too. It’s not that hard to figure this stuff out and be funny doing it. The ABC has a long and proud tradition of putting to air shows that have managed exactly that.
What the fuck went wrong here?
Down Ricketts Lane
On the surface of things, Sammy J and Randy’s Ricketts Lane looks like the sort of high concept sitcom we get every couple of years. As per the Rebel Wilson-penned Bogan Pride the characters break in to song and dance numbers every so often, and like Frank Woodley’s 2012 solo vehicle Woodley this is a show about failing relationships and disappointing lives in a quirky old school suburb. Hey, look! Curtains from the 70’s. And other retro stuff you used to see ‘round your grandparent’s house. Actually, that could be the house in Please Like Me. Anyway…
Ricketts Lane actually comes out of various live stage shows that Sam McMillan (Sammy J) and puppeteer Heath McIvor (Randy) have been presenting at comedy festivals for more than five years. The material, the schtick and some of the songs are therefore fairly well-honed, and on screen work reasonable well by setting the action in a heightened reality universe of broad brushstroke characters (the bastard boss, the bitchy ex-wife) and odd situations (the bastard boss and the bitchy ex-wife enjoy bondage with each other).
It’s the kind of show you imagine would work well on ABC2, but instead the entire series is premiering on iView. Apparently this is because ABC2 don’t broadcast new shows anymore, and as it’s presumably too niche to just put out on ABC (?) here it all is. Sammy J and Randy’s rusted-on fans, and maybe you dear reader, have watched it all by now. Sadly, we’ve only had time to watch the first episode, which is what we base this review on…
It’s census time! And both girlfriend-less Sammy J and unhappily divorced Randy are desperate to restore some pride by being able to place a tick in the married box on their household’s form. So Randy heads off to try and woo back ex-wife Victoria Vincent (a hard-nosed tabloid TV current affairs host) while Sammy J asks his secretary Wednesday to help him find a wife…and having missed the signs that Wednesday would happily be that wife, Sammy J ends up with a mail order wife called Smilté, an East European bodybuilder with an aggressive teenage son and a pet llama.
With so many ingredients for comedy gold present, this really should be funnier than it is. Many of the songs, which were probably a hoot in the stage shows, fall flat when performed on camera, and 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). Adapted for TV some of this may be, but successful on TV it isn’t. Not quite, anyway. Instead it falls in to the classic high concept sitcom trap of letting the high concept dominate. Compare this to something like Utopia, which while not high concept is very much about being a political satire, and it’s notable that getting laughs from gags is at least as important in the writer’s minds as producing satire.
In other words, what Ricketts Lane needs to do is to place more emphasis on getting laughs from dialogue, and writing song and dance sequences which work well on camera. There may be some of this coming up in future episodes (the save the trees plot in episode 2 looks promising) but this may also be one of those series which needs to throw off what’s worked in the past in another medium (stage) and look at how it can work in the medium it’s trying to work in (TV).
Things That Make You Go Hmm
So we picked up a copy of Greg Fleet’s latest book These Things Happen pretty much the moment it hit the shops. Why wouldn’t we? Fleet is a comedy titan: a legend of the local stand-up scene, a regular on television for close to twenty years, and always good for a laugh on radio show Get This. Trouble is, this isn’t really a book about that stuff: this is a book about his extensive career as a professional junkie.
So, as comedy fans first and junkie fans last, how does this stack up? This isn’t a full review – the book only came out last week and we’ve barely had time to dig beneath our initial impressions. But we figured those impressions are still worth sharing, even if we reserve the right to bang on about this book in more depth later on. Bring on the bullet points!
*okay, so we all know the book is about drugs. Lots and lots of drugs. Fleet estimates he spent “millions of dollars” on drugs over the years, and considering he estimates at one stage he was pulling in $400,000 a year ($300,000 from radio, $100,000 from stand-up and other performing work), that seems more than plausible. And if you’ve come for a steady stream of stories about horrible drug-fucked behaviour, congrats!
*Far be it for us to suggest that Fleet’s two decades worth of hard core drug use has dented his attention span, but this is a book that wanders all over the place and all over his life, though there is a rough chronology to the overall sweep of things. There are snippets on bad gigs, being paid as a comedy guru, drug-fuelled tour stories and so on, and they’re all good stuff. But they pop up seemingly as they come to mind rather than part of a well-structured story.
*Some chapters, like “Exile on Christmas Street”, are just ramblings – if you ever wanted to get the impression of a book where they threw everything in to hit the word count, here you go. But they do give an insight into Fleet’s “voice” – there’s not much reason for them to be left in, but they do sound a lot like what it might be like to spend time with Fleet.
*While Fleet’s focus might wander, there’s no denying that he’s sharp as a tack when he wants to be. Those of you who remember the Mick Molloy / Tony Martin feud from close to a decade ago might be wondering which side Fleet – who’s worked with both men – is on. On the one hand, Fleet never even mentions it. On the other, an comedy anecdote starts with this:
“The show featured myself, The Empty Pockets (Matt Quatermaine and Matt Parkinson, a successful double act and long time partners of mine), Mick Molloy, and the hardest-working man in showbiz, the greatest comic mind I have ever seen, Tony Martin.”
You get the idea. No superlatives for Mr Molloy.
*Those who remember Get This might remember a catchy little ditty “Pushed off or stabbed off” (sung to the tune of the I Dream of Jeanie theme). Fleet doesn’t: he remembers a version that goes “Stabbed off or fell off”
*Remember Fleet’s previous successful shows about his drug use?
Forget them:
1. They were lies. I was still using when I did them and was desperately trying to convince people that I was clean
2. I changed events to make myself look like a victim, or a better or more rational person than I was. I wanted to have done all of that stuff and still be everyone’s friend. Clearly, that is not going to happen.
*There’s quite a sad chapter where Fleet reminisces about much-loved Get This producer Richard Marsland, but it does feature this bit:
“Something I have never discussed is that I find it impossible to form a picture in my mind of Richard’s last moments. My brain and heart just won’t let me imagine that scene.”
Never discussed until now, you mean. Also, who tries to imagine stuff like that?
*It’s very much a “warts and all” portrait, and not just because of his massive drug use and often appalling behaviour. It’s also very revealing of the kind of guy Fleet is. Which is to say, if you’ve spent much time at all wondering about what kind of person would choose to stand in front of a crowd and try to win them over for a living night after night, this gives you a pretty good idea.
*While his partner is giving birth to their child, he steals $100 from her purse to go score heroin. There’s a lot more of this kind of thing in this book but that’s pretty much all you need to know right there about what being a junkie is about. And for much of this book, Greg Fleet is a junkie.
*Fleet knows all this. He talks about how his bond with Lawrence Mooney is based on a mutual need for approval (while also trying to shock and appal), he talks about how all authors are wankers because they snubbed him at a publishing event – but then he turns that into a joke against himself, which doesn’t exactly hide the fact that his most severe vitriol of the book is directed towards a group of people who didn’t embrace him.
*Comedians are largely named. Fleet’s junkie friends are not. Guess who “The Actor” and “The Movie Star” really are! Here’s a clue: they were junkies around St Kilda during the 90s. Also, if you tell us who they are we promise not to print your answer because we’re not that keen to dig our own grave just yet. Supposedly The Movie Star was really disappointed he didn’t get to join in on a (fake) gay sex session between Fleet and The Actor. Remembering this makes Fleet smile every time he sees The Movie Star playing a tough guy role.
*It’s also a very patchy book, with lots of chapters starting off with stuff like “I’m writing this in Adelaide 2012”, which doesn’t really add much to proceedings apart from the feeling that this could have done with a really rigorous edit. Then again, a rigorous edit might have involved pointing out that at least some of this gear is old rope for long-time Fleet fans.
Although Fleet has been claiming to be newly clean in every interview he’s done in the past decade…
Oh wait, we meant to quote this bit:
He’s strip-mined his own life for material, writing shows about his relationship breakdowns, his disastrous holiday in Thailand (the basis for his book Thai Die), and the story of his deadbeat American father, who abandoned the family when Fleet was small.
Anything he does, and every person he comes in contact with, is scrutinised for potential comedic fodder. His life, it seems, is set permanently on a track of “Can I use it or not?”. His shows and stand-up routines are not so much written as born out of verbal sparring with fellow comedians.
*At our first glance the most interesting comedy bit is where he explains his use of the phrase “they look good, like a faggot in a ditch”. Basically, it’s an inside joke – he and Mooney were trying to horrify each other and the phrase stuck. Then Fleet tries to explain how this particular inside joke works, which is interesting because “Inside joke” or “you had to be there” is usually all most of us need to understand that a): something was hilarious for b): reasons that can’t easily be explained. But explain Fleet tries:
It seems what makes the joke work is the tension between the horrible things being said and the actual moral views of the person saying them. A random stranger saying something awful is awful; someone that you know is kind-hearted and generous saying something awful about poor people can be funny. It’s not an amazingly profound insight, but the fact he works hard to explain it goes some way towards showing how devoted Fleet is to comedy, even in a book largely sold on his scary tales of drug excess.
*So is it worth it from a comedy point of view? For sure: Fleet has been there and done that and what he’s got to say is always worth a read. And while we’d have much preferred a more focused book looking at his comedy career, it’s the horrific tales of junkie-dom that have been getting this particular book all the attention. And some of those stories are pretty funny too.
Long story short: We paid recommended retail for These Things Happen, and we haven’t regretted it yet.