Ground Up review: comedian Sam Pang’s got a winner here

Tasmanians – well, some of them at least – have been pushing for an AFL team for decades. No sooner do they get one (with an extremely hefty price tag for a non-optional stadium attached) than the ABC’s presenting a sitcom making fun of the whole situation. In this case, they should take it as a compliment: Ground Up is one of the sharpest and smartest local comedies in years.

In something you don’t see every day with Australian sitcoms, there’s two levels to the comedy here. The first is a whole lot of jokes that are aimed at the many absurdities fans accept as being part and parcel of a sporting club. As the Great Southern Football Club is being built from the ground up, it needs things like mascots and mottos and club songs. All of which are ruthlessly and deservedly mocked.

But the specifics of a Tasmanian football team are a bit more fraught than most.

The state of sport

For starters, the AFL – here personified by brash AFL CEO Alistair Penfold (Josh McConville) – demands that the club and a roughly half-billion dollar statement are ‘intrinsically linked’. As for why such a massive expense should be foisted on a state that can’t really afford it, his one-word explanation is difficult to argue with.

So alongside the jokes about basic football stuff, there’s a focus group that rapidly dissolves into physical violence as the pro-footy forces butt heads with those who think the team should be named The Tasmanian Homeless. You know, after the people left out on the street because all the budget is being spent on the stadium.

On one side of the divide is Great Southern Football Club CEO Hugh Shen (Sam Pang, putting his dry wit to very good use). He’s been sent south by the AFL to get the club up and running, a gig that he sees as his way into the league’s top job. But to get there he first has to get the stadium built and the team up and running, which is already shaping up to be a big ask.

On the other is COO Destiny Pitt (Emma Harvie). She’s been put there by the Tasmanian Government to make sure the money they’re putting in is spent wisely – which she suspects would involve spending it on anything else but a stadium – but getting the job done will give her public service career a big boost. She’s a cultured type who knows nothing about football, and Hugh isn’t all that keen on educating her, what with him suspecting she’s a plant designed to bring his dreams crashing down.

Building a club from the ground up

With a job that requires a lot of schmoozing with potential sponsors (here’s a tip; maybe don’t try the wasabi in a meeting), pushing around councils to secure locations, and facing off with local identities with rival agendas, Hugh and Destiny are constantly stuck working side by side, even when they’d rather stab each other in the back.

For those of you feeling a chill run down your spine at the thought of yet another ABC office sitcom built around two people who don’t get along, this does manage to avoid many of the more obvious pitfalls. For starters, there’s Jameson (Dylan Murphy), Hugh’s executive assistant who only got the job thanks to his extremely wealthy and well-connected mother, club president Catherine (Marg Downey). His outright incompetence provides a handy lightning rod for their hostilities, while his blundering provides many of the broader laughs on offer.

The inspiration here is more series like Yes, Prime Minister and The Games, where wheeling and dealing is how things get done and characters with somewhat different goals find themselves forced to help their rivals for the greater good. The good in this case being largely things like trying to secure training sites and making nice with various groups unhappy with the new stadium, while at the same time dealing with a hostile media and various sub-par members of the actual team.

Watch the trailer

Local comedy at its best

Australian television comedy is rarely writer-led these days. Ground Up is an exception. It’s a Gristmill production created and written by Gary McCaffrie, best known for working on pretty much all the decent sketch comedy shows of the last few decades and being head writer on 15 seasons of Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell.

While there’s no denying that the first-rate cast go a long ways towards making this work – and the supporting cast here includes Lisa McCune, Dave Thornton, Broden Kelly, Toby Truslove and Tegan Higginbotham – each episode balances multiple storylines, numerous comedy set-pieces and plenty of one-off gags in a way we don’t see often enough from local comedy.

Putting together a project as massive as a new top-tier sporting club and stadium is a complex juggling act. Ground Up throws a few balls of its own into the mix and kicks consistent comedy goals in the process. Or something like that, honestly I’m more with Destiny when it comes to sport.

Ground Up premieres 7 June on ABC and ABC iView.

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