The inveterately political Tom Ballard has delivered many ‘urgent’ comedy shows in his time, but none more timely than this offering inspired by a referendum that is now just days away.
In fact, this show is not entirely about the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice vote but concerns itself more with the strikingly miserable success rate of referenda in Australia.
If you’re as across your constitutional history as this reviewer is (i.e. not at all), it turns out that this country does not like change. Not one bit. A derisory amount of suggested amendments that have been put to the people have succeeded, and if it happens to be a Labor government asking the question, the answer has almost always been: ‘Nah’.
The show’s title does not lie: this is a lecture. A now clichéd criticism of a comedy show that employs multimedia aspects is that it resembles a TED talk. This is not that (I haven’t watched them all, but I don’t think you’re treated to many images of niche erotic acts or animal penises in a TED talk), but it’s not as far away as a comedy fan might hope.
At the risk of offering what sounds like the faintest praise imaginable, Ballard is an excellent user of PowerPoint, as demonstrated in his barnstorming 2021 Comedy Festival show that breathlessly covered the pandemic, Black Lives Matter and climate change in the space of an hour.
This does not have anything like the breakneck pace of that show as Ballard attempts to make some extremely dry government machinations digestible in a relatively - by his own firebrand standards - sedate manner. He does his best to keep the gags rolling, but when he’s leaning on the aforementioned sex and genital pics to break things up, you begin to appreciate the degree of difficulty.
Ballard’s noble effort to bust pervasive myths and deliver frustrating truths to a generally history-averse population is admirable, and it's tempting to wish that this could have been the basis for a TV show that could reach a wider audience than a small crowd of politically-adjacent sympathisers. Of course, that would struggle to find a home for obvious political reasons and necessitate some sanding off its sharper edges, a requirement the increasingly strident Ballard may not be keen to entertain.
What has been achieved here is a genuinely fascinating and uncompromising show that carefully exposes a maddening tendency by the powers that be to make meaningful change in this country as difficult as possible. But even Ballard’s formidable talents struggle to spin subject matter this dusty into consistent comedy gold.