TV: The Wedge needs to follow Yasmine out

In perhaps the worst news in the history of Australian history, The Wedge has been renewed for a second series. If you consider that to be good news, stop reading, because I hate you. If you have no idea what The Wedge is, you’re not Australian, so I envy you. Now, accuse me of hyperbole here, but I do think this show is possible one of the worst every screened in this country. And we even get According to Jim down here. We have a show hosted by someone named Hotdogs.

It’s a sketch show. It’s called The Wedge because the skits are about recurring characters of a fiction suburb called Wedgedale. It’s supposed to allude to wedgies, I guess, which is would be cutting edge if conceived by a first grader.

I caught five minutes of it- all I could handle- tonight. We’re at a spelling be. An adult dressed as a child walks to an oversized microphone. A disembodied voice says the word is ventriloquist. The child character then spells the word without opening his mouth.

No, it’s not funnier when you see it.

No, that’s not as awful as it gets.

We have these two bogan (that’s Australian for hick) women who sit at pokies and… make various noises, this sportsman who creates scandals while his lawyer tries to explain them away at press conferences (with hilarious results!!!), and this fat British girl. There are others too, I guess, but I try to scrub my mind clean of them.

There was a glut of these sketch shows here a few years ago, and these tended to rely on punchlines. Sketch after sketch remained joke free until the very end, when BAM! It hit… and then usually wasn’t very funny. Not offensively bad, just not all that funny, which is something any comedy usually needs. I’ve watched an episode or two of How I Met Your Mother and that’s minorly watchable without being funny, but that’s a unique case, and it might just be the lingering effects of the thing I had for Alyson Hannigan in Buffy. Red-haired and quirky is hot.

So The Wedge seems to be a response to these shows, being catchphrase and repetition based. The pokies woman seem to say “lucky” a lot; a sportsman always gets words wrong, making his lawyer’s words of defence meaningless. Over and over and over. Oh, they say “lucky” in a high pitched voice, if that increases the humorousness of the situation. (It doesn’t.) Sameness is a substitute for humour.

Plus, it’s mean. I like my humour as dark as it can get, but only when it’s clever, or there’s at least there’s a love or sympathy for the characters or situations. The Wedge wants to be Little Britain, but as awful a character Vicky Pollard may be, Matt Lucas, who plays her, loves her, as should the audience, unless they’re humourless prudes. The Wedge is the televisual equivalent of Nelson Muntz pointing at someone stupid or poor or fat and saying “ha ha!”

Network Ten is the channel responsible for renewing this abortion of comedy, but they’re also the ones who have just cancelled a reality show of similar quality- Yasmine’s Getting Bukkak- sorry, Yasmine’s Getting Married. This mercy killing happened after just four episodes- less than a week- after the premiere. Yasmine is your average girl in her late twenties: bubbly, career-minded, willing to find a man to marry in the space of nine weeks so the search and ceremony can be aired in an act that’s about an inch away from prostitution.

Or, that’s what she would have done, had the show lasted more than a week. Ten is still willing to pay for the ceremony, though, should it eventuate.

Now, I may get things wrong here, having only watched about twenty minutes of the show in total from a couple of episodes. But I’m not getting payed to write this thing, and I don’t have a strong gag reflex. The show was aired live, with a panel consisting of a regular hostess and three or so different famewhores per evening, who would dissect the things they saw. The things they saw involved Yasmine- who didn’t appear to ever pop up on the panel- whether she be organising the nuptials or going on dates. Now, these dates were decided by the viewers. People voted on who the Yasmeister would see judging by snippets of about fifteen seconds in length, with guys trying to be witty (in a Perfect Match sort of way) on why Yasmine should marry them. So you vote and Yasmine dates and decides for herself if it should go any further.

One thing never addressed was how Yasmine could get to know these guys, really get to know them, on the dates with a huge camera in her face and a boom mic above her head. Or maybe they had radio mics, I don’t know. There was likely a director and lighting crew just offscreen, as well. And this is supposed to be Yasmine deciding who she’ll be with forever!

There was also something intensely creepy about the way the panel dissected Yasmine’s every move. If I were Yasmine- and thank fuck I’m not, because can you imagine the humiliation?- and I saw these people watching me like this and talking like they know me, I’d be intensely creeped out. But then, she signed up for it.

And now it’s gone. It was on nightly but is now replaced by Futurama, which would be awesome if I didn’t have the DVDs already, but an episode of that cartoon I’d seen one thousand times before is still an improvement on Yasmine’s little debacle. The best part of the situation is how, now, it's like Yasmine never existed. "Who's Yasmine? Futurama's on in the 7pm timeslot, silly!" It's so unceremonious, especially after the extreme hype generated for the show. Months ago, the ads began, and now, no mention. It's all very Big Brother. The 1984 'character', I mean, not the show. Nicely done, Ten. Now you’ve just got the world’s worst sketch show to queef out, and the world will be right again.

Sorry, Yas.