Australian Tumbleweeds
It’s the little things
What have Gristmill been doing since Upper Middle Bogan, you may be wondering. The answer is making fifteen 15-minute episodes of a kid’s comedy called Little Lunch. Based on books by Danny Katz, these snack-size stories are told through the eyes of six primary school children.
The first episode, which aired on ABC3 this afternoon, centres on problem child Rory who’s sent to the Principal’s office for biting fellow pupil Melanie. But as Rory, Melanie, brain box and To Kill A Mockingbird reference Atticus, and various other students explain, Rory’s always doing this kind of thing – he even has his own chair in the corner in the Principal’s office called Rory’s Spot. Cut to Rory in his Spot cooling his heels yet again, but finding it tough going as the Principal’s not there to tell him off all the time. But just as Rory’s about to go off the wall again, the bell rings for little lunch and the kids start chucking notes to him through the window. Hooray! Boredom busted!
If this sounds potentially funny, at least to kids, it probably is, although as adults we struggled a bit: the story is fairly inconsequential and the gags aren’t exactly side-splitters. To be fair, the show’s intended audience of primary school kids probably don’t find Shaun Micallef or Clarke & Dawe very funny, so we’re not going to go too hard on Little Lunch – it’s not made to amuse us.
Or to put it another way, if you’re a parent and your kids have seen this we’d be interested to know what you and they thought. But if you’re an adult hoping for more comedy from the Gristmill gang, maybe give Very Small Business a re-watch instead, because based on episode 1 Little Lunch isn’t one of those kids comedies that has a few gags aimed at the parents – this is strictly for the kids.
If You’re Gonna Binge, You Better Purge
Press release time!
ABC is thrilled to announce, that from September 1st, the entire six-part comedy series, Sammy J and Randy in Ricketts Lane, will be available to binge watch on ABC iview first, before airing on ABC TV later in the year.
With their unique brand of comedy, music and puppetry, Sammy J and Randy have played to sell-out audiences across Australia and overseas.
ABC Head of TV Strategy and Digital Products Rebecca Heap says “ABC is the home of Australian stories, home of Australian comedy and home of Australia’s favourite internet TV service – iview. Sammy J & Randy on iview in September delivers all three and showcases what the ABC does best: connecting all Australian audiences with unique Australian content.”
The award-winning comedy duo says “This is an appalling, undergraduate series that should never have been made. We salute the ABC for giving viewers the opportunity to watch it swiftly and then move on with their lives.”
ABC Head of Comedy Rick Kalowski says “As usual, Sammy J & Randy have no idea what they’re talking about. Sammy J & Randy In Ricketts Lane is a brilliantly original piece of musical comedy joy you’ll want to smash through in one go, then watch all over again. We love it.”
As this is basically the usual pointless hype – “ABC is the home of Australian stories, home of Australian comedy and home of Australia’s favourite internet TV service” wow really you don’t say – we’re only mentioning it for one reason: the “we’re releasing the whole series first on iview!” news.
Those of you with memories not completely scrambled by having watched every episode of Tractor Monkeys will recall that the ABC have previously tried this approach with comedy – and yet oddly, not drama – with Jonah from Tonga. You know – the show that ended Chris Lilley’s career? The show that ended up being one of the ABC’s biggest flops in recent years and that’s pretty big for a network that aired oh wait did we mention Tractor Monkeys already? Sorry, we meant Randling.
With that in mind, you’ll forgive us if we read this less as “oh look, the ABC are moving forcefully into the digital arena to counter Netflix, Stan and the rest” and more as “oh look, the ABC are trying to game the ratings for what they clearly think is going to be a massive dud by releasing it on digital first so they can then claim that of course it rated badly, everyone watched it on digital first.”
So the bit to keep in mind around September is this:
“This is an appalling, undergraduate series that should never have been made. We salute the ABC for giving viewers the opportunity to watch it swiftly and then move on with their lives.”
Especially if viewers take the opportunity to simply not watch it at all.
Behaving Badly
Hey, so you know that moment eleven minutes or so into the first episode of How Not to Behave when in the middle of a bit about how annoying charity collectors are Gretel Killeen suddenly gave us a bunch of stats about how effective they are in collecting funds for charity? Um… what the hell was that about?
Not that the show had been a barrel of laughs up to that point, what with kicking things off with a quote from Winnie the Pooh and then going on to re-introduce us to former cast members from The Ronnie Johns Half Hour and Double the Fist. Because when your comedy show contains the line “let’s start with queuing”, it’s not like you need a top-level cast to sell the jokes to come.
Wait, did we say “jokes”? We meant to say “[incoherent strangled vomiting noise]”, because while the banter between hosts Killeen and Matt Okine was passable – in that it seemed at least slightly improvised and there was some rapport between them – the sketches themselves were about as funny as a pointless instructional video. Because that’s exactly what they were.
If you’re going to make comedy about queuing, maybe “cutting into a coffee shop queue is ok, cutting into a supermarket queue is not” should be the point you start with, not your punchline. Normally at this point we’d ramble on a whole lot more, because the show sure did: stats about queues! Wacky ways people queue in other countries! This is the first segment in the first episode of a 15-part series and they’ve decided to go with the queue material! Seriously, do they even want people to stick around for the rest of the episode, let alone the series?
But let’s cut short our ramblings for this week, because to our eyes the big problem with How Not to Behave was obvious: it’s not finished. Well, it was finished in terms of being an actual television show with opening and closing credits, but the comedy? Still got the scaffolding up.
What they’ve done here is collect a bunch of observations that they could base a handful of moderately funny sketches on – how to get into the fastest queue at a supermarket, ways to dodge charity muggers, people who are too protective (or not protective enough) of their personal space – and then just patiently explained the concepts to us. The result? This is a show based on the idea of explaining jokes.
Smarter people than us have explained that jokes work by presenting someone with first one idea then another and then allowing them to make the leap to connect those ideas. This didn’t just build a bridge between its ideas, it put the audience in the back of a bus and drove them over it at five miles an hour. Seriously, after the personal space prank stuff they even brought in an expert on personal space to explain the concept in depth. Remember how Monty Python followed up the Parrot Sketch by bringing on an expert in retail sales to explain the concept of customer service?
There are funny ways to talk about cinema etiquette. Simply describing behaviour and labelling it is not one of them. Worse, what little comedy there is in these moments relies entirely on recognition – the “joke” is that we go “ahh, I’ve been there”. So if the joke is that you’re telling people something THEY ALREADY KNOW, maybe you need to come up with a heightened framework that will make that information funny. Protip: simply explaining this information in a blandly generic style is not that framework.
Oh wait, sorry, we forgot it’s 2015. The whole point of this stuff isn’t to create something funny, it’s to create a short clip that can be shared online with a tagline like “Last night How Not to Behave totally nailed it when it comes to cinema armrest hogs.” Only no-one is going to be doing that, because these short clips were bland, dull, and stating the obvious in a totally unsurprising fashion.
Then again, this is the show that told us “There are serious rules for walking on the street”. If an idiot said that in a sitcom, you’d probably laugh; when it leads onto a segment that semi-seriously explains what those rules are, you’re fully entitled to look around to see if you’ve become part of some candid camera show.
Because what are the alternatives here? Either this is a comedy show that fails pretty much completely from the ground up, or it’s an educational show that really is trying to explain to people how to queue in supermarkets or walk down the street. Either it’s a show made by people that think calling someone who uses their mobile phone in a cinema “a glow worm” is funny, or it’s a show that thinks its audience doesn’t know how personal space works.
Either way, it’s doing a great job of insulting its audience.
The Natter That Doesn’t Matter
So Room 101 finally made its long-awaited debut – yes, we know we’re stretching the definition of ‘long-awaited” to breaking point there – on SBS over the weekend, in one of those “special double episode” launches that tend to smell just a little of “let’s get this over with”. Especially after those lengthy delays in bringing it to air. And the Saturday night timeslot, though to be fair SBS has done a reasonable job of training their viewers to expect comedy-esque material there thanks to Rockwiz. Basically, we went in expecting a shocker. And what did we find?
Well, presumably SBS coughed up the money to licence the format from the UK because it’s the cheapest format in living memory: two people chatting for 20-odd minutes. Remember when Tony Martin had that interview show? It’s like that, only way less informative BUT WITH A WACKY SET. We’re going to assume host Paul McDermott has a “wacky set” clause in his contract these days, lord knows he’s never seen without one.
The idea of the show is that the various “celebrity” guests being along a list of peeves and dislikes that they hope to persuade the host are actual peeves, and therefore worthy of being locked away in ah who cares it’s just more comedy chit-chat. McDermott is not the worst person in Australia to be hosting this kind of thing, which immediately puts it ahead of pretty much all the ABC’s efforts at this kind of thing, and the guests – Julia Zemiro and H.G. Nelson – are people who can speak, so there’s that.
But it’s still a show that opens with five minutes of talk about hi-fives. In fact, it’s still a show that’s basically just a variation on Grumpy Old Men which yes we know wasn’t invented until a full decade after the original UK radio version of Room 101, let alone the television one but the only other example we could use for this sort of thing was The Agony of Life and we’ll be buggered if we’re going to get dragged down that mineshaft again.
So Zemiro doesn’t like people eating in the theatre, or buffets, or life coaches, or tamper-proof packaging. H.G. Nelson doesn’t like paper cuts and pre-match entertainment. They chat away, time passes, McDermott doesn’t really press them on the subject, and we’d be looking at our watches if it wasn’t easier just to check the clock on the front of the PVR under the TV set.
“Bland” has never been a word used much by TV critics in this country, mostly because if they said it once they’d never stop. But this… this fits the bill. There’s nothing here to make this worth your time, and unless things go seriously wrong in future episodes – McDermott starts getting really aggressive and probing, a guest or two reveals some grim horrifying secret – that’s not going to change.
And even if that did happen, it wouldn’t make the show funny. The kind of people who can make 20-something minutes of chat about their fears (well, dislikes really) funny are stand-up comedians or other comedy professionals… you know, the kind of people who don’t become famous enough in this country to be a guest on this kind of one-on-one show. Especially when McDermott gave up his edge and became a professional television host a good decade or more ago.
What’s left is a show where two television hosts natter to each other about niggles. Wake us when Rockwiz is back on.
Bloodbath at the House of Death 2: Another P.O.V.
Amongst the former Open Slather writers not to contact us about the recent writer’s cull was Doug MacLeod, who’s previously written for Full Frontal, Fast Forward and various other well known shows from the “glory days” of Australian TV comedy. However, MacLeod did write about his experiences of working on the show on his blog In The Front Room last Saturday night. Interestingly, a day or so later that post was taken down, although not before Google had cached it here. Now it’s back online in edited form.
Why, we wonder. Many of MacLeod’s tales of working on Open Slather are similar to those we’ve heard from other writers on the show: i.e. they wrote a bunch of sketches which they thought were pretty good but none of them made it to air, and yet they were still credited as writers – how annoying/weird! Other areas of concern in the blog are more specific and its these about which MacLeod seems to have had a re-think. Fair enough, he’s allowed to change his views, but we ran the text of both versions through Diff Checker anyway to try and work out why. Here’s a summary:
- In the first version MacLeod is sometimes casually critical or off-hand about some of the key players on the production team (a comedy writer, being critical or off-hand about management – that never happens!), whereas he tones things down a little in the second version (not that he was savagely critical about any of them to start with!).
- In the second version he’s removed much of a (seemingly) not-very-controversial and actually pretty interesting section about writing sketches for a Magda Szbanski character based on the British fashion journalist Suzy Menkes. His only real criticism in the first version was that Szbanski couldn’t hang around for long when they met up to write and that she seemed a bit off hand…maybe. He also thought he’d left the iron on at home and was worried about that, or something. Either way, he says some good material came out of it.
- MacLeod is more positive about the work some of the younger cast members are doing on the show in his second version. He is quite critical of Ben Gerrard’s style guru character Johann in the first version, but less so in the second version. He also adds in a section praising George H. Xanthis in the second version. (Actually, his real gripe about Gerrard seems to be that Gerrard got in first with a fashionista parody, meaning the Suzy Menkes sketches couldn’t be used. Fair enough, that must have been quite annoying from MacLeod’s perspective.)
- He puts more blame on the critics for the show’s falling ratings, and in particular blames Bruce Elder of the Sydney Morning Herald (we love it how the production team never blames itself for attracting bad reviews in the first place!). Having said that, we couldn’t find the review by Bruce Elder that MacLeod is referring to. This SMH one by Craig Mathieson isn’t exactly positive, and it’s quite recent, so we’re going to assume this is what he’s talking about. It’s certainly a big contrast to Fairfax’s earlier pieces about the show which were very positive in tone, such as this article by Amanda Dunn.
And that’s pretty much it. Even we’re wondering if all this is worth noting as it seems like fairly typical behind-the-scenes-of-TV-show-type gripes and anecdotes. But in the interests of fairness – or even just providing some first-hand evidence for the scuttlebutt we ran earlier this week – allow us to point you in MacLeod’s direction.
Although, we are still wondering what caused MacLeod to re-write his piece so significantly. Did someone put the hard word on him, or did he just have a re-think after mature reflection? And is any of this likely to effect the public’s perception of Open Slather now anyway? From what we can see, the public (and the critics) have seen more than enough to make a call. Getting them back watching the show now will be near impossible, especially as the one thing that could improve things – changing the sort of material on the show – clearly won’t happen. The people who wrote those endless Downton Abbey sketches seem to have kept their jobs while everyone else has been fired. So another typical day down the Australian comedy salt mines, then.
Blue Remembered Hills
We don’t usually bother with The Last Leg, as despite the all-Aussie host – that’d be Adam Hills – it’s a UK show and as such outside our sphere of interest. But recently someone pointed this out to us:
Sure, Hills makes a very good point, but… is anyone else just a little creeped out by how forcefully he makes it? Some might say he’s passionate; we’re slightly more inclined to say he looks like a bit of a nutter.
Of course, this is hardly the first time Hills has made a name for himself by ranting. Typing “adam hills rant” into YouTube provides all manner of opportunities to see the one-time charming host shouting down the camera like a guy you’d hurriedly flee from in the street. Because that’s the thing about these rants: unlike most comedy sprays – and Hills is neither the first nor the best to come up with the idea of flying off the handle – Hills leaves out the part where we get the impression he’s joking.
But what are we complaining about? For years we’ve been saying that Hills is too bland for his own good, a likable host with the rough edges so forcefully sanded off he’s basically spherical. Surely the fact that he’s finally showing some bite – even if he had to go to the UK to do it – is good news both for him and for comedy in general?
Perhaps. But in our cynical, somewhat unpleasant minds another picture is forming. 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.
Remember Die on Your Feet, Greg Fleet’s sitcom about a bunch of comedians struggling with various comedian stuff? Oh right, it was buried on one of Ten’s digital channels and no-one saw it. But if you had, you would have seen Adam Hills playing someone very different from his Spicks and Specks persona: he was dark, he was mean, he acted like an arsehole most of the time and one episode ended with him seriously contemplating killing himself. At the time it was sold to viewers as a very different look at the much-loved TV host, with him playing a character 180 degrees from what audiences expected from him.
Not any more.
Bloodbath at the House of Death
We don’t usually run scuttlebutt here at the Australian Tumbleweeds, and not just because we’re not entirely sure what that word means. But after the flood of emails – well, three emails – we’ve received over the last week, we figured it was our civic duty to let the public know of what we can only call a bloodbath at the offices of one of this nation’s most prominent sketch comedy shows. Okay, it’s the only current sketch comedy show. But still: BLOODBATH.
Or to put it in slightly less tabloid terms, it seems that Open Slather just sacked a whole lot of their writing staff.
We heard rumours a week or two back that the two head writers had been given the chop, but now it seems the current management has run through the writing room with a scythe. It doesn’t seem to have come as a huge surprise – by all accounts the writers room was fairly heavily over-staffed, and not everyone there was getting material on the show – but when we’re being told that the numbers have dropped from around forty down to nine, that’s some pretty serious cuts right there.
Presumably management has decided that for what they’re trying to do they only need a core handful of staff. After all, who needs professional comedy writers?
Turning up to work to tell jokes sounds like a dream job. And for actor Ben Gerrard, Foxtel’s new Open Slather, has been just that for 3 months. But it’s also been a lot of work in the school of sketch comedy, juggling both performing and writing.
“It’s been an exciting challenge the way we are creatively involved,” he explains. “On the days you’re not shooting it’s by no means a day off. You’re constantly workshopping with writers, each other, and developing with everyone.
“I shot the first sketch I had written a week or so ago and there’s other stuff in development.
“For the performers it’s like going through an apprenticeship of writing in sketch. That’s the amazing challenge of the job.”
And now having gone through their apprenticeship, the cast can now take over from the recently sacked writers. Hope they’re getting paid extra!
What effect this will have on the end product (if any) remains a mystery. As we said, it seems like Open Slather was at least somewhat over-staffed, and a lot of the material is fairly performer-led, so as long as the cast is still around – and as far as we know all the on-air talent remains – the series should continue pretty much as is.
So, you know, great news there.
Move As a Team, Never Move Alone
Press release time! Hang on a second, these aren’t comedies…
Five popular ABC dramas set to return
Tuesday, June 30, 2015 — In good news for lovers of great Australian drama, ABC TV has commissioned new series of the popular series Janet King, Rake, Jack Irish, The Code and The Doctor Blake Mysteries.
Marta Dusseldorp will star in a second series of Janet King; Richard Roxburgh returns to the role of Cleaver Greene for a fourth series of Rake; and Guy Pearce will return in a new six-part series based on the books of top selling crime writer Peter Temple in Jack Irish: The Series.
Craig McLachlan reprises his role as the charming Dr Lucien Blake in a fourth outing of The Doctor Blake Mysteries; and Dan Spielman and Ashley Zuckerman return for a thrilling follow-up series of The Code.
Okay, perhaps the return of Rake is relevant (and welcome) news here. But what makes this worth mentioning in general is the way that the ABC drama department seems to a): be able to create shows that work then b): keep them going.
We now pause our impending beat-up of the ABC’s various comedy departments to acknowledge an inconvenient truth: it’s a shitload easier for a drama series to be sold overseas than it is for a comedy, and once that sweet overseas cash starts coming in the ABC are going to milk it for all it’s worth. The relevant comedy comparison here is the “success” of Please Like Me, aka the only ABC scripted comedy to get a third series since The Librarians in 2010.
(And word is s3 of The Librarians only happened because the ABC wanted to get out of greenlighting a second series of the same production company’s Very Small Business.)
But the other relevant factor here is that while all these dramas have very visible public faces – they’re basically star vehicles, like all successful television – they also have solid production teams behind them. That’s something very few local comedies can claim. Craig McLachlan might be the star of Doctor Blake, but he doesn’t write the episodes; arguably that’s why the show’s lasted so long and also why – for what it is – it doesn’t completely suck.
In Australian comedy though, the star is almost always pulling double duty as the main writer. No surprise then that high profile shows have short runs while the shows we get that do run for months lack star power to bring in audiences (or just to give the show a distinctive voice). Everywhere else in the English-speaking world there’s comedy where a big name is backed up by a solid writing team (ever checked the credits of Inside Amy Schumer?); here only Shaun Micallef seems to work that way – and it’s no surprise he’s one of our most consistently funny performers.
We’re not saying that every comedy show needs a team of writers. We’re saying that in between the two extremes of Australian comedy – shows largely driven by a writer-performer, and sketch or panel shows with a writing team but no real face to bring in the public – there’s a promising middle ground we’re ignoring. Unless you count The Weekly, but if Charlie Pickering’s your role model then there’s not much help we can give you.
Why Change a Winning Formula
Amongst all those solid but firmly average comedies currently enjoying long runs is Foxtel sketch show Open Slather. Half its cast, some of its production team and the formula of the show are all very familiar from long-running weekly sketch shows of the 80’s and 90’s such as The Comedy Company, Fast Forward and Full Frontal, which is fine – those shows were popular at the time and are fondly remembered – but as the weeks of Open Slather fly past the show isn’t exactly developing…which isn’t exactly inspiring us to watch.
But we do, and just when we thought they’d got through all the Downton Abbey and Random Breath Test sketches…there’s a whole bunch more of them. Great. It’s not that we don’t kinda admire the way in which a relatively small team seems to have written and made seemingly hundreds of sketches on the same theme, it’s more that this isn’t our definition of comedy. What joke there was to start with has been done now. Many, many times. We’re bored now!
Amongst the parodies of well-known and long-running TV series like Masterchef, Mad Men, Real Housewives of… and Game of Thrones, and the “contemporary lifestyle” or “modern workplace” social satire sketches, we almost wish they’d thrown in something topical – a parody of The Killing Season, say, or a take on Zaky Mallah’s controversial Q&A appearance. Sketches about politics or ABC shows aren’t really done on Open Slather – and that’s a reasonable and fairly typical commercial television creative choice to make – but it feels odd to watch a local comedy in June 2015 and not see anything about some of the programs and issues that have fired up politicians, media pundits and social media junkies in June 2015.
Of course the real problem with Open Slather isn’t the decision to not parody ABC shows or to do political or topical comedy, it’s more the decision to do repeated sketches and lots of them. It’s partly one of finances – hire some stately home and a few early-1900’s costumes and wigs for the day, shoot a billion Downton sketches, et voila: 20 episodes worth of sketches in the can! – but it’s a cost cutting decision that severely effects the quality of the end product. Sketch shows on TV are about variety – different scenarios, different characters, different styles – and if every week your show features parodies of the same well-known shows, and a smattering of other stuff that isn’t that great, then it’s going to get a bit boring.
The initial buzz around Open Slather has definitely died down, largely because its predictability means there’s nothing more to say about it, and in today’s TV market that’s a huge problem. The reality shows and big budget dramas Open Slather is parodying understand that they need to keep things fresh and exciting to keep audiences watching, yet Open Slather itself seems to have settled in to a firm creative rut. Sure, there have only been six episodes so far, but if they want to keep people tuning in for the remaining 14 they’ll need to do something very, very soon.
Full Frontal could so easily have been a sold but average sequel to Fast Forward, but then along came Shaun Micallef and friends and suddenly it had spark. Open Slather needs to find its Shaun Micallef. In the days of The Comedy Company and Fast Forward the idea of repeated sketches and recurring characters was fine, but attention spans are shorter these days and thanks to the internet there are more comedy choices, from more parts of the world, delivered in more ways, than ever before…and of all of them, why would you pick Open Slather?