Behind the scenes: NEWStopia

Shaun Micallef might have had his mind on the job as performer when TV Tonight dropped by the NEWStopia set yesterday, but in between takes he was consulted on script and producerial duties too. With co-writer and co-producer Gary McCaffrie, Micallef oversees the entire production which keeps itself fresh until the last possible minute.

“On Sundays, that’s when most of my work happens because I plot out the show in terms of what the subject matter is likely to be,” says Micallef.

“I keep my eye on what happens Monday night. On Tuesday if anything major happens during the shoot I make sure I know about it so I can either write something up at the desk, anticipating of course that it’s going to be seen the next night. So what’s likely to happen in the next 24 hours…

“And when we use newspaper headlines (at the end of the show) for tomorrow, all I say is ‘The Australian says…’ and I won’t actually say anything, and that just gives us a chance to look at the newspapers tomorrow. We just put a caption in, so anything that does happen the next day and is likely to be in the news the next night, we’ve sort of covered.”

Following a Tuesday record, the show is quickly edited on Wednesday for airing that night, while the creative team begin work again on the next episode.

One of the challenges is to have fresh jokes on news topics that haven’t already been done.

“A lot of radio will write kneejerk jokes, so we don’t write those because we know they will already be out there by the time go to air. It happened with The Chaser too, sometimes we’d stumble across the same area, we might even have the same observation. Of course they were on the ABC an hour before us so we’d sort of put our Chaser filter on and ask ‘what are they likely to do?’”

NEWStopia again brings back director Jon Olb, actors Kat Stewart and Nicholas Bell, with a number of other supports, including a regular Sportscaster – one of the subtle changes of the third series.

“It’s probably a little less bizarre than the other two series came to be,” he says. “It’s probably a bit more sardonic. I think a lot of the news pieces we’re writing are less-jokey about the vision that we’re seeing. And more about what the message of the actual story is. We’ve all got a little bit more interested in what’s happening in the world as a result of watching the news. A lot of the jokes are a bit more serious I suppose. But I wouldn’t want to eliminate entirely stupid jokes.”

Micallef, who has now worked on every network in one form or another, says SBS originally wanted their own Panel-style show.

“They actually wanted The Panel with comedians. So we just changed it a bit and said ‘it’ll have a desk!’

“And I knew of Jon Stewart’s existence but I hadn’t really watched him. The Colbert Report is probably a bit more comparable to this one, I think he’s quite brilliant and I think his writers are quite brilliant.

“He’s playing a character all the way through which is very difficult.

“My character doesn’t have much attitude in the show, it’s just odd. Because I’m allegedly playing myself, it’s whatever we need to be. I’m either slightly acerbic or completely straight for the material. Compared with the sketch show character we used to do (on the ABC) where my character was quite really vain and really rude and stupid.”

NEWStopia has also become a cult show for its spot-the-fake-ads sandwiched in between the studio show and SBS sponsor advertisements. Viewers love their self-referential style, that mimic the tone of SBS’ own ads.

“It gives us an opportunity to do gags that we can’t do, because of the rhetoric and grammar of news shows (which) prevent you from going and shooting things elaborately as you might a documentary about Hitler or ‘Inspektor Herring.’ We can play with mood and production value a little more. And because they’re short they’re not astronomically expensive.”

So clever are the ads, they’ve even thrown some SBS viewers into a state of confusion.

“We did do a joke about the history of Hitler documentaries and we suggested it was happening for the next six months. Every week there’d (theoretically) be several documentaries about Hitler, which there seems to be on SBS. And they did have people a bit distressed that the Festival of Hitler documentaries wasn’t on.”

Micallef says they dropped their original plans to have the fake ads actually appearing within the SBS breaks, rather than leading out of the show itself.

“They said ‘no it’s going to be too confusing for the programmers, and the technicians and also for the audience,’ so we didn’t do that.”

When NEWStopia reaches the end of the third series Micallef will shoot an entire episode in the style of his phony Inspector Rex parody.

“The last episode is a full length Inspektor Herring episode,” he laughs. “I would love to do a series.

He plans to play around with pantomime and silent comedy, using subtitles and having fun with the storytelling.

“It’s a bit of a sneaky way for us to get a pilot in and see whether they like it or not,” he admits.

NEWStopia airs 10:05pm tonight on SBS.