Tonight at the Museum review: letting comedians loose in the museum

Tonight at the Museum is an ABC success story right out the gate: it’s a brand new show that feels a lot like something you’ve seen before. In the long and storied history of ABC panel shows that are kind of a quiz, kind of a comedy and kind of informative, this is very much another one of them.

The big twist here is that Tonight at the Museum is filmed inside an actual museum (the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, to be exact), source of the many props brought out to fuel the quizzes and puzzles that make up the show. Unfortunately the actual set looks identical to pretty much every other ABC panel show in living memory, which does undercut the whole museum setting a little.

Hosted by Alex Lee, best known for various ABC hosting gigs and also The Roast of Paul Hogan, Tonight at the Museum sees four comedians invited to go through a range of games related to various museum exhibits, competing for the ultimate prize of having something that they’ve brought in put on permanent display in the museum. Which suggests the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery must be a little hard up for new exhibits, but maybe a voodoo doll of Alan Davies will be a big drawcard in the Apple Isle.

Tonight at the Museum treads familiar ground

It’s not for a television critic to say the first game – titled Put a Label on It, in which two people provide conflicting descriptions of an exhibit (in this case, a microscope) and the other two have to decide which one to believe – felt surprisingly close to the central conceit of long-running and extremely popular panel show Would I Lie to You? But presumably there’s only so much comedy you can get out of a microscope or a feather at the best of times.

To be fair, original ideas are few and far between on television, especially when it comes to panel shows. It’s the execution that counts, and Tonight at the Museum takes full advantage of Australia’s growing collection of panel-friendly comedians. Aside from the aforementioned Davies, episode one features Tegan Higginbotham, Zoë Coombs Marr and Brett Blake. As a group there’s enough variety in their comedy styles to keep the banter flowing.

While much of the episode relies on the contestants’ storytelling skills – there’s always an anecdote behind the item each comedian has brought in hoping to have it go on display – they do get to get out from behind the desk later in proceedings.

First there’s a scavenger hunt to find the item that would best impress a 14-year-old (don’t worry, they’re not breaking into the cabinets or anything), which rapidly turns into making jokes about weird stuff in the museum that could have been a segment titled Historical Pottery or Potential Bong?

Things do get a bit more educational after that with the arrival of a museum expert to class things up, oh wait no, she’s a ‘vagina expert’ bearing various moulds of animal vaginas.

Museum curios and a healthy sense of fun

Not every episode of Tonight at the Museum reaches these dizzying heights, but expert guests, treasure hunts, Put a Label on It and a final quiz are pretty much standard across the series’ eight episodes. There’s only so much craziness you can get up to in a museum, especially when they’ll be opening the doors to the public the next day.

That said, this does manage to get a bit of mileage out of being filmed inside the actual museum. Getting to see exhibits usually considered too precious to display is kind of cool, and the sheer depth of the items available in the museum really does make TMAG seem like something of a treasure trove. Not necessarily a trove of things that would impress a 14-year-old, but they’re not watching the ABC anyway.

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These kinds of panel shows are the ABC’s bread and butter at the moment. Who could forget last year’s attempt to turn true crime into a panel game show with Crime Night! This one at least has a strong central idea, and while mucking around with museum exhibits will only get you so far, the vibe here is very much that of a show that is more inclined to have a bit of fun than some of the ABC’s more recent efforts.

So while yes, Tonight at the Museum is yet another ABC panel show, at least it’s an entertaining, well-made ABC panel show. When the animal vagina expert explains how she got into her line of work, it’s clear she’s on a mission to change the (often quite sexist) way people view animal reproduction. Like all the museum staff that show up this season, she’s out there doing important work – and if there’s a few decent clitoris jokes along the way, both we and the ABC are the better for it.

Tonight at the Museum premieres 4 March on ABC TV and ABC iview.

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