Some comedians and shows leave the stage all too soon, others just keep on coming back, eerily immune to ratings failure and audience hatred...

   Least Hoped-For Return
Winner:
Good News Week - 43.48%

Nominees
Chris Lilley - 39.13%
Rebel Wilson - 17.39%

Last Year's Winner
MOST INEXPLICABLY RE-COMMISSIONED PROGRAMME:
The Wedge

Voter comments

Standards are so goddamn low in this country that crap like Good News Week gets hailed as a revival of "satire". Should people settle for a show simply because it's not as shit as The Glasshouse was?
- 13 schoolyards

Chris Lilley could at least conceivably bumble onto something good someday provided he's divested of all creative control, and I expect Bogan Pride was Rebel Wilson's first and last leading-lady gasp, but Good News Week was a raging hurricane of noise-over-signal SUCK for five years. If the massive power of its own shitness couldn't stop it, what on Earth could? FINALLY it died down, and now it's been buffeted back in on a wave of...false nostalgia, I suppose. Who looks at Good News Week and thinks, "Thank God it's back"? I know people who watched The fucking Glasshouse, and even THEY don't watch Good News Week. Hopefully this means it won't be back for long, but then, I thought the same on its first run. At least this time it's not associated with any radio stations I listen to, I suppose.
- samadriel

The Amanda Vanstone jokes weren't clever, biting or funny when she was in office, let alone when she or her government isn't in office. Their response to the Rudd government's lacklustre climate change agenda? Mikey Robbins talking about Penny Wong going to k.d. lang concerts. And they had deputy opposition leader Julie Bishop on as a panellist. Fucking hell.
- mixmaster flibble

Ted Robinson is either the smartest man in Australian television, or he's the smartest man on Australian television. In the first case, he knows exactly what the public craves and has been a regular supplier of it for the last ten years; in the second, Australian television is staffed top-to-bottom by morons who just keep hitting the "buy" button when a series ends because they simply don't have any other idea about what to do with the network they're running.

The insultingly cynical return of Good News Week was trumpeted in faux-ironic press releases letting us know that, thanks to the US writer's strike, Ten needed a cheap, easy-to-make show to pad out its schedule. That's right: Ten couldn't care enough about ITS OWN PROGRAMMING to do anything more than bring back a failed show for one more swing. They'll point to the million-strong ratings to say they're right. Slightly more savvy television watchers might point out that in that Monday night timeslot and surrounded by those shows, the only way it could fail to bring in a million viewers would be if it was Monster House.

Make no mistake: no-one wanted GNW back. Everyone agreed that it had run its course. No Get This-style protests here, no desperate hoping for it's return a la The Late Show. Mikey Robbins' career should have faded away like his physical form and Paul McDermott's aging hipster antics were rapidly finding him a home hosting an ABC arts programme alongside Michael Veitch and the Ghost of Shirty the Slightly Aggressive Bear.

It gets worse: Ted Robinson's sure-fire, rock-solid comedy formula of calling politicians fat, dumb and ugly - then getting them to appear on the joke so they seem "in on the joke" - was the prime force behind the rise of John Howard. All politicians are dumb, fat and ugly, so we might as well elect a Prime Minister who lives up to our high standards. It's kick-to-the-brain television, designed to make you dumb and keep you stupid, and having it return to our screens is about as welcome as a boil on the inside of your eyelid.

HOLMES LETS OUT ANOTHER HEAVY SIGH.

Chris Lilley didn't return in 2008 - it just felt like he did. God, the Australian media loves him. I wouldn't be surprised if they got married on the beach at Noosa. Just so long as Lilley wore the Ja'ime outfit in bed.

Rebel Wilson's return almost made sense. She'd never actually starred in a show after all, so the string of failure that compromised her entire career could be argued away as "She was the best thing in a lot of bad programmes". Which was technically true, in much the same way as a peanut might be the best thing in bowel movement. That doesn't mean you should return that peanut to the jar so other people can have a chance to experience it, though.

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