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Hungry for new ideas

Andrew Denton talks to TV Tonight about how he found success in an experimental ABC show in 1988, and how he is now giving 19 young Australians the same chance in Hungry Beast.

hungrybeastAndrew Denton can’t think of any other show that he can liken to his newest project, Hungry Beast.

“Some of it is News, or more Topical than News. Some of it is Comedy and some it is in a strange nether world in between the two,” he told TV Tonight.

“I guess a better way to think of it is, in a traditional sense, like a showcase for new talent coming from all different directions. In a more contemporary sense it’s a bit like the internet, where you click between different worlds. You might see something stupid on YouTube, then go to a very serious site about climate change. Then you might go to an email from someone you really like, and then you might go onto something about your favourite TV show.  So it’s like that… where you click in between different worlds.”

The series, set to premiere on Wednesday night on ABC1, is the result of an exhaustive search for new media faces. There are 19 who comprise the Hungry Beast project, 7 of whom are on air.

“The concept was both simple and scary: to throw open the doors to a bunch of new people and give them an opportunity to try a whole lot of different ideas and styles. That’s why it’s really going to have a very unpredictable quality. I expect that over the series the show will start to take on some sense of itself. But right now it’s a wonderfully loose and open experiment,” he says.

“I think it’s going to come out of the gates at a hundred miles an hour and people are going to think, ‘What the hell was that?’

“But we’ve always said to these guys, ‘You’ve got 10 shows. We’re not going to talk ratings. We’re not going to talk reviews. All we want you to do is focus on really interesting ideas.’ It’s going to take at least that long for everyone to work out what they’re doing.”

With the backing of the ABC, both tangibly and spiritually, the hope is to uncover future voices just as ABC did with Denton himself on 1988’s Blah, Blah, Blah. He fondly remembers the late night comedy experiment.

“There were parliamentarians screaming for it to be taken off air even though some of them hadn’t seen it, which was very exciting. It was wildly experimental, grotty and messy. Much messier than this show will be.

“But it was a very thought-through, deliberate, poke in the eye to the manicured, middle-aged, predictable Australian television that we’d all lived through for the previous 20 years where youth television was ghetto-ised to rock clips,” he declares.

“The ABC has done this for many, many years with Race Around the World, Chaser, Fly TV –which threw up some great talent, I’m sorry that Fly didn’t go further. Then there was Double the Fist, the Review guys….”

Denton says ABC knows Hungry Beast is an investment in its own future. With that in mind he does not anticipate ratings pressure from management.

“I think of the ABC not so much as a bandwidth but a mindset. The ABC’s job when you boil it down, and this ranges all the way from Compass to Double the Fist or Hungry Beast, is actually about showing people different ways of thinking, different ways of running a subject. That’s what the ABC is there for.

“Ratings are secondary. Don’t let anyone kid you that at the ABC people don’t look at the ratings. And we love it if we get great ratings. But they’re actually not the point your start from and they’re not actually the point you end at either.

“I think the show will start moderately and then it will drop. Because people will sample it and go, ‘I don’t get it.’ And then if it’s any good it will build from word of mouth and slowly start to build. I don’t think it’s ever going to be a million strong audience for it. Which is probably going to disappoint the ABC at that time on a Wednesday night.”

The 19 who comprise the Hungry Beast team are aged 20 – 30 years. Under the auspice of Zapruder’s Other Films, they have been given a crash course in everything from camera, research, defamation and storytelling. They have soaked up a diverse range of television shows.

“One of the things we started with was Laugh-In, which was a show that very few of them had heard or seen. And one of the reasons we did that was to say, ‘Look how much you can do with 5 seconds. Look how much you can do with a word in 10 seconds.’ Television doesn’t always have to be about ‘Here’s the story and we’re going to plod through it in 5 minutes.’ Maybe you can make a point in 5 words. So we’ve really encouraged them to think in different ways.”

Amongst the industry speakers were Julian & Chas from The Chaser, politicial spin doctors, journalists and even Seven News boss Peter Meakin.

“We asked Peter to talk about ‘What Makes Good Television?’ If anybody has worked out the black art of getting a commercial audience it’s Peter,” Denton insists.

“Forget your David Leckie’s. He is the great driving force of modern Australian commercial television. If you look across the factual slate at Channel Nine, he basically introduced Infotainment.

“When Channel Nine was at its absolute peak in News and Current Affairs that was Peter Meakin at the helm. There’s much more than just A Current Affair or Today Tonight. He knows how to reach an audience, and that’s why we wanted him to speak to these guys. Whether you’re trying to do Today Tonight or Four Corners you’re still in the same game, which is to put forward an idea and hold people’s attention long enough to absorb it,” he says.

“You can debate the merit of the ideas but the challenge remains the same, which is ‘how do I get somebody to lock into this and take it away with them?’

Hungry Beast airs 9pm Wednesdays on ABC1.

4 Responses

  1. Looking forward to it. With this and the new channel 7 show it looks like some people will actually get a shot on tv. Hopefully the networks are learning that you don’t always get it right the first time and people need to get some low pressure experience under their belts. It’s very rare for someone’s first tv show to be a massive hit.

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