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 Micallef Programme
Bob’s House of Horrors
It’s a sad state of affairs when we have to stop and think about whether we’re going to have to explain who Bob Franklin is to a comedy crowd. But let’s be honest: it’s been a fair while since he was a deadpan regular on Australian comedy TV. At a guess, we’re going to say... Read More »
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 »
They’ve fallen over!
Viewers of Wednesday Night Fever, The Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting and The Roast could easily be forgiven for thinking that we, Australians, just can’t do sketch comedy any more. Not relatively young Australians... Read More »
Give a dog a bone
As we often point out 'round these parts, we Australians don't make much sketch comedy. Particularly the sort of “pure” sketch comedy shows associated with British television, programs like That Mitchell and Webb Look or The Armstrong and Miller Show, or if you're old enough to remember them, A Bit of Fry & Laurie, Smith & Jones and French and... 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 »
Ben Elton vs The Twitterverse
So Live From Planet Earth returned last night, and while the changes made were for the best it wasn’t like there was a whole lot of them. More Elton stand-up and less shoddy sketches was a good move, but it still felt like tinkering around the edges of a now-proven dud. What, they thought last... Read More »
Yet Another Thing to Thank Tony Martin For
Remember the “good old days” of Australian comedy DVD releases, where extra features were a joke instead of actually containing more jokes? But as everyone who scored a copy of series 3 of The Librarians for Christmas now knows, All That’s Changed: not only does this particular slice of Aussie comedy hilarity contain a descent... Read More »
Status Symbols
A preview disc of the first two episodes of the upcoming third season of The Librarians has fallen into our possession, and while a full-length review isn’t yet good to go – short version: it’s funny, you should watch it – we can talk about the first three scenes and what, taken together, they do... Read More »
Dog Training
The final episode – you’d have to guess forever – of Wilfred aired earlier this week and hard as it is to admit, I’ll be sad to see it go. Not all that sad mind you, because that first series was pretty much a textbook example of how to put together a comedy that contains... Read More »