Charlie Pickering delivered a reasonably good rant about rape culture this week on his ABC show The Weekly. His scriptwriter did a nice job skewering stereotypes about how women ‘ask’ to be assaulted by the way they dress and behave. Pickering finished by suggesting that a better approach would be to tell men not to rape (a great point that’s been stated by thousands of feminists before him, none of whom are quoted in this segment). The segment finished with a neat song performed by Geraldine Quinn, Miranda Tapsell and Angie Hart called ‘Don’t Rape’.
Less than 24 hours later, the video had been written about in at least three news sources with comments posted urging for international recognition of the work and talking about how important men like Pickering are (not dissimilar to the reaction he got a few weeks ago when he said what tons of Aboriginal writers and thinkers had already said about Adam Goodes).
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Australia's most opinionated blog about comedy.
Struggling Weekly
It’s pretty difficult to find anyone online willing to utter a harsh word against Charlie Pickering and The “nailed it!” Weekly. That’s because The Weekly is happily doing a shitload of their work for them: when The Weekly runs a segment on, say, how people who boo Adam Goodes are racist, or how rape culture is A Bad Thing, all they have to do is take that clip, slap “The Weekly nails sexual harassment!” on it, and hey presto – fresh content.
So thumbs up to Clem Ford over at Daily Life – a site not exactly estranged from the concept of praising Pickering’s work – for pointing out the obvious:
Ford’s point is that women – lots and lots of women – have said exactly the same thing to resounding media silence, while Pickering gets all the praise simply because he’s a dude. It’s a totally valid point, but we’d like to make a slightly different one: Pickering and The Weekly pull this shit on every single topic they cover.
Week in, week out Pickering and The Weekly not only tackle issues with clearly defined “right” and “wrong” sides – what, you expected him to come out and say Rape Culture was ok? – they tackle issues that have already been done to death by smarter, funnier people elsewhere. And by “elsewhere” we mean “elsewhere online”, because The Weekly seems to be put together based on the assumption that every single one of their viewers has spent a sum total of zero time online over the past week.
Pickering is a one-man smug-fest all on his own, but being the frontman on a show built around acting like widely-discussed internet topics are in fact deeply buried social issues they’ve uncovered all on their lonesome doesn’t help one bit. If you’re going to take that approach, it helps to actually be giving audiences something new: one of the numerous ways in which the late, lamented Hamster Wheel shat all over The Weekly is that with The Hamster Wheel The Chaser had a bunch of people actually doing original research into the Australian media. That way, even if the jokes tanked there was a pretty good chance you were being told something you didn’t know.
In contrast, The Weekly has failed to break a single story, failed to highlight an issue not already covered better elsewhere, and failed to create a single moment of comedy that might excuse any of its other many, many sins. It’s a show that hasn’t had an original thought in its life: it seems it’s really easy to nail it each week when you’re just handing out opinions your fans already agree with.
Just to make it perfectly clear, while we fully agree with Ford – and anyone else who’d like to point out that everything The Weekly does has been done better and earlier elsewhere – the biggest sin here as far as we’re concerned is that the show simply isn’t funny. It’s a series of plodding news reports with some strangulated faux-outrage smeared over the top: either be more informative and give up on comedy entirely, or take the time to come up with some real jokes about the state of the world today.
Of course, this is a problem all news comedy shows face. The more obscure the news covered the less funny the show is going to be because of the whole “having to explain what the joke is” problem, while only covering the really big stories means that your show is both dull (everyone having already heard the news) and competing with everyone else for the good jokes. It’s a tricky balancing act, and it’s one that hardly any show gets right all the time.
And yet The Weekly never gets it right. Every week it serves up generic opinions on topics covered more fully and successfully elsewhere, and then it fails to actually wring any humour out of them. Our advice is simple: if you can’t be original, be funny. And if you can’t be funny, presumably The Weekly is still hiring.
Seventeen nine-tee-hee nine reasons to laugh
Umbrella recently released the DVD Studio 9 – The Home of Australian Television, featuring golden moments from Channel 9’s glorious past. As you might expect this includes yet another opportunity to see Graham Kennedy’s set falling over, plus all the other classic Channel 9 clips that get dragged out every time they do one of these retrospectives. And who isn’t prepared to spend $17.99 to watch all them again?
To put this in a little context, the golden moments package is actually a program from 2004 called Inside Studio 9, a celebration of live TV broadcast from the famous GTV-9 studio where shows such as In Melbourne Tonight (both versions), The Don Lane Show and The Footy Show were made. Hosted by Don Lane, it does (mercifully) include many, many clips you probably haven’t seen before, including performances from well-known local and international acts, talent show contestants making dicks of themselves, live ads going wrong, and some really quite dodgy clips of Sam Newman and his footy-loving co-panellists doing their thing*.
If the latter turns you off, at least most of the clips last less than 20 seconds. On the other hand, if you want any sort of context for the clips forget it – one joke from a comedian, or one chorus from a singer, or one short anecdote from a chat show guest are all you’re gunna get. As clip show packages of this ilk go it’s pretty good, although what with all the incredibly short clips and with Lane’s links being so short as to barely be worthwhile, you wonder if the producers were on speed when they put this together.
Also on this disc is the notorious Don Lane Celebrity Roast from 1978. Inspired by The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast, this is Channel 9’s first attempt at the genre – and as Roastmaster Bert Newton jokes “If this doesn’t rate there’ll be another roast next week…in Kerry Packer’s office!”
Helping Bert to roast Don in the studio are Paul Hogan, David Frost, Whitlam-era Minister Fred Daly and Don Lane Show writer Tim Evans, plus (on film) Sammy Davis Jr, Frank Thring and Toni Lamond. As roasts go this is a fairly gentle affair, with Frank Thring’s section, in which he reads out telegrams from various notables who couldn’t attend, being the only point at which things get truly vicious.
Hoges, Bert and Evans have some pretty funny things to say about Don’s history, professional achievements and personal life, and Sammy Davis Jr and Toni Lamond do their best to be funny in their pre-filmed segments.
David Frost’s appearance is quite interesting, particularly as he spends much of it barely trying not to look as if he has somewhere better to be. A reasonably large proportion of his speech about Don consists of jokes about himself, and when it concludes and Bert holds up a copy of Frost’s (then new) book about his famous interviews with Richard Nixon, it’s hard not wonder if Frost was treating this like a chat show appearance. Or wonder if he’d ever met Don at all!
But despite Frost and the politician-trying-to-be-funny stylings of Fred Daly, this is well worth setting aside 45 minutes to watch. And coupled with the Studio 9 clip fest, it’s several hours-worth of (almost) consistent laughs – and who isn’t prepared to pay $17.99 for that?
* Speaking of dodgy, there are also two clips featuring Rolf Harris in Inside Studio 9.
Cliff 2 Hanger
The last episode of Ryan Shelton’s latest Instagram series Cliff 2 (the sequel to his previous Instagram series Cliff) will be uploaded today to his Instagram account. What will happen? Has Rebrecca killed Cliff? And is there a future in this kind of thing?
Before we vaguely answer at least one of those questions, just a reminder that Instagram only allows you to upload between 3 and 15 seconds of video. And when someone starts to play it, it plays on mute (the user has to tap again to hear the sound). And as soon as the video ends it starts playing again, and will keep playing on a loop unless the viewer taps to stop it or scrolls away. As if less than 15 seconds isn’t restrictive enough for a sitcom episode, in Cliff Shelton can’t have anything important going on sound-wise for the first 1-2 seconds because many people won’t hear it, and he’s got to create a clear endpoint or deliberately structure the ending so he can use the loop back to the start to his advantage.
That’s a lot to think about in a short video, but those restrictions lend themselves to comedy pretty well. Comedy works best when its pacey and loaded with gags, and here Shelton has no choice but to tell his story quickly and to look for any opportunity to insert humour. In Cliff 2 the characters are deliberately odd, with stupid wigs and outfits, who talk in bizarre language and suddenly do strange things – plenty of funny there!
This isn’t necessarily a fair comparison, but it’s a welcome contrast from the sketch shows which stretch out one weak gag over multiple weak sketches (Open Slather) or the sitcoms which waste time on half-arsed, waffly dramatic sub-plots (Please Like Me returns soon!). Perhaps the people with social media-era attention spans have the right idea about comedy after all – get to the gag as soon as possible!
And in the spirit of Cliff 2 we’ll keep this review brief and end it here… Or will we? (Yes – Ed.)
Nailed It Shut
Time was, the idea of having a long-running show was that you’d be able to tweak the format to improve things. Not on the ABC: after last weeks shock discovery that everyone there seems to think that How Not to Behave was a show that reached perfection with episode one, we turned our attention to The Weekly. Surprise surprise: it’s (long-running) business as usual there as well. We know the ABC’s not supposed to be concerned with ratings (and yet…), but we had hoped that attempting to improve their on-air programming was still on their shopping list.
[here’s an interesting tidbit: according to those in the know, the admittedly tiny world of torrenting Australian television shows has given up on torrenting The Weekly. Either ex-pats and TV hoarders aren’t big Charlie Pickering fans, or they figure you can see all the worthwhile bits scattered across the internet captioned “THE WEEKLY NAILED IT AGAIN”]
Then again, considering the format was lifted wholesale from The Daily Show – and you’d have to think recent US comedian guests Bill Hader and Amy Schumer would have raised at least an eyebrow there – why mess with success? And so, aside from shifting around the segments of Kitty Flanagan and Tom Gleeson, there remains little to update when it comes to the basic structure of the show.
Likewise, the content remains filed firmly under “more of the same”. Sure, politicians’ entitlements have been in the news, and then shifting the focus of the segment to target fund-raisers was smart. But what we actually got from all this was a basic political primer – “what’s that? Political campaigns are all about advertising and advertising costs money?” – that didn’t really go anywhere funny. It’s painfully clear that topics and not jokes are the starting point here, which would be fine if the writers were good enough to make any topic funny. They’re not.
Also, forgive us for having no idea whatsoever how television comedy works, but last time we checked there were two main components to creating topical jokes: topical stuff and funny stuff. The previous paragraph pointed out this is a show that hasn’t been great on the funny stuff, and when there’s five minutes on “drugs in sport” it’s not doing so well on the topical side either. You can find an excuse to do drugs in sports jokes every single week. That means that whenever you do decide to do them, it looks like you’ve got nothing better to do.
And if you were taking bets on what big issue would be the centrepiece of The Weekly this week you’re out of luck, because “that lion that dentist shot” was so obviously going to be the frontrunner the bookies shut up shop five minutes after it happened. An internet furore, you say? A hot topic with a clear right side? An issue that has zero effect on how Australians go about their daily lives? Nailed it. We wouldn’t be surprised if The Weekly brought it back next week as a regular segment.
But The Weekly‘s general gutlessness is nothing new. Which is the real problem here: there’s nothing new about any of this. Here’s a scary thought – what if this is the new way that television works? With it becoming accepted wisdom that you’ll never pull a bigger audience than you do on opening night, where’s the incentive to actually work on a show week after week to make it better?
It increasingly seems as if we’re in the worse of all possible worlds, one where long-running comedy series are the norm but they never try to get any better. Why should they? The only people watching by week four are the people who thought weeks one to three were good enough. Improving things might just put them off – and if they leave, there’ll be nobody left watching.
You’d think Australian comedy would be used to that by now.
Bloodbath Aftermath: Why Open Slather still sucks
Is it just us still watching Open Slather? Assuming so, we can report the following: despite the fact that they’ve sacked a large proportion of their original writing team, and that there are now a lot less Downton Abbey sketches…it’s still crap. This isn’t such a surprise as shows like this are like big ships – hard to turn around – and any changes made behind the scenes aren’t going to be obvious to audiences quickly. They also seem to have a whole stack of those RBT sketches to get through, so pre-writers cull material is still going to air.
Maybe the show will have improved by the end of its run, maybe not. Our guess is not, because the central problem with Open Slather remains: ensemble sketches shows written and performed by a bunch of people who’ve never worked together always suck. And as for the possibility that one part of the team might manage to break out with something fresh and funny from beneath the piles of TV parodies and half-arsed running gags…that seems unlikely.
Open Slather has the look and feel of a show which needs to fill air time, where sketches are written and made quickly, and in bulk. The kind of comedy that people laugh very hard at, share with friends and remember years later tends to come from a different place: it comes from like-minded people who know each, getting together to produce something they find funny and believe in. And judging from the end products on display in Open Slather, our guess is that the only thing its writers and cast believe in is whatever money they can get for it doing it.
Whoever pitched this series grossly underestimated the ability of this team to produce a watchable 45 minutes of sketch comedy every week for 20 weeks. And watching Open Slather has become a bit like watching late-noughties phone-in quiz show The Mint: the only thing even slightly compelling about it is that the makers succeed in filling airtime with something vaguely resembling entertainment.
And in a world where the eyeballs of target demographics are glued to clickbait, cat videos and other pointless internet memes, Open Slather is kind of on-trend: it’s creating content to fill in space, rather than content that deserves to exist. Yet, as it’s content that’s not as entertaining or resonant as even a half-arsed cat video, it’s content that really really doesn’t deserve to exist. Sure, this series will limp over the episode 20 line, but that’ll be the end of it. And within a week, no one will remember it was even there.
The Return of Uncle Chop-Chop
Heath Franklin, perhaps best known for his impersonation of the late Chopper Read, now has his own TV series…in New Zealand. Franklin as Chopper, it seems, is pretty popular in New Zealand, and appears on TV and tours live quite often. His series, Chopper’s Republic of Anzakistan, is currently airing on TV3.
Playing on the historic friendship and rivalry between Australia and New Zealand, the series imagines that both countries have united as the Republic of Anzakistan with Chopper as leader. Dressed like a South American dictator Chopper addresses the united country, using his speeches to ponder the differences and similarities between the two nations. But it’s there that the high concept of this series ends, for this is really just an excuse to showcase stand-up from Chopper, introduce guest acts (from both countries) and present some sketches about the ANZACs in the trenches. It’s basically Legally Brown, but with more white people and swearing.
Chopper’s stand-up is exactly what you’d expect (honed bogan material that gets solid laughs), the selection of guests is pretty impressive (Sam Simmons, Sammy J and Randy, Jesse Dixon as country singer Wilson Dixon and some good local acts) but the sketches need work.
The concept of an Englishman, an Australian and a New Zealander in the World War I trenches is reasonable enough, but hey, wouldn’t it be funny if the Englishman had to take the coffee orders and the Australian and the New Zealand keep changing their minds about whether they want a soya mocha or a skinny cap? It’s 1915, guys!!! Oh, and none of them can get phone reception, gee these Turkish telcos in 1915 are crap!!! Yeah, it’s that kind of sketch comedy. Probably best to fast forward through those bits.
Chopper’s addresses to the nation are also a bit half-arsed, but hey, it’s a way to link the show together. Sort of. Seriously, they probably just should have framed this as a hands-across-the-Tasman-Sea-stand-up showcase – and without the sketches they could have had room for another guest! But as shows of this type go, Chopper’s Republic of Anzakistan isn’t bad. It’s currently available in Australia if you know where to look for this sort of thing.
How Not To Create a Watchable Television Program
Okay, it’s our own fault: we shouldn’t have given How Not to Behave a second try. But after one of the most pointless opening episodes in recent memory, we assumed – foolishly, as it turned out – that the only way for things to go was up. Surely it couldn’t go on week in week out being nothing more than a clumsily thrown together collection of half-arsed sketches and awkward couch banter?
Well, yes it could.
In fact, it seems to have gotten worse. What we assumed was moderately warm and fun chemistry between the two hosts in episode one now simply seems like two decent comedy professionals doing their best despite only barely interacting with each other. And when they do, the painfully obvious editing makes sure to destroy any real interaction they might have going on.
Meanwhile, the sketches continue to be amongst the most bizarrely pointless things we’ve ever seen, and we watched at least two episodes of that ABC sports quiz show that Peter Helliar hosted. We’re usually somewhat wary of revealing the true depths of our ignorance, but help us out here: what exactly is the joke meant to be? That we, the audience, are so clueless we need this kind of ultra-basic advice on how to live our lives? Or that the advice being handed out is so rubbish no-one would follow it? We get that the “don’t do this” parts are meant to be funny – they’re not, but whatever – but what’s the point of the “good” advice?
As for the prank stuff… well, it’s prank stuff. So pretty much totally pointless once you get past “how embarrassment”. Remember Candid Camera? Of course not, you’re not a thousand years old. But at least Candid Camera would pretend that the idea of the show was to reveal how people act when they think they’re being unobserved: when you can tell from the set-up of a prank that the end result is going to be “they’re so embarrassed!”, you probably don’t need to bother doing the actual prank. Especially as the year is not currently 2007.
And then along comes an expert in stuff to tell us about stuff. In theory this could be interesting, only hello: we came here for the comedy. Are these people experts in making us laugh? Are they experts in a topic that will make us laugh? Are they even just wacky comedy experts we can laugh at because they’re obsessed with some obscure topic? And every episode to date the answer comes back: fuck no.
But what really got us about the whole “revisiting” situation was this: nothing at all had changed. There’s not the slightest sign that anyone had looked at the first episode and thought “hmm, maybe tighten this up a little”. It was as if the cast & crew had looked at the first episode, said “perfect, fourteen more just like that and we’re done”.
Well, they got the “we’re done” part right.
Writing Wrongs
A little under a year ago we flipped our lids when the Australian Writer’s Guild awards – known as the AWGIES – gave Wednesday Night Fever their “Comedy – Sketch or Light Entertainment” prize. Our readers were quick to inform us that while this was obviously a result no-one could be happy with, it wasn’t quite as bad as it originally seemed… mostly because the AWGIES are generally seen as a bit of a joke.
That’s because a): you have to be an AWG member to nominate your show – yes, as the scriptwriter of your show you’re clearly best positioned to decide that your show should win an award – and b): hardly anyone of note in the world of Australian comedy is a member. So you’d think the announcement of this year’s nominations would pass by with nary a murmur from us now that we know they mean pretty much nothing. But you’d be wrong!
If this line-up from the 2015 Awgie nominees wasn’t grim enough:
COMEDY – SITUATION OR NARRATIVE
Maximum Choppage: ‘A Fistful of Pastels’ – Lawrence Leung
It’s A Date: Series 2, ‘Worst Thing’ – Phil Lloyd with Peter Helliar
Danger 5: ‘Back to the Führer’ – Dario Russo and David Ashby
Please Like Me: Series 2, ‘Scroggin’ – Josh Thomas
Then say hello to the true face of terror:
COMEDY – SKETCH OR LIGHT ENTERTAINMENT
Only one nomination and the winner will be announced on the night.
Just FYI, the sketch comedies in 2014 were: Black Comedy, Clarke & Dawe, Fresh Blood, Kinne, Legally Brown, Mad As Hell, The Roast, Soul Mates, and This Is Littleton.
Shows that could be considered “Light Ent” in 2014 were: The Agony of Modern Manners, Back Seat Drivers, Bogan Hunters, The Chaser’s Media Circus, Comedy Up Late, Dirty Laundry Live, The Friday Night Crack Up, Hamish & Andy’s South American Gap Year, Have You Been Paying Attention?, Julia Zemiro’s Home Delivery, Plonk, The Project, Reality Check, Spicks & Specks, Stand Up @ Bella Union, and Total Football. Only one nomination you say?
Meanwhile, over in narrative comedy we had the following in 2014: Die On Your Feet, It’s A Date, Jonah From Tonga, Please Like Me, The Moodys, Upper Middle Bogan, Utopia, Maximum Choppage, and Danger 5. And yet this was the best they could do? Well, at least no-one nominated Jonah.
(and what happened with The Moodys? They were all over this last year)
Fortunately it’s not all horrible, horrible news:
DRAMA OR COMEDY, OTHER FORM
Crazy Bastards: Episodes 1-3 – Justin Heazlewood
The Katering Show – Kate McLennan with Kate McCartney
BedHead: Episode 1 and 4 – Jon Dalgaard and Claire Phillips with Tom Keele, Reece Jones and Ben Mathews
Restoration – Stuart Willis with Matthew Clayfield
Maybe the future of Australian comedy really is online after all?
We don’t want to say the AWGIES are complete and utter rubbish – we wouldn’t bother mentioning them if they were. And in some areas, such as feature films, they seem at least moderately representative. But when it comes to comedy the fact is that they are rubbish, for two reasons:
*They’re rubbish because they’re not representative – it’s a member’s only club.
*They’re rubbish because of the shows nominated – if this is the best they can attract, no wonder the big names steer clear.
There’s a very large gap in the awards market for something aimed at praising quality rather than popularity, chosen by people who actually know their stuff rather than just shout the loudest. By focusing on the writing side of things, you might think the AWGIES could be those awards – but only if you knew nothing about them.
The Answer’s Still No
Press release time!
Josh Thomas’ Please Like Me season 3 premieres on ABC
Thursday, July 23, 2015 — ABC TV is pleased to announce the highly-anticipated third season of Josh Thomas’ comedy drama Please Like Me will premiere on ABC on Thursday, October 15 at 9.30 p.m. The third season also marks the show’s move from ABC2 to ABC’s main channel.
Inspired by the stand-up comedy and real life experiences of Thomas – the series creator, writer and star – Please Like Me explores the world of a man who’s in no hurry to grow up.
This season Thomas extends his talents by taking a seat in the director’s chair for an episode. Original director Matthew Saville also returns. The new 10-part series will give viewers another glimpse into Josh’s darkly funny world.
Joining the cast is award-winning actress, Emily Barclay as Ella. Original cast members reprising their roles alongside her and Josh Thomas are Thomas Ward (Tom), Caitlin Stasey (Claire), Hannah Gadsby (Hannah), Keegan Joyce (Arnold), Debra Lawrance in her AACTA award-winning role of Mum, David Roberts (Dad), Renee Lim (Mae) and, arguably the show’s biggest star, Josh’s dog, John.
When asked what viewers can expect to see that’s different this time around, Josh Thomas said, “I lost too much weight in my face this year and now I have my dad’s face. Otherwise Season 3 is our best yet”.
Since its debut on ABC2 in 2013, Please Like Me has been praised by critics around the world. It was named one of the year’s best shows by prestigious publications including The New Yorker, TIME and The Los Angeles Times and has been named in the top five TV shows of the year by America’s Entertainment Weekly for two years in a row. It has earned a swag of awards and nominations here and overseas including nominations for the International Emmy Award, the Rose d’Or Awards, the GLAAD Media Awards and the Logie Awards for Most Outstanding Comedy, Most Outstanding Light Entertainment and Most Popular Actor. It has also been nominated for nine AACTA Awards, taking home the trophies for Best Comedy Series, Best Screenplay in Television and Best Performance in a TV Comedy.
Rick Kalowski, ABC Head of Comedy, said, “We’re thrilled to introduce Please Like Me to a whole new ABC audience with its move to our main channel for its third season. We know it will delight existing fans and find many new ones”.
Please Like Me is a Pigeon Fancier/John & Josh International production, produced in association with ABC TV and US broadcaster Pivot.
Good news! The ABC still has no idea when the Sammy J and Randy musical sitcom will air, but they can warn us this is coming three months out.
Presumably the actual news here is that Please Like Me is coming to ABC1… just like every other ABC2 show before it that wasn’t axed in 2014. We’re starting to think the rumours that ABC2 is no longer running original programming are true, mostly because they don’t really seem to be running any original programming. So the headline here really should read “Show Already Bought and Paid For by US Network Pivot Will Air on Only ABC Network Currently Airing New Comedy Programming”.
Also, in comedy news, we’ll be glad if anything in Please Like Me is half as funny as this line from the ABC’s current Master of Laughter:
Rick Kalowski, ABC Head of Comedy, said, “We’re thrilled to introduce Please Like Me to a whole new ABC audience with its move to our main channel for its third season.”
Yeah, the ABC1 audience has no idea that ABC2 even exists. Those constant promos for it on ABC1 must be utterly bewildering to them.
Of course, what he really means is “Please Like Me rated so badly on ABC2 because there’s basically no floor on that network’s viewing figures – thankfully ABC1 has a bunch of rusted on viewers that guarantees this season will be the highest-rating one to date. Which will come in very handy if Pivot decide to give Thomas more funding for yet more Please Like Me, because then we can say we’re showing it because of higher ratings and not because it’s a show hardly anyone watches but we get it for close to nothing.”
Still, we’ll be very interested to see just how many viewers Thomas gets on ABC1. Mostly because the ratings are probably going to be the only thing that’s going to be original, interesting or funny about yet more Please Like Me.
Hardy Working
Earlier this week Screen Australia announced their latest round of funding for 2015. One of the names that came up in the various reports about what was being funded was one Marieke Hardy, co-writer and creator of the memorable sitcom Laid. Being always inclined to keep track of perhaps this country’s only non-acting sitcom writer to get her face on the cover of The Green Guide, we googled the title of this project – which was receiving an as yet undisclosed amount of “story development” funding for 2015 – to try and find out a little more.
As it turns out we found out two things. This is the first:
DEATH IS FOR THE LIVING
Jungleboys FTV Pty Ltd
Genre Comedy, Drama, Romantic comedy
Producer Linda Micsko
Executive Producer Jason Burrows
Director Trent O’Donnell
Writers Kirsty Fisher, Marieke Hardy
Synopsis In search of pain relief from her terminal illness, Sara encounters Dan, a psychotherapist who, through hypnosis, gives her a way to ‘live’ her ‘future’ in her subconscious – but things get complicated when Dan, enamoured by Sara, begins to write himself into her dream future.
It’s a film about a guy who gets a woman unconscious and then sexually exploits her. So we’re guessing it’s basically the Bill Cosby story.
The second thing we found out was that there seemed to be a lot of hits for “Death is for the Living” dated 2014. Which seemed kind of odd, considering these hits also seemed to be about funding. Had we messed up the dates somehow?
Well, no: it turns out that this is Hardy’s second bite at the Screen Australia cherry for this particular project, having already received $38,500 in “feature development” funding in the Dec 2013 – March 2014 period for Death is for the Living. Guess $38,500 – or half of that, as Hardy’s teamed up with her Laid co-writer Kirsty Fisher – doesn’t get you a finished film script from the author of You’ll Be Sorry When I’m Dead. Fingers crossed this second bundle of cash is enough to get it over the line.
We don’t pretend to be experts in how film funding works. Which clearly sets us apart from Hardy, who’s received funding from Film Victoria for various projects every year since 2011:
* 2011: Laid season two
* 2012: Laid season three ($18,208)
* 2013: Corp ($8000)
* 2014: The National Standard ($9000)
Nothing so far for 2015, but there’s still plenty of time. Presumably there’s also still plenty of time for those last three shows to turn up somewhere, as none of them are yet to appear on our screens. Though the Laid Facebook page says the first two episodes of season three were scripted before they finally figured out the ABC weren’t going to make their low-rating show the first ABC sitcom since Kath & Kim to get a third season.
(we all know The Librarians only got a third season because the ABC didn’t want Gristmill to deliver a contracted second series of Very Small Business, right? Let’s move on)
As previously stated, we know next to nothing about film and television funding. But one thing we can tell from looking at these various documents is that Hardy is hardly alone when it comes to hitting up the funding bodies multiple times. Clearly once you know the secret handshake, these guys are happy to toss sacks of cash your way.
The thing that seems to stand out to us is that most of these people tend to fall into one of two categories: proven performers like, say, Stephan Elliott, and up-and-comers like, say, the guys behind the Stevo and Mel Project (let’s take a guess… Stevo and Mel?). And this is exactly what we want our funding bodies to do with their cash: give it to proven performers to help them take another crack (if you made Priscilla, Queen of the Desert you deserve funding no matter how many Welcome to Woop Woops you have on your resume), or hand it out to newcomers to give them a shot at the big time.
Hardy – and we’re talking here about projects where she’s chief creative; she’s also involved as a staff writer on recent funding winners The Family Law and Secret City – doesn’t really fit either category. She’s had her shot at the big time with Laid – two shots if you count her earlier dramedy Last Man Standing, which aired on Channel Seven back in 2005. Neither of them could be counted as success stories, especially as far as ratings are concerned. To be blunt, Death is for the Living sounds a lot like more of the same. So why are government funding bodies throwing good money after bad?
At a guess, it’s because Hardy knows how to fill out the right forms and – thanks to her previous two shots at the big time – she technically qualifies as the kind of experienced television producer they want to encourage. As people who have seen pretty much all of her television output to date, may we respectfully suggest they reconsider.