Just over two years ago we lost John Clarke, if not the greatest satirist the Southern Hemisphere has ever produced then certainly in the top two. Clarke was best known for writing and starring in the sitcom The Games and for his weekly sketches with Bryan Dawe, but he did an awful lot of other... Read More »
Amongst all the solid but average comedies currently enjoying long runs is Open Slather. Its cast, production team and the formula of the show are very familiar from the 80's and... Read More »
Press release time! ABC APOLOGISES FOR THE CHASER’S MEDIA CIRCUS ABC TV has today issued a pre-emptive apology for the whole series of the Chaser team’s new show, The Chaser’s Media Circus, which starts on ABC on Wednesday 15 October at 8.30pm and continues for 8 weeks. “Looking forward a few weeks, we’ll definitely have... Read More »
Is The Late Show the most overrated Australian comedy of the last twenty years? The answer may surprise you: yes it is. Not only is it massively overrated, it continues to be overrated to this very day – which, considering we’re currently celebrating the twenty year anniversary of its initial airing on the ABC, gives... Read More »
Well, it’s not like Jim Schembri is dead exactly, but as Crikey reported on Friday he has left The Age: Age film critic and senior writer Jim Schembri has been sacked from his position following revelations he had repeatedly dobbed on the employers of his Twitter critics and hinted at taking legal action under the... Read More »
It’s crap. And with the obvious out of the way, let’s get down to business. 1998’s Totally Full Frontal was the third version of the by-now-a-full-decade-old Fast Forward franchise, where television and ad parodies mingled with single gag snippets and traditional comedy sketches to create an hour of, at the very least, television. When most... Read More »
Nobody seriously expected anything startlingly original from Nine’s first proper stab at prime time “all-new” comedy in almost a decade. Once the cast details for Live From Planet Earth eaked out – name after name from Comedy inc is never a good sign – expectations for anything fresher than the contents of Elvis’ colon evaporated.... Read More »
One of the more impressive contortion acts on offer at the moment is watching various Australian television columnists and reviewers trying to talk up Laid without using the word “funny”. That’s because, despite its good points – and it does have some – actually being funny is not one of them. By a long, long... Read More »
In a new, and no doubt soon to be highly irregular, feature of this blog, Bean Is A Carrot trawls through her collection of books about Australian... Read More »
So, as a token gesture towards the idea of live entertainment, I went to see The Shambles – Live in a Ballroom a few nights... Read More »