While we were still working on the 2025 Australian Tumbleweeds Awards, the ABC aired the new one-off, satirical, First Nations-led tonight show Always Was Tonight. And new episodes of The Weekly with Charlie Pickering. The contrast between these two structurally similar, topical comedy shows could not be more stark. The Weekly…, as we’ve long documented,... Read More »
Welcome to the Australian Tumbleweeds Awards 2025. Our readers have been voting for the best and worst of Australian comedies of 2025, and you can find the results below, but first, here’s a reminder of the 2025 comedy year that was… Every year with Australian comedy the baseline gets that much lower. We never really... Read More »
It’s perhaps unfortunate that The Weekly with Charlie Pickering airs two days after Have You Been Paying Attention? and a day after The Cheap Seats. They all often use the same clips, and if you happen to watch all three shows, it’s clear that The Weekly… doesn’t have the funniest jokes about those clips. But... Read More »
Welcome to the Australian Tumbleweeds Awards. People from around Australia have been voting for their best and worst of Australian comedies of last year. But before we get to the results, let’s remind ourselves of what went wrong (and right) with Australian comedy in 2024… We can usually tell what kind of a year Australian... Read More »
The ABC’s 2025 upfronts announcement last week says a lot about why the ABC makes the scripted comedies it does. And it’s all about where comedy programming sits within the ABC’s corporate structure. A couple of years ago the ABC restructured and split its operations into two areas: Content and News. Content oversees comedy, drama,... Read More »
So messed up and lacking in cash is the ABC comedy department at the moment that we pretty much only get one comedy show on air at a time. Last week we had the final episode of The Weekly. This week, in the same timeslot, we have the first of a new series of Gruen.... Read More »
So The Weekly isn’t funny. No news there. You know what else contains no news? The Weekly itself. Wait, hang on a second. The selling point of the current version of The Weekly is that “we watch the news so you don’t have to”. As the ABC Youtube channel put it: “Charlie Pickering takes all... Read More »
As previously mentioned, currently Australian television is serving up one (1) new Australian comedy series: The Weekly with Charlie Pickering. One show. Across all of Australian television. Real solid foundation we’ve got for a blog there. This perhaps wouldn’t be quite so big a problem if The Weekly was any good at its job. As... Read More »
The results of the Australian Tumbleweeds Awards 2023, in which we honour the best and worst of Australian... Read More »
You know what they say – you cannot kill what does not live. And so trying to shovel some dirt over The Weekly once again proves to be utterly pointless, because across 19 episodes the whole thing showed about as much life as your average Dodo and yet it’ll somehow be back again next year... Read More »