Most Disappointing Comedy Winner: The Hollowmen - 38.1% Nominees The episodes of Spicks & Specks with Tony Martin and Shaun Micallef - 33.33% Salam Café - 28.57% Last Year's Winner The Chaser's War on Everything

	Voter comments Working Dog were one of the earliest comedy teams in the world to create a mockumentary-style sitcom, the brilliant Frontline. But instead of having the guts to stick to the style of mockumentary which had put them on the map (one which wasn't afraid to stick in some more traditional-style funny lines) they adopted the worst excesses of the more recent, reality-obsessed mockumentaries and assumed we'd laugh at The Hollowmen anyway. When they eventually gave this up and started putting in the kind of Gleisner-written lines their fans adore, The Hollowmen changed from a fashionably-made dud to a partial return to form. Where they go in series three is unclear, I'm just hoping they priotise comedy over reality. - Bean Is A Carrot To quote an awful Grinspoon B-side from 10 years ago... "Muttering bullshit! Muttering bullshit! Muttering bullshit! Muttering bullshit!" - samadriel The sublime Frontline managed to effortlessly fuse broad gags and subtle charcaterisation/satire, often during the same bit of dialogue; The Hollowmen did neither. Mike Moore rehearsing his "Hmmm, it's a worrying trend" back-announcement said more about the media than the countlessly dull hours of heavy-handed faux-satire here. Throw away your The Thick Of It DVDs, Working Dog! - Emergency Lalla Ward 10

The Hollowmen was always going to win this category. Expecting anything from Australian comedy is a fool's game, but Working Dog are about as close to a sure thing as laugh-out-loud television gets in this country. Which means they manage it around half the time. But their return to Frontline-style comedy raised expectations that, in hindsight, they were never going to meet.

That's not to say the first series wasn't a real let-down though: with a too-large cast of too-bland characters, the personality-based comedy was weak at best, and the generic (if no doubt accurate) political plots weren't specific enough to raise anything more than the occasional mild chuckle.

Luckily for Working Dog, their clout with the ABC enabled them to run straight into a second series where the characters were sharpened and the comedy was stretched beyond the remit of "this is how politics really works" into Working Dog's traditional silly observations and gag-filled dialogue. If The Hollowmen wins this award in 2009, it'll be because they couldn't maintain the quality of the final few episodes of 2008.

A decent guest appearance on Spicks & Specks is always bound to disappoint. Surely Shaun Micallef can break out of the confines of the tired, repetitive format to provide some real laughs? Tony Martin will come out with some real zingers, won't he? No, no, a thousand times no. But don't worry: Alan Brough will still look pissed off when he gets a question wrong.

Salam Café was a Muslim-centric panel chat show on Channel 31 that SBS picked up. I'm sorry, but unless you not only had no idea of its development but also thought - based on a bizarre mis-reading of the title - that it was going to be a spin-off from Salem's Lot featuring coffee-addicted vampires, there's simply no way you could have been disappointed with the result. It wasn't very funny, but a Christian-centric panel show wouldn't have been much of a kak either.

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