BEN ELTON - LIVE FROM PLANET EARTH POST MORTEM AND EPISODE THREE REVIEW

SO WHAT HAVE WE LEARNT FROM THE BEN ELTON EXPERIMENT?

Channel Nine has been rebranding itself as the home of comedy this year – with such comic treats as %&*# My Dad Says and Mike and Molly to offer up to a comedy-hungry TV audience. Part of that rebranding was Ben Elton: Live at Planet Earth, which when all is said and done was a commercial and critical failure.

But that’s not the last hurrah for Channel Nine and their approach to the funny – two highly anticipated shows on my list will both pop up on their network later this year. One is Hamish and Andy’s new venture, whatever that may be, and the other is the Gruen Transfer-esque show about television The Joy of Sets, featuring Tony Martin and Ed Kavalee.

So I guess the real question in the post-mortem is – what can those shows and the network that produces them take away from the Elton failure?

1.              Don’t hype and over promote your show if you don’t know what the finished product is actually going to be. We were completely smashed with Ben Elton’s face during the cricket and the lead up to his pilot – creating expectations that this would be everything you loved about his previous work crammed into a one-hour live laugh fest. But Channel Nine couldn’t have known it was going to be good – since it was live, they were counting purely on one man’s comic ability to produce an entire hour of quality comedy with a rapturous live audience. Entertainment is hugely about meeting, surpassing or failing the audience’s expectations, and Channel Nine’s promotions department set the bar way, way too high. Now that’s going to be unavoidable for Hamish and Andy, but I hope at least that The Joy of Sets will start from a bit less of a handicap.

2.              Always have a team of writers. My biggest problem in the wash-up from Live From Planet Earth was that everything felt so much like it was written by Ben Elton – a misanthropic, joyless take on the world from a middle-aged man that would have been current and contemporary in 2001. Maybe 1997. Jokes about SPAM, rappers interrupting singers, teen culture that all seemed like the comedy world had longed moved past it. The trick to a lot of comedy is identifying things people didn’t know they thought were funny, not things we’d been finding funny for half a decade. Elton desperately needed input from writers, editors and performers to give his show the comic edge it really needed. I don’t think that will be a problem with the two dynamic duos I mentioned earlier.

3.              Allow for chemistry and utilize the strengths of your performers. I thought the way LFPE was structured was one of its biggest problems. Elton/Sketch/Elton/Sketch/Elton doesn’t allow for rapport and is a breeding ground for awkward transitions and segues. People like watching people interact, and although it still didn’t work all that well, Elton seemed to realize this during the third episode.  What’s more, can we find a job for all the talented young people on this show in better projects please? The cast really was doing the best they could with bad material and it is they I felt most sorry for when the show was cancelled.

There’s more, much more (Don’t fight Twitter, don’t explain your jokes, make sure the show is sustainable), but I don’t want to beat a dead horse. Live from Planet Earth was a worthy experiment, maybe even one that needed more time, but I don’t think it was ever really going to work. I hope that Blake, Lee, Kavalee, Martin et al learn from the mistakes made by Elton and the Channel Nine promotions department. I’m sure they will and I can’t wait to see what they come up with for the rest of 2011.

For those that care – here’s some thoughts on the third and last episode of Live From Planet Earth. By special request.

I started out the third episode of LFPE (after the awkward transition from coverage of a huge tragedy) thinking about how Ben Elton did a great job going after Ricky Nixon and that whole debauched scandal.

Then he did a section from his book Inconceivable pretty much verbatim. Oh well, never mind. Then he took a swing at the newspaper industry. Not a funny swing - just a swing. Then he made a Rod Stewart joke. Also from Inconceivable – the farmer/sundried tomatoes sketch. I think its from Inconceivable.

After that, the show debuted its best character so far in current affairs host Tuffy Nightly – beautifully played and well suited to this type of comedy show. Good start. After that, Elaine Front turned up - continuing to try to bail out the Titanic with a bucket – and interviewed the cast backstage in what was a spectacularly awkward couple of minutes. The character is funny, though. Maybe she could be the Mr. G of this show.

Madonna turned up on Girl Flat. So there’s that. I do like the fact there’s a lot of very funny women on this show. Though I still don’t understand why Lily Allen is Milly-Molly-Mandy.

The show meandered along at a half-decent pace and then we hit the throat lolly song. I have to admire the cast’s commitment at getting through that one. Remarkable. The audience was just completely dead. It was like they’d recorded it after everyone had left. Or everyone had left during the ad break - or just filtered out during the show. Anyway, I’m done with ragging on it now. Everyone involved do something better next time, please?

TODAY’S SCREAM AT THE TV MOMENT:

After Veronica Milsom’s Nigella Lawson impression, Ben Elton says this. ‘Nothing like a good old double-entendre, huh?’ Is there really anyone hearing that and going – ‘Oh, it was DOUBLE ENTENDRE! Got it!! Brilliant! I didn’t get that at all before you explained it! Breast/breast. With you now.”

Positives? One line I can’t stop saying – ‘I’m sure you’re the same.’ It might become the new ‘That’s what she said.’

TV REVIEW - BEN ELTON: LIVE FROM PLANET EARTH EP 2

Ben Elton started out the second episode of Live from Planet Earth by apologizing for the first one. Youch. I always think it’s a better option, if your show has been hammered in the press, to just ignore that and do a better show the next time around. Actions speak louder than words and all that. The show rated shockingly last time, but I wanted to give it a chance, so I'm back for round two and hoping for improvement.

The main criticism of the show last week that Elton responded to was that there was a prevalence of knob and vagina jokes that bordered on the pathological.

That was not what I saw the main criticism to be. The main criticism of the show, from myself and all the other reviewers I read, was that Ben Elton: Live from Planet Earth wasn’t funny. Knob and vagina jokes are fine if they’re funny – but improving the show isn’t about making it less crude, it’s about making it wittier and less obvious.

So this week Elton opened up with a Julia Gillard impersonation from Paul McCarthy that could have been brilliant in the right context but was killed by bad writing, framing and staging with a half-assed ‘The King’s Speech’ reference. Hey, we’re off to another cracking start!

Elton followed that up with ‘Bit of satire, ladies and gentlemen.’

No, that wasn’t satire, Ben. That was parody. Satire has a point. Also, there’s not much more insulting than someone explaining what kind of a joke the audience has just seen to the audience.

Then Elton decided to have a crack at Twitter. He actually hit on a fairly funny idea – what if Twitter had been around in Shakespearean times? Maybe Hamlet would have never got off the ground? That’s a funny idea – though he didn’t really take it to its extreme – but I want to address the theory.

Twitter has no effect on whether a show is successful. Sure, it can be a very annoying outlet where Average Joe can have a crack at anything he wants for no reason, but bad shows have been successful and good shows have failed, and vice-versa, since THE BEGINNING OF TELEVISION. Twitter is not to blame for your show not getting out of the blocks – the quality of the show and its ratings will always be the most determining factors. I don’t like Twitter much either, but having a go at it on national television just seems petulant.

Other cringe-worthy moments include Ben Elton pointing out to us that which was painfully obvious – that PEOPLE WHO WERE IN THE SKETCH YOU JUST SAW WERE TOTALLY OMG THE PEOPLE WHO WERE IN A SKETCH TEN MINUTES EARLIER IN A DIFFERENT WIG. THE MAGIC OF LIVE TELEVISION IS SO MUCH BETTER THAN CANNED LAUGHTER AMERICAN COMEDIES. It just got painful after a while.  Especially given that Two and Half Men is Channel Nine’s most popular show.

Other thoughts:

-                Girl Flat was just as messy as last time, though occasionally more funny than the first time around. I really like Veronica Milsom’s Lady Gaga, as it actually feels like a character rather than a caricature.

-                Elton continued begging for the audience to stay tuned after the break, next week etc. It’s bordering on the desperate. Also desperate, describing his one successful sketch from week one (Elaine Front) as ‘celebrated’, only to watch it groan under the weight of Kris Smith’s charisma vacuum.

-                Most of Ben Elton’s stand-up material isn’t new, but that’s not a bad thing. If you’ve read his books, you’ll have heard most of it before. It’s more suited to Grumpy Old Men than groundbreaking live sketch comedy.

-                Apart from the last line, I don’t think there were any laughs at the Big Miner sketch. The singer/rapper one was better but suffered from being a sketch that would have been current in 2001.

-                Tim Minchin was amusing, which was an improvement over most of the show.

Overall, the show was a mild improvement over last week, mainly because there were less sketches and they were given a bit more time to breathe. I still didn’t laugh though, save for a mild giggle at Elaine Front.  Less knob gags, same amount of laughs. Last week I was kind because I thought this show was doing good things and I want to give live Aussie comedy a chance. But that live Aussie comedy should be Adam Hills in Gordon Street tonight. It’s much, much better.

TV REVIEW – BEN ELTON: LIVE FROM PLANET EARTH

OR AS IT MIGHT BE KNOWN FROM NOW ON – BEN ELTON, VAGINA JOKES FROM PLANET EARTH

(Channel Nine, Tuesday night, 9:30pm)

The first ten minutes of Ben Elton: Live from Planet Earth must have contained at least 2000 words, two comedy monologues and three character sketches. Between Elton’s fast-paced stand-up delivery and the sheer velocity of the first two sketches, it was like walking into comedy machine-gun fire.

(If I was a harsher critic, I would follow that sentence with ‘but more painful’. But I won’t.)

Ben Elton has been a great comedy writer, a very good stand up comedian and at times a brilliant novelist who has written some of my favourite books. I’m not sure he’s any of those things any more, but he’s still more than qualified to run a show along these lines – which is why it’s a shame that it doesn’t hit the mark.

The show’s main issue is not the talent involved, which is mostly great – but the format. The premier live comedy sketch show in the world, Saturday Night Live, usually operates at a 50% or lower comedy strike rate, and that show has produced some of the greatest comedy writers and performers in the world. Furthermore, even SNL pads out its running time with musical performances and pre-recorded material. Live from Planet Earth throws its young cast into a sterile environment counter-intuitive for comedy success and expects them to nail it. The fact they do a half-decent job is credit to their talents.

As for the writing, Elton made a joke during the opening of the show about how strange it was that the more juvenile the humour, the more ‘mature’ you had to be to get it. I assumed it was just a joke, but two segments later it felt like an apology. The humour never gets much above fart-joke level.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this scattershot, scatological approach – some of the sketches are bound to die, but some are bound to work – and it’s just a matter of ending on the right side of that ledger. Most of the early sketches are kept mercifully short – though the flipside of that is any that really work aren’t given time to breathe. Fortunately most of them are just wig-and-funny-voice humour, so no breathing required.

I hadn’t laughed out loud, though, until the third break when Genevieve Morris turned up as celebrity interviewer Elaine Front, and her chat with game-for-anything Ruby Rose was genuinely funny and made even funnier by the fact that Ruby Rose was such a charming guest – probably the most charming she’s ever been. The mini-sitcom that followed, Girl Flat, that was almost amusing enough to warrant an entire segment – almost.

Elton himself opened okay and mainly stuck to the sidelines as the show went along. He kicked off with at least four scatological jokes in about three minutes. No wait, I wrote that and then he made another one. They weren’t bad scatological jokes, but they were just scatological jokes. He was much better once he left the current affairs humour alone, which came off more as an angry political monologue. That’s fine, but maybe save it for episode two.

The performers are universally talented though some haven’t quite struck the balance between performing for the television cameras and performing for just the studio audience. Early sketches felt like they were trying way too hard but that should improve as the show goes along. The standout at this stage is Veronica Milsom*, who debuted two good characters and a great Lady Gaga interpretation.

(*Full disclosure – I went to university with Veronica. But she is the legitimate standout.)

I also need to mention Paul McCarthy. McCarthy has appeared in pretty much every Australian sketch comedy show I can remember in the last ten years (Totally Full Frontal, Comedy Inc and Double Take are a few examples.) He’s a talented, experienced member of the cast here and accordingly appeared in exactly one sketch. That sketch didn’t even feature his primary comedic talent – impersonations. It just seemed like a huge waste. Why is he there if he’s not going to be used?

One more thing - I noticed a trend early on and started a tally of how many of the sketches involved mentioning a vagina. We were four out of four early on. Plus a few mentions during Elton’s stand-up. By the end of the show we had an eighty per cent vagina-joke-per-sketch strike rate. A couple of the jokes were funny but by the end of the show it was just fatiguing.

Overall, I think the format of Live From Planet Earth is counter-intuitive to comedy success. Accordingly, the show veers from amusing to cringe worthy – and the highs aren’t high enough yet to justify the lows. I’ll keep watching because I like the talent – but improvement is desperately needed.

Feel free to let me know what you thought in the comments!