Can Australia’s television everyman, Rove McManus, bring a sprinkle of success to Three? finds out.
Adam Dudding
uys. This could really open some doors for me,’’ bellowed the small, sharp-suited Australian bloke, in the general direction of the studio audience and his co-presenters, ‘‘so don’t f... it up!’’
This was a joke – quite a funny one actually, because the bloke was Rove McManus, who is rather more famous than the three other presenters who were sitting with him at a big desk in a small Auckland TV studio, and they were quite possibly worrying about their own doors. Plus McManus owns 50 per cent of the intellectual property of the show, so he’s almost their boss.
For the audience, it was a teeny bit funnier still, as they knew this was one of the swearier, exclusive jokes that were for their ears only, and not for the nation of New Zealanders slumped on their sofas wondering if this new 7pm post-news show on Three was going to be any good.
In the over-excited minutes before the show opened, then again during the ad breaks, then once more at the end of a breathless half-hour mash-up of current affairs and banter, the presenters and crew of The Project flattered and flirted with the 50-strong audience to ensure they were sufficiently hyped to clap and whoop and holler at the presenters’ jokes and adlibs and, slightly incongruously, after the successful completion of each ad break.
This was on Monday, day one of The Project, which is closely modelled on the Australian show of the same name. Each night the three regular hosts – Kanoa Lloyd, Josh Thomson and Jesse Mulligan – are joined by a different guest host, and McManus had flown over from Melbourne to sprinkle some celebrity pixie dust on the first night.
As was noted in all the media previews and personality profiles, and in Monday’s Twitter hot-takes and Tuesday’s reviews, this show – filling the cursed slot abandoned by Campbell Live in May 2015 and by Story last December – is a big deal: ‘‘a brave roll of the dice’’, as former TV3 news boss Mark Jennings put it; an expensive, high-production-value attempt to grab a decent share of the audience that might otherwise be watching Shortland Street on TVNZ 2 or Seven Sharp on TVNZ 1 or, increasingly, fiddling on a smartphone while streaming something random from elsewhere on the planet.
The format is imported – name, set design, philosophy, production techniques and all – directly from Roving Enterprises, the Melbourne production company that’s been making The Project since 2009. The company is owned by McManus and producer Craig Campbell, and while McManus nipped over for just a day, Campbell arrived two weeks before D-Day and stayed for the first week of broadcasts, to coddle his transTasman clone baby.
Since the launch of McManus’ hit chat-show Rove in 2000, Roving Enterprises has produced more than a dozen shows in Australia, but unless you count McManus’ 2011-12 attempt to make it big in the US with Rove LA, ‘‘this is the first time we’ve made a twin’’, said Campbell.
Campbell hadn’t had time for sightseeing. The Australian Project was still chuntering along, ‘‘so when the New Zealand show is done I’ve got rehearsals streaming live to my laptop from the studio in Melbourne, then I’m watching the show live and contacting the team’’.
Buying and selling TV formats between countries is big business. But while audiences here are used to local revamps of Real Housewives of … or The X Factor or MasterChef or Grand Designs, it’s unusual for a current affairs format to be bought outright, rather than cobbled together from local elements and borrowed ideas. But Campbell says New Zealand will benefit from the The Project’s Australian successes and failures.
‘‘In our first year we made many mistakes and corrected them, and Three gets the benefit of all that history.’’
The basic idea remains just as he first pitched it though: that ‘‘funny people can be serious’’.
The show’s meant to be a bit like dinner-party conversations, where you talk about the serious news, then make a gag, then talk about something silly, then flip back to serious.
‘‘We wanted to make a show that captured some of that conversation.’’
Also vital is the studio audience, because ‘‘it gives the presenters a genuine feel for where they’re heading. If a joke dies you acknowledge it died and ask the audience why they didn’t support you in it.’’
Four years ago, TVNZ replaced their 7pm show Close Up with Seven Sharp, which in its first incarnation openly ripped off aspects of The Project: jokes, snappy graphics-led news packages, multiple hosts behind a desk bantering their way through the news.
None of it really worked for Seven Sharp, and TVNZ swiftly shed the launch team (including, funnily enough, a straight-faced comedian called Jesse Mulligan) and reverted to a more conventional soft news show.
Campbell didn’t see Seven Sharp back then, but he heard enough about it to develop a view: ‘‘They forgot that they weren’t the news, but also that it’s not about trying to be funny. It’s a news-show format with a little bit of comedy on top, and to do that you need a live studio audience.’’
Without the audience, ‘‘they ended up just laughing amongst themselves’’.
It’s exactly that kind of lost-intranslation glitch that TV3 (it’s only been Three since earlier this month) sought to avoid by buying a fullyfledged format.
Producer Jon Bridges got involved at the point when TV3 was still umming and aahing about whether it should create its own new show or buy off the shelf. Bridges’ vote was to buy.
It was a no-brainer: ‘‘If you make something up from scratch, there are a million ways to fail. If you buy something that’s been honed and developed and perfected to match its audience’s desires for over seven years and won numerous awards – if you buy all that experience, you are so far ahead.’’
Inventing formats is ‘‘a hit and miss business’’, says Bridges, and many fail.
So what exactly did Three get when they bought The Project?
‘‘We got the set and studio design; the mix of comedy and news and how it’s handled; the production ‘bible’ that tells you the processes you need to pull that off.’’
For some formats, the production ‘‘bible’’ is a physical document specifying every little rule. Is The Project’s bible a literal document in that sense?
‘‘No. It’s not like they’ve …,’’ Bridges peters out. ‘‘Actually I probably