Rob

Rob

Sophie, I too love the “shot in Vancouver” reference. To show my age, no matter how many X-Fileses and… what's the one with the floating letters? Wasn't that “SiV”?… I still always think of 21 Jump Street whenever I hear Vancouver mentioned – I think because I first read about the use of Vancouver as a sit in for Anycity, U.S.A. in relation to that.

I don't often see Ghostbusters 2 references these days, but oddly enough the blog entry above was the first of two I had this week. It is unlikely that it will be a good sign when a plumber says to you “have you seen the movie Ghostbusters 2… when they look down into the pit”. Fortunately it emerged that this was just chit-chat and not an indication that a 10 metre wide channel of evil undead spirits is running under my house.

Am I allowed to say how great the Outland Institute is here? Oh well, very well then, I shan't.

CNNNN was great. The Election Chaser was great. CWOE, though, has for three years relied upon ambushing receptionists, hassling foreigners and seeking controversy.

Last night featured a dumb sketch in which Hansen played a bloke with stigmata. He bled on everything all the time, which made his life a misery. The sketch followed his journey through various occupations, all of which just happened to involve bleeding on people. No wit, no intelligence, just bleeding on people. Oh look, he's a dentist, he's bleeding into the patient's mouth! Hilarious.

One short piece featured two of them on a vox pop excursion in Norway, waving the Muppets' Swedish chef at people. Oh my aching sides. Mick and Tony did much the same thing on The Late Show, but they said funny things, chose interesting people and (I presume) cut hours of material down to a couple of minutes.

Julian Morrow hijacked the PA system in some American train station for about 15 seconds. That was a whole item.

And then of course there was Chas Licciardello's Botox effort. It can't be a coincidence that he looks a lot like Johnny Knoxville. And. It. Wasn't. Funny.

Brett made the point that CWOE has been hobbled by recent ABC editorial knee-jerking, but it was never funny. Ever. The first series was just as devoid of wit, just as desperate to offend people and just as desperate.

The most annoying aspect of all this is that we know they can be funny. We've seen it.

I remember, in the lead-up to the first series of CWOE, reading an interview in which Chris Taylor (I think) admitted that 25 half-hours per year would be very difficult to fill. He was right.

Mickey Hardy's thrilling fruit story certainly puts 7 News' 'Who is AFL's Hottest Player?' story in a new light. Thanks, 60 Minutes, I can always count on you for hard-hitting investigative journalism like “How many fruits can you name?” (Answer: Not many; I generally don't ask their name, as my mouth is usually full)

DanBo

PS Expect my pitch entry in the next couple of weeks. I started it on the train on the way home from work tonight.

The web site has been largely updated over the last week – not that you'll really be able to tell – and that, along with Google's buyout of Feedburner and moving around servers, means you may notice something with the feed – beyond it being held up by eight hours between the episode post and the show coming up in iTunes and other podcatchers.

We should be back to our usual, uninterrupted high quality shortly.