Australian Tumbleweeds

Australia's most opinionated blog about comedy.

Spin Cycle

Dirty Laundry Live is a show that came up the old-fashioned way: a panel show focusing on celebrity gossip on the ABC’s second network, it was basically a low-key time-filler until it turned out to be surprisingly watchable and so swiftly – well, swiftly by the standards of the ABC – moved up to the big time. The system works!

Unfortunately, last season this move to the big time also involved a move to a longer format, which (in our opinion at least) was less successful. When your show involves people sitting around talking crap, often more doesn’t equal better: there’s such a thing as wearing out your welcome, you know. So with season three, our big question – as we already know Lawrence Mooney, Marty Sheargold and Brooke Satchwell can be both smart and funny – was this: is the show going to tighten up?

After three weeks, we can finally provide an answer: nuh. Despite the many and varied attempts to mix things up, fifty minutes of this show is at least ten minutes too long. Still, considering pretty much every Australian panel show of the last decade has worn out its welcome at the five minute mark of episode one, that’s pretty impressive stuff.

If we knew exactly why this show works when so many others have failed, this blog would be a ghost town and we’d be off raking in mad cash from the commercial networks. But at a guess, it doesn’t hurt that it has a fairly specific remit. Panel shows that are too broad are usually shit because what’s the point? You can talk about general stuff with your mates. You want a topic that’s specific enough that you might learn something yet general enough that you won’t get lost. That’s usually sport or music, only sport has its own programs and music equals Spicks & Specks and the ABC shat the bed there.

Having a decent panel composed of various slightly different funny people would also seem like an obvious starting point but then you turn on your television and Peter Helliar’s still getting work so clearly we need to point it out yet again. Lawrence Mooney is the perfect host for this kind of show – a happy-go-lucky type with no worries about going sleazy yet able to look just a little embarrassed at how sleazy he’s going – Brooke Satchwell is the insider happy to be in on the joke, and Marty Sheargold is a sure-fire laugh getter presumably only hampered in his seemingly inevitable rise to the top by the occasional moment where he seems just a little bit creepy.

But that’s another strength of the show: unlike most panel efforts where it’s a flat out battle to get the funniest lines out there and so the shoutiest person – hello to Kate Langbroek if you’re reading – wins, Dirty Laundry Live has a core trio with different strengths. Marty will take it too far, Brooke will rein it back in, and Lawrence gets to deliver the capper that signals it’s time to move on. It’s pretty much the formula that’s made the various Gruen shows work; why it hasn’t been applied more often remains a mystery.

Hang on, no it isn’t, because it clearly comes off here as something they stumbled across by accident. The main factor in what makes Dirty Laundry Live work seems to be that they were largely left alone to figure out the show on their own. It’s a panel show about celebrity gossip: does anyone seriously think the ABC bigwigs are taking pride in it at dinner parties?

Not every Australian comedy show needs to be a massive break-out success, though fuck knows we could do with at least one a decade. Dirty Laundry Live isn’t that success, but it does deliver what it promises on the side of the box: a show that revels in mindless celebrity gossip while occasionally wondering why we give a shit about mindless celebrity gossip. The quiz show aspect isn’t great but it keeps things moving, the cutaways to other panel members laughing at jokes is annoying but we get that some people need to be told they’ve just heard a joke, and it’s all at least ten minutes too long (the sketches with John Wood scrape by largely because oh look, it’s John Wood).

But hey, we laughed. Which is more than we ever said about Tractor Monkeys.

OAM? OMG! Plus Fresh Blood

They say you’re only cynical of honours and medals until you or someone you like gets one, and yes, we’re cynical about this kinda thing. But it’s worth noting that amongst this year’s recipients of a Medal of the Order of Australia (or OAM) is comedy legend Rod Quantock, “for service to the performing arts, and to conservation and sustainability”.

Quantock, known for his left-wing activism and stand-up dissecting the policies of Liberal Party figures such as Jeff Kennett, John Howard and Tony Abbott, isn’t your typical OAM recipient. “My only disappointment is it’s not a knighthood”, he joked in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald. So are we, come to think of it, although fans of 1980’s British comedy may be pleased to hear that Lenny Henry is to be knighted in the UK.

Past comedy recipients of Australian honours include Barry Humphries, Clive James, Bert Newton, Garry McDonald, John Doyle and Rolf Harris, although Harris was later stripped of his.

* * *

Meanwhile, at the other end of their careers are the comedy teams involved in Fresh Blood whose sketches made for ABC iView last year are finally being broadcast. Wil Anderson is the host of three half-hour compilations and we have to ask why. Since when has any type of sketch comedy been funnier when introduced by someone? Even if that someone is a comedian. Not that Anderson does any gags at all. So, yeah: pointless.

The sketches in this first compilation included awkward relationship comedy from Bed Head, an awkward “the bride’s not coming to the wedding today” song from Donnatelegrams, a less awkward documentary about a middle-aged couple trying to re-take their kissing world record in The Record, and a not at all awkward a song about bikies from Aunty Donna. Of these, Aunty Donna is the funniest. Their song is pointed, funny, makes good use of a cameo from John Wood, and most importantly isn’t not too long. Some of the other sketches in this series should have aimed for brevity in the edit suite, or indeed the writer’s room. Bed Head and Donnatelegrams, while they had some moments, seemed endless, and The Record only got away with its length by being documentary-style.

We have no idea which sketches will feature in the final two compilations, but you can re-live our original reviews of all of Fresh Blood by clicking here.

Spread the Good News Around

Ahh, memories:

There’s something reassuring about seeing Gina Riley, Marg Downey, Jane Turner and Magda Szubanski on telly on Sunday nights. The women of our collective sketch comedy consciousness get better with age, and they never disappoint.

Presumably Ruth Ritchie never saw Madga’s Funny Bits.

Still, there’s no denying that – going by the collective sighs coming from television critics nationwide – nostalgia for the good old days of Australian sketch comedy is a big factor in the support that Open Slather‘s been getting around the traps. Who gives a fuck if it’s funny: it reminds people of their youth and that’s what sketch comedy is all about, right?

Fortunately, week three of the show itself reveals something with a bit more going for it than just easy nostalgia and “remember when” flashbacks. For one thing, there’s a sketch about playing Baby Boomer Monopoly which is both reasonably funny and an extremely sharp reminder why it’s a bad thing that Australian comedy is almost entirely focused on the ABC. They don’t take swipes at rich old people at the ABC because rich old people are their target audience; we’ll happily eat our words when The Weekly tackles housing affordability or university fees. Or any other internal Australian issue that’s even moderately divisive.

Open Slather still relies a lot on firmly average material: a series of Game of Thrones sketches were largely pointless – no, downloaders don’t “want to find out what happens before everybody else”, they want to find out what happens at the same time as everybody else – “Man vs Awkward” is not working out and the two priests seem to have disappeared up their own arses surprisingly quickly considering it’s only week three. At least the Downton Abbey sketch came right at the end of the episode and was basically about how there’s nothing to make fun of on Downton Abbey, so they’ve finally realised that.

But in between the dross a lot of the stand-alone sketches were surprisingly strong. Hamish Blake playing God at a press conference about “ticketing problems” was basically just an excuse for Blake to do his sub-David Brent arrogant arsehole act, but as a once-off bit it still worked. And Magda playing a snarky alarm clock that sneered out contemptuous abuse every time someone hit snooze was a good idea executed well; a show full of sketches that sharp would actually be worth everyone’s time.

It’s still a show with a disappointingly low strike rate, but even the duds have a glimmer of hope. “Wipe my bum for cocaine” at least had a point about how far people will go for free drugs; the one about the guy wanting six months off to catch up on prestige television drama probably needed at least one more draft. As for the run of Family Feud sketches… yeah, if the joke is “the family is actually feuding”, try again.

By definition an hour-long sketch show has to be all over the place. If you’re running that long you have to cast a wide net, and not everything is going to work for everyone. But after a fairly jarring first week things seems to have settled down enough to create a show that tackles a wide range of material while still feeling like all the sketches belong together.

Even better, it now feels like a show where everyone is pulling their weight, rather than the name brand performers being off in their own corner. The Family Feud sketches were weak but Jane Turner as host lifted them; Magda’s alarm clock felt like a character that could take off through sheer quality rather than – as is the case with the already fatally tired ‘Gina Minehart’ – sheer repetition. Hell, if Open Slather keeps improving – and of course there’s absolutely no guarantee that it will – it might get to the stage where the stuff you like is so good it’s worth sitting through the stuff you don’t.

And as for this observation from Ritchie:

Magda’s trancelike Gina Minehart moves like a cyborg, determined to consume everything in her path. Children all over Australia are already mimicking her as they reach for the hot chips after school, droning, “Mine… all mine.”

Yeah, we’re pretty sure she just made that up.

They’re Just Taking The Piss Now, Clearly

Press release time!

Unsuccessful delivery

Julia Zemiro’s Home Delivery, now in its third series, seems to have run out of funny people to take back to their childhood and interview. Kinda. This time ‘round there’ll only be three comedians – Matt Lucas, Alan Davies and Jo Brand – the rest of the shows will feature the likes of Ita Buttrose, Leigh Sales, Waleed Aly, Mandy McElhinney, Kurt Fearnley, Matt Moran, Billy Bragg, and tonight’s guest Ian Thorpe.

On the one hand that’s fine – the show’s format can work with non-comedians, and the celebrities featured are (for the most part) well-liked and interesting. But on the other hand, once you move away from focusing on comedians, who will usually keep the laughs going no matter what the question, you get in to serious interview territory, where unless you ask a decent question the show dies. Or to put it another way: Ita Buttrose won’t make up for your bad question by being funny. Ever.

Which begs the question, is Zemiro any good as a serious interviewer? Based on tonight’s episode, not so much. Ian Thorpe’s an interesting guy but his story is well known – he’s been in the public eye for around 20 years and Michael Parkinson got him to talk about the topics he’d been coy about in the past – his sexuality and his depression – last year. Basically, if Zemiro wanted to get “exciting revelations” or even “something interesting” out of Thorpe she was going to have to find a new angle, and taking him back to the pool where he learnt to swim didn’t really do the job. Even Thorpe’s old boxing coach could only say something we already know: he’s a nice guy.

The whole “taking people back to places from their childhood” angle is a nice idea but it’s really just a gimmick; it would be possible to get pretty much the same stories out of this show’s subjects in a more trad interview set-up. The missing element for this series is the research. Criticise Enough Rope all you like, we certainly have, but that show nailed its serious interviews (and its comic ones, for that matter) through research. A Quiet Word With…, Tony Martin’s short-lived interview series with comedians, also worked because Martin knew a lot about the people he was talking to.

As for Julia Zemiro, she’s a friendly, warm person genuinely trying to get interesting stories, but she’s going about it all wrong. You don’t just have to know a bit about your subject, you have to know a lot. And more importantly you have to know more than the audience does, because they’ll only be interested in your interview if they learn something. And about Ian Thorpe we’ve learnt nothing new tonight.

Braaaaaaaains

If you’re like us, occasionally you wonder how Australian comedy writers pass their time between the rare gig where they get to actually write some comedy. In the case of Michael Ward, writer for various Shaun Micallef projects such as Mad as Hell, mystery solved: he’s written a children’s book titled Zombie McCrombie from an Overturned Kombi. Take it away, press release:

Zombie McCrombie is a hilarious parody of the well-loved children’s book Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy, by Lynley Dodd. Zombie McCrombie (from an overturned Kombi) and his zombie dog pals, Montague Klutz (trailing his guts) and Benedict Wise (enshrouded by flies) roam the empty streets, sniffing the wind for bones they might gnaw … with a gut-bustingly hilarious outcome! Topped off by the perfectly gruesome illustrations by Gypsy Taylor.

We’re not exactly going to make a habit of spruiking kid’s books here – especially ones we haven’t actually read yet – but this one does have an excellent website which we can highly recommend if you’re looking to waste some time and maybe get into the mood to buy a book (not necessarily this one). There’s a nice swipe at Kathy Lette, a thumbs up for Alan Partridge’s zombie work, and this bit made us laugh:

Who or what inspired your interest in horror and zombies?
I think my earliest memory of what we today call ‘horror’ is of my father smashing through a bathroom door with an axe and wanting to kill me.  At the time we were spending the winter in a haunted hotel and I recall escaping from my maniac dad by climbing out a window, sliding down a snowdrift and losing him within a giant hedge maze.  Long story short: dad froze to death and somehow ended up in a photograph taken in 1921. I know, it barely makes sense.

Maybe the book might be worth a look after all.

Tomorrow, You’re Always a Day Away

This is more of an update to our last post than a stand-alone item, but TV Tonight has picked up on the news that Nine is considering a couple of comedies:

Nine is developing two new comedies: a half-hour and a one-hour show.

Andy Ryan, co-head of drama, recently told Fairfax, “Comedy is back on the table in a way that it wasn’t probably five years ago.”

Which is very good news. These appear to be in addition to Stan’s upcoming improvisation comedy, No Activity featuring Patrick Brammall. It feels like a long time since Nine was burnt by Live from Planet Earth, directing much of its comedy into travel shows such as Hamish and Andy’s Gap Year.

As we said in our last post, we’re not all that excited by this news. That’s because we don’t really think it is news. In much the same way that Seven seemed to be continually developing various late-night talk shows throughout the late 00s without ever putting one to air, comedy is currently the kind of format plenty of people (clearly including David Knox at TV Tonight) would love to see come back to commercial television. But the numbers never quite stack up.

That’s not to say they never will again, but it’s hard to see them doing so any time soon. Comedy only works on commercial networks when they can make fun of a topic everyone (or a close to a million people) knows about. Which rules out pop culture (quick, name five current musicians everyone in Australia knows about), which rules out the kind of comedy most of these articles are angling for: remakes of Fast Forward and The Comedy Company.

Seven’s Kinne is the future of commercial sketch comedy: a cheaply made, tightly focused show aimed at a narrow audience and therefore shown on a speciality channel in an out-of-the-way timeslot. As for mainstream sitcoms, the commercial networks already have them – only they wack in a bunch of drama as well and call them House Husbands or Offspring.

We’d love to see comedy make a big return to commercial television, but some vague promises from Nine and an improv show on Stan aren’t the second coming. Presumably Knox knows this:

More than any other genre, Comedy is about throwing a few darts at the target -some will land close to the bull’s eye.

Now, we just need to live in a world where the commercial networks are willing to gamble consistently on comedy over, say, reality shows where the product placement means the show costs them nothing to make,

Or drama series with just enough comedy mixed in to cover all the bases.

Or… hang on, that’s all that the commercial networks make these days.

Damn.

 

The State of Play in the World Today

Looks like someone at Fairfax has noticed there isn’t much Australian comedy on the commercial networks these days:

Those of us who remember the halcyon days of TV comedy of the late ’80s and early ’90s will know that shows such as The Comedy Company, Fast Forward and Full Frontal were “appointment” television – wildly popular, they made several contributions to the Australian vernacular (who could forget gum-chewing schoolgirl Kylie Mole’s punchline “she goes, she goes … she just goes”?) and gave an outlet for some of the country’s brightest comedic talent, including Magda (Szubanski), Gina (Riley) and Jane (Turner).

Sadly, those days are long gone, and commercial television has very few comedy programs on offer. In fact, outside of the ABC – which continues to support a range of locally-made comedy – and to a lesser extent SBS, there is very little to laugh about. Instead there is a constant stream of reality TV shows, the demand for which never seems to diminish.

Or put another way, if you can remember the Cold War, you might be able to remember the last time Australian comedy was worthwhile. Uh, what?

The trouble with these kind of articles is that they often – well, this one does at least – come from a place that demands a very specific kind of comedy. Unless Australia is generating a series of pop culture-mocking commercial sketch comedies (like they did when the author was young), it’s in the shitter. Still, at least this one isn’t asking why the commercial networks aren’t making sitcoms.

Where to start with the problems here? Well, for one thing, the commercial networks are making local comedy: Seven has two series of Kinne under their belt, Ten has three series of Have You Been Paying Attention, and Nine is never going to let Hamish & Andy back into the country. It might not be the same as all the kids in the playground talking about how awesome last night’s Fast Forward was, but it’s a lot healthier than the market for other late 80s relics like talk shows or late night news programs.

And then there’s the more subtle mistakes:

Comedy shows, on the other hand, tend to run for half an hour at a time, and even after that investment is made, they can flop spectacularly – Nine’s Ben Elton Live from Planet Earth and Seven’s Let Loose Live are examples of local comedies that had very short runs simply because their ratings tanked.

No, they had very short runs because their ratings tanked and they were broadcast live, and so could be openly axed without leaving behind a stockpile of publicly embarrassing episodes to get rid of. Remember the second series of The Wedge, shown late on a Saturday night after it flopped? Remember how Randling just kept on going long after everyone stopped caring?

And how this line got through to the keeper is a mystery:

[Andy] Ryan [Nine Network co-head of drama] also argues that comedy takes a slightly different guise these days, citing the hybrid genre “dramedy” House Husbands, for example.

Clearly he’s referring to comedy taking on the guise of something that’s not funny.

Like all good newspaper features, this firmly avoids coming to any real conclusion and yet still somehow manages to serve one up anyway: sure, Australian comedy (as we narrowly define it) might be dead on the commercial networks right now, but don’t worry – it’s coming back!

Um, no it’s not. Mentioning that the commercial networks have a couple of comedies in the pipeline isn’t cause for a sigh of relief, because they always have a couple of comedies in the pipeline. And they never get out of the pipeline because compared to pretty much anything else local they could be making, they cost too much and promise too little.

We’ve explained a bunch of times in our reviews of The Weekly why the old Full Frontal model of comedy is dead: even in Australia, pop culture is just too fragmented in 2015 to find enough targets everyone knows. Another Downton Abbey sketch? Uh, no thanks.

Without pop culture – and putting aside sport, which has its own comedy ecosystem (even we don’t cover The Footy Show) – all that’s left to laugh at on commercial television is the news and the world of personal relationships. The commercial networks aren’t going to go hard on news, as it might piss off advertisers, plus news is a big ratings winner for them, so a show that points out that much of their product is drivel might not go down well.

As for personal relationships… hey, you’ve already got House Husbands.

 

 

P.S. Anyone else notice that this article miscaptioned Fast Forward member Steve Blackburn as “Steve Blackman”. Shows you how much they really loved the old days of Aussie comedy, doesn’t it?

Vale John Pinder

We were sad to hear of the death of legendary comedy producer and co-founder of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival John Pinder. He died of cancer at the age of 70 on Tuesday.

“John Pinder was a great, big, loud, in-your-face force of comedic nature” said comedian and broadcaster Richard Stubbs on his Melbourne radio show, who wasn’t even slightly exaggerating. Most Australian comedians owe Pinder their careers; he discovered or championed many, but more significantly he created the scene in which they now work.

Born in New Zealand, Pinder grew up next to a lot where circus’s would perform. He also loved radio comedies such as The Goon Show, and was a keen fan of music. In the late 1960’s Pinder co-founded a band management company, managing bands such as Daddy Cool, but by 1970 he was organising rock concerts in Melbourne. These concerts required fill-in acts between bands, which sometimes included Max Gillies and fellow satirists from the Australian Performing Group, or a group of young ex-architecture and law students from Melbourne University called The Razzle Dazzle Revue (Rod Quantock, Mary Kenneally, Steve Blackburn, Alan Pentland and Geoff Brooks).

At this time the only venue for live comedy in Melbourne was the rear auditorium of the Pram Factory, home to the Australian Performing Group. The Razzle Dazzle Revue put on a show there (attended one evening by Pinder) but despite its success there was nowhere else for the group to go after the run. Just as they were thinking of disbanding, Pinder opened The Flying Trapeze Café, a live cabaret venue operating on a shoestring budget; the Razzle Dazzle Revue soon took up residence there.

Pinder’s motivation for opening The Flying Trapeze, it is said, was a “desire to create somewhere interesting to spend his evenings”. He certainly succeeded as the venue quickly became popular, with audience members often spilling out of the Café and on to the street straining to get a glimpse of the show. Building on this success Pinder opened The Last Laugh in 1977. Early acts at the Last Laugh included Richard Stubbs, Peter Rowsthorn and Circus Oz.

By the 1980s other live comedy and cabaret venues (including the famous Le Joke, located above the Last Laugh) had begun to open in Melbourne, and the city was home to a vibrant comedy scene. Comedians starting out now had somewhere to play and TV was also interested in the burgeoning scene. Shows such as Australia – You’re Standing In It, The D-Generation, The Comedy Company and The Big Gig featured acts who’d got their first professional experience in Pinder’s venues.

So big did the Melbourne comedy scene become that in 1987 John Pinder, along with others, co-founded the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. By the mid-1990’s it rivalled similar festivals in Edinburgh and Montreal, with its success leading to other Australian cities putting on their own comedy festivals to ensure that touring international acts would visit them. Pinder himself helped found or build-up several of these, and today’s circuit of summertime Australian and New Zealand comedy festival owes its existence to him.

Less well known is Pinder’s move in to television in the 1990’s, first as a consultant on Tonight Live with Steve Vizard, and then to Foxtel’s Comedy Channel. According to Wikipedia, it was in this latter role that he discovered Rove McManus.

In the 2000’s Pinder was asked to create a comedy festival at the Riverside Theatre in Parramatta, which became known as The Big Laugh. He ended up reuniting British comedy trio The Goodies in 2005, which led to an Australia and UK tour of their show, and also produced the first live shows of The 3rd Degree, which later transferred to TV as The Ronnie Johns Half Hour. He also helped devise Sydney’s World’s Funniest Island event, which launched in 2009.

There have been many deserved tributes to John Pinder in the last day or so, and there will be many more, but we think one of the best comes from Richard Harris’ 1994 book Punch Lines – Twenty Years of Australian Comedy.

John Pinder’s desire to create somewhere interesting to spend his evenings had unwittingly laid the foundations for a revolution in Australian comedy which would continue for almost two decades.

If Harris was writing that today he’d need change the “two” to a “four”, because there wouldn’t be the sort of comedy scene we have in Australia without John Pinder. Australian comedy owes him its life.

The Weekly Week Six: The End.

This was the week where The Weekly finally decided it was time to stop carving out that rut it’s been so proud of and just settle back into it. No more tinkering with the format: everything we saw this week was old news. More importantly, the tone of the show – which is probably the biggest problem – seems set. If you like Charlie Pickering being astonished, that’s a pit that doesn’t have a bottom.

The trouble with lifting your act wholesale from John Stewart is that John Stewart actually has a point of view. Pickering… not so much. Ending a report on gay marriage with “When an Englishmen, and Irishman and an Aussie walk into a bar, it turns out we’re the punchline” is not just a dumb line – it’s basically the safest possible thing you can say on the topic. You just did a story on how three quarters of Australians support gay marriage: you can afford to go harder on the guys who don’t.

But then there’s Tom Gleeson’s utterly shithouse “Hard Chat” segment, in which he gets the people who run this country and asks them “what would a dick xylophone sound like?” Ouch, sick burn. Looks like once again, the ABC has served up a comedy segment where the point seems to be to make politicians look good. Of course, even a segment where you sat politicians down then smacked them across the back of the head with a chair leg would still make them look good. SO DON’T HAVE THEM ON.

This is the last week we’re going to bother with The Weekly (hurrah!). It seems to be happy with what it’s doing: acting like it’s smarter than it really is and funnier than it really is. And that’s not its fault. Being on the ABC (a network that has to appeal to everyone from old farts and grumpy right-wing nutters to smart-arses who think they know a lot about comedy) trying to do a show designed for US pay TV (where the whole idea is to do something really well that will only appeal to a narrow audience) meant this was never going to work. And lo, it doesn’t.

Yes, it could be a lot better than it is. Maybe try giving Tom Gleeson no air time. Maybe get in another comedian or two to do short self-contained bits so the show doesn’t leave you thinking “how the fuck did that drag on for half an hour?” Maybe either actually make the big “hard-hitting” story actually hard hitting (that is to say, take a swing at some actually controversial issues – and maybe even take a stand on them too), or make it a lot sillier and cut it in half.

But then you’ve still got Charlie Pickering. Others have pointed out that his entire career arc has been from fake television news reader to real television news reader and back to fake, which gives you a pretty solid idea of why he got the job and why he’s not very good at it. The default setting for a host on a “John Oliver-like” show should be righteous indignation: who-gives-a-fuck-smarm is not the same thing.

The Weekly is bland, safe, largely pointless and a constant reminder that the ABC’s favourite kind of satire is the kind that doesn’t actually rock the boat. Fourteen more weeks to go, everyone: hope you brought a pillow.

Australian Tumbleweeds is Australia's most opinionated blog about comedy.
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