Pointless’ Mark Humphries to present comedy segment for ABC’s 7:30
Former presenter of SBS’ The Feed and host of Ten’s Pointless, Mark Humphries, will produce sketches for ABC news and current affairs show, 7:30.
Humphries will work with co-writer Evan Williams to produce fortnightly comedy sketches for the show, which is hosted by Leigh Sales.
The sketches will run fortnightly from this Thursday, October 4. Humphries took to Twitter to share the news: “Excited to announce that @evanwilliams and I will be making fortnightly sketches for @abc730.”
ABC’s announcement was coupled with a short video, which saw insiders allege Sales was not funny. The video said that in light of the “allegations”, 7:30 would add Humphries as a contributor to the show.
Excited to announce that @evanwilliams and I will be making fortnightly sketches for @abc730.pic.twitter.com/38xIIntK0F
— Mark Humphries (@markhumphries) October 1, 2018
Williams said the new activity would be “really, really fun”.
Executive producer Justin Stevens said he hoped the segment would provide some “light relief”.
“7.30 has a rich tradition of satire with Clarke and Dawe’s long running and much loved Thursday night segments,” Stevens said.
“We are huge fans of Mark Humphries and Evan Williams’ work and they’ve shown they can satirise all sides of politics. We cover politics very seriously throughout the week on 7.30 and this will hopefully give the audience some light relief at the end of each fortnight.”
The addition of a comedy segment to 7:30 follows a number of changes to the ABC’s comedy and satirical programming. Almost two months ago, the ABC axed comedy and entertainment program Tonightly with Tom Ballard, arguing it needed a “fresh approach”.
Three weeks ago, ABC revealed a new weekly panel show, Tomorrow Tonight, with Charlie Pickering and Annabel Crabb.
Today’s announcement comes a week after the sacking of ABC managing director Michelle Guthrie, which was followed by the resignation of chairman Justin Milne. ABC’s director of entertainment and specialist, David Anderson, has been appointed acting managing director, while Kirsten Ferguson has been nominated ABC’s acting chairperson.
Interesting. Ten and ABC have been doing a few crossover events lately. Leigh Sales was on the Project’s panel, Hamish Macdonald was on News Breakfast this morning and now this announcement.
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Oh, hell no. This’ll be more Elliott Rhodes (Frontline) than Clarke and Dawes. (Google it, youngsters.)
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We know what Frontline is. It’s part of the high school English syllabus.
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Isn’t that the point? If it’s anything like Frontline, I’d be stoked.
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Mark Humphries is essentially migrating his The Feed work to 7.30. He and Evan should be able to excel doing 5 minutes a fortnight.
And in other Roast alumni news, Nick Richardson was assistant hosting in a non-comedic role on “Go Back to Where You Came From” last night. He seems to be working towards Leigh Sales’ position.
Tomorrow Tonight is a reformatted The Weekly, because the latter is rubbish. It was also the ABC’s replacement for The Roast.
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