David M. Green: Purveyor of fine humour

Tag: TVS

  • 31 Questions S2E06 & Sydney Funtimes

    31 Questions S2E06 aired on C31 Melbourne & Geelong on the 31st day of August. And there is it on glorious YouTube.

    I spent 4 days in Sydney last week. It was the first time in seven years I’d been somewhere that wasn’t Melbourne or Adelaide. And it was fantastic.

    I stayed in the seaside suburb of Sans Souci on the shores of Botany Bay (to my knowledge, the only bay named after a spaceship from Star Trek) with the lovely Barb Badham:

    She’s mother to my good friend and mentor Van Badham. Here’s a photo of her aged 14, which I discovered in a drawer that wasn’t locked in any serious kind of way:

    I forgot that I actually like Sydney. Last time I was there it was for New Year’s Eve 2006 when my Grandma treated the family to watch the fireworks on Sydney Harbour. An unforgettable experience. Back then, I returned to Adelaide via Melbourne. On that trip, I had a much better time in Sydney than Melbourne. To quote my 19-year-old self from my own diary:

    7 January 2007
    “I think I prefer Sydney to Melbourne. Watching this promotional video in the Rialto Tower really gave me the impression Melbourne is an arrogant city. It’s really just a bigger, more disorganised Adelaide.”

    It probably didn’t help I was travelling with my good friend John Timoney and by the time we got to Melbourne, we were well and truly sick of each other. While I’ve got my diaries out, here’s how I felt about Melbourne when I was there again 18 months later:

    12 July 2008
    “Melbourne is great. I can see myself living here more than I could last time.”

    Quite a turn around! And since then, the only news I ever hear about Sydney is to do with traffic congestion, high cost of living and racist electorates in the western suburbs. But I always have a great time when I’m there (I don’t drive and I stay away from the western suburbs).

    Highlights of this Sydney trip include meeting Mark Humphries from ABC2’s “The Roast” at Pizza Hut. We talked comedy and TV and such for 5 hours straight. Didn’t even take a photo with him. But he’s pretty good in this:

    I also caught the train to the Petersham TAFE to be interviewed by Sean Campbell for his “The Sean Campbell Show” on XRLENT Radio. Good guy. We talked about 31 Questions, TVS, RMITV, radio and Adelaide. Here’s the video of our chat:

    On Thursday, after one and a half cancellations, I finally caught up with my old radio pal Matty B at the Queen Victoria Building (or MB at the QVB). Hadn’t seen him in 3 years. Again no photo, but we did do this once:

    [display_podcast]

    And now for the strangest experience of my trip…

    On Thursday night, to coincide with the broadcast of S2E04 on TVS, I journeyed to Ultimo (a couple of streets back from the headquarters of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation), home to the infamous “Ultimo Bachelor Pad” – the self proclaimed (and probably rightly so) biggest 31 Questions fans in, if not Sydney, then the world.

    Now, they are some REAL fans…

    To illustrate:

    Dear God. We must be doing something right with 31 Questions?

    Thanks again to Mike, James, Zoe, Nathan, Mel and (via Skype from Europe) Daniel for a magnificent dinner and cake, as well as their ridiculous amount of support they continue to give to me and the rest of the 31 Questions team. Fans in other cities, you’ve got your work cut out for you if you plan on topping that.

    I’m now safely back in Melbourne. And it’s back to the hyper-reality that is my life.

    Kind regards,
    David M. Green
    PS. 31 Questions debuts on Face Television New Zealand this Thursday 9.30PM.

  • 31 Questions with John Blackman and Dicky Knee! (and Rohan from Big Brother?)

    Here’s the YouTube link to S2E05 of 31 Questions, which aired on C31 Melbourne & Geelong 8.30PM last Saturday. This is the one with special guests John Blackman and Dicky Knee (a)LIVE in the studio. Both an absolute pleasure to work with.

    It was a tight battle between this week’s contestants, Dani and Rohan (AKA the guy from Big Brother). One of them even won.

    And man, it was pretty surreal doing schtick with Dicky Knee. I used to love “Hey Hey, It’s Saturday” when I was growing up back in the 90s, before the Internet. What a vastly different media landscape we live in now.

    Speaking of which…

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CjhQNSros0

    And you can now also follow the REAL Sophie Loughran on Twitter: @SophieMLoughran

    Only 2 episodes to go!

    Kind regards,
    David M. Green
    We just realised Anthony, Sophie and I ALL have the middle initial of “M”. What are the odds?

  • The Good Show(s)

    It’s taken 16 months but FINALLY, we have a new episode of The Good Show, my sketch comedy podcast with TV’s Anthony McCormack.

    They say  9 out of 10 podcasts fail within their first 5 episodes. Don’t ask me who said that. I don’t know. Actually, I suppose I said that. Yeah, you can just quote me.

    Although, I’d like to see the stats on how many podcasts are put on hold due to no access to a studio AND because the hosts are too busy making TWO seasons of a TV show… Though I suspect the answer is The Good Show.

    Episode 3 can be acquired via this direct link, or on the iTune, or through this handy player thing:

    [display_podcast]

    Among sketches about cheeseburgers, tractors and expensive hookers, Anthony and I also discuss our upcoming second season of 31 Questions – the TV game show of that name.

    In fact, the Season 2 PREMIER EPISODE is on Channel 31 Melbourne & Geelong this Saturday 27 July 8.30PM! That’s a convenient 90 minutes earlier than last year’s time slot.

    At this time I can also tell you 31 Questions will air in Perth on WTV at the dangerously family-friendly time of Sundays 11.30AM from August 4, with a repeat Mondays 3.30PM from August 5. We’re apparently going for the early crowd over in WA.

    Across the Tasman Sea, catch 31 Questions in New Zealand on Face Television Wednesdays 9.30PM from August 14. And if you hop a plane to Sydney, you can watch it again on TVS Thursdays 9.30PM from August 15.

    Still waiting to get our time slots from 44 Adelaide and 31 Digital Brisbane. There may also be some extra repeat time slots, but I can assure you once I get them, I’ll keep them secret and refuse to give them to you.

    And did I mention we were on the TV Tonight website?

    Just ignore the bit where he lapses back into the press release.

    😀

    Kind regards,
    David M. Green
    (TV’s)

  • 31 Questions – Season 2, Episode 1, Take 2

    Losing the master tape for our second episode turned out to be the best thing that’s happened to us during the course of making 31 Questions Season 2. Tired and irritated, we went back into the studio with an audience one more time on 13 May 2013 to re-shoot the lost episode. It could not have gone better.

    Allow me to give you a quick tour of the set:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clnyyD-_btI

    I used the best questions and material from our first two episodes to make a kind of “super episode”. And as it was the absolute last chance for the foreseeable future to see a taping live, we had a fantastic crowd. Much better than the one we’d had when we taped it the first time round. Damn Comedy Festival.

    As we were re-using questions, this did mean we’d need some fresh contestants. And Declan and Lisa were fantastic.

    I’d felt a little disconnected from the show the last couple of weeks and I was concerned about my performance. The original plan was to get rough edits of the episodes done before taping the next one. But once again, logistical issues prevented that from working as efficiently as we’d like.

    Though plenty of people were telling me “hey, you were great” (#humblebrag), the only way I know how to access my on-camera performance is by watching the footage back myself. Anthony managed to get a couple of short clips from the raw footage up on a private YouTube link the night before, so I could at least check out some of it.

    It’s amazing how bad habits can creep in if you don’t continually self-evaluate. And just like my golf swing, I think my posture had gradually degraded over the course of the season. But I fixed it for this episode. I think.

    And that’s the beauty of this redux. Undoubtedly our finest episode will be the first one that goes to air, and – if the YouTube views for Season 1 are anything to go by – quite possibly the only episode a lot of people will watch. Better it be the best one.

    There was a bit of TV magic in the studio that night. We were given an absolute gift from above during the “Complexity” round. We’d done this round during the Episode 2 taping, and it was quite well received the first time, so we kept it exactly the same for the re-shoot. A lot of the “gag rounds” are still legitimate game show rounds, where actual points are fairly and squarely earned. Not this round. It’s essentially a sketch.

    The gag is the round is so complicated, it doesn’t make any sense. So at the start, Anthony reveals a huge rule book and insists on reading all the rules. He also pulls out a brand new candle. We were planning on doing a jump cut to simulate the passage of time, and come back to Anthony reading from the END of the book and the big candle has burnt all the way down.

    But to set this up, Anthony actually had to light the candle first on camera. He’s really dragging it out, and I’m telling him to hurry up. But when it was time to actually light the candle, Anthony for the life of him just could not light the thing.

    The audience was starting to giggle, and after about a minute, Anthony finally got the candle burning. But it was the tiniest flame. And after about 10 seconds, a line of smoke streamed from the wick, indicating the flame had gone out. The audience just lost it. You could not have scripted it.

    And I’m there looking irritated, but all the while thinking, “Oh thank you. Thank you God.”

    I’ve now seen the rough cuts for all the episodes. They’re all pretty good. A couple of them are amazing. Of course, I am extremely biased.

    This week, we did something that most community TV shows don’t bother to do: We had a dedicated studio date just for pick-up shots. And I’ll tell you why most shows don’t do this: Because it’s a pain in the arse. But we really want 31 Questions to be the poster child of low budget television. So we knew we had to do it.

    After going through the rough cuts, Anthony and I compiled a list of 15-20 things that would benefit from being re-shot. They were mostly due to audio problems, but there were also a few bits of footage that we just didn’t have, even on the iso-recordings, eg. shots of the score board at critical times.

    So we went back in the studio on Monday May 27 with a skeleton crew (not actual skeletons) and set up half the set. We were also planning on shooting some prize footage for our “prizes” at the start of each episode (this is a Season 2 addition). But the pick-ups took longer than we thought, as is usually the case with making TV. So we’re still not done yet. But we’re close. So, so close.

    We’re currently exploring options to shoot this prize footage outside the heavily in-demand RMITV studio.

    Our first episode of Season 2 is due to air on Channel 31 Melbourne & Geelong at 8.30PM, Saturday July 20. TVS Sydney, 31 Digital Brisbane, 44 Adelaide and Face Television New Zealand have all said they’re keen to air Season 2.

    We’re still waiting to hear back from WestTV Perth. I’ll have air dates for all of these cities & NZ soon. But they’ll be on YouTube shortly after they air in Melbourne.

    Subscribe to the 31 Questions YouTube Channel, if you haven’t already.

    We’ve just about reached the end of the “production” stage of 31 Questions Season 2. We got off to a shaky start, but there’s some real magic this year.  I’m proud of my team. I’m proud of how we got it done. And I’ll be proud of the finished product.

    I don’t know about you, but 31 Questions is the kind of TV show I actually want to watch.

    Kind regards,
    David M. Green
    Content maker.

  • 31 Questions – The Recording of Season 2, Episode 7

    After the dizzying highs of Episode 6, we were back in the studio on Monday April 29 for our 7th shoot of Season 2. And I was dog tired.

    This year I’m back panelling “AFL Live” for Crocmedia on regional radio around Australia. I’d worked a 10 hour shift on ANZAC Day, which included 9 straight hours at the panel, panelling two full AFL games. It’s the longest I’ve ever spent panelling live radio. It was great fun, but I was pretty damn mentally exhausted by the end of it. That Thursday shift was followed by my usual weekend shifts. So I panelled for 29 hours in 4 days.

    Then it was straight on to 31 Questions Day.

    I was running late as I hadn’t had a chance to do all my little last minute preparations until, well, the last minute; Cutting out the questions and sticking them to my cue cards, ironing my only white shirt, practicing the movie quotes, organising props and sending out endless emails.

    As always seems to be the case with days like this, for the first time ever, I left my autocue script at home and I set a new record for finding the farthest ever parking space from the RMIT studios. When I finally hauled myself and my box of tricks in (well, Antonio carried the box), it was straight into shooting a sketch and then straight from that into Episode 7. In hindsight, I should have had a coffee. Or at least a can of Diet Coke.

    If for no other reason than to control my explosive flatulence.

    But aside from my slight irritability, it was another successful shoot. We’re continuing the string of great crowds and people seem to be “getting it”. Either that or they’re laughing at us. Either way.

    There was a guy named Henry with an English accent, sitting in the front row. For a moment there I thought he was that Marcus Taylor guy, making good on his threat to turn up to one of my gigs. Fortunately it wasn’t the same guy.

    Back in 2011 he asked me to do a funny review of his help self book. He didn’t much like my review. It’s a long and ridiculous story. Read it here.

    Kudos also to producer and production manager Riyana Kasmawan. Not only has she been making the fabulous prizes and props every week, she’s also been cooking dinner for the cast and crew. And though I personally haven’t eaten any of it because I’m never in the mood to eat before a taping, I’m told it’s been adequate and more importantly, within budget.

    A+

    Simon Owens from Melbourne radio station 3AW joined regular person Ashlee behind the contestant podium this week. It’s always great when our contestants have a go, even if they don’t get every question right. Points for effort count.

    Actually, points for absolutely no reason also count. That’s Moderator Anthony’s department.

    And so we reach the END of Season 2. Tonight we’re taping Episode 8, the glorious season finale.

    If you want to be a part of it, come join the studio audience!

    Pop in 8.30PM:

    Studio A, Level 2, Building 12
    RMIT University
    on Melbourne’s fabulous Swanston Street
    (near the corner of Franklin Street)

    Or RSVP to the event on Facebook.

    Of course there is still ONE MORE opportunity to see 31 Questions live in 2013. Next week on Monday 16 May, we’re re-shooting Episode 2, which we lost to a tape malfunction. And that really will be the last one. To my knowledge.

    See you tonight!

    Kind regards,
    David M. Green
    To my knowledge (wink wink).