Delivering the blands
Cordell Jigsaw Zapruder may now be, as The Chaser put it, “Denton free”, but their new show Julia Zemiro’s Home Delivery still has the air of Denton’s meisterwerk Enough Rope about... Read More »
Tag: John Safran
Reading the Tea Leaves
Is Q&A a terrible show or what? Answers accepted only in the form of a snappy tweet that we can run across the bottom of the screen as we co-op social media into not realising that the ‘debate’ we offer is nothing more enlightening than the dregs of the letters page in your local News... Read More »
Mean Green Guide fighting machine
Some great comedy routines have been inspired by weird news stories or nutbag letters to the editor, and if the podcast I Love Green Guide Letters is any indication the latter is in abundant... Read More »
What’s So Funny About the Future of Australian Comedy?
For a few years now – well, it feels like years at least – we’ve been complaining / warning that Australian television likes everything about comedy but the making-people-laugh stuff. Of course, who listens to what we have to say? And so it has come to pass that in a few short weeks (July 25th)... Read More »
Willing to pay the Nice
So, Nice has made it to air and we finally got to see the context in which that duet of “Islands in the Stream”... Read More »
The Hamster Dance
The Chaser are back – as a proper team this time, not just various members hosting one-off arts specials and short-lived attempts to make public speaking thrilling – and it’s like they never went away. No, we don’t mean they’re such an important and vital part of our national consciousness that they never left our... Read More »
The Gospel According to Lucy
Within minutes of her first appearance on The Late Show (and quite possibly within seconds of her first appearance on TV, on The Big Gig a year or so earlier) audiences were divided on whether Judith Lucy was hilariously funny or a caustic, sarky harridan. Lucy's long-awaited solo TV series Spiritual Journeyseems just as likely to divide audiences, for that reason and... Read More »
Snippy snippets
Hamish & Andy's new TV show Gap Year gets started in a couple of weeks. It'll be interesting to see what the nice guy radio favourites will come up with. Information is fairly sparse but judging by the videos they've been posting to their website Gap Yearwill be the duo's usual mix of pranks, stunts and special... Read More »
Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Curtian
We don’t normally get much mail here at Tumbleweeds Central, but our recent post on Lawrence Leung’s new show Unbelievable drove someone to write in with a John Safran / Leung connection we’d missed*. It seems that, for once, our comparison of Unbelievable with Safran’s earlier shows had some basis in real-world events: There is... Read More »
In Search Of… Laughs
We all know television doesn’t work this way, but still: It’s tempting to think the decision to team the second half of Chris Lilley’s Angry Boys series with Lawrence Leung’s new series Unbelievable (ABC1, Wednesdays, 9.30pm) was guided by more than just the programmers grabbing whatever was next on the shelf after Hungry Beast finished.... Read More »