The Cheap Seats beats up media, but in a good way
When news comedy show The Cheap Seats launched in 2021, Victoria and NSW were in lockdown, borders were closed, and there didn’t seem much to laugh about on the news. Since then, things have gotten much worse.
Hosts Melanie Bracewell and Tim McDonald quickly found the secret lay in skewering those reporting the news, rather than the subject matter itself. Tonight, for example, they’re covering the Papal conclave.
“It is a really sad story,” Bracewell said. “But we’re not going, ‘Ha, ha, look at these people mourning.’ We’re going, ‘Look at this poor journalist that has been forced to cover this serious thing, and their camera’s fallen over.’
“We get really fascinated with the media coverage of everything. We take a lens and we look back at the media, and all the hubbub around these big stories. We tend to not want to be punching down on a sad situation, just punching up towards powerful broadcasting networks.”
Melanie Bracewell and Tim McDonald
McDonald notes the dissonance that often occurs on live network TV.
“Channel 7 in Queensland was going, ‘We’ll have more on the passing of Pope Francis … after the premiere of Farmer Wants a Wife!'” he said. “It’s those moments where big stories are merged with things that they shouldn’t quite be merged with.”
The Cheap Seats is produced by Working Dog, the team behind current shows like Utopia on ABC, and Have You Been Paying Attention and Thank God You’re Here on Ten. Working Dog is also behind past successes like comedic talk show The Panel, news satire Frontline, lifestyle spoof Russell Coight’s All Aussie Adventures, and the unassailable film The Castle.
McDonald grew up worshipping the team — featuring performers Santo Cilauro, Rob Sitch, Jane Kennedy, Tom Gleisner, and producer Michael Hirsh — and “somehow” wrestled a job in the office in 2016, which he recalled consisted of “basically fixing the photocopier and remembering the Wi-Fi password.” Over a number of years, he moved into producing, writing, and then an appearance on Have You Been Paying Attention, which turned into a semi-regular spot.
It was on the set of Have You Been where he met Bracewell. She had come up on the live comedy circuit in her native New Zealand, before getting a shot on the Australian program. As the two youngest regulars by a margin, they quickly bonded. “Whilst Kitty [Flanagan] and Sam [Pang] were bonding over investment properties, we were sort of chatting about being under the age of 55,” McDonald joked.
“I wasn’t aware of the prestige of Working Dog until I was kind of in amongst it,” Bracewell said. “Then I thought, ‘Oh! This is actually a huge deal.”
The Working Dog team
Despite the Working Dog team’s experience — especially in news-based comedy — they are largely hands-off when it comes to the writing and execution of The Cheap Seats. “The freedom we have on this is just insane,” McDonald said. He likens the support of Working Dog to having “the answers at the back of the book. Occasionally we’ll go to them.”
They meet up each Monday morning “with a blank page” and go from there. “That’s so rare in the TV landscape around the world – the freedom and the trust that the Working Dog team and Channel 10 have put in us.”
In contrast, Bracewell recalled an Instagram post she once did for a wine brand “that had about 15 producers in the room, all approving where a product must be placed, and at what angle it must be rotated in order to make the shot look good. I’m just so relieved that our job is to write a funny show — and that’s our main priority.”
Both Bracewell and McDonald studied journalism at university, and have maintained a lifelong interest in it.
“I guess that’s why we have such a keen eye on it,” Bracewell said. “It’s simply something that’s fascinated me. The news is exciting; it’s good to be in the know of what’s going on in the world. And I have always been interested in journalism. Comedy just opened up that pathway in a different way.”
McDonald’s interest in news came through blunt force exposure: as a child he was forced to sit through the 5pm news on Channel 10, then Nine news at 6pm, followed by ABC at 7pm. He hated the repetition of having to watch coverage of the same story three different times. He now has to do it again on The Cheap Seats.
Not surprisingly, the pair often encounter news journalists in the wild. Far from being offended at a show that basically pillories their work and industry, Bracewell and McDonald said there’s a sense of “camaraderie” with journalists, who delight in seeing their gaffs — not to mention those of their competitors — ridiculed on national TV.
“Most of the journos we see, they’re dobbing each other in,” Bracewell said. “They’re going, ‘Oh my God, you should see our mate Jono at ten past six. He had a nightmare. You’ve got to play it on the show.”
“There’s a sense of pride, I think. Some journos go, ‘It’s been my dream to be on The Cheap Seats’, or ‘I was so honoured to be on the show’.
“That gives us a lot of joy to know it’s taken in the good spirits that we intended.”
The TV journalists aren’t just delivering the content on air, they are literally timestamping it for the pair.
“The amount of times we’ll be at an event, or a red carpetand we’ll see a journo and they’ll say, ‘Oh, just hold on a second. I’ve got something I want to show you from the news last night’,” said McDonald.
“We love those moments.”
The Cheap Seats airs on Tuesdays at 8.40pm on Channel 10 and 10Play
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Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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