Fans of Australian television sketch comedy now have a chance to reminisce about the golden years of July 1992 to October 1993 when The Late Show was broadcast on Saturday nights on the ABC.
A group of diehard fans of the show have created the Champagne Comedy podcast, in which they discuss their favourite sketches and segments from the show, episode by episode. As the presenters have often observed, the cast often had a prickly relationship with television critics, because the show received some terrible reviews. Most notable among these critics was one who worked for a Melbourne newspaper.
For some reason I followed his career closely after he regularly started slagging off The Late Show, and the later projects that some former members of the cast made during the late 1990s and early to mid- 2000s. This is why I am able to recall some random examples of this prickly relationship, much to my own amusement, and possibly that of my reader.
When The Panel, a humorous topical discussion show, first started in 1998, one of the core cast members, including Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner, Jane Kennedy, and Rob Sitch, would regularly appear on radio to promote it. In one appearance, Kennedy discussed her recent interview with this newspaper's TV guide. It was her first time hosting the show. The angle of this article was that Kennedy was both excited and nervous about hosting the show because, being a woman, she wasn’t sure that her male colleagues, would allow her to, or that she would be able to handle it.
Actually, rather than speak to her, the author fabricated the whole story. The first she knew about it was when she saw it published. This was years before the term "fake news" entered the lexicon. She was justifiably offended by this patronising and sexist article. “Ooh, goody. I’m a girl. I get to host,” she said, paraphrasing him.
Another time he wrote an article where he got Tom Gleisner’s name wrong, calling him “Paul Gleisner."
Fast forward a few years, and this same critic wrote an article listing Australia’s worst TV comedy shows. He mistakenly included Funky Squad, a parody of 1970s cop shows such as Starsky and Hutch, also produced by Cilauro, Gleisner, Kennedy, and Sitch, in this list, claiming that it was so bad, it only lasted seven episodes. The fact of the matter was that it was always intended to be a short run series. The joke could not be stretched out longer than that.
I have other stuff to think about these days, and my television watching habits have changed, so I don't have the time to closely follow and catalogue the writings of television critics. This podcast is a nice distraction from the daily grind of driving in city traffic.
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