Five Stars

Crossing a review-style format with doco-reality TV is the best comedy idea to hit Australian TV screens since Alan Jones decided to squawk for five minutes just before 8am on the Today Show (sadly that piece of daily Gold is no longer). The smartly dressed Myles Barlow is the man responsible for the hilarious, disturbing, challenging, WTF? show Review, returning for its second series on ABC2 tonight at 9.30pm.

So what's under review for Review 2?

"I review Addiction, Fear, Starting a Cult, Being a B-Grade Celebrity, Buck’s Parties, Happiness, Justice, Racism, and Killing Kyle Sandilands, to name just a few."

Sadly, Kyle Sandilands was not willing to add total authenticity to that review.

The trailer :



Featuring one of the most realistic stabbing scenes ever seen outside of Melbourne public transport, Barlow reviewed Murder in series one :






To finish, some good advice from Myles Barlow :

"Don’t listen to advice, would be my advice. And yes, I’m aware that by taking that advice you’d be doing exactly what I’ve told you not to, but therein lies the central paradox of critical analysis. Do you listen to others or do you make up your own mind? A smart pin-stripe blazer doesn’t go astray either, just quietly."

Noted.

There's Nothing Like...Fake Fakes?

By Darryl Mason

Within just two hours of Tourism Australia's new international "There's Nothing Like Australia" advertising campaign being launched, a parody site with an almost identical web address, was posting mock ads, and scoring the sort of widespread media attention that the original campaign launch sought, but did not get.

Some of the first images on the parody site.

The parody site is now taking suggestions for future slogan and image combinations.

As is the legitimate site.

The cynic in me wonders if, in fact, the real and parody sites are not more connected than it would appear.

After all, what's a major Australian tourism campaign without parodies and mockery? Why let someone else get in first and do something much worse with the slogan than any of the above?

Word got out that Tourism Australia was going to take legal action against the parody site, which bumped up the media coverage of the real and fake campaign sites, before Tourism Australia announced that no legal action was on the cards.

An example of a fake fake ad campaign?

Australian Beaches "Like A Petting Zoo For Great White Sharks"

It blows my mind that anybody is seriously discussing whether or not Robin Williams is being racist in his jabs at Australians :

Robin Williams loves Australia, he's been working and holidaying here for decades, and owned a house up near Palm Beach for years. If you find anything at all offensive, as an Australian, in what Williams had to say, you should have heard him ripping Australia and Australians during his unannounced appearances at Sydney's Harold Park Hotel and The Comedy Store back in the mid-1980s. Now that was some hardcore slagging of Aussies. Brutal, and absolutely hilarious.

Prime minister Kevin Rudd would have been better off correcting Williams and pointing out that Charles Darwin did in fact visit Australia, and his observations of Australian fauna, and flora, played an important role in Darwin's humanity rocking theory of evolution :

While Darwin never saw a kangaroo in Australia, despite riding a horse from Sydney to Bathurst, he did see many other species. Darwin made some very astute observations about Australian animals, especially the platypus. At the time, the platypus was regarded as a curious creature, and it baffled the scientific world. Darwin was the first British scientist to see a platypus in its natural environment, at a creek near Bathurst, in 1836.

For over forty years after his visit, Darwin used and relied upon collections of specimens from Australia that related directly to his 'theoretical concerns at any given time and his recognition of the peculiar status of the continent'.

A Comprehensive Look At Charles Darwin In Australia

UPDATE : An unnecessary apology from Robin Williams, with an offer of friendship :

"Mr Rudd, I apologise. I would like to modify my terminology and use the term `English good old boys' instead.

"I'd love to go to a strip club with you in New York...."

Brilliant!

Hungry For More

Just one example why Hungry Beast is the best new Australian current affairs show in many, many years :



And this interview with an Australian soldier who served in Afghanistan is stunning :



Plenty more Hungry Beast clips on their official site here, and on YouTube here.

There was a bit of nervousness, as you'd expect, amongst Hungry Beast producers and ABC executives as to how a show could leap almost instantly from absurd satire to devastating journalism. But it worked. It worked brilliantly.

Hungry Beast returns in 2010.

The Chaser Is Not "The Media", You Morons




By Darryl Mason

Australia's most boring columnist, Gerard Henderson, has long thought satirical ABC show The Chaser is not comedy television but "The Media".

Incredibly, the editor of The Australian now also thinks The Chaser is "the media". No, really. He does. The editor of The Australian newspaper can't tell the difference between A Current Affair and a comedy show full of made-up nonsense and occasionally cutting social and political satire. He thinks The Chaser, like 2GB or the Sydney Morning Herald or The Australian is part of "The Media"and so therefore must be hammered by the ABC's Media Watch :

For weeks, Media Watch, the in-house organ of the ABC's opinion makers, has bagged management over a broadcast computer system that is slow to settle in. But now presenter Jonathan Holmes and his team have a superior scandal they can chase hard next Monday night - The Chaser's dour and disgraceful sketch that mocked the wishes of dying children and the people who love them.

Then again, maybe it's easy for the editor of The Australian to confuse The Chaser with real "media". After all, The Chaser has covered the Iraq War, and the 'War on Terror', over the years, with a savage honesty that The Australian shied completely away from.

Plus, The Chaser did once have a newspaper.


And so The Chaser caved in, or were likely forced to, and just like The Glass House and The Gruen Transfer before it, the show will now fall under a new regime of increased censorship because people were upset by their reaction to a show that implicitly aims to provoke a reaction in a television era filled with the drab, the unchallenging, the politically correct, the grindingly bland.

The Chaser are clearly not happy about what's happened :

We want to make an apology for a sketch we created called “The Make a Realistic Wish Foundation”.

We’ve just heard from the ABC that they’re suspending the show for 2 weeks. We were keen to keep making the show, so we’re disappointed by the decision, and we don’t agree with it.

But that aside, we’d like to apologise. The piece was a very black sketch. Obviously too black. And we’re really sorry for the significant pain and anger we have caused.

Many people have asked how could we possibly think a sketch like that should go to air. We realize in hindsight that we shouldn’t have done it. We never imagined that the sketch would be taken literally.

We don’t think sick kids are greedy and we don’t think the Make a Wish Foundation deserves anything other than praise. It was meant to be so over-the-top that no one would ever take it seriously.

But we now understand the sketch didn’t come across as intended, and we take full responsibility for that. Now we’ve seen the impact of the piece we wish we’d thought it through better. There was no value in it that justifies the impact it’s clearly had on people whose grief or trauma is so great already. We should have considered that. We got it wrong. We’re sorry.

We'll be making no further comment at this time.

What else is there to say?

The Chaser's audience wanted 'The Boys' to keep pushing the limits of what they may or may not find funny, just how far 'The Boys' would be willing to go, for a laugh or a reaction, or something beyond the reaction most watch television with, a nonchalant 'Eh.'

Now The Chaser has most definitely found out what that limit is.

Dying Children.

Well, at least actors playing dying children.

Not so long ago, Australians could tell the difference.

ABC News : Australians Divided Over Censorship Of The Chaser