Scope SCREEN INDUSTRY VIEWS
STAND-UP ON THE SMALL SCREEN
Liz Giuffre
As calls for the commissioning of local content on streaming services continue, one lovely place where movement is happening is the One Night Stan series. Developed by Guesswork Television and iconic local comedy management/representation company Token, this Stan series is high-budget, high-quality and high-profile in terms of its pool of talent.
The 2018 season features six comedians – Wil Anderson, Celia Pacquola, Tom Ballard, Sam Simmons, Judith Lucy and Tom Gleeson – who each perform a full-length show, and promotes these as having been ‘recorded live at Melbourne’s Comedy Theatre’. Watching the episodes feels like experiencing a mixture of live and staged, with some even deliberately including references to the apparatus of production. For example, in her episode, Pacquola breaks the fourth wall several times by telling the audience they are ‘being filmed’ and asking them to make her look good. It’s delightful and engaging – and the kind of acknowledgement of a live audience and the artifice of TV production that is rarely allowed to coexist.
Full-length stand-up comedy recordings have always been popular, but often also hard to place. Fellow comedy nerds like this writer will remember having coveted, bought and replayed comedy vinyl records until they literally wore out. For me, it was The Pick of Billy Connolly, a compilation originally released in 1981 but featuring material from before then. Stand-up – such as the annual Melbourne International Comedy Festival (MICF) Gala, held as an Oxfam fundraiser – has also appeared on television in small grabs; however, Jerry Seinfeld takes home the honour of having brought the format into audiences’ lounge rooms (and, accordingly, their lines of sight). In the US and the UK, ‘tonight’ and talk programs like those of Johnny Carson, David Letterman and Michael Parkinson provided a place for stand-up comedy as a format as well as the artists practising it to develop.
In places like the US, it’s often been pay TV that has enabled stand-up to enter into the domestic sphere. For a comedian, the HBO or Comedy Central ‘special’ is akin to landing
