 The Australian sitcom, favourite whipping boy of the sour-faced TV critic. Supposedly, we can't make them. Supposedly, we're not good at them. Supposedly, we shouldn't even bother trying. It's a moronic view to have once you actually look at the sitcoms we've turned out over the years: Mother & Son, Frontline, The Games, Kath & Kim. Even the rubbish ones have often been commercial hits, from Hey, Dad..! to Summer Heights High. Sadly, this year the local sitcom reached none of those heights. But the ABC did repeat Welcher & Welcher at 2am, so it wasn't a complete loss.
It's not that the ideas behind the nominees and winner in this category themselves are bad - a musical set in a High School could work, and Double The Fist certainly did something different - it's more that the laughs were few and far between. If your plan was to do a musical sitcom, why were there so few songs in each episode? Why were the songs that were in the show musically poor? Why did the songs not have funny lyrics? Why wasn't there any good dialogue or visual humour? And why couldn't the actress playing the main character sing very well? Swift & Shift Couriers, on the other hand, was simply a retread of the sort of humour which had been more than covered by five series of Pizza; it was even set in a company which delivered things. With its cast of stereotypes and reliance on broad politically incorrect humour, it was very much an Acropolis Now for the noughties - and who asked for that? Where it did differ from Pizza was that well known faces didn't just turn up in cameos - they were the principle cast. The rest were a rag-tag bunch who were mostly there because they looked the part. If the skill of these lay comedy performers was a physical object, you'd need a microscope looking through the scope of another microscope to see it. When it was announced that Double the Fist would be returning to our screens, good-natured puzzlement was pretty much the response all around. The first series back in 2004 had been erratic but occasionally entertaining, thanks largely to the innovative use of computer effects to create some visually inventive slapstick. Most put its return down to the ABC's sudden realisation in the wake of the success of The Chaser and Summer Heights High that local comedy rates. If only they'd stipulated that it return as a comedy, and not some kind of hyper-violent over-the-top surreal drama, maybe they would have got their money's worth. Good effects though. When someone sent me a VHS tape with "Bogan Pride: Deleted Scenes" written on it, I wasn't all that surprised to discover it was really just an off-air recording of the entire series. I was slightly more surprised to discover this actual deleted scene right at the end though.
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