Scattered amidst the elephants graveyard of bad Australian television there has always been one dependable genre: the sketch comedy show. Whilst our country has only made a handful of genuinely good sitcoms, the sketch comedy genre has been the source of numerous gems. "Fast Forward", "The Late Show", "The Big Gig" and "The Micallef Programme" are just four examples of great Australian comedy.
Sadly, the last few years have not been so kind, with duds such as "Skithouse", "Big Bite" and the disastrous "Let Loose Live" going some way to degrading a once reasonably proud tradition. Now along comes "The Wedge", an amalgam of every single thing that is wrong with Australian TV comedy.
If you're the kind of person who finds bogans, wogs, fat people and overbearing laugh tracks automatically funny - without anything so intrusive as wit or irony - this is the show for you.
"The Wedge" tries desperately to be a "Little Britain" or "League of Gentlemen" for Australian audiences, which is a worthy idea, except that to succeed in that goal, the writing actually needs to be, y'know, funny. All the performers try too hard to be funny, as if you were stuck watching a bad university revue. The writing is loaded with tired stereotypes, grindingly predictable setups and lame puns (Sandra Sultry - stop, my sides!) backed up with the world's most unsubtle laugh track (Laugh dammit! LAUGH!!!!!) which often runs when there isn't even a joke! If "The Wedge" had run on Nine or Seven it would have been axed within six weeks. Ten may be more patient, but based on what "The Wedge" has come up with so far, that goodwill is sorely misplaced. It's truly disheartening that Ten has given a 26 episode commitment to this garbage when we have some of the best stand-up comedians in the world who can deliver more laughs in 30 seconds than an episode of "The Wedge" can muster in 30 minutes.
