Pop Culture [#593]

As far as Australian television goes, any way you slice it Working Dog is our number one success story. Santo Cilauro, Rob Sitch, Jane Kennedy, Tom Gleisner and (behind the scenes) Michael Hirsh have been making television for twenty years – longer if you count their work as part of The Late Show and The D-Generation – and they’ve been making a lot of different television at that, from the sitcom Frontline to the panel show The Panel to game show Thank God You’re Here, to lesser-known efforts like A River Somewhere, All Aussie Adventures, Pictures of You, Sam, Santo and Ed’s Cup Fever and Audrey’s Kitchen. Then there’s the movies (The Castle, The Dish, Any Questions For Ben), the books (The Jetlag series of fake travel guides, the Warwick Todd cricketing diaries) and the radio work – clearly they’ve been doing something right over the years.
Surprisingly, considering Frontline is probably their biggest claim to lasting TV fame, in recent years scripted comedy has been something of a weak spot for them: while Thank God You’re Here and The Panel were massive hits and their current news quiz show Have You Been Paying Attention is doing well (and is extremely funny), their last scripted show, the political satire The Hollowmen, took a surprisingly long time to find its feet, only really getting into its stride in the back half of its first (and to date, only) run.
Their first play, The Speechmaker, was another stab at political satire, this time looking at the US President and the War on Terror; again, it was a little flabby and unfocused. So feelings at the news that they were working on yet another political satire – this time sending up Australian government’s fondness for announcing massive “nation-building” projects with dubious value to the community – were perhaps a little mixed.
Fortunately, my worries were, as usual, ill-founded: while Utopia (Wednesdays, 8.30 p.m. ABC1) definitely has touches of both Frontline and The Hollowmen about it, Working Dog have managed to put a fresh spin on endless meetings, meaningless political jargon and a whole lot of people working hard to produce very little indeed. Having a great cast doesn’t hurt either: aside from Sitch (who really is one of Australia’s great comedy actors) in what passes for the lead, there’s Celia Pacquola, Luke McGregor, Dave Lawson, Kitty Flanagan, Anthony “Lehmo” Lehmann and Toby Truslove all running around slowly murdering grand schemes with a thousand tiny cuts.
It does feel a little like a continuation of both The Hollowmen and Frontline (there are clearly certain kinds of characters Working Dog slot into their sitcoms), which means at times it’s hard not to wish they’d been able to figure out a way to fit all their political observations into the one sitcom instead of splitting it between this and The Hollowmen; having to start all over again with fresh actors does mean Utopia takes a little time to settle in and get going. But it’s smart and funny, and those two words don’t apply to anywhere near enough Australian comedy these days.
By Anthony Morris