Celebration of a nation
The ABC’s 90th-anniversary program ABC 90 Celebrate! was a noble attempt cover nine decades of broadcasting but left some... Read More »
Tag: The Gillies Report
Unshockable
Here’s our take home from Shock Horror Aunty: most things that people say are shocking aren’t. Especially when you see out-of-context clips of them 30 or so years on. This is particularly true of... Read More »
It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World
There are a lot of reasons to like the work of Shaun Micallef, but the one that stands out to us today is that he’s his own man. When Shaun Micallef shows up, you get The Shaun Micallef Show: he has his own style of comedy, he knows what works for him, and that’s the... 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 »
A comedy fan in The Lodge?
We've argued before on this blog that The Gillies Report deserves a DVD release. It was enormously popular at the time, it won a Logie in 1986 for Best Light Entertainment Series, it's fondly remembered by those who saw it, many of the sketches still stand up (there are plenty on YouTube), it's a significant series in the history of Australian comedy, and now it seems a future Prime Minister once sat in its audience. What more could you... Read More »
A Plea for Preservation (pt 1)
If you’re anything like us, you’re constantly in awe at the vast collection of Australian television comedy that’s been released on DVD. Seriously, there’s a best-of collection of Graham Kennedy’s Coast to Coast: who ever expected... Read More »