O'BRIEN
Welcome back to the Australian Tumbleweeds 2007, wherever you are, although it's presumably the internet.

Stand-up is the cutting edge of comedy - a performer, a microphone and a stage are all you need to get an audience laughing. You'll notice I didn't mention jokes!

	WORST STAND-UP Dave Hughes - 83.33% Hughesy loses it. He'd make a pretty good street beggar, though. - bithez I'm assuming his act now consists entirely of him making that "arrrrrrr" noise for an hour. - 13 schoolyards "I'm angggggrrrrryyyyyyy!" Here's a new catchphrase for you, Hughesy: "I'm boooorrrrrriiiiing." Gah. - Moribunderast NOMINEES Claire Hooper - 8.33% Akmal Saleh - 8.33% Last year's winner: Dave Hughes

O'BRIEN
And that's two years in a row to Dave Hughes. 13 schoolyards, could you take us through the results?

13 SCHOOLYARDS
Certainly Kerry, Claire Hooper raises a question every time she performs: why would anyone base their performing style on Jean Kitson? Actually, that's a bit harsh - she actually raises a whole range of questions, mostly to do with why anyone would watch her act. But the Jean Kitson one is the one that lingers. It's such a clear influence, yet such a strange choice, like a male stand-up deciding that former Governor of the Reserve Bank Bernie Fraser is a great model for stand-up. Oh wait, The Sandman did already that. And The Sandman appeared alongside Hooper on The Sideshow... As for Akmal Saleh, he's a bit like that "funny" uncle who gets up at your cousin's wedding to crack a few jokes, only you've paid money to see him and his jokes aren't any good.

But the winner was Dave Hughes, which was no surprise as Hughes is perhaps this country's most high-profile and highly annoying stand-up, a man who's given up on the very idea of having material in favour of simply making a grating nasal whine designed to indicate that he's "annnnngriiiiiii", before complaining about something that most seven year-olds have noticed and most eight year-olds have gotten over. Considering Hughesy was spotted earlier this year sitting in a fancy American convertible at the intersection of two of Melbourne's most exclusive shopping streets on a nice sunny day - and yet he was still wearing an expression that suggested he'd somehow managed to step in shit - perhaps it's time he sought professional help for his anger issues.

O'BRIEN
And Dave Hughes is here tonight, but as he can't actually be angry about winning an award, he's decided not to come here and talk to us. Which makes us all the winner.

GREEN
An interesting fact about Dave Hughes, Kerry. Every single person who emigrated from Australia since 2002 has cited Dave Hughes as the reason why they left this country never to return. His knockabout all-Aussie image and fair-dinkum attitude are the kind of thing that make this country truly painful to live in - and that's before he opens his mouth.

O'BRIEN
Thanks, Antony. Now...game shows - is there any lower form of life? Oh wait, I forgot about the other half of this category...

	WORST GAME OR PANEL SHOW JOINT WINNERS Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader? - 44.44% Rove hasn't been the same since those Leno appearances. Friday Night Download - 44.44% You Tube videos on TV linked by morons. Well, I'm smart enough to know it's "grade 5". - bithez I'll never understand why parents allow their children onto shows like ...5th Grader. Don't they realise it will just make a bunch of strangers hate the poor things? Anyway, maybe for this year's Comedy Festival I can follow Rove around, film him and compose a doco: Is Rove's stand-up smarter than a 5th grader? - Moribunderast Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? was awful, but my vote must go to the show that took the concept of You Tube but put it on TV, thereby defeating the purpose of You Tube. - shunkymonky Friday Night Download was a show so diabolical they had former Big Brother contestants and that horrendous Goldman bloke host it. Hotdogs dodged a bullet. - oceanthroats NOMINEES The Einstein Factor - 11.11% Last year's winner (WORST COMEDY GAMESHOW): The Up-Late Game Show

O'BRIEN
The Einstein Factor is the ABC's idea of a game show: no prizes, boring questions, "celebrities" that no-one's ever heard of and a host chosen because they had to put him on something. With its smug attitude, condescending air and firm determination to avoid anything approaching entertainment, it's made for people who proudly tell you they don't watch television any more - usually they leave out the part where they can't watch television any more because this crap made them put their foot through the screen. But what about our winners?

13 SCHOOLYARDS
Well Kerry, there's a great rant at the end of the movie Quiz Show (about the rigged quiz shows in the United States back in the 1950's) where a TV producer explains that from now on they won't need to rig the quiz shows to get the results they want: they'll just make the questions a little easier, get in dumber contestants and basically fix the whole thing without doing a single criminal thing. I'm not exactly sure why I remember that scene every time some arrogant smart-alec or ditzy bimbo swaggers out to the front of the set of Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?, but I'm sure if I keep watching it'll come to me eventually.

O'BRIEN
And there was some surprise in the media that Rove fitted into the role of game show host so smoothly...

13 SCHOOLYARD
Yes, but it's not hard to see why: for all the publicity over the years trying to sell Rove as a clued-in comedian, he's always seemed basically a younger, less interesting version of Larry Emdur.

O'BRIEN
Well, Rove cannot be here tonight...

THE CROWD CHEERS.

13 SCHOOLYARD
Yes, Friday Night Download - hey kids, it's the internet! Only now it has commercial breaks and dickhead hosts and you can't choose what comes on the screen! Hey, come back! Anyway, it's a worthy co-winner of this award. Cheap, nasty and completely pointless, this collection of sub-Funniest Home Video Show clips scavenged from the internet was an insult to the inventors of every item of technology since the lever!

O'BRIEN
And we're just hearing that the hosts of Friday Night Download are here tonight, but they're all too busy getting their audition tapes in for a pay TV series on the history of lip piercing. However, they have managed to send us this "hilarious" clip via the internet. Antony, if you could do the honours...

GREEN PRESSES A BUTTON. A MESSAGE APPEARS: 404 ERROR - FILE NOT FOUND.

MICK MOLLOY IS HALF-HEARTEDLY LOOKING FOR THE TAPE AMONGST THE OVERFILLING ASHTRAYS, EMPTY VB CANS AND DISCARDED PIZZA BOXES THAT SEEMINGLY COMPRISE HIS HOME.

O'BRIEN
Hang on Mick, what's that over there? Next to the dead pot plant?

SHOT OF TAPE LABELLED TUMBLEWEEDS CONFIDENTIAL.

THE RUNNER WHO DROVE MICK HOME GOES OVER TO LOOK.

O'BRIEN
Great news. Bring it straight back to the Tally Room.

RUNNER
Will do.

O'BRIEN
Oh, and Mick...

MOLLOY
(UNENTHUSIASTICALLY) Yeah...

O'BRIEN
Your film Boytown's won this next award...

	WORST FILM Boytown (hold-over from 2006) - 80.00% Tough titties. After listening to all the hype on Get This and remembering how everyone involved was hilarious, I wasn't just disappointed in the film I was really pissed off. Why the fuck was there a need for a love triangle? - shunkymonky Boytown was a pile of crud. - joelde For 30 minutes, Boytown is one of the sharpest, sparkiest comedies of the last five years. But then seemingly Mick Molloy fell down a hole, suffered massive concussion and forgot how to end a film. Or write the middle of a film. Or pen songs that don't actually just say the thing you're meant to be subtly implying. Get well soon Mick and watch out for coned-off areas. TV's Ben Baker NOMINEES Razzle Dazzle - 20.00% Dr Plonk - 0.00% Last year's winner: Kenny

O'BRIEN
For years now, Australian film has been about as funny as a pimple on the inside of your eyelid. But unlike Australian television comedy, which seems immune to any notion of actual quality, after years of rock-solid crap like Takeaway and The Wannabes Australian film comedy has finally gone to God.

GREEN
And given that, Kerry, it's not surprising that the Australian Electorial Commission are telling us that ballot after ballot came in with this category empty or with "were there even any Australian comedies out in 2007?" written in, because in 2007 Australia simply wasn't in the business of making movie comedies. Which is why the winner is Boytown, a film that debuted at the end of 2006.

O'BRIEN
13 schoolyards, you're our film expert, could you take us through the Boytown story?

13 SCHOOLYARDS
Well, Boytown was based on a sketch on The Mick Molloy Show and it's origins showed: while it had it's funny moments and an admirable commitment to at least trying to be funny - a commitment increasingly rare on the small screen - all too often it felt like a sketch dragged out way too long. A sudden shift into semi-seriousness two-thirds through didn't help either and an oddly downbeat ending just confirmed the feeling that this was a film written by people not quite in control of their material. What Tony Martin's Boytown Confidential doco did with the same material remains a mystery - but there'll be more on that later I expect...

O'BRIEN
Thanks schoolyards, now the entire Boytown cast and crew were going to reform for one night only in honour of these awards and they'd planned a massive musical comedy number that would have redefined the very shape of musical comedy in this country, but with Mick Molloy still on his way back to the Tally Room and Tony Martin fielding calls from the Murdoch press about his latest tiff with Molloy, we've had to call the whole thing off.

And on to our next category, Antony...

GREEN
Yes Kerry, for years, as Aussie sitcoms bombed, tonight shows failed to fire and stand-up showcases stunk up the place, the refrain could still be heard: "at least we can still make sketch comedy". Tonight's winner and nominees prove those days are well behind us...

	WORST SKETCH SHOW The Wedge - 61.54% Miserable 11 year old conservative governments come and go, but we will never forget The Wedge. - Tim Costello, World Vision We may only broadcast second-rate British comedy, but we rip off the very worst! - bithez The Wedge, well, what can be said? The Aussie version of Little Britain that everyone (read: no one) was asking for. This show ranks up there as being one of two programmes that caused me to throw my remote at the television this year (the other being Border Security). I know, I know, I should've just changed the channel. Anyway, this show got cancelled right? Please? - Moribunderast They're still making it? - oceanthroats NOMINEES The Chaser's War on Everything - 30.77% Comedy Inc: The Late Shift - 7.69% Last year's winner: The Wedge

O'BRIEN
Another win for the programme 3AW's Neil Mitchell described as "one of the freshest things on TV", Bean Is A Carrot...

BEAN IS A CARROT
Yes, sketch comedy which was once the dominant comedy genre on Australian television has made way in recent years for the documentary-style sitcom and the gotcha show. What sketch comedy now exists is either a cynical quota-fulfilling exercise (Comedy Inc), largely unscripted (The Chaser) or just plain dire (The Wedge). And this is worrying as sketch comedy programmes have been an important training ground for comedy's future stars. In the competitive writers-room of a good sketch show the best writers get their sketches on air. Having built a reputation there, they are then well placed to get their own sitcom or film script commissioned. Classics of Australian comedy like The Games and The Castle came from writers who'd done their time on good sketch shows...

O'BRIEN
But haven't the cast and writers of The Wedge gone on to do other things? We heard recently that there'll be a sitcom based on one of the characters from The Wedge soon.

BEAN IS A CARROT
The key here is "good", Kerry. The writers of The Wedge are hardly likely to produce a decent sitcom or film if the work they've been allowed to get away with are any guide.

13 SCHOOLYARDS
Yes Kerry, it was inevitable that the winner of this award would be The Wedge. Of course it was - this was the programme that become a byword for crap Australian comedy within weeks of it's debut in 2006, a show that somehow managed to be recomissioned for 2007, only for the network to wise up within seconds of signing the contracts and refuse to air the completed episodes until late in the year at 10pm on a Sunday and then pull it from even that dud timeslot and bury it after midnight on weekends. Realistically, no-one should have been surprised: when a series is basically the same jokes for 22 episodes - and after episode one no-one's laughing - there's nothing anyone involved can do except learn from the mistake. And of course, learning from mistakes is what Australian television does best.

O'BRIEN
And sadly, like the winners of the next award, mostly what they learn is to repeat them...

	WORST OVERALL COMEDY The Chaser's War on Everything - 38.46% A war in a teacup. If Crikey is saying you're too smug, you've hit bottom. - bithez Because it wasn't funny, wasn't even trying to be funny and was made by people who've clearly forgotten how to be funny but think that running up to a politician with a prop and then standing there as the politician calmly drives away might cover for them while they try to remember what "funny" is. - 13 schoolyards Every time the Chaser team writes a sketch they have the lawyers go over it with a series of fine bristled combs to make sure there aren't any jokes in it where there could be a stunt in a department store. Their focus became matching it with Today Tonight and was as worthwhile as that show as a result. - oceanthroats NOMINEES Summer Heights High - 30.77% The Nation - 30.77% Last year's winner: David Tench Tonight

O'BRIEN
A tight result, but a win to The Chaser. Bean Is A Carrot, I know you'll have something to say about this...

BEAN IS A CARROT
I'm not surprised, Kerry - in 2007, The Chaser seemed to be falling apart in front of our eyes. What they should have been doing was highlighting issues few people knew about or cutting through the tabloid media hype - their own included - but even in an election year they failed utterly to come up with anything approaching half-decent satire. There was even a clue to the sort of targets they should have been going for - they appeared in the show's between-sketch stings. Was this the team's subtle way of admitting that they knew who to go after, but had neither the skills or guts to do it properly, so they just stuck pictures of them in between they rubbish pranks and hoped for the best?

13 SCHOOLYARDS
What's even worse is that The Chaser used to be pretty funny. Remember when The Chaser's War on Everything was going to be a news/variety-style programme? That sounded really good - what happened to that? Now, this is wild speculation on my part, but I think because they were boned by the ABC at the end of 2003, when they were told that CNNNN wouldn't be back and the group was forced to split up to search for work for a bit, they now feel their return to the ABC is a pretty insecure one. Hence all the shitty crowd-pleasing material they've been doing - they're simply not confident enough of either themselves or their backing to do the kind of half-smart stuff that made CNNNN worthwhile. Unless Charles Firth really was the political brains behind The Chaser?

OCEANTHROATS
Maybe they just love doing fake pranks? Toothless, badly thought-out pranks that are about as cutting edge as a pillow and as insightful as a blindfold. Pranks that basically involve them hoping their victims will do their work for them. They’re basically playing it safe on every level - if you wrote down all the ideas in an episode of The Chaser's War on Everything you'd be lucky to get the opening monologue on Rove!

O'BRIEN
And any thoughts on the nominees for this award?

13 SCHOOLYARDS
Well Summer Heights High did everything right, it was well filmed, well packaged and had an obviously talented actor in the lead roles...where it fell down was when it came time to be funny. For whatever reason - my money's on Lilley falling so far in love with his characters he couldn't imagine we wouldn't be enthralled by their every action - this was a comedy that for scene after scene didn't even try to make viewers laugh. Of course, if you were a parent of school-aged children or a high school student yourself, that didn't matter. Just the existence of Lilley's broad, amateurish caricatures seemed to be enough for a large section of the audience, whose only response to criticism of Lilley's work was "If you knew a kid/teacher like that yourself, you'd find it hysterical". Which raises the question: if that's all it takes to make a comedy, why not simply send a documentary team into a state school?

And while the makers of both The Chaser and Summer Heights High would no doubt be proud of their achievements, it's hard to see Mick Molloy looking back at The Nation as a high point of his career. For every decent moment there was at least two that fell flat, for every funny joke an endless segment with Jackie O. Unlike the disappointing final year of Tough Love, where it could be reasonably argued he was distracted by movie work, Mick should have been free to give The Nation his full attention. Instead the show felt like the work of a distracted, unfocused and almost disinterested team from the get-go. Considering Mick said more than once that it would be his last big shot at making a go of it on television, most would have expected better. Then again, he also said he willingly handed over creative control of the show to Nine executives and with their proven track record in comedy it's a wonder The Nation didn't feature twenty-five minutes of Matt Tilley doing gotcha calls.

O'BRIEN
And with The Nation and Matt Tilley in it's schedules in 2007, Nine must surely be the winner of our next award, Antony.

GREEN
I'm afraid not Kerry, this year's winner is our employer...

	WORST OVERALL CHANNEL/NETWORK FOR COMEDY ABC - 46.15% That nice Jackson Five song, before it all went wrong and Tito went a bit funny. Public broadcasters are supposed to be better than this. - bithez This is for still not putting on mousePATROL. - Claire Flynn Boyle They give local comedy a decent run, it's true. But they hype the hell out of crap, give no-talent chumps tenure (Hi, Peter Berner - and look is that Richard Fidler over in the corner next to Paul McDermott?) refuse to give quality local talent on-air time (mousePATROL), deny us quality UK comedy unless we have a set-top box (why isn't Peep Show worthy of free-to-air time while Jam & Jerusalem is?) and generally continue to screw comedy fans over. How The Librarians got through I'm not quite sure, but I have a feeling the comedy department aren't the ones to thank. - 13 schoolyards NOMINEES Nine - 30.77% Ten - 23.08% Last year's winners: Nine, ABC

O'BRIEN
Well, I don't know if I'm game to say much more about these results. oceanthroats, your thoughts?

OCEANTHROATS
The ABC is basically a preservation house of past, present and future Australia, but after its ransacking in recent years by the likes of Richard Alston, John Howard and Dave Hughes, all that's left is an institution with almost no identity. Most who care about the ABC are remembering an older attic of treasures and rainy days that no longer exists. An institution that once produced a handful of gems a year now struggles to commission a half-decent show a decade.

It has been clear for some time that the ABC has almost no interest in producing quality original programming. Comedy is not seriously explored or developed on any of its radio stations and it is instead left up to television to provide us with the laffs. There seems to be just about enough money to produce a programme like The Sideshow every five years or so and if it turns out that this programme is, in fact, a bit of a dud, then any spare bits of money seems to get funnelled into a PR blitzkrieg in an attempt to convince the poor faithful ABC true-believer that the dreadful programme they are watching is not in fact rubbish and the bland comedian they are watching is not completely incapable of making anybody laugh at any point.

With an unwillingness to foster and develop new talent and the strange ability to mess up any new talent by handing them over to former DAAS members who take charge and try to make things more like boring ballroom dancing shows and bad panel programmes about the arts, the ABC doesn't need Richard Alston to make it more irrelevant and boring. It now knows exactly what it has to do to. Be as unimaginative as possible: make more episodes of Carbon Cops.

13 SCHOOLYARDS
And Nine doesn't care about comedy either. Nine hasn't cared about comedy since Graham Kennedy left. Nine makes television for families and old people and they don't really want to watch anything confrontational - which pretty much rules out comedy. The Nation was less a comedy programme than Nine's attempt to make Mick Molloy one of their "stars", so he could pop up on Getaway and whatever gardening programme Don Burke is hosting in 2009 before eventually hosting a game show. And Matt Tilley's Surprise Surprise Gotcha was just a painful rehash of pranks from Nine's long-forgotten Surprise Surprise (though to be fair, it was actually really funny if you read any interviews with Matt Tilley, where he explained that he'd been hired to make a show based on his gotcha calls, only to have Nine executives force the old Surprise Surprise material on him against his will, thus making sure his show was pretty much born dead. Gotcha!) And as for Comedy Inc: The Late Shift, this pointless time-filler is shown so erratically it's barely a notch above the late night game shows Nine amazingly still persists with. Please Nine, just stop trying.

Ten, on the other hand, knows what its audience wants in its comedy: nothing good. As the commercial network that's put the most effort into Australian comedy in the last few years, you'd think they'd be worthy of our respect and admiration. Trouble is, they almost always give the green light to rubbish. David Tench. Ronnie Johns. The Wedge. A third series of Thank God You're Here when the idea was stale after series two (and then they repeated earlier episodes just to make sure we were all totally over it). And with the return of Good News Week and (maybe) a spin-off from The Wedge in 2008, there's a good chance we'll be seeing Ten doing even better in this category next year.

GREEN
And in this next category this year...

	MOST INEXPLICABLY RECOMMISSIONED PROGRAMME The Wedge - 76.92% Lucky. So bad, I couldn't even find a single IMDB messageboard idiot who liked it. - bithez The only reason I can think of for this show being recommissioned is that the original contract was for two series. Surely no one, not even a Channel 10 executive, would recommission this for any other reason than that. - Bean Is A Carrot I have seen The Wedge all of once and felt suitably dirty never to feel the requirement to go back. We already had the 90's. Thanks. - TV's Ben Baker NOMINEES Pizza - 23.08% Comedy Inc: The Late Shift 0.00% Last year's winner: David Tench Tonight

O'BRIEN
For a show that went out in a dud timeslot, The Wedge is doing very well tonight...

13 SCHOOLYARDS
Well, Pizza might be well past it's use-by date, but it's not hard to figure out why it keeps coming back: it's cheap to make, it's local content and it fits in nicely with the SBS's charter. In a perfect world, none of those reasons would be good enough to justify its existence, but hey - at least Rebel Wilson isn't on it any more. Likewise with Comedy Inc, it might be just as painfully bad now as it was when it first started, but for Nine keeping it going is - like most of its writers - a bit of a no-brainer: it's cheap to make, it's local content, and it keeps a bunch of comedy types on Nine's books in case they need a new Friday night funnyman for A Current Affair. In a perfect world, none of those reasons would be good enough to justify it's existence, but hey - at least that chump who replaced Nudge on Hey Dad..! isn't on it anymore.

But The Wedge was a loser straight out of the gate. After the first week jokes were already being made in the media about how poor it was. Yet someone at Ten thought that a second series - all 20-something episodes worth - was a good idea. Clearly they'd changed their minds by the time it came time to actually screen it, eventually dumping it in graveyard shifts during the Christmas period. Lesson learnt? Uh, no - not if the rumours of a proposed spin-off featuring that sporting character who kept giving press conferences to apologise for his private life prove true. And with Ten's track record, how could they not?

GREEN
Hey Kerry, this is interesting... A study conducted by the University of South Australia last year concluded that 98% of those involved in the making, commissioning or publicising of The Wedge are morons.

O'BRIEN
And the other 2%?

GREEN
The other 2% was a cupboard in The Wedge's production office that when filled with DVDs of the show collapsed, rendering them unwatchable...

O'BRIEN
...so no change there.

GREEN
Indeed. But there's an upside, that cupboard has been awarded a posthumous AO in the Australia Day honours, the first time an inanimate object has been presented with such an honour since the meter box which caught fire in the Roving Enterprises production office in 2004 was presented with the Nobel Peace Prize for destroying material from Skithouse.

THERE IS AN ODD MOMENT OF SILENCE AND SOME CONFUSED CAMERA WORK. A STATION BREAKDOWN SLIDE APPEARS FOR A FEW SECONDS, THEN THERE IS AN AWKWARD CUT BACK TO O'BRIEN, WHO IS SMOKING HEAVILY.

	WORST RADIO COMEDY Wil & Lehmo - 69.23% Bring back that kangaroo who beat up Marty Monster, give them both a show! Whilst they're all repugnant, I could remain blissfully unaware of Kyle and Jackie O's show as well as Matt and Jo's. Will & Lehmo however had advertising space during Get This, meaning that I had to hear Wil Anderson's voice every day as long as I wanted to listen to my favourite radio programme. Proof positive that every silver lining has it's cloud. - Moribunderast Not funny enough to keep the Get This audience tuned in, yet they're the ones who get to keep their jobs. - shunkymonky The worst post-World War 2 'thing' to ever happen anywhere, except for that nasty The Glass House business. - oceanthroats NOMINEES Kyle & Jackie - 15.38% Matt & Jo - 15.38% Last year's winner: The Shebang

O'BRIEN
A solid win for Wil & Lehmo there, 13 schoolyards...

13 SCHOOLYARDS
Yes Kerry, and this is down to the fact that Wil Anderson's comedy doesn't really work on radio because if you can't see his hair, then what's the point? And Lehmo doesn't work because he's never said anything funny in his whole entire life. Yet while the other nominations came from breakfast radio - where, let's be honest, a certain level of nail-pulling painfulness is required from the hosts - Wil & Lehmo are on in the afternoons, where listeners generally expect at least trace elements of charm and ability. Instead, in 2007 they were presented with this manufactured meat product, two bland tastes that do nothing more than co-exist alongside each other and make statements that might be confused for comedy by the elderly and infirm.

O'BRIEN
And oceanthroats, you have something to say about the nominees...

OCEANTHROATS
Well Kerry, Kyle and Jackie O continued to get paid for their bizarre broadcasts in 2007 and nothing will confuse historians quite as much as that. Sandilands, almost certainly odds-on favourite to be the first prat on the moon when Richard Branson gets his lunar breakfast show broadcasting company up and running in about five years, has a good foil in JFK widow name-alike and "worst person in the southern hemisphere" Jackie O. Both of them provide the soundtrack for our lives, the wallpaper in our hallways and 500 reasons to read more than five books a decade.

But I think it's a shame that Matt & Jo didn't win this category. Together they show what you can do when you put two people in a room, don't worry that neither has a crisp of ability and that Matt Tilley might have been a poorly-sketched character in Skithouse at its zenith or that Jo was at one time odds-on favourite to be crowned "the new Kate Langbroek" until it became evident that this was extremely unfair to Kate. There is plenty of shocking breakfast radio around Australian nowadays, but there is nothing quite as powerfully bad as the sort of stuff these two put out every day. This is the sort of comedy that makes Summer Heights High look vaguely alright. Mind you, the Iraq war starts to look quite pleasing after hearing a few podcasts of Matt & Jo. Camel spiders included.

O'BRIEN
So given those results, Antony, can we assume that Wil Anderson has won our next award?

GREEN
Surprisingly not, Kerry...

	WORST RADIO PERSONALITY Kyle Sandilands - 58.33% Arrogant, fat and talentless. - Molly Meldrum How can someone so hateful be so popular? - Bean Is A Carrot A floating mass of old car bonnets and the occasional fridge collecting off the coast of Chile, Sandilands will probably continue to grow and drive the porpoise to extinction. - oceanthroats Already taught in University botany classes, prospers in the warm and damp. Chris Masters is already taking notes and expects to put out volume one by July. - Benny Fakename NOMINEES Wil Anderson - 25.00% Matt Tilley - 16.67% Last year's winner: Kyle Sandilands

O'BRIEN
Of course, it's our old favourite Kyle Sandilands...

OCEANTHROATS
That's right Kerry, Kyle Sandilands, a man who continues to churn out first class bad radio at a pace. And with John Laws reduced to airing his long suffering cheese-grater toupees on his window sill, as he relaxes in a charming rural setting in blissful retirement, Sandilands leads the charge for his now silent golden microphone. The slight problem with Kyle being nominated for the award for Worst Radio Personality is that what he does isn't quite radio as much as bilge water and he doesn't really have a personality, more a penthouse suite. Still, he fits "worst" fairly comfortably, so that will have to do.

13 SCHOOLYARDS
Can I just say a few words about the nominees, Kerry? Wil Anderson was clearly never going to win against Sandilands in this category, because his personality is contained largely in his hair. As does the fact that what little personality remains in the rest of his body is the kind of hip, Triple J-listening "cool dood" that starts to seem a little embarrassing about three years before whatever age Anderson is now. Usually people like him manage to end up on ABC radio complaining about everything: Anderson's shift to Triple M seems to suggest he has a bright future ahead of him as Ugly Phil..

But I think it's a shame that Matt Tilley didn't get a few more votes. His on-air persona is that of a complete shit, a pathetic prat prankster whose sole route to getting laughs involves harassing innocent chumps by subjecting them to unsolicited phone calls featuring racist stereotypes. A key to his motivation was evidenced in an interview he gave to the Fairfax press last year in which he revealed himself to be an indie-music loving, inner-city hipster who had very little in common with his fans. Nice one: the only thing worse than a complete shit is a person who consciously pretends to be a complete shit for money.

O'BRIEN
So no surprise who won this next award...

	WORST PODCAST OR CD Matt Tilley Cereal Pest: Gotcha Calls - Three's a Crowd - 66.67% We no rickey. I don't know who to hate more: Tilley for making yet another CD of his crap prank calls, the members of the public who bought enough of the first two to allow him to release number 3, or the people he pranked who gave their permission for their gullibility to be immortalised. He calls you up to make fun of you, then you agree to let him bring out a CD of it? - 13 schoolyards Whilst I never listened to any of these (yes, not even the Micallef ones) I'll go with Matt Tilley on principle. - Moribunderast Just when you thought the kind of comedy Indian stereotype done by Peter Moon and Greg Ritchie had been consigned to history, this fuckwit brings them back. - Bean Is A Carrot NOMINEES Dave & Denise with Shaun Micallef - 25.00% Thank God It's Friday - 8.33% Last year's winners: Matt Tilley Cereal Pest: The Gotcha Calls, Dave & Denise with Shaun Micallef

13 SCHOOLYARDS
The amazing thing about Matt Tilley's latest gotcha calls CD isn't that it was released: people like prank calls, no mater how moronic they are. It's that the people Tilley calls up and subjects to his inane, vaguely racist babblings agree to let the calls be released in CD form. Why? Are they so desperate for fame in any shape or form that they figure being immortalised as someone sucked in by Matt Tilley is a good move? Tilley might be a shit, but his victims are the people who let him get away with it - they're his enablers, and they should feel sick to their stomachs over what they've taken part in and then bought on CD.

O'BRIEN
And Bean, what about this year's worst podcasts?

BEAN IS A CARROT
Well, for those who balked at the idea of paying for stuff they'd already heard on radio, a great many programmes offered their "best bits" for free via iTunes. Vega's Melbourne breakfast show Dave & Denise with Shaun Micallef put together a daily compilation which kept listeners up to date with the team's latest mad schemes. But it seems barely relevant whether callers to the show were being encouraged to participate in a soccer match, join a Police tribute band or assist Dave O'Neill with his obviously doomed run for parliament when the net the result was that Vega continued to ignore the potential gold that Shaun Micallef would no doubt produce if he were given a decent run on radio. Towards the end of the year Micallef finally quit the show, went to SBS and made Newstopia. The results speak for themselves.

Meanwhile 702 ABC Sydney continued to podcast the Thank God It's Friday segment from Drive with Richard Glover, often failing to edit out the news, weather, traffic reports or party political broadcasts that appeared before, after or sometimes during it. But having fast forwarded through or tried to ignore them, it was impossible not to become annoyed to the point of violence as an endless parade of comedians - some of them actually funny in other contexts - ran through their hackneyed observations about that week's news. Still, at least Glover didn't read one of his poems too often.

O'BRIEN TURNS TO ANTONY GREEN.

GREEN
Not at this stage, Kerry.

O'BRIEN
OK...is Mick Molloy back, yet?

MOLLOY TRIES TO HIDE BEHIND A SCREEN. THE FLOOR MANAGER DRAGS HIM OUT.

MOLLOY
Sorry Kerry, it's too expensive to screen. I can't allow it.

TONY MARTIN
How much will it cost to screen?

MOLLOY
Um...$5,000.

MARTIN WRITES MOLLOY A CHEQUE FOR $5,000.

MARTIN WRITES MOLLOY ANOTHER CHEQUE FOR $5,000.

O'BRIEN
Do you have any cash on you, Tony?

MARTIN
(SEARCHING POCKETS): I've got...$57.85.

O'BRIEN
Well, maybe we can have a whip-round...

MARTIN STARTS RUNNING AROUND, ASKING PEOPLE TO PUT MONEY INTO A SACK. MOLLOY RUNS AHEAD OF MARTIN TRYING TO PICKPOCKET PEOPLE SO THEY CAN'T CONTRIBUTE.

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