Author: Stuart

More Tales from the Forest

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Happily Ever Afterwards book cover

A few years ago, Shaun penned a book aimed at early-teenage kids (or “tweens” as some people say), based on the way he used to twist his telling of fairytales to his kids when they were younger. It was smart and fun, and a little less mind-bending than some of Shaun’s other books.

Now, Tales from a Tall Forest has a sequel: Happily Ever Afterwards

The Queen of Tancred and her royal retinue are on a mission: to ensure all the citizens of Tancred are happy. But that’s a lot harder than it sounds – especially when the Happiness Tour accidentally stumbles into the neighbouring region of Hamelin. Oops. Soon, Queen Mathilde smells a rat. A whole kingdom of them, in fact … because Hamelin has been overrun with rodents. Why is a rat on the throne? Where are all of Hamelin’s children?

Like the previous book, it’s been illustrated throughout, but by a different illustrator. It is due to be released September 29th, and can be pre-ordered online. Sadly, with the current COVID situation, it doesn’t look like we’ll see any book signings.

Lucky 13 for Mad As Hell!

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The thirteenth series of Mad As Hell began last Wednesday – and are we very glad for that! It’s the ninth year for the show, and we’re expecting 12 episodes. Six! Other Random Numbers!

All the cast has returned, so we can just crack on an enjoy it. 

It’s back again without an audience due to COVID restrictions – but it nearly had one… New restrictions were introduced by the Victorian government at 6pm, just 30 minutes before the first episode was about to be taped WITH an audience. It would have been a huge letdown for that audience, but strangely enough, the lack of audience hasn’t really taken away from the show in the last season and a bit… it might be a bit of a shock when those laughs return.

Usual time slot of 8:30pm Wednesdays, or watch on iView. You may need a login now to watch online (as sent up by Tosh’s parody of Charlie Pickering’s ad about it in episode one of season 13).

Time for Round 12 of Mad As Hell

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It’s almost difficult to believe that we’re about to enjoy a 12th season of Shaun Micallef’s Mad As Hell, almost 8 years after it first started.

There’s is no doubt it is the best Australian political satire, which is pretty good for a show that Shaun considers a sketch comedy show framed around the local politics of the day.

This season, like the second half of the previous one, will continue to have no studio audience due to the Coronavirus restrictions in Melbourne, where Mad As Hell is filmed.

The lack of audience makes it reminiscent of one of Shaun’s previous shows, Newstopia, an SBS news based show that had international news, rather than Australian, as a source. The Newstopia link hasn’t been lost on Shaun, with the Newstopia music and style making a few appearances, significantly in Episode 7 of last season, which was the first audience-less.

Mad As Hell is back for 12 weeks starting August 5th at 8:30pm on ABC.

Ten years!

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It’s been ten years since this very website first appeared on the Internet, and wow hasn’t time flown!

At the time, Shaun was between seasons on Talkin’ ‘Bout Your Generation (the Channel 10 years) … Mad As Hell was still a few years away. I’m so grateful to Shaun and all the fellow fans for making this website what it is over the last 10 years; Shaun’s someone who’s always got something new on the boil, and it’s been enjoyable to help share them. (He’s also a really nice person.)

But I must apologise, as I feel like I’ve dropped the ball on this website, having been so long since the last update. With Mad As Hell continuing it’s path of excellence (renewed for another season later this year), using Twitter to share breaking information and Shaun himself being on Twitter, there’s not much extra news to share. It’s mostly been sit back and enjoy the Micallef time. Also, I’m excellent at procrastination, so there’s that too. I’ll try to post some new things over the next few weeks 🙂

Here’s to another ten years of Shaun brilliance, and this website sticking around to discuss it.

Shaun on this season of Mad As

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With season 10 of Shaun Micallef’s Mad As Hell wrapping up, I spoke to Shaun a few weeks ago about how it was going and what lies ahead for the future.

Ten seasons and a 100+ episodes – are you still enjoying Mad As Hell and would you do another 10?
I always talk to Gary (McCaffrie) immediately afterwards, and now he’s in Tasmania so I just ring him; he watches a feed from the studio. He just moved there, so is writing from home. He used to work in the office next to me, but it doesn’t feel much different, we might miss the lunch. Because he’s not driving any more, he’s working – we get another three sketches out of him! As long as he wants to do (Mad As Hell), I’m pretty happy doing it. As he said to me last year, “this is the perfect show for us”, which is no surprise because it was constructed by us. It’s pretty good, and I can’t think that in my remaining life in television, we’ll find something that is better. As long as they want it, and as long as Gary wants to do it… If the cast and crew wanted to go off and do their own thing, as they do from time to time, we’re able to bring new people in, and we’ve had Christie (Wheelan-Browne) hit the ground running. And that’s good, because everyone steps up with someone new there. There will come a time when the audience say “that’s enough, let’s not hear from someone who’s 60 years old.” (“Don’t be like that!” I replied)

There have been a few cast changes this season: you mentioned Christie, plus Roz has departed and Francis has been in and out.
Francis did the first live night, and he did some later ones, but he otherwise hasn’t been available because of the play he’s been in. But he has made himself available to do some field pieces. If you didn’t look too closely, you wouldn’t be able to tell. Just as Roz being absent for the latter part of the season. Roz isn’t going to come back, she’s decided it’s time to take advantage of some new opportunities which she deserves. It’s perfectly understandable she wants to flex her dramatic muscles. I do it myself, go off and do a few things between seasons. You’ll see Laurence (Boxhall) appearing in the Curiosity Cul-de-sac sketches. He’s in the play with Francis, so when I saw the show, I caught up with Laurence and I wrote up a little piece for him.

Christie you had worked with in The Odd Couple, how did you meet Michelle (Brazier)?
I was seeing some Aunty Donna stuff, and she had featured a bit in their stuff, and I noticed how good she was. Then she happened to be doing a show at the Comedy Festival called QANDA (a send up of Q&A) with Emily, and it all seemed to work as a sort of audition. We asked if she was interested, and she was, and she also hit the ground running. She had to go away for Edinburgh fringe, but in the last 2 weeks we have everyone, so it will be an old-school full-sized cast.

Are you hopeful the show will be back next year?
Always hopeful, but we’ve had an indication – it will be back.

And will you be able to bring all the cast along?
I think everyone is up for it.

25 years in one book

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Shaun’s latest book has hit the shelves: Mad As Hell And Back, an anthology of sketches from Full Frontal, The Micallef P(r)ogram(me), Newstopia and, of course, Mad As Hell.

It’s co-written with Shaun’s writing partner Gary McCaffrie, and the two introduce each section of the book (grouped by program) with a story about how they got to that point, sparing back and forth.

I was very happy to get my hands on my copy, it’s a celebration of some of Shaun and Gary’s best sketches in 370 pages. Sure it’s really for die-hard fans, but why would you want to be anything else?

The ABC of repeating an episode

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It was a very strange week last week, enough to make Shaun himself actually Mad As Hell. (Well, slightly)

If you didn’t notice, the ABC played the wrong episode of “Shaun Micallef’s Mad As Hell”. Instead of episode four, recorded the previous night to air Wednesday 17th at 8:32pm-ish, we got episode three, originally aired the previous Wednesday.

As the ABC (with all broadcast TV networks) have outsourced the actual playback/transmission of their feed to a company called MediaHub, there was no one at ABC Melbourne to correct the issue, and no one to rectify the mistake before it aired across timezones in SA and then WA. So the whole thing played out as if it was new, except for an apology crawler message.

The blame was placed on a tech at ABC, who, after it was supplied by Shaun’s team, mislabeled the episode in delivering it to MediaHub.

The result was Mad As Hell appeared on screens four times in a week (one additional Thursday night airing), and the Wednesday night repeat still ended up rating #1 in it’s timeslot.

At least Shaun and Leigh Sales got to have some fun with it.

Double the Shaun for one night only

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Wednesday is shaping as a double Shaun night, with the finale of series 2 (or 6, depending how you count) of Talkin’ ‘Bout Your Generation on Channel 9 at 7:30pm, then straight over to the ABC at 8:30pm (ish) for the start of series 10 of Shaun Micallef’s Mad As Hell.

On TAYG, we’re getting the first fancy dress theme since the show moved to Channel 9. And Mad As Hell, expect “same government, fresh hell”… but also, two new cast members: Christie Whelan Browne and Michelle Brasier will appear at different times during the season. It’s a healthy 13 episode season too.

Finally… time to be Mad As Hell again!

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“This is an illness, take some time off till you can write a headline without a pun in it.”

While we have been very much enjoying the sheer absurdity of Talkin’ ‘Bout Your Generation, we’re delighted that the place where Shaun really flexes his chops, Mad As Hell, is back in less than a month, Wednesday 26th June at 8:30pm on ABC.
And it’s Season 10. Freak me sideways!

Yes, the ABC missed an opportunity to let the show air during the federal election, but now that we know exactly who is running the asylum, you can expect some laser focused satire.. so that we can all yell “something, something, I’m not going to take it anymore!”