The Weekly with Charlie Pickering review: that shrinking feeling

The ABC has been shrinking in front of our eyes for so long now that it’s rare we get an opportunity to notice what we’ve lost. Arts programming, state-based current affairs, anything aimed at teenagers; one minute they were there, the next all that’s left is another look at the glory days of Countdown.

But with an election coming up, a nation’s worth of viewers are about to turn to the ABC for something that used to be a core part of the national broadcaster: political satire.

Even just a few years ago, the ABC managed to have a handful of different voices on the air doling out the usual jokes. Sammy J had inherited the former Clarke & Dawe timeslot of 6.57pm on a Thursday; Mark Humphries was turning up semi-regularly on 730, mostly to make fun of Bob Kattar. Since the last election, both have been dropped and not replaced.

If you want political comedy on the ABC in 2025, there’s only one place left to go: The Weekly with Charlie Pickering.

Which is just another way of saying there’s nowhere to go, because calling The Weekly political satire is wildly defamatory to political satire and at the moment the ABC has enough legal trouble as it is. Which you’d know if you watched this week’s episode, because they did an entire bit on how the Antoinette Lattouf sacking is … bad? Sorry, it was hard to focus after Pickering was asked what his favourite race was and he said it was a tossup between ‘The Jews and the Tour de France’.

The Weekly … done weakly

So if it’s not satire, what is it? Sometimes it’s hard to tell. The now long-running segment where Margaret Pomeranz reviews trashy reality television is seemingly based on the idea that Pomeranz was once a serious highbrow critic and not the lowbrow-loving half of a popular duo that reviewed mainstream movies.

‘Older woman says mildly surprising things’ stopped being funny back when it was Lee Lin Chin doing it a decade ago: The Weekly has been flogging that dead horse for going on three years.

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Most of the non-clip comedy is outsourced to the guests, with uneven results. Rhys Nicholson is the closest thing The Weekly has to a second cast member (long gone are the days when The Weekly featured Kitty Flanagan and Tom Gleeson every week); he’s usually a reliable laugh getter when he’s not doing an extended bit comparing compulsory voting to getting a hand job in a cinema. Who said satire was dead? Oh wait, it was me after seeing that segment.

Mostly though, The Weekly is what all the promos say it is: a show where Charlie Pickering goes over the week in news. And to be fair it’s a tricky gig, even when Have You Been Paying Attention? and The Cheap Seats aren’t on air using all the same clips to make better jokes. Trying to recap a week’s worth of news at a time when week-old news might as well have happened a decade ago isn’t easy. Which is pretty obvious from watching The Weekly.

The Weekly … done meekly

The political content that makes it on air is much more about making jokes about politicians than saying anything about their politics. Supposedly the PM was shattered that Cyclone Alfred ruined his plan to announce an election date; Dutton bailing on his own electorate during the storm to attend a fundraiser wasn’t a good look either. But why linger on what that says about how politics works when you can make jokes about the way a reporter repeatedly used the word ‘scarping’?

A seemingly ongoing segment introduced this week entitled ‘Albo’s F**king Dog’ is, as you might have guessed, a bunch of clips about Albo’s dog accompanied by a voiceover letting us know that they’re not impressed by his dog.

A generous reading would be that there’s a deeper point being made about populism, only that point is ‘if you put all these clips together on top of each other this looks fake’. Which is about as insightful as saying ‘Donald Trump seems a bit unhinged if you listen to him talk for an hour’.

The clips of Albo’s dog are designed to be glimpsed out of the corner of your eye during the tail end of a news report you weren’t paying attention to: they seem clumsy and over the top because footage of the PM being boring and normal isn’t going to get him on the news.

But The Weekly is a show where the comedy is largely based on the clips they can find. Explaining that the clips they’re laughing at for being a bit weird or stupid are meant to be a bit weird or stupid because that’s what gets them on television might lead to people figuring out The Weekly is part of the problem.

There was never a golden age of ABC satire. While John Clarke and Brian Dawe were doing world-class work in three minute snippets, The Chaser were hogging the election limelight with specials that seemed largely about getting politicians on to show that they could take a joke when they weren’t trying to slash welfare benefits or demonise minorities.

At least back then there was a chance that someone might make a decent joke that would also make you think: these days The Weekly just makes you think ‘what else is on?’

The Weekly with Charlie Pickering airs on ABC Wednesdays at 8.30pm and is available on ABC iview.

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