The Blow Parade

Mon 17th May, 2010 in Features

The Blow Parade is a new mockumentary series written and performed by The Chaser’s Andrew Hansen and Chris Taylor taking the piss out of music industry mythology and golden-oldies radio.

FasterLouder caught up with Taylor to talk about writer’s block, U2’s over-bloated, self-important enterprise and regretting the third season of The Chaser.

Could you tell me a bit about your new show, The Blow Parade: what is it, where did the idea come from, what influenced its creation?

I suppose in basic terms that the show’s a parody of those Classic Albums music documentaries where bands, producers and sound engineers rabbit on at length about their role in the making of a seminal record.

I’ve always loved those docos, especially the scenes where a washed-up engineer sits at a mixing desk bringing up one fader at a time to explain the different components of a song, and how it was invariably left to his unique genius to make it all work. I thought that the language and the self-aggrandisement in those docos were fairly ripe for parody. But beyond that, I also wanted to take a look at other elements of the music industry – such as the role of record companies and the sheer stale monotony of music radio presenters and the hipster music press alike.

I’ve always loved radio as a medium for comedy. And I think some of the Coma FM sketches I did on the Today Today show are among the better things that I’ve done, so I was very keen to team up again with the Today Today producer Craig Schuftan to try our hand at a much longer, proper radio series. These sorts of shows are very common in Britain. Radio 4 in particular has a wonderful tradition of scripted half-hour comedies.

Everyone knows about the Goon Show, but much more recently there’ve been equally great shows like On the Hour, People Like Us and Knowing Me, Knowing You. I devoured all of these shows on cassette, and have always been amazed that nothing similar has ever existed in Australia, at least not in my lifetime. So I guess I sort of took it upon myself to try and get one on the airwaves, and I was very lucky that triple j was generous and willing enough to give it a go.

Take me through your process. How do you go about putting pen to paper? Are you highly critical of your own work?

I always had great confidence in the concept, and had confidence too in *Andrew Hansen8 nailing the music side of things, but despite all that the scripts didn’t come easily to me. I told the ABC I could have the series written in 13 weeks, and it ended up taking me closer to 6 months.

But that was entirely my fault – I hit a particularly bad period of writer’s block, which can happen from time to time, and it’s the most annoying and stultifying thing in the world. It’s as though your mind just freezes and quits out of a fear that it won’t be able to do the original idea justice. But nothing cures writer’s block quite like a deadline, and eventually the ABC cracked the whip and got me moving – and once I was back at the desk I ended up finding the writing process very pleasurable.

The way I tend to work is to make a bullet point list of ideas and jokes that I want to include somewhere in the series. So I have notebook full of about 20 pages of bullet point gags – they’re usually something as brief and simple as “Parody of Chess musical – Backgammon?” or “Rooftop gig on Chrysler Building”. And then I go through the list and allocate those gags to specific episodes, and try to work out a very loose structure for each episode.

The first thing that usually got committed to paper was the lyrics for all the songs. I’d write lyrics for about 15 songs per episode and email them to Andrew Hansen, who would then email me back with an mp3 demo of the song’s melody. Occasionally Andrew would tweak or add lyrics to scan with his tune, or to add more comedy, and it was a very easygoing, uncomplicated way of collaborating.

It’s the same way we’ve always written songs for The Chaser – we’re never actually in the same room. The entire thing is done by email. Then once we’re happy with all the songs, I’d sit down and write the dialogue for the episode, which mostly just amounted to fleshing out and honing all those bullet-point gags from my notebook. Many jokes got cast aside on closer scrutiny, whereas sometimes I’d stumble on something entirely new. The Johnny Carson section in the Folk episode, for instance, was never in the notebook – that just spilled out spontaneously, and ended up being one of our favourite bits.

Fans of the Chaser team are able to approach The Blow Parade comfortably, with Andrew Hansen more than ever seen as the ‘musical one’. It seems like a natural fit. Have you yourself dreamt of becoming a rock star?

Yes, of course. That’s all I’ve ever wanted to want to be. But I have very little musical talent, so that’s why I’ve always surrounded myself with brilliant musical people like Andrew Hansen who can help me live out my rock star fantasises. Andrew himself was in a proper band once, but they never quite cracked the big time, so I think he’s quite grateful that comedy has given him a second-chance to get his music out there.

Do you have a specific band that you tend to pick on, target or parody?

Each episode focuses on a specific genre of music, and I think when I started I intended our fictional bands to be composites of various different groups within that genre. But it didn’t quite turn out like that.

The five acts we’ve invented for the series are clearly heavily modelled on Pink Floyd (Lake Deuteronomy), Bob Dylan (Egg Zagar), Sex Pistols (The Fatcocks), U2 and Funkadelic/Parliament.

But with the possible exception of the U2 episode, the pisstake is always entirely affectionate. Those other four acts I absolutely love. U2 on the other hand I’ve always found to be a slightly over-bloated, self-important enterprise. And musically they’ve become increasingly less interesting over time.

If you could head out tonight and see any band in the world, who would you want to see?

The National, probably.

Do you have a personal favourite sketch or activity you were involved in: Blow Parade, CNNNN, the War, or otherwise?

No, not really. I think The Blow Parade’s probably the best thing I’ve done to date. Actually, no, it’s the second best thing: in 2008 I wrote a pilot for a TV comedy series that I was really pleased with, and I think it’s easily the best piece of TV writing I’ve done – and very different to the Chaser stuff – but unfortunately the ABC passed on it. So who knows if it will ever get made?

As for The Chaser, because those shows are a collaboration between six very different senses of humour, there’s not a single episode that any one of us would look at and be entirely happy with as a cohesive piece of work. The Cadman or Lunchgate episodes of CNNNN probably get closest. But there are some individual sketches or segments from the War that I’m still quite fond of: Hill$ong, Cats the Movie, I am Thesaurus and the review that Chas and I did of The Secret, just to name a few.

_The Chaser’s War On Everything _was a juggernaut of controversy – some highs, some lows – but overall its gone down as infamous in Australian television history. Was it hard letting go of the program initially, and how do you reflect upon the decision now?

No, it was actually very easy to let go. We’d had a tremendous ride, but we all felt that the show had run its course and that it was time to try our hand at something new.

Aside from the obvious – the skits that might have missed the mark – do you have any regrets about the show?

The only real regret I have is coming back to do a third season. We all had fairly mixed feelings about returning, and Chas and I were particularly sceptical about it, but we reluctantly signed up on the promise that we’d only have to do 10 episodes – and to be honest, we kind of needed the work and couldn’t afford to be too precious about it. But it became obvious quite quickly that our earlier instincts had been right.

The public’s appetite show for the show had diminished, and our inability to reproduce a stunt on the scale of APEC was clearly a disappointment to most viewers.

Ironically, even though I think it was wrong to return, I actually think the third season contains some of the strongest pieces we ever did. Items like the Chas botox piece, the Shore Rowing Shed Appeal, the Small Talk sketch and In Due Season easily hold their own against anything from the first two seasons. The main problem was that the show was no longer a cult novelty. It had become a mainstream entity, which kind of goes against the spirit and the purpose of a program like that.

My research has uncovered that you were actually a proficient journalist before the fame of the Chaser. Do you recall a moment or a series of events in growing up which led you to think that journalism was the way forward?

No, I never really wanted to be a journalist. I always wanted to be a writer. Journalism was just the default course I enrolled in because it seemed to be the closest match for my interests. This was in the day before universities offered courses in Creative Writing, so if you were the sort of person that was good with words you usually ended up in an Arts or Journalism degree, and I ended up in both.

But I was never one of those people who thought journalism was an honourable or glamorous profession. I think even as a student I recognised it was mostly full of bimbo newsreader wannabes and hacks who thought that rewriting a press release somehow amounted to “changing the world”.

You were making your name as a journalist, now you’re a comic and a television personality. How did the cross over into comedy come about?

I worked as a reporter for the ABC by day, and wrote comedy pieces for The Chaser newspaper by night. The Chaser was just a fun hobby. Very few people read the paper, and none of us ever seriously thought it would lead to a professional career.

My first big break actually came when I got glandular fever. I wasn’t allowed in the newsroom for six weeks so I stayed at home and, to keep myself occupied, I started submitting comedy scripts to BackBerner, a few of which were actually used.

Around this same time, Andrew Denton also got in touch to say how much he enjoyed The Chaser newspaper. He encouraged us to think of television ideas, and used his clout to negotiate a deal for us to make a pilot for what eventually became The Election Chaser. I remember quitting my job as a journalist just so I could make the pilot – it was a big risk. But thankfully the show got picked up, and bizarrely we’ve somehow been able to sustain a career out of it ever since.

We’ve just been incredibly lucky, and to this day we owe a massive debt to Andrew Denton and the ABC for taking a punt on us.

What makes satire so attractive? What draws you to this particular sub-genre of comedy?

I think The Chaser is often mistakenly labelled as a satirical team. We don’t really see ourselves that way. We just think of ourselves as a comedy team. There are occasional elements of satire in our work – particularly in those early election specials and in CNNNN. But a show like the War was really just devised as a vehicle for a bunch of mates to piss-fart about.

Andrew Hansen and I are both huge fans of absurdist comedy, and a show like The Blow Parade has finally given us the opportunity to explore that type of humour. It’s actually a lot closer to the type of comedy I like, compared to anything I ever did with The Chaser, and it’s probably the least satirical thing I’ve ever written. I’m hoping in the next couple of years I can explore that side of things further, and try a few more projects in this vein.

The Blow Parade airs on triple j at 5pm on Wednesdays (1am Thursdays uncut encore and 12pm Sundays encore) and is available as a podcast from the triple j website for a limited time.