Imagine you’ve been a successful sketch comedian for over ten years and won a heap of awards for your shows at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival as well as at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. You’ve just accepted a role on new TV shows spearheaded by one of the true comedy greats and after the first rehearsal you realise it’s a steaming pile of shit.
That’s exactly what happened to Kate McLennan when she took a job as one of the performers on the epic fail that was Ben Elton’s Live From Planet Earth.
While there’s been plenty of talk within the comedy world about exactly went wrong, no one has spoken about it publically… until now.
Kate sat down with Barry’s new show, The Little Dum Dum Club, and has give a painfully honest account of exactly what was going on behind the scenes.
Hanging At The Gates Of Impending Doom
Anyone who watched 5 minutes of the first episode of LFPE knew that the show was going to be axed, it was only a matter of time.
Kate explains “I was expecting on the Wednesday that I would get the axed phone call”. Instead the Executive Producer told her that Channel Nine had decided to keep the show on for another week. Every week the cast and crew would find out if the show was going to be on again the next week.
Hear Kate talk about the weeks leading up to the axing and how things went down when the show was finally shelved.
Working On A Dud
So what was it like working on a show that you didn’t think was any good? Kate tells it like it is, “it was awful, it was really shit.”
“You’ve got to talk yourself into doing a good job” says Kate, “everyone else who is working on the show is doing a really good job.”
In the age of Twitter, there’s no doubt for a performer about how their work is being received.
Kate confesses “a lot of the things that were said on Twitter I guess I had probably had said myself leading up to that point, so none of it surprised me.”
“All the young kids (working on the show) were getting on there looking and laughing at the time but you knew they were going to go home that night and be really upset.”
Hear exactly what it was like turning up to work every day on the show.
Ben Elton’s Role On The Show
On the LFPE website, one exasperated Ben Elton fan posted “Just let Ben Elton have creative control Channel Nine!”
Little did this fan know, Elton had complete control over everything.
“There were no writers on the show, there was just Ben” reveals Kate, “It was weird not having writing meetings… or an editor.”
Yep, Ben Elton was the host, the writer and the director of the show. Now Ben is an incredibly talented man who has been hugely successful over there years, no one would deny that. Not even the most talented comedian in the world could have pulled this project off alone. It’s no surprise that Ben failed.
Hear Kate’s full description of how the show was put together.
Working With Ben Elton
Sure, publically Ben Elton was busy telling anyone who thought the show was terrible that they were idiots. There was even one interview where he seemed to be comparing himself to Shakespeare and came up with a conspiracy theory about Twitter trying to undermine him. He wasn’t interested in listening to anyone critical of his show. What was he like behind the scenes though?
According to Kate, nearly every day he would come out and ask “Girls, what’s another word for vagina?” On one occasion he asked the cast whether girls say “fan-wa”.
When it comes to Elton’s material, Kate says “He was very much about the catchphrase and working back from there.”
Now, we’re no lady experts here at Barry, but thankfully Kate is and she told Elton that girls would probably say “fanny or vag” hell, she even threw in “vajayjay”.
“At the dress rehearsal,” Kate recalls Ben saying “you know, I’ve realised that the first 9 sketches all have some reference to the genitals so I’ve decided to cut some of that back.”
When it comes to how girls refer to their front junk however, Ben decided he knew better than Kate. Fan-wa made it to air.
It seems Ben wasn’t interested in listening to anyone working on the show either.
Hear Kate talk about a sketch involving the Queen and anal bleaching that was so bad it never made it to air.
Listen to how Ben dealt with the failure of the show.
That’s A Wrap
Make no mistake, even though Live From Planet Earth was a terrible show, we have the utmost respect for the cast and crew that put this show together. It’s not easy to make comedy for a mainstream audience and it’s exciting to see a TV station like Channel Nine get behind a live comedy sketch show.
It seems like the only ingredient for success that was missing was the word “no”. If someone said no to Ben Elton when he demanded to be the director AND the only writer AND the only editor AND the host of the show, it probably would have worked.
We can only hope that the television industry sees this experiment not as a failure of comedy, rather a failure of how to make comedy.
Hear the Little Dum Dum Club on Barry at the following times:
Monday at 11am & 10pm
Tuesday at 5am & 5pm
Wednesday at 8am & 8pm
Thursday at 2am & 2pm
Friday at 4am & 4pm
Saturday at 2am, 9am & 8pm
Sunday at 5am, 2pm & 11pm
All times are in AEDT.
Post a Comment