Fully Furnished comedy pilot online at SBS
Tom Ballard's pilot about housemates from hell is uploaded to SBS Comedy site.
- Published by David Knox
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Comedy pilot Fully Furnished, featuring Tom Ballard and Tommy Dassalo has been made available online by SBS Comedy.
It is the third pilot from a nation-wide initiative Comedy Runway to be released online.
12 finalists each received $20,000 in development funding to create a five minute web pilot, with at least one pilot to be developed to a five episode web series.
According to a press release, ‘Fully Furnished tells the tale of Todd and Dayne, two terrible people in a three bedroom house who have just driven out the last person willing to live with them. Desperate to cover the rent, they’ve turned to ‘Sky B ‘n’ B’ who, every two weeks, send a new overseas traveller to stay and, most importantly, pay the bills. Unfortunately the people they select turn out to have some very out of the box ideas on what constitutes a good use of the spare room.’
Creator, writer and performer Tom Ballard said: “I would say that making Fully Furnished was a dream come true but most of my dreams don’t involve me having to walk around naked in front of a film crew with a DIY modesty patch super glued over my genitals. Apart from that though, it was jolly good fun.
“We’re eternally grateful to SBS Comedy and the Runway grant for allowing us to bring our very stupid ideas to life in a very professional way. We think we’ve made something funny and original and we’re really excited about getting it out to a comedy-loving audience.
“Scoring our friends and heaps good comedy-ers Ronny Chieng and Susie Youssef was a real treat because their talent distracted from our bad acting (and hopefully, my bare arse).”
4 Responses
Heads up : Currently not available on the PlayStation SBS OnDemand platform, but it is on the website. Just checked it out. Defo got potential (the episode, not Tom’s arse, I mean). I’d like to see a full five episode run.
Once again an initiative designed for “unknowns” is awarded to an established comedian. Yes I’m bitter! I entered Comedy Runway thinking that your level of fame would be taken into consideration. Tom Ballard is an established comedian who should have been disqualified in my opinion. He already had a now cancelled show on ABC last year. Jungleboys had a similar intiative asking for new writers for their sketch show. One of the credited writers was Josh Lawson and a quick IMDB search revealed that the other credited writers mostly had previous connections to Jungleboys.
We’ve been over this before. It’s not for unknowns, it’s for emerging talent. Tom Ballard has never written or produced a comedy series as far as I recall.
Yeah Mike, I totally get you.
These comps are to find new talent yet well known names who have been in the industry for years, employees of the networks (the other one was from a guy who has worked for SBS) and popular Youtube personalities are the ones getting this funding. and for the quality I have seen so far $20,000 for a 5 min clip which looks like they have spent no money on production. I know for a fact one of the winners from the ABC Fresh Blood who was a very popular Youtube personality got $10,000 for his production and still pulled in all the favours of free/cheap equipment and put his friends as cast.
Plus Screen Australia are now funding web series such as “The Katering Show” with proper budgets, that’s the things these guys should be going for not emerging talent comps.