The Cheap Seats review: Australia’s consistently funniest TV show

Just to get it out of the way: The Cheap Seats is the most consistently funny show on Australian television. A clip show where they’re constantly turning up clips that go well beyond the obvious targets, it’s built around making fun of the news and yet never turns mean about it. Well, unless you’re the Cash Cow.

Hosts Melanie Bracewell and Tim McDonald are likeable, charming and extremely good at delivering both scripted gags and off-the-cuff banter in a way that leaves most Australian on-camera talent looking like they’re auditioning for a gig modelling outfits in the front window at Myers. They’ve taken one of current television’s most generic formats and made it into something special.

What they haven’t done is turn it into a vehicle for political satire, which made returning during the final week of an election campaign starved for laughs a bit of an odd move. Politics has been filling the news for weeks. Making fun of the news is what The Cheap Seats is all about. And yet parts of the return felt a little like the show was deliberately skirting the big issues.

While the first segment was largely and unsurprisingly focused on the Pope’s funeral, after the break we did get some political content, mostly looking at dodgy campaign ads from minor candidates and Pauline Hanson stabbing sausages in a somewhat disturbing fashion.

Mocking the shonky and the shoddy is the kind of thing The Cheap Seats does well, and with the major political campaigns being fairly slick and professional there’s probably not a whole lot there to work with. This is a show that got big laughs out of a running gag involving a no-longer-missing sausage dog; unless Barnaby Joyce has got another bout of public footpath fondling in him, politics aren’t going to be top priority.

Cheap Seats: political?

But for this week at least, it’s fair enough to ask: if The Cheap Seats isn’t going to do real political comedy, who is? It’s clearly not their job to deliver zingers about tax policy and programs to rebuild the national power grid (all hilarious subjects, obviously).

But the fact that the best comedy series on Australian television is also a show that quite pointedly doesn’t do political comedy does suggest something about our current television landscape.

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Not that long ago, political comedy used to be mainstream entertainment. Popular sketch shows like Fast Forward on commercial networks had political segments; for decades the ABC ran shows that were nothing but political comedy.

Even in living memory, Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell on the ABC could loosely be described as ‘satirical’, what with Micallef making jokes about economic policy and saluting a portrait of Malcolm Turnbull and being horrified by Bill Shorten’s terrible zingers.

Political comedy was often sketch comedy, so it’s hardly surprising that the commercial networks haven’t had room for satire since the days of John Howard. Trouble is, the ABC has dropped the ball as far as comedy goes, quietly axing their few remaining satirical spots (mostly only a few minutes here and there) since the last election without replacing them.

The commercial networks are all we have left – 10 has shown an impressive commitment to local comedy in recent years, with more to come – but they don’t seem interested in stirring up controversy.

Cheap Seats: best of the bunch

In a nation awash with comedy clip shows, The Cheap Seats stands a noticeable distance above the rest. The clips are funnier, the jokes about the clips are sharper, the banter between Mel and Tim is top notch, the off-the-cuff lines get laughs even when they don’t work, and when things do stumble they almost always fall over in a funny fashion.

But The Cheap Seats gets its many, many laughs by sticking to the surface of things. Much of the focus is on the way the news is presented, the sports segment is about making jokes about sports clips, and the (always excellent) arts and entertainment segment is all about holding up trash TV and saying ‘what’s going on here?’

It isn’t their job to look deeper; unfortunately, at the moment it isn’t anyone else’s job either.

The Cheap Seats is broadcast on Tuesdays at 8.30pm on Channel 10 and is available on 10 Play.