The Lifetime Achievement Award For Crap Comedy

In Australian comedy, it's easy to be rubbish for one, two, even five years running. There are networks and producers lined up around the block to throw money at audience-insulting drivel so if you have a proven reputation for being shit, chances are you'll be given every opportunity to be shit time and time again. But even against that backdrop, there are a handful of performers who stand out. People who have gone above and beyond the call of excremental comedy to build entire careers around being no damn good. And for these people there can be only one award: The Australian Tumbleweed's Lifetime Achievement Award for Crap Comedy. This award is designed to salute and recognise those who year in, year out go out of their way to ensure that the very idea of Australian comedy remains a joke in the minds of the general public. It may be an honour just to be nominated but, with all three nominees set for bigger and better things in 2010, in a very real way it's the audience at home that are the real winners here.

THE LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD FOR CRAP COMEDY
Daryl Somers - 55%
"Stammering idiot."
- TheUglyBaby
"Why does he feel like he's doing us all a service by coming back? He's a samaritan, he's doing it for the greater good. At least it'll be a great yardstick."
- Shannon
"Being an unrepentant Pom, I'd previously had little or no concept of Daryl Somers beyond a few vaguely confusing (but no less amusing) references on Get This. Having been forced to watch a bunch of YouTube clips - both old and new - in preparation for designing this website, I can only conclude that the voters have made the correct choice. He's shite."
- Champniss
NOMINEES
Andrew Denton - 25%
John Blackman - 20%

Last year's winner:
Good News Week

Oh, come on. Seriously? Hasn't this gone beyond a joke already? My show was one of the top-rating programmes on Australian television in 2009! You narrow, bitter, small-minded creeps may not have liked having me back, but Mr and Mrs Australia sure did - and they're going to like having twenty more episodes of me in 2010 even more. So screw you - I'm going to read this one out myself, and with every cruel, insensitive and just plain wrong word that comes out of my mouth, know that inside I'm laughing all the way to the bank. Ha ha ha ha ha.

In the face of an increasingly impersonal and dehumanised world, where people are little more than interchangeable cogs in a globe-spanning machine, it's somehow reassuring to know that one man truly can make a difference. Unfortunately, that man is Daryl Somers and the only difference he's trying to make is to the amount of airtime the front of his head gets on Australian television. The bulk of society votes for zero: Daryl wants it all. In the end, a compromise is reached that lets us all know that if you want something bad enough and work hard enough for it, sometimes dreams can come true. Even if those dreams involve a reanimated corpse lurching around on camera croaking out constant updates about its internet popularity and wheezing out reminders that said corpse is the only one willing to give up-and-coming acts a shot on Australian television. You know, up-and-comers like John Farnham.

It's only natural for someone like Andrew Denton, who's worked their whole entire life in television, to eventually want to move behind the scenes. And when that person has spent the last decade soaking up bogus praise hailing him as Australia's best interviewer when his real skill lies in getting the ABC to give him enough time to waffle on at length, no-one's going to mind him finally fading from view. But when that man continues to have a reputation as some kind of funny bugger despite not having actually said anything funny since the mid 1990s, then eyebrows need to be raised. Especially when his behind-the-scene work involves people who seem to be just as funny without his help as they were with it (The Chaser) or making a show so painful its name remains a byword for time-wasting drivel (David Tench Tonight). Add in the fact that his current claims to fame involve either combining The World's Wackiest Commercials with The Panel (The Gruen Transfer), making a sitcom based on the panel discussion from the previous show (:30 Seconds) or reviving "yoof tv" (Hungry Beast), and you have a figure that understandably looms large over the wasteland that is televised comedy in this country.

John Blackman is a man out of time. Back when Hey Hey it's Saturday was funny, he was just one aspect of a finely-tuned comedy delivery system, but as the wheels slowly fell off and parts of the machine - Ossie, Jacki MacDonald, Animal the drummer - hit the bricks, Blackers rose through the ranks to become Wormtongue to Daryl Somers Sauron, Starker to his Siegfried, Jamie to his Malcolm Tucker, Sgt Schultz to his Colonel Klink, bottle of rum to his Oliver Reed...well, you get the idea. So while other perfectly competent old-school radio announcers faded back to late evening broadcasting, Blackers was always out there on the fringes, letting people know he was still available for work, not taking bugger off for an answer. Unlike the class act that is Pete Smith or the comedy craftsman that is Trevor Marmalade, when it came to television Blacker would only dance with the one who brought him; why Somers didn't get him to do voice-overs for Dancing with the Stars during his hosting gig remains a mystery. Well, to him at least.

Hey, that last paragraph was pretty good.

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