GRAN TORINO (2008)
Y’know, for a picture with a lot of extraordinarily serious themes in a deep newsreader’s voice – about racial tension, the legacy of old wars inc. returned servicemen, urban crime and the choices facing the Young People of Today, traditional values vs. modern lack of values, the difficulty of communication between different family generations, and did I mention racial tension at all – I can’t recall the last time I laughed so much at a nominally dramatic movie.
It’s not that the movie isn’t good, either. It’s real good. It’s just that Clint Eastwood, playing the ultimate aging grump is utterly hilarious, and you probably haven’t heard such a comprehensive collection of hand-crafted, traditional quality old-school racial epithets in the world of entertainment from anyone other than Don Rickles in around the last 30 or 40 years.
Trust me – they’re all there. He really knows how to put that little spin of extra grumpy old guy FEELING on them as well. Some nice elaborations on a theme too. I guess I should be all hand-wringing and brow-furrowing about people getting offended by this practice, except:
(a) It’s 100% valid in the dramatic context, without a skerrick of doubt; and
(b) I’m part of one of the racial groups that comes up for a good ol’ fashioned verbal pasting, and I thought THAT was hilarious as well.
So, anyway, once or twice per decade, at least, Clint makes this western where he’s the uneasy, long-fighting, man of action, usually with some dark, horrible secret buried in his past, who’s decided to settle down somewhere. Without intending to, he becomes embroiled in the lives and causes of some good, regular squaresville folk, of the kind he presumably never previously had much of anything to do with during his roaming days on the prairie, or wherever the heck it was he roamed, exactly.
Some bad guy or guys mete out some hideous injustice to the square-john neighbours, or they already have done, or they’re about to, and Clint is soon, reluctantly, and somewhat to his own surprise, back in action-man mode one last time (or from a career perspective, apparently any given number of last times) to put himself on the line to take on the bad guys, reverse the injustice, stand with the ranchers (or whatever it is they do for a living), and then die dramatically, or ride off into the distance, or make a dud like Firefox, or whatever.
Clint’s consistency in following this rigorous policy reminds me of the great popular culture writer Rick Johnson’s one-time review of an early 80s album by the US pomp-rock band Kansas:
“They’ve recorded 1974’s Album of the Year six or seven times now, and they’ve got it down to a skit.”
Of course, Rick didn’t mean that as a compliment.* What I’m saying about Clint is intended as a compliment. He makes that picture great every single time.
Clint made The Outlaw Josey Wales, Pale Rider, and The Unforgiven all pretty much out of the same bolt of material, and then he got so confident with the material that he made Gran Torino, and didn’t even have to put horses, prairies, ranchers or the 19th Century into it.
The new version is set in the current day, kind of a small town, or the suburbs of a bigger one, and Clint is a Korean War veteran, with some dark horrible secret buried in his past, whose wife has just died, and that was pretty much his only connection with broader humanity, other than his barber (they have a relationship based on exchanging highly abusive racial epithets to each other’s mutual satisfaction), his dog, and some of the old boys down at the bar he sometimes frequents. His grown son is a wet-end, the son’s wife is worse, the grandkids are horrible selfish meatheads, the local priest is some whiny, know-nothing tenderfoot fresh out of seminary college, the streets are crawling with shiftless, bored and amoral youth in gangs, and even worse, a large family of Asian people has moved in next door.
Clint plays the kind of guy who permanently flies a US flag from the front of his house, and probably has matching jockey-shorts, presumably starched for extra annoyance. He walks tall, wears an expression of permanent suspicion (of everyone) mixed with a certain amount of dyspepsia, you don’t even need to wait around for about twenty minutes of the picture to KNOW that he still keeps guns around the house and to KNOW that he keeps them in perfect working order.
He can fix anything mechanical ever made on the planet including some items that haven’t been invented yet, has more tools in his shed (both literally and figuratively) than any Bunnings Warehouse, and his pride and joy is his early 1970s Gran Torino, which is maintained in the exact condition it was in when it rolled off the Ford assembly line he was working on back then.
He drinks beer on his porch out of a cooler next to his chair. He both chews and smokes ‘baccy. He is the last of his line, and I guess that stands for the character and the bloke playing him. There is not one atom of anything politically correct to be found anywhere on his person. You’d think his kids and grandkids would have to be the stupidest people on the planet, because if any of us had this guy for a relative, we’d alternate between worshipping him and putting the odd couple of beers in the freezer ahead of time to make sure they were at the perfect temperature when he was ready for them.
The local Asian gang is trying to recruit the young guy from the house next door to their nefarious ways, even though he really wants nothing to do with them and would prefer to continue his studies. However, they’re persuasive, not to mention violent. Clint probably wouldn’t care anything much about this, other than the initiation task they set the kid is to steal Clint’s car, which is not exactly the brightest idea any character has had in a movie lately.
Eventually, through the feisty young girl next door (the kid’s older sister) and through the family forcing the kid to come and do odd jobs for Clint to make up for their disgrace at his failed car-heisting attempt, Clint slowly, and tremendously grudgingly, becomes involved with them and their problems.
Soon enough (using that expression in its broadest and most leisurely sense) Clint is checking the guns and riding out to protect the homesteaders, by taking on the ornery hombres who have meted out injustice to them.
You can pretty much fill in any narrow remaining blanks for yourself.
If it’s the same picture all over again, this is a pretty inventive, thoughtful and slightly revisionist variation on the theme, and more than enough of one to make seeing this worthwhile, even if you’ve seen Clint play pretty much the same tune at least three times previously.
Setting it in the modern day is the key – it means the solutions available are less pat, the moral landscape more complex, and the resolutions more impactful.
The slower pace, although deliberate, and even if sometimes leisurely is mostly a blessing as well. The most entertaining material in the film is Clint grappling in a state of permanent perplexity (and sometimes near-apoplexy) of trying to come to terms with the ways of his new neighbours, which are just as traditional as his, although apparently from a completely different tradition (which, of course, in some ways turns out to be not so different at all.) All subsequent developments in the film are based on this relationship, so the material is essential anyway.
But it’s a long film, and in terms of construction where it seems to drag a little is on the downhill run to the climax, where there’s maybe one or two too many additional plot hiccups, and it’s just taken maybe a little too slow. There’s one scene in there in particular, probably because the writer wanted to show the young priest character as, finally, a stand-up guy with his own rigorous moral code, as someone worthy of Clint’s respect, which adds nothing essential to the plot, is a little confusing besides, and would only have helped the shape and pacing of the movie by excusing itself, and later turning up on the DVD extras as a deleted scene.
Other than that, all good, you bet. Clint does it yet again, and does so with the same movie that all his Clintamaniacs have enjoyed so many times before, and perhaps thought they might not get to see him do again.
His direction is sure-handed and as reliable as those well-oiled tools in his character’s garage. How he does this on a schedule where he seems intent on knocking out roughly two movies per lunch-break these days is beyond me. I know Clint’s realistically on a time limit now, but only Woody Allen seems to turn out quite so many movies, and in Woody’s case, you’ve barely had time to remold your face from the look of aghast horror from the last one before the next clunker’s turned up in the arthouses to be inevitably praised by the truly clueless as “His best since Crimes and Misdemeanours” (as if that was any Woody Allen landmark to shout about). In Clint’s case, he’s fighting the trend and still making good movies.
But as fine as his direction is (and he’s probably STILL underrated as a movie director) what you’ll wander away from Gran Torino with is his portrayal of the main character lodged firmly in your skull locker. Clint’s long-since displayed his knack for deadpan humour, but there’s something truly unforgettable and iconic about this performance. That perpetual scowl of confusion and annoyance, that chewing up and spitting out of the words, the perennial irritation verging on an explosion of ill-temper, not to mention an even-handed spray of hilariously delivered foul dialogue for every race, creed and occasion. Trust me, it’s a barn-burner. This may be the funniest non-comedy I’ve ever laughed with, rather than at.
(9 out of 11 on the laboratory-proven MPHOAH scale)
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* (Rick Johnson also used to sometimes quote a similarly-oriented line from the weary schoolteacher character from some sitcom or other, directed to the regular class-clown character in that show, “Your material gets fresher every time I hear it.”
Of course, not everyone gets the humour in this. Once Rick was interviewing the band Loverboy, and told them that his magazine had received this “letter” from a fan of theirs (entirely fabricated), and then quoted them the line “Your material gets fresher every time I hear it.” Interestingly, the band’s guitar player took this as an enormous compliment.)
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From a comment-post thingo I made under the article (or whatever you’d call it) headed:
10 More Off the Back Shelf:
You also may enjoy this comment I stumbled across, contributed by a blobbing person on the Sydney Sun Herald website, of all places:
“I caught a couple of episodes of Hey Dad! recently - possibly the most unfunny, unoriginal, poorly-scripted, poorly-acted Australian comedy of all time.”
Hmm, all I could say in its defence there is that there would be plenty of competition. Most people don’t remember “The Bluestone Boys”. Or “Bingles”. No-one much talks about the one with Jon English in it either. And I think there might have been one with Johnny Farnham in it that was even worse than the Jon English one, if such a thing is imaginable.
From the same comment-thread (or whatever you call it), a comment from reader Tony T:
Don’t forget Let The Blood Run Free, Bligh, Bob Morrison, Brass Monkeys, Hey Dad spinoff Hampton Court and… fanfare! the Aussie version of Are You Being Served.
On second thoughts, do forget them.
Tony’s list of classic Aussie inverse-entertainment gold in the sit-com category is impeccable.
A rock critic once made an observation, re progressive rock and/or fusion music, which went something along the lines of: To rock out in 11/8 time isn’t so much impressive or difficult as it is impossible.
I feel the shows under discussion, when considered individually, or all together (now), achieve much the same effect. Watching any of them, it’s easy to get the impression that producing comedy isn’t so much impressive or difficult, as it is impossible.
Incidentally, for completists in the field of trademark Aussie entertainment gold, the Jon English show was called “All Together Now” and the Johnny Farnham one was entitled “Bobby Dazzler”. In the field of immortal thespian tragedy, next to these, Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” comes over like “Spongebob Squarepants”. And you could make a case, if you really had to, that “Bingles” and others from the list were even worse.
“Bligh” for example, was astonishingly rotten, and featured the supposed cream of the then bold New Wave of Australian comedy talent. I remember seeing just my first three minutes or so of it, and just being frozen in my seat with the sheer appallingness of it, from conception to writing to acting to direction. I went back to it, just occasionally, in that kind of “can’t take your eyes off the car-crash” way, and had my initial impression richly confirmed. It’s a rare creative enterprise that so thoroughly defines its own creative DNA with such determined miniaturism. I mean, three minutes was probably twice as long as you really needed, and you just KNEW the whole show was like that.
“Let the Blood Run Free” is a valid, often-overlooked inclusion. (’Often overlooked’ most probably for the most valid reason - everyone’s comprehensively forgotten it, a distinction it went to great pains to genuinely earn.)
People went easy on it because it featured tried-and-true veterans of the supposedly ‘alternative’ stage comedy scene here who’d never got their big TV break before. But as colourful and energetic, and kind of kid-oriented (whether by accident or design) and nominally a soap-opera parody as it was, it was flat as a tack and never funny. It was a stage conception that needed a well-sozzled audience to generate any remote hint of laughter, and it died reliably and repeatedly in the clinical petri dish of television.
It should never have GOT to television, which brings up the whole area of who makes the decisions, and why what flies under the apparently merely generic description of “Australian TV comedy”, has, over lo these many years, so reliably reeked of stinkitude. (Thanks to the professional wrestling tag-team of Edge and Christian for that expression; and for being so much funnier during their relatively brief run as a team than roughly 97% of Australian TV comedy.)
One might well ask, why limit this to sit-coms? The only reasonable negative answer would regard the expenditure of time compared to the harvested value of further research in this area.
“Three Men and a Baby Grand”, (or was it two? - it’s so hard to remember, and even harder to care), “Fast Forward”, “The Comedy Company”, the possibly even more valueless versions of both shows that followed, “DAAS Kapital” (inventive in format and visual content by Australian TV standards, and still amazingly awful - the level of the fey, stilted, smug, private school/Uni humour of the enterprise being aptly indicated by the title), the sub-MAD magazine parody of that hopeless show on Channel 9 that was meant to bring sketch-comedy roaring back to life a few years back that I can’t even remember the title of, “The Comedy Sale” (two episodes of sheer disaster on Seven, and I’m not even certain that both aired), etc etc etc.
If anyone had any conscience, or the limitless quantities of free time that would be necessary prerequisite to research and confirm, or even care about, this claim, going back now and investigating the supposedly satirical (or whatever were the hopeful claims of the time) majesty of then-lauded items such as “Australia - You’re Standing in It”, “The Gillies Report”, or any version of “The Big Gig” (whether “Re-Jigged” or otherwise) would result in both a magnificently futile treasure-hunt, and the kind of profound embarrassment which would occasion the reddening of all available cheeks in a five-block vicinity.
(a) The writing was, much like the fabled contents of Al Capone’s vault, i.e. not so much disappointing or over-hyped, as just not there;
(b) Gillies as a comic actor was a theatre-restaurant level performer, of a subtlety comparable to a series of walls crashing on one’s scone, and it wasn’t like he had the flair to extract comically fulfilling “bigness” from this trait, like a John Belushi, or a Curly Howard, or anything, he just had the one gear, and that was it. If he ever “got” the difference of appearing on television, as opposed to the stage, I never witnessed that particular epochal moment.
(c) Mike Carlton used to send-up the politicians and featured notables of the day (as well as the standard methods of presentation of those stories, and their media hosts/presenters in a radio comedy segment of the day called “Friday News Review” and his portrayals and the writing were much more apt, surprising and hilarious, on material that wasn’t notably more subtle or less immediate, or really much different in intent, than the Gillies material. The key difference is that Carlton’s impersonations were funny in themselves, sly aural caricatures from an expert mimic, and Gillies was a guy who tried to get laughs by comic Bob Hawke hairpieces, bulging his eyes, pursing his lips, and wiggling hairy eyebrows. The man of a thousand face.
(d) Did I mention the writing? There were serious political reporters of the day writing material at least as funny about the exact same stories, and no less creative, innovative or subtle either.
Most of what’s been issued as “Australian TV comedy” (and I say that’s a purely generic description, because comedy generates laughter, and these didn’t - they’d be more honestly termed “Material presented with the hopeful intention of somehow being viewed as comedy”, although that would be wearing to have to type too often, and also would have expanded TV programme listings to telephone-book dimensions) were thuddingly-obvious, frying-pan-across-the-head, stabs at the comedy of pure recognition (i.e. they’re trying to get the reaction “I KNOW someone just like that” or “Aren’t those politicians JUST like that?”) in which the sheer naked desperation of the approach was only matched, and sometimes, miraculously, surpassed, by the quality and style of performance, not to mention the howlingly empty bucket of writing inspiration.
Folks will say I’m very much down on Australian comedy. Actually I don’t care where comedy comes from, only whether it makes me laugh, whether it came up with something new, whether it was well-performed, it has a definable perspective, it sustains a tone etc etc
As brutal and “unfair” as it may seem to others, to me it’s a fair reaction to what was presented as Australian comedy on television - it simply reflects the weight of the bad vs the weight of the good.
What perhaps brings this point of view into sharper relief is when you try to list the really good Australian comedy TV shows over, say, the last 25-30 years.
In fact, let’s have a bash.
- Mother and Son
A decent sitcom, with plenty of laughs, probably carried to a fair degree by an all-time great comedy characterisation by Ruth Cracknell, with a very solid and well-schooled comedy foil in Garry McDonald - it was overly stagy, to a degree that generated a certain level of cheesiness and a stilted, if not Stilton, quality, but it was sometimes very funny.
- Frontline
A great show by any standards, and one with an unusual amount of both satirical and comedic perspective - only one or two episodes maybe misfired or showed the seams more than was edifying, but the vast majority of it was exceptionally well written and acted.
- The Games
I find these “behind the scenes of the headlines”/”how things REALLY work politically” shows, inc “Yes Minister”, “The West Wing” and a few others, to be inherently somewhat smug and creatively jury-rigged, which to me is somewhat off-putting, but in “The Games” (and the various flavours of “Yes, Minister”) the results are sometimes undeniably funny and apt. “The Games” was flavoured with the more colloquial, laconic approach of John Clarke, and seemed more improvisational and slapdash (it may have been the former, but probably wasn’t the latter) and that made it more digestible to me. (Co-writer Ross Stevenson undoubtedly also deserves credit, as do the other regularly featured performers for adjusting themselves to the style, but it certainly feels like a John Clarke project.) You could say that the area of Australian management of an Olympic Games (or any big sport/entertainment communal project) is/was an easy target, and it’s possibly true, but I think the way comedy works, you get points for generating laughter, and and for the show as a whole “feeling right”, if you know what I mean, and not so much for degree of difficulty. The latter might come into play in aesthetic considerations if the other factors are also present and working like the proverbial clappers, but not if they’re not.
- The Late Show
The D-Gen and friends one - plenty of loose-brained, generally well-performed fun, vaguely disrespectful in tone, and sometimes less vaguely, the kind of mix of inventive tonight show presentation methods and sketch-comedy that suggests “This is TV and we can do anything here”, a philosophy that I’m particularly susceptible to. Some of the linking “hosted” material was a little stiff and some of it didn’t work, but the show had the advantage of the viewer knowing that if something flopped for them, there was something better coming pretty much straight away. It also had an unusually high strike-rate for good material, and a good range of varied comedic approaches within the team. The kind of playful disrespect underlying proceedings had apparently completely dissipated when some of the same principals (and none of the same principles) were later involved in the stridently unimaginative coffee-table chat show-cum-Young Libs/Labor meeting, “The Panel”.
- Hey, Hey It’s Saturday
Almost exclusively a reference to the original show of this title which aired on Saturday mornings. Some long-term showbiz pros (and one younger one, albeit also a showbiz maven of the extremely traditional school) found themselves with a kids show and presumably nobody watching, and made up a show as they went along, apparently deciding that this was the perfect opportunity to ignore all the rules they (and the rest of Aussie showbiz orthodoxy) had previously rigorously followed.
Although words like satire and parody were presumably a million miles from their minds, their idiotic sketches, often shambolic presentation, wisp-thin regular “characters”, and general air of circumstantially-forced improvisation resulted in something very like a parody of kids shows, and conventional Australian variety shows in general. Much like the three pre-Monty Python guys involved with the English kids show “Do Not Adjust Your Set” had independently decided in the late 60s, it seemed like HHIS was made for the sensibilities of those on the programme (and those in the audience who got the gag) rather than any conventional presumption as to what children’s entertainment should entail.
As a result it garnered an audience rather larger, and less demographically confined, than Channel Nine had probably expected, and the kids were laughing right there along with the adult audience.
Greater acclaim was to come with its move to Saturday nights, as Australia’s most successful TV variety show of a time, and also it becoming a genuine institution of Australian television. Its early years as a night time show were still pretty good, and it handily survived the addition of a conventional female foil in Jacqui McDonald, as she was very good in the role, and added spark at a time when increasing conventionalism and the falling away of genuinely innovative ideas was slowly but surely hardening the show’s arteries.
As time oozed on, HHIS perhaps inevitably shed all the aspects (in particular the bizarre, threadbare regular characters) and “Anything Can Happen day” attitude that had made it such a welcome shock to the system, added more and more dull nominally “celebrity” guests and conventional and largely unnecessary segments, and became a part of middle-Australia, instead of what had made it work in the first place, which was that it was APART FROM the middle-Australian entertainment mainstream.
This coincided with, and was probably inherently married if not welded to, the increasing perception of his own star status, conservatism, and apparent self-importance of its host, Daryl Somers. People more familiar with the latter years Somers, and who never saw the Saturday morning run of the show would probably be extremely dubious about this (I can assure you from anecdotal evidence of many, many conversations with people younger than me on the subject) that Daryl Somers was once an extremely engaging, quick-witted, open, amusing and generous TV host, who could, when circumstances permitted (which usually meant when everything went wrong at the same time) be the funniest thing on the show.
The stiff, stodgy, formal compere/admiral that Somers became in the show’s later years, as its success solidified, and congealed the show, was almost unrecognisable from the earlier version. By the time he welcomed Billy Joel, as if a god, to (and I’ll never forget this outstanding cringe in Australian television history) “Our humble little show”, that show was long since a museum relic, albeit a popular one. It had become as Aussie as the proverbial meat-pie, and with all the same entertainment value, not to mention nutritional content.
But the original conception of the show (from when Daryl joined, until it went to nights), and in some ways the conception was that there was no conception to speak of, remains unsullied as an example of just what people can do when they put no mind whatsoever into it, and just go out and have fun, flying by the seat of their pants. At this distance down the track, and looking around at what’s happened in Australian TV since, and now, it seems like it must have been a complete miracle, if not accident.
- League Teams
Put three ex-footballers in charge of a Thursday night show listing team changes for the then Victorian Football League in the 1970s, and you might expect something a little rugged around the edges by pro TV standards, (ex-Aussie Rules players then weren’t all perfectly coiffed, groomed and mannered wannabe media professionals) but you didn’t expect an accidental comedy cavalcade. The show, which seemed to have no clearly defined time-limitations, featured craggy ex-champion footballers and long-time media residers Jack Dyer and Lou Richards, alongside the only one of the three who even remotely had the inclination or ability to host the show and remain vaguely aware of format, Bob Davis. (And, in all fairness, the ability was remote and the awareness certainly appeared to be vague.) It was one of the most entertaining shambles ever to appear on Australian television, and over time grew into a late night monster in which the actual team listings and changes were a barely noted McGuffin, and the show was actually all about the interplay between the three principles, along with Lou’s ancient jokes adapted to rubbish Jack Dyer, Bob’s similar but less frequent ones adapted to rubbish Lou Richards, Lou’s ever-expanding recipe segment which probably never finished a recipe in its history, and came to exclusively feature any foodstuff with the word “balls” in the title (meat balls, fish balls, rice balls, prawn balls etc), Bob’s ill-fated attempts to control the others and keep this mess vaguely resembling a television show, and Jack’s lifelong pitched battle with the English language, any proper names of a non-Anglo-Saxon derivation, and his astonishing, rusted-on, lack of any understanding of a medium he’d already been working in for at least a decade when the show started, much less when it finished.
What was said and implied on this show in casual asides was not-infrequently stuff you couldn’t even refer to in any mass medium of the time in Australia. (Mr Dyer’s casual reference in passing to a Footscray player of the time being known to the cognoscenti as “Jack the Gripper” was an unforgettable example, as was Bob and Lou’s reaction when they realised what he’d said.)
No-one apparently ever informed Jack Dyer from beginning to the very end of this show’s run that that thing over in the corner was the monitor rather than the camera, so Jack perennially sat on one end of the desk staring at a 45-degree angle to “camera-true” over at something none of us could ever see, and his comments would emerge, irrespective of the timing or content of the rest of the show, from the side of his mouth, in a kind of disembodied manner, made apparently to no-one in particular. To plug sponsors Carlton Draught, rather than merely parrot some slogan, Jack would sip away at the old seven-ounce glass right there on camera, while intermittently pursing his lips and grunting “Beautiful” with a fervour that bordered on the pornographic.
As much as it was Bob Davis that kept it vaguely approximating a show, and Lou Richards who kept the energy going and the proverbial volleyball in the air, it was Jack’s disembodied comments delivered from a very strange angle, (and often after five or ten minutes of near-silence) that most frequently popped the home crowd. Even at a distance of decades it’s impossible to forget the night an indignant “Captain Blood” refused to believe that the first name of Melbourne’s Sean Wight wasn’t pronounced the same way as that of the actor who only Jack, in the known world, believed was pronounced “See-Ann Connery”. Bear in mind, purely by way of additional disbelieving comedy value rather than ethnic humour, that Jack, of course, was of Irish extraction himself, and yet had apparently managed to live his entire life without becoming aware of how the name “Sean” was pronounced. And then there was the night he was trying to remember the name of the show his grandchild watched all the time, and finally pronounced, in ringing triumph, “See-Same Street!”
This was basically anarchy nominally disguised as a football panel chat show, and a darn good thing too. It still stands as probably one of the funniest shows in Australian TV history, and one of the most influential too, even if that was completely by accident. (And it was.) It gave rise to all the later “variety-style” footy chat shows, including Nine’s much-later Sunday “Footy Show”, its much more mainstream and successful Thursday night sibling also known as “The Footy Show”, the Sydney rugby league motion cave-painting, also known, with unbridled innovation, as “The Footy Show”, and via extension the one that people inexplicably watch on Channel Ten on Saturday nights which is nominally a humour-based footy show, which isn’t called “The Footy Show” but I’m so filled to the brim with enthusiasm for that I actually can’t recall right now what its name is. Not to mention, (and preferably one wouldn’t) the many and varied attempts by Channel Seven to replicate the success of the Nine “Footy Shows” during the five year period when Seven didn’t have the football coverage, the one thing all of which shows had in common was that they were hopeless. The only thing entertaining about any of them was purely conceptual - i.e. that Seven would have wasted all that time trying, and hopelessly, to ape a format from another network, when that format entirely owed its existence to a show that was from Seven in the first place.
There had, of course, been footy panel shows long before “League Teams”, (Pelaco Footy Inquest comes to mind), but what the various “Footy Shows” were attempting to knock off, and still do to this day, was the mix of personalities and cack-handed, knot-headed banter that “League Teams” had brought to the format. Incidentally, Sam Newman’s first appearances “playing himself” as it were, i.e. the seeds of the characterisation that became familiar on Nine’s Thursday night “Footy Show” were also on “League Teams”, when his peculiar sense of sarcasm and then off-kilter rather than off-the-planet humour became apparent during a couple of fill-ins for an absent Jack Dyer in the show’s latter days, Jack by then being apparently committed to an almost bi-weekly schedule of car accidents. In the style of the show, Jack’s bingles were treated with appropriate concern and respect, by means of the sound-effect of a police or ambulance siren being played whenever Jack’s name was brought up.
That’s about it, at least that I can think of right now. I might have left one or two significant ones out (”Aunty Jack” much as a lot of it doesn’t fly so well these days, definitely would be in there as a genuinely innovative ground-breaker, because of its lack of regard for Australian conventions of the time, and because enough of it is still funny, and it sure was a poke in the eye back then, but this is outside the time-frame I set, of the last 25-30 years. “The Norman Gunston Show” (original ABC run of shows only) - an outgrowth of “Aunty Jack” incidentally - would absolutely be in there, and is again, outside the time-frame. Basically 25-30 years is plenty of time to allow a country to come up with significant comedy shows of any type, without going back to what would now seem pre-historic or antediluvean times to many. (Bearing in mind that to have seen “Aunty Jack” or Norman Gunston in the bloom of their first airings, you’d have to be at least 40-45 years old in one case and not far under that in the other, which excludes a lot of people who presumably also feel they’d like to experience the occasional decade which includes a genuinely funny Australian TV comedy.)
A couple of the shows in the list started at the same time as those shows, but they continued into the 1980s, so fit the bill for time-frame. (You could make a case that Hey Hey, It’s Saturday wasn’t the same show lauded above by the mid-80s, but memory suggests that it still had a spark or two earlier in that decade.)
Seven’s “World of Sport” could “have claims” as the horse-racing fraternity are wont to say, but it was, in intent, a serious show about sport which naturally tended to comedy due to the personalities involved, the mostly happily indulgent approach to encroaching chaos of its avuncular host, (Melbourne) Ron Casey, that inevitable chaos itself, and the palpable lack of caring about hiding its inherent Sunday morning casual lay-about nature. While it undeniably regularly generated a lot of unscripted laughs, the intent was different from its effective spin-off, “League Teams”, where, ‘eventually if not sooner’, it seemingly became apparent to all concerned with the show (with the possible exception of Jack Dyer) that its actual appeal lay in the humour generated, rather than the transmission of information concerning football team composition, which was its nominal reason for existence.
The fact that that’s pretty much all the shows I can come up with, and that “World of Sport” although not a comedy show in intent, induced innumerably more genuine laughs over the years than all of the Australian comedy shows which don’t appear on the list of “the good ones” above, pretty much tells the story.
Australia has by and large, and to put it poetically, been pox at producing good comedy TV shows. A few random strays I may have left out by accident (there was that sort of private eye comedy-adventure show that I think John Clarke may have had some involvement with, that was at least watchable, I just remembered) don’t really change the overall result.
There’s one outstanding plotted/scripted comedy show in there, a couple of pretty good ones, a solid sketch comedy show, and a few happy accidents in the chat/variety show area. The other side of the ledger is filled with a landslide of, not just less successful shows, but amazing garbage that cumulatively most amazes in that it got made in the first place, much less actually got to air. (Admittedly fleetingly in a few cases.)
Interestingly, the middle ground is almost non-existent, or so closely tending to the landfill side of the ledger than any distinctions seem hardly worth their cost in imaginary electrical typeface. Some hail Kath and Kim. To me it’s Kingswood Country 20 years down the track, only with not quite the same general butcher-shop approach to performance, style and direction, and sausage-factory approach to episodic comedy writing. I say to the Kath’n'Kim fanciers, have a look back at it ten or fifteen years down the track, if you dare, and then prepare to be as heartily embarrassed as those tomb-silent folks who raved about The Comedy Company or Fast Forward at the time, and then have had the sad misfortune to revisit them since. But you could make the case that Kath and Kim isn’t as immutably crappy as, say Bingles or Hey, Dad. It would even be true. Personally, I say why waste the typeface.
What do we learn from all this, other than some of you concluding, via impeccable if possibly misleading inductive reasoning that, in the famous words of the boss from Herman’s Head, Leapster is a “bitter old crap-hound”.
We learn what we should already know, prairie pardners.
We learn that for all the excellence Australians may have achieved in the performing, technical, and creative areas of film and television, that our achievement in producing writers hasn’t matched up.
We learn that the executive types who oversee and ok the comedy content for television have no earthly idea, apparently.
We learn that, with very rare exception, innovation in Australian showbiz largely only occurs by pure accident.
We learn that dragging nominally successful comedy theatre-restaurant performers from their natural habitat of the stage, bong-tinged dressing rooms and drinkies-affected audiences, and plonking them within the confines of a television screen isn’t exactly a guaranteed formula for providing limitless TV comedy gold.
We learn that, with regard to scripted shows, having funny TV comedy without the prerequisite of funny TV comedy writing is not so much difficult or impressive as it is impossible.
We learn that, flying in the face of all probability, the opportunity of watching decades’ worth of successful movie and TV comedy from around the world can be entirely wasted on people who either refuse, or have a complete psychopathological inability, to extract the basic principles of what worked and why, from this massive body of examples.
(And placing at their disposal a heaping pile of comedy that didn’t work from the same media and time-frame would clearly be a waste of time for the exact same reasons - they couldn’t extract the key principles from it if they had a detailed instruction manual, with diagrams. To paraphrase another pro wrestling comedy great, the Honky Tonk Man, they couldn’t grab it if it had HANDLES on it.)
We learn, as we do from so many other fields of cultural achievement, that Australians too willingly, too wilfully and too damn early, abandoned the concept of the cultural cringe. Perhaps nowhere more than in the field of comedy, although the general area of Australian movies would probably richly earn a silver medal position in there.
If there’s one thing we learn above all else, or should, it’s the principle that until the industry, all individuals who sail in her, the kneejerk defenders of tripe, and/or good ol’ Aussie viewers, accept both the fact and the degree of failure in Australian TV comedy, then any improvement remains impossible.
Or to put in another way, if you endlessly defend, or idealise, the half-baked, then the production of the halfway-decent becomes improbable, and excellence becomes effectively unattainable.
And did I happen to mention the writing at all?
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