Say what you like about Working Dog, but they definitely know the right way to do an end-of-year wrap-up. Throw in a few old clips, make the hosts dress fancy, and otherwise stick to business as usual. Which is just the way we like it. Of the two Working Dog series that wrapped for the... Read More »
In a semi-recent interview to promote the return of Have You Been Paying Attention? – in the real estate supplement Domain, of all places – Tom Gleisner pointed out it was now a full decade since HYBPA? first aired on Ten, and that the first few seasons had been teetering on the edge of cancellation:... Read More »
A few months back we expressed befuddlement over the way 10 didn’t seem all that interested in exploiting one of their biggest local hits. MasterChef and Survivor get spinoffs, why not Have You Been Paying Attention? And clearly the programming chiefs at 10 are big fans of this blog – despite giving How to Stay... Read More »
This week saw the two hundredth episode of Have You Been Paying Attention? and the show feels as fresh as it ever did. We say “fresh” but we could have gone with “timely”, or “thrilling”, or “topical”, or any number of words that don’t necessarily start with “t”: HYBPA? came out of the gate strong... Read More »
With Taboo making its debut later this week on Ten, we now have the unusual situation where one commercial network all on their ownsome is showing roughly double the amount of Australian comedy than the ABC. Yeah yeah, we know: is Mr. Black really comedy? Let’s put it this way: it may not be all... Read More »
Remember how we were wondering if we were ever going to see Seven’s long-promised sketch show Orange is the New Brown? Seems we are – and sooner than we expected: New Seven sketch comedy Orange is the New Brown, featuring Nazem Hussain, will debut next week (that’s 8:30pm Thursday November 8 on Seven) Following on... Read More »
The funniest thing about Have You Been Paying Attention? is – okay, there’s a lot of funniest things about HYBPA? and we’ve covered just about all of them a whole bunch of times. Australia isn’t great at comedy quiz shows or comedy panel shows, so it’s a blessed relief to have this one around for... Read More »
It’s taken us an extra week to get around to the return of Have You Been Paying Attention, because quite frankly we were shocked. Shocked! Ok, maybe just shocked. Who would have thought that Australia’s most steadfast and reliable laugh-delivery-machine – well, once they fine-tuned the shift from half-hour to hour episodes at least –... Read More »
There’s a whole lot of ways you can try to make a television show funnier. Two of the more popular ones are a live audience and editing out the boring bits. So how is it that Have You Been Paying Attention? seems to know how to use both in a way that actually does result... Read More »
One of the things that’s probably too obvious to be worth mentioning but it’s a pretty dry period for comedy at the moment so here goes is that the days of single-theme comedy shows are all but over. Remember that nightmarish period where it seemed everyone was trying to do “Spicks & Specks, but with... Read More »