Australia Day ~ Television Focus

[annarti]

Part three of my Aussie pimping, now moving onto tv! In which case, you probably won't be able to watch it unless you're Australian, however you can YouTube a lot of it. We don't export much except Neighbours and Home and Away. We keep all the good stuff to ourselves :D

This is all comedy, because dramas are kinda hard to get clips for out of context, but Aussie cop shows are pretty awesome, too. That's most of what we do, comedy and cop shows. But we do them WELL.

The Chaser's War on Everything
These guys you may have heard of, or so the news and papers have led us to believe. They're. Um. Contravertial? To put it lightly? To the point of having been cancelled last year >> The clue is in the title. They focus mostly on mocking the hell out of politicians and current news events, but also other stuff. I will miss them =(

Full Frontal
This was a sketch comedy program from the 90s, and there hasn't been one to match it since. The David McGahan's World series of sketches was without doubt my favourite, because Shaun Micallef is just BRILLIANT and I love him a lot. If you want to YouTube but are scared to type 'full frontal' in for fear of what it'll come up with, other sketch series of note were the National Nightly Network News (eee Kitty Flanagan <3), anything with Milo Kerrigan (Shaun Micallef again) or Poida (Aussie for 'Peter', the role for which Australia knows Eric Bana) and the Netty Show (piss-take of the Footy Show, this one looking at netball. Also with Kitty Flanagan and Eric Bana, and Julia Morris when she wasn't irritating).

Thank God You're Here
Improvisation comedy at its absolute best. The actor is given a costume and thrown into a situation with no script of their own. SO MUCH FUN. Highly, highly recommend YouTubing this one. Also, I see the UK has bought its own version, so Pommies, look that up. Hamish Blake seems to come on there as often as he does here :DDD Don't look up the American one, cos they broke it.

Good News Week
Sort of panel quiz show looking at the news. Sort of. They side track a lot. At the beginning, each team is given two props and a song and they have to guess the "Strange but true" news story it relates to, so that's what this is. The second clip is the finale from 2008, which was awesome fun. Paul McDermott, the compare, started out in musical comedy, so yes he can sing :D

The Games
Ran for two seasons preceding the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, a mockumentary of the Olympics organising committee, featuring John Clarke, Bryan Dawe and Gina Riley. Here, they discuss the merits, or lack thereof, of various Olympic sports. When it ran, they sometimes took bits from the news about the organisation of the Olympics and made an episode out of them, like with the tickets not fitting in the machines and such. As a result, a lot of people thought the entire show was real, including the bits they HAD made up themselves, like the 100m track only being 94m long X3

The Dream
Man, the Olympics created some good comedy. Ran every night of the Games, picking some stuff that had happened over the course of the day and yakking about or commentating on it in typcial Roy and HG style. They came back again for the Winter Olympics and the Athens Olympics, but not for China because China wouldn't allow it =( Roy and HG, btw, are actually characters. Like, if you ran into either of them in the street, they wouldn't actually be Roy or HG. That so made sense.

Stuff not included because of either my fail or YouTube's:
Frontline: A mock news show from the ABC in the 90s. YouTube has NOTHING unless you want to watch the entire thing. You know you do. Go look it up.

Underbelly: Series one was all about the gangland wars a coupla years back. At the time the show went to air, court cases were still being held for the people who weren't dead yet >> As such, it only got shown in Melbourne (where it all took place) about, what, a year later? And even then it was a heavily edited version of it. Very cool show, this one. Last year they did a sort of prequel to it, setting up all the people from the first series with their parents/mentors/whatever back in the 70s. Dunno what they're doing this year but we shall see!

Blue Heelers: My favourite Aussie cop show <3 Set in the tiny Victorian town of Mt Thomas, just good country coppers dealing with country crimes like stolen sheep. It was fun :D And it had PJ who was awesome <3 I kinda lost track of it after I got back from the UK, because it started going downhill from there. Still in a country town, but they tried to make it more DRAMATIC with serial killers and blowing up their cop shop and filling the cast with sexy blonds and it just didn't work. Got cancelled a coupla years after that, sadly. Shoulda just left it alone and let the country coppers go about their business. Loved this show~

Water Rats: Another cop show from the 90s set in Sydney Harbour. I never watched it, but a lot of good actors came out of it.

Rush: A cop show that's still actually running, omg. I don't watch it myself cos... I dunno why. I fail at keeping up with tv shows when they're actually on tv, I think. But yeah, set in Mmmmmelbourne? I think? Seems to show the less glorified side of the cops--I know one of them is crooked, anyway. I got that impression from the first episode.

City Homicide: Australia's shot at a CSI-type show. Never watched it because I missed the first couple episodes and had no idea what was going on. Should get around to downloading this one.

Kath & Kim: Suburban bogan mum and daughter, with Gina Riley and Jane Turner, both of whom were on Full Frontal, so you know it's going to be funny :D Hard to find clips from when it was on ABC, and it's gone crap since Channel 7 took it up. So many shows do =( ABC version was AWESOME.

And various others I know so little about it's not worth me mentioning them o/

Comments

[ladylight.livejournal.com]

Ai! But where is The Shaun Micallef P(r)ogram(mme)? :O :O

[annarti.livejournal.com]

In the comedians post that will come tomorrow X) Along with Newstopia and Talkin' 'Bout Your Generation. I can't put them ALL up, with Full Frontal there as well! People will start thinking he's a tv whore! =0

[silvanime.livejournal.com]

Have I mentioned that one of the writers of Underbelly was my script writing teacher at uni? She's totally awesome.