Happy 30th, Channel 31!
People often ask how I got started as a screenwriter. My answer is usually “by doing a whole lot of writing for the fun of it while pursuing other careers”. But that was only possible thanks to community broadcasters like PBS-FM and Channel 31, who gave my collabers and I an outlet for our nascent crap.
The very first sketch comedy show to screen on Channel 31 was my debut venture into the world of TV: Laugh You Bastards. (Anyone here for mature dramedy has already changed the channel.)
Yes, before Peter Helliar, Rove, and Hamish and Andy all got their starts on Channel 31, there was LYB. October 12, 1994 saw its premiere, with the full season being screened at 9:30pm across the first six Wednesdays of Channel 31’s life.
LYB was the baby of myself and a couple of other comedy buffs turned writer/performers: Peter Tatchell and Matthew K. Sharp. Sadly, over the past few years, Peter and Matthew have both died. I guess that means that I am the last bastard laughing, the keeper of this dubious legacy.
It was very much a show of its time, and that was a time when creating a TV show with zero budget really wasn’t easy. You young content creators with your TikTaks and your Instygrans have no idea.
The material was virtually all adapted from sketches from our radio show of the same name, which was broadcast on PBS-FM over the two previous years. Peter, Matthew and I were very inspired by the silliness of Monty Python and similar British comedy, and the sketches were full of silly characters with silly voices saying silly words in silly scenarios. There was also a strong seam of black satire; we were very much in the early 90s mode of smashing taboos, with a philosophy that anything was fair game for a joke, using the cover of community TV as a shield to see what we could get away with.
Our crew was mostly drawn from RMIT Film students who volunteered to cut their teeth shooting these sketches as part of Channel 31’s biggest production partner, RMITV. Our cast was fleshed out with mates and the occasional person who’d actually had some performance experience.
It took us at least 18 months of weekends shoots and learning how to edit (the old-fashioned way, analogue tape-to-tape), and it was a weekly scramble to meet our deadlines. It was a steep learning curve and the production quality could these days be bettered by a three year old, but for me, it was the first step on a long journey of writing funny stuff for TV. (Performing, not so much.)
So at risk of serious baby photo levels of embarrasment, I’ve uploaded a few of the more tolerable sketches from LYB to the Empire – you can find them on this here playlist – enter at own risk, apologies in advance, etc etc.
But wait – there’s more, punishment gluttons.
While LYB was the last time I worked with Peter, my association with Channel 31 continued with Matthew KS and a very amusing, multi-talented young man who became my partner-in-rhyme or -grime or -slime or some other lame pun: Mat Blackwell. Mat, Matthew and I dubbed ourselves Nyah Nyah. That maturity, it runs deep.
So while I’m trapped in the archives (help), it seems like there’ll never be a better excuse, if indeed there can ever be any excuse, to post the full series of Nyah Nyah’s 1997 anti-sitcom, Dad’s Got The Moose:
Congratulations Channel 31 on lasting three whole decades! A remarkable milestone, even if you are now actually located on channel 44. It’s enough to make a bastard laugh.
