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Theft - it's a burning thing. And it makes for a fiery ring. Oh wait, that was love. But much like love, theft usually involves someone getting screwed.
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A good television producer doesn't let anything go to waste. And for all his flaws as an interviewer (zoom in on those tears...NOW!) and comedy writer (David Tench Tonight, anyone?), no-one ever said that Andrew Denton is not a canny producer. So when you've just spent a year making sure everyone knows you're the go-to-guy when it comes to tearing apart the advertising industry - okay, strike "tearing apart" and insert "handing out the big cuddles to" - why not use that rep to get a sitcom on the air? Well, because the resulting sitcom feels like a slightly fictionalised version of the laboured, condescending lectures delivered by the Gruen Transfer panel for one.
New year, new calls that The Chaser ripped off every other comedy show under the sun. It's hardly surprising: putting together hours of television comedy in a year churns through material like mad, and being a high-profile shows means that everyone sees what you're doing - especially when it looks like something done by a show that's smaller or further away. Not to mention that pranks in general aren't all that original. But just for the record, this year's collection of Chaser rip-offs includes but is not limited to Jackass (the toilet seat "try before you buy" sketch); The Late Show (that "what we did on our break" sketch); The Mansion (who originally did a sketch about a stingy charity for cancer-afflicted kiddies); British sketch shows like Monty Python's Flying Circus and I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again (just two of many who featured irate letter-writing wowser characters); US sketch series Mr Show (who did something similar to the baby day spa sketch); and Australia's own Newstopia (who pointed out the growing trend for politicians to have people nodding away behind them in their press appearances years before The Chaser). Also, a large number of their sketches seemed to have been inspired by news stories from 2008, which seems a bit tardy even with the slow-motion nature of the Australian news cycle. And at least one Chaser sketch was inspired by something on Media Watch, which is just poor form considering their audiences overlap completely.
Proving that there's no such thing as a dead format, Hungry Beast resurrected the "right on" school of training-wheel television for yet another generation. For all the funky graphics reminding us of what we're watching every three minutes - guess the kids these days really do have a short attention span - what Hungry Beast turned out to be was the kind of garbled, patchy mess that seems like a good time when it's on at 9am on a Saturday, but is a waste of time in prime time. In theory the success of columnist Charlie Brooker's school of talking head snark programming in the UK should have provided some guide towards making the stale, stale, stale "yoof TV" formula seem relevant. But Brooker chooses relatively narrow topics - television and news coverage - and then covers them in breadth, if not depth: Hungry Beast tried to report on everything and ended up getting nothing right.
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