Elegant Gentlemen take sketch comedy to the sharp end

AUNTY'S edgy new sketch comedy show ranges from the ridiculous to the surreal and, at times, it cuts to the bone.

The Elegant Gentleman's Guide To Knife Fighting

IN times past the magnetism to hold a comedy audience could be acquired only after years and years of what old jokers called "apprenticeship in the long grass", working the clubs and then the new comedy stores that burgeoned a couple of decades ago.

Appearances, if you were lucky, were on TV variety and later talk shows, and then maybe you fronted breakfast radio programs. It was all about the painstaking perfecting of acts and timing, getting to know each audience and its likes and dislikes.

How it's all changed. Now the internet can provide instant feedback, likes and derision coming almost instantly, when something comic or even just amusing reaches YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, SoundCloud or podcast. And when we talk humour and the net we don't only mean all those pictures and videos of cats in ridiculous situations, wearing silly outfits, doing hilarious things. No, it's the way humour gives all of us strangers instantaneous common ground, creating a virtual coffee shop, a fertile place for comedic experimentation. If, of course, you can handle all those sometimes vicious anonymous critics.

The Elegant Gentleman's Guide to Knife Fighting, the new ABC comedy series with the baroque, Victorian-sounding name (or is it a spin-off from 1930s pulp comics) started with production company Jungleboys FTV. Crammed with cleverness, it's an online offshoot from the Jungleboys group, which produces award-winning TV series and commercials. Its directors created five of the past seven Australian Film Institute/Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts best comedy series winners, including the ABC's Review with Myles Barlow and A Moody Christmas.

Their internet comedy channel hosts a mix of content that Jungleboys produces, as well as other comedies "that we love from around the world". As they say, people are too busy to sift through mountains of content to find material they like. "We're keen to build an audience that shares a similar comedy sensibility to ourselves and one that wants to contribute," their site says. "And if you don't find the content funny, then we don't like you and we don't find you funny either. But the next day self-doubt will creep in and we'll try to remember why we thought we were funny in the first place."

Well, that maybe gives you some idea. The website channel is curated by Trent O'Donnell, Phil Lloyd, and Jason Burrows, three of the parent company's TV big hitters. They've also been involved in the creation of The Elegant Gentleman's Guide to Knife Fighting, scenes for which were first aired on Jungleboys FTV.

With the Jungleboys group of producers, it's often hard to know who exactly is responsible for any content - there's much role swapping with their other directors, most of whom also write or act. (The Jungleboys moniker emerged out of the principals' original desire to be guerilla filmmakers when they began doing low-budget work for advertising agencies from Burrows's flat in Bondi in 2003.)

Apart from O'Donnell, directors include Wayne Blair (The Sapphires), Craig Melville (John Safran's Race Relations), Abe Forysthe (Mr and Mrs Murder), the Van Vuuren Brothers (Bondi Hipsters), award-winning documentary director Stephen Oliver (Skippy: Australia's First Superstar), and Tropfest winner Alethea Jones. All are involved at some level in the inventive new series, along with experienced actors Damon Herriman, Darren Gilshenan, Georgina Haig and Robin McLeavy.

Oh, and the baffling series title? "Originally we liked the name because we loved the obscurity of it and we loved the idea of a long title and we thought the show was around the idea of the hapless male trying to be a man in the modern world," Burrows says. But the show moved on from this idea it seems, and the producers now don't want to pigeonhole it for a male audience. "Anyway, I actually do still love the name, even if everyone calls it 'that knife show'," Burrows adds.

This small, steaming factory of talent wants to take TV sketch comedy in a new direction. "With longer-form scenes, less traditional material and a surprising cast, it will be at times random, often ridiculous and occasionally surreal," their PR material says. And from a rough cut First Watch has seen, they have certainly succeeded; "That knife show" is certainly all those things but often it's also subtle and underplayed, with a disquieting sense of mordancy.

They work from the notion that in these days of internet communication we don't need to know anything about where an idea came from or where it is going. Though while this usually translates into quick hits, jabs and jolts of humour, the Elegant Gentleman also features ongoing vignettes from the same sketch, like grabs from some disquieting alternative movie.

The attention span of the online audience is short and the team tries to grab it in the first 10 seconds, but they develop some sketches in the almost old-fashioned way that allows character development and the possibility of long-running narratives. The irony is they tend to use quietness and an almost documentary style of extreme observed naturalism that usually quickly intrigues after the cut from one scene to an other.

The sketches are linked by what TV calls "breakers", gloriously silly and quite beautiful animations from Doug Bayne that parody the minutiae of internet exchanges and its well-known graphics that balloon out of his manipulation of famous classical paintings. They almost run away with the show.

The running long-form sketch in the first episode features Patrick Brammall as a Prius owner, a kind of mysterious stranger called Geoff, echoing Clint Eastwood's nihilistic heroes, in a story in which - like Eastwood in High Plains Drifter - he destroys all semblance of middle-class civilisation. He wrecks a suburban dinner party in a savage extension of the omnipresent TV car commercial: "I drive a goddamn Prius," he tells them as he orders them to do unspeakable things.

He's morally superior to everyone in the room, especially the man who drives a 2007 Subaru Outback. Geoff is brutal and demanding. The sketch probably kicks off from the way the idea of masculinity is embedded into men's lives in so many facets of life, but especially in glossy TV car spots, setting the standard that chaps should define themselves through cars. Consumerism morphs men's desire for cars because they have been told continuously that this is what will make them masculine.

It really is very clever and funny, even as he bashes the craven blokes and makes the women make out for his pleasure. "You should probably do it," one of the husbands says, abashed. "He drives a Prius."

One cute shorter sketch shows the way the phenomenon of the celebrity chef has transformed the restaurant industry and, in the process, changed the nature of how we eat. It reinforces in its understated way that cooking is best left to the professionals. By turning chefs into entertainers, whether performing onscreen or via the impeccable platings in their restaurants - in this case some seaweedy melange served on a fat, still breathing man in underpants lying seemingly comatose on a trolley - we have widened the breach between ourselves and the once ordinary task of cooking.

Another stand-out sketch shows the way some - shall we say fashion-forward - men have become obsessed with hats and caps, rarely seeming to take them off, even indoors, despite etiquette breaches. These are not guys either whose forays into hatdom started with a doctor's warning about the harmful effects of sun exposure - they have simply become obsessed with stylish looks and accessories from the past. They won't let anybody, especially their wives, see their heads.

There's a nice sketch too about a rather raggedy porn movie shoot - they're making Kitchen Sluts Five - interrupted by a council safety officer (very funny deadpan Darren Gilshenan) hammering home the "Make Safe, be Alert, Not Inert" message. Its dry humour deals with the way we live in a society governed by fear: fear of the authorities, fear of fellow citizens' covert suspicions and overt accusations, and fear of having even our most decent human impulses twisted into unthinkable crimes.

And at the same time it satirises the prevalence of home-grown, everyone-is-a-filmmaker porn. There's also a subtext that parodies the notion of doing sex scenes in any movie, the way the studio somehow fills up with technicians of every kind.

"This show will certainly get a lot of people talking," says Jennifer Collins, the ABC's head of entertainment, appointed last year after three years as factual boss. "There's darkness to it but the cries I heard when I came into this job were for new, fresh shows and that's what it delivers; it's razor sharp and comes with their unique style."

"THAT knife show" may be a bit too razor sharp for some ABC viewers; it's certainly not to everyone's taste. But Aunty is for all of us, after all, and if you're not keen on new guerilla-style satire then check out the BBC's Last Tango in Halifax, starring Derek Jacobi and Anne Reid as a couple who fall in love for a second time. It starts this week too, and is an affecting promotion of love for the over-60s and the way early romantic experiences leave a lasting imprint on who we are and who we fall for.

It's written by Sally Wainwright who most recently gave us Scott & Bailey, also broadcast on the ABC, the subtly realised police series featuring all-female leads and full of calamity and intrigue, and a nice change from all those crime shows about male cops.

Last Tango is a nice change, too, from the cliched depiction of the over-60s in most TV dramas. They're usually figures of fun or targets for condescending sentimentality. And when physical attraction comes into it, they more often than not become the subjects of comedies of embarrassment.

Even so, shows promoted as "uplifting" and "heartwarming", as this one is, are usually experiences to be avoided and make you long for those male cop series about blokes who are bitter, frustrated and without a good grip on themselves.

But Wainwright, a fine writer with a gift for pithy dialogue, gets away with it and, helped by stellar performances from Jacobi and Reid, avoids any belittling caricature. They are childhood sweethearts Alan Buttershaw and Celia Dawson, both widowed and in their 70s and who last saw each other in 1973, now reunited by the internet and email. The scenes where they hesitantly and charmingly write to each other set the slightly humorous tone of the series, beautifully edited to Murray Gold's evocative musical score. As Wainwright says, they embody the spirit of the show: it's not about being old, it's about being in love.

When they finally meet up they discover an almost Shakespearean misunderstanding on both sides has kept them apart. And, as often seems to be the case, their romance proceeds rapidly; they have wasted too many years without each other, have little time left in life, and they do not want to wait.

The story was inspired by the experience of Wainwright's mother, who logged on to Friends Reunited, found a school chum she'd not seen for 60 years, fell in love at the age of 75 and married, late and blissfully. "It's simply a great story," she writes on the series website. "Uplifting, life-affirming, joyous. Those words just come to me all the time when I think about what happened."

But her fictional family is not as supportive as Wainwright obviously was of her mother's rekindled romance. While the overarching story of Alan and Celia is delightful, their sometimes bitter dysfunctional families bring drama and chaos and countless plot twists.

Caroline's daughter (Sarah Lancashire), a headstrong, successful headmistress, questions her life choices and her relationship with her mother. Her marriage is collapsing - husband John (Tony Gardner) recently left her to move in with his alcoholic mistress Judith (Ronni Ancona) - but now he's back and wants to try again. She's also caught in a fraught little something with a fellow female teacher.

And Alan's daughter, the chaotic, earthy widow Gillian (Nicola Walker) works on the family farm and in the local supermarket. She has a troublesome son and is also burdened with the accusations of brother-in-law Robbie (Dean Andrews), who is convinced she was involved in the death of her husband.

It all sounds more complex than it plays. The scenes are short and the writing crisp, much of the narrative carried in the faces of the actors, especially Jacobi and Reid, who are both wonderfully expressive. Such gracious actors they both are, each look revealing layers of character. They never overbalance their roles, just quietly disclose their humanity.

Director Euros Lyn, who also did some inventive work on Sherlock, makes great use of tight close-ups, the camera slowly tracking though space and almost subjectively hovering around Wainwright's characters as they think about what is happening to their lives.

The first episode sucked me right in, even if it's more Alan Bennett than Bernardo Bertolucci, and I can't wait for more - even as I dread the possibility of ever having to go through this kind of experience myself, no matter how uplifting it is for Alan and Celia.

The Elegant Gentleman's Guide to Knife Fighting, Wednesday, 9pm, ABC1.

Last Tango in Halifax, Saturday, 7.30pm, ABC1.