Ha-ha: Death and being dumped
Television Steve Kilgallon
Kiwi comedian Jamie Bowen has relocated to Los Angeles, secured a part in a TV pilot, and sold an hour-long standup special to the streaming platforms Amazon, iTunes and GooglePlay, which began showing it on Thursday.
Watching Jamie Bowen, Not so Special (out now) which he says he devoted two years to making, I just felt pleased for him. It seemed like he deserves a bit of success.
You would most likely recognise Bowen, even if you didn’t recognise his name: a stalwart of the local circuit and the annual comedy festival, he’s got a beard as bushy as his head is bald, and for years he was the warm-up guy for Seven Days.
This is not your typical stand-up special. Much of the opening 20 minutes is concerned with Bowen rushing back from an already ill-fated OE in London to be at his father’s bedside before he dies; then about returning to England for his girlfriend to leave him four days later. Then he’s deep into an existential crisis. In one aside, he says to an audience member: ‘‘What’s two minus one? Loneliness.’’
In between the chunks of Bowen on stage at Auckland’s Classic Comedy Club, he completes the sense of self-excoriation by subjecting himself to a grilling from an anonymous interviewer (a technique lifted straight from British comedy great Stewart Lee). You’ll be pleased to learn that he eventually finds his way to some purpose in life.
He’s a confident, polished performer, and he knows his material and, yes, he’s funny. But you probably want to be in a pretty good mood before you start watching this to get full enjoyment from it. Bowen puts it this way: ‘‘The human experience is an intrinsically funny thing. Tragi-comedy... you know, we’re floating on a ball of rock... in a vacuum of nothing...’’
One small part of Sky’s change of direction, in the hope it becomes a more cuddly, lovable prospect for the Kiwi public, was a stated desire to show more sports documentaries. With the broadcaster’s recent expansion to 12 devoted sports channels, goodness knows they’re going to need material to fill those gaping daytime hours between live events.
But they’ve made a good start with their three-part documentary charting the 25-year existence of the Warriors NRL club, called Keeping the Faith, (all episodes available on demand on SkyGo) made by Gareth Thorne and Simon Head. The pair say they’ve watched 1000 hours of archive footage and interviewed more than 50 former and current players, coaches, administrators, fans, and broadcasters.
Thorne takes 50 per cent of the credit (with Kerry Russell) for last year’s atmospheric and insightful documentary which followed Joseph Parker through his title fight with Anthony Joshua, and Keeping the Faith makes the same appeal to the emotions.
It’s not strictly chronological, but part three broadly focuses on the past decade or Simon Mannering after the 2011 Grand Final: he speaks eloquently about the crushing disappointment. so. There’s particular attention paid to the tragic 2009 death of young player Sonny Fai, a moment which still brings tears to the eyes of former teammates, and to the Warriors’ 2011 Grand Final run, with a secondary focus on some of the club’s most obsessive fans.
Thorne and Head have indeed done their homework: they’ve got lots of former players (including a few, like Simon Mannering, who were never huge fans of being interviewed in the first place) and got them to say interesting things, which as a former rugby league writer, I can attest is often an achievement.
There’s no narrator – instead, live action, music and interviews are woven together and that makes sense, because watching this, it reminds you of how quickly you can forget moments that seemed so important at the time. Focusing on the fans reminds you of the transience of individual matches and players, and how far outweighed it is by the sense of belonging to something.
It ends, remarkably, and actually rather poignantly, with the gravel-voiced Australian commentator Ray ‘‘Rabbits’’ Warren intoning a Kipling-esque piece about fans, and loyalty, and the Warriors’ journey. Keeping the Faith.