If you haven’t been paying attention to one of Network Ten’s highest rating shows, you might not be familiar with the work of Melanie Bracewell and Tim McDonald.
As regular guests on the weekly current affairs quiz show Have You Been Paying Attention?, they compete with four other comedians over who knows the most (or the least), with host Tom Gleisner keeping a loose rein on proceedings.
But now Bracewell and McDonald have gone one step further – snagging their own show, as hosts of HYBPA? spin-off The Cheap Seats.
The hosts of The Cheap Seats – Tim McDonald and Melanie Bracewell.Credit:Hwa Goh
It’s quite the opportunity for a couple of newbies, especially when you consider the bulk of comedians on Australian TV have been rusted on for years, cycling through panel, reality and game shows, with an often short-lived stop on commercial breakfast radio. The lucky few these days will score a stand-up special on one of the streaming platforms or a half-hour comedy on the ABC.
“I come from New Zealand and the comedy community is quite small, you know, everyone gets a couple of TV shows each,” says Bracewell. “But the thing with New Zealand is, no one really watches TV, so it’s not a big deal.
“But coming to Australia, where people still watch television and are engaged with it, it’s a much bigger deal. It wasn’t until we did the first episode that it sunk in. Like, wow, we get to do a TV show here. That’s pretty amazing.”
And while Bracewell and McDonald match up well on the screen – his sharp one-liners against her self-deprecating Kiwi schtick – on paper it’s almost an odd coupling: Bracewell is an award-winning stand-up comedian who also writes for Taika Waititi’s superb TV comedy Wellington Paranormal, while McDonald has done, well, what exactly?
“I’ve worked at [HYBPA? production company] Working Dog for six years,” says McDonald. “I actually started as the digital person – essentially, they needed someone to fix the photocopier. And then one day on Have You – Tom does a little rehearsal with the crew just to go through the questions and make sure everything works – and one day, one of the crew had to step out, and they asked me, ‘Would you mind sitting in for the rehearsal?’ ”
He did so well they asked him to come back to some more rehearsals and then, last year, when about “1000 people dropped out” on the day of filming, McDonald got the call-up. “They said, ‘You’re in the studio, you’re a medium, so you’ll fit in the set perfectly,’ and it snowballed from there.” (To be fair, McDonald also hosts an engaging Formula One podcast The Reserve Drivers, which has quite the following among the sport and has even been name-checked in the Netflix series Formula 1: Drive to Survive.)
Bracewell, meanwhile, has been building a solid comedy career since 2014, winning a number of breakthrough awards before picking up the highly regarded Billy T Award for the country’s best emerging comedian. This year she won the director’s choice award at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival for her show The Rumours Are True.
“I try and keep it a little bit low-key,” says Bracewell. “[The Melbourne award] was a particularly funny experience because when I won – and this is probably like a humble Kiwi thing – I didn’t think I’d be up for any awards. I was playing netball at the time. And then I got a call from my manager saying, ‘You’ve got to come,’ and I was like, ‘OK.’ And I turned up in my netball uniform and accepted the award. So, there’s no expectation at all.”
Bracewell and McDonald behind the desk on The Cheap Seats. Credit:Hwa Goh
Over Zoom, Bracewell, 26, and McDonald, 28, are exactly as you find them on television. McDonald is quick with the one-liners, while you can see Bracewell shrinking, even covering her face, if she has to talk about any success she has had.
The pair clicked last year when they did a few HYBPA? episodes together, many of which were filmed remotely from their homes, with Bracewell beaming in from New Zealand.
“Often when Mel and I are on the show together, we’re in the same age bracket,” says McDonald. “No disrespect to [show regulars] Sam Pang, Kitty Flanagan and Marty Sheargold, but they’re all talking about negative gearing, Mel and I are on TikTok. We bonded over our youth.”
McDonald says Working Dog had been mulling over a news show pitched at a younger audience for a while and the green light was given when Ten asked them if they had any shows up their sleeves. (“Ten had run out of NCIS episodes,” jokes McDonald.)
Now Bracewell and McDonald work with The Working Dog team – Gleisner, Rob Sitch and Santo Cilauro – and a team of researchers digging through the news to find the funny and weird stuff that’s out there and presenting a curated feed of the week.
“I try and watch every state’s news,” says McDonald. “In Melbourne and Sydney they lead with the lockdown, the latest case numbers and then on the Gold Coast news one night, [the lead] was a blazing portaloo.”
Adds Bracewell: “And I watch the New Zealand news quite often because I think everyone likes to make fun of New Zealand. So I go, ‘I’ll watch the news,’ and then the first story is, ‘Cucumbers are expensive.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh no.’”
With so much bad news around at the moment, do they think there are subjects that can’t be made fun of?
“The common mantra of comedians is punching up,” says Bracewell. “So if you’re looking at someone – and they’ve got a decent amount of privilege, a decent amount of power or the thing you’re making fun of them for is very normal and human – that’s absolutely fine.
“If you’re punching down to someone who’s not privileged, it’s not funny. It’s not that it’s not allowed, I just think it’s not that funny. When people are like, ‘Oh, you can’t say anything these days,’ well, you can, it just has to be funny.”
McDonald: “Genuinely, we’re two JobSeekers on Channel 10 at nine o’clock, we’re going to be punching up. I don’t know if there is a down.”
Bracewell: “Exactly. We’re at the bottom of the food chain.”
The pair is four episodes deep into The Cheap Seats now after it launched just before the Olympics began (“There’s an old TV rule,” deadpans McDonald, “that says ‘launch a show up against the Olympics.’ It’s just the best time”) and the ratings have been climbing, with the show sitting in the top 20 for 25- to 54-year-olds.
Over those four weeks, though, one other thing has improved: Bracewell’s ability to pronounce the name of Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk.
“It’s been hard,” says Bracewell, laughing. “And the problem is, we’ll do a rehearsal and I won’t know how to say it. And now everyone’s going, ‘We’re not gonna tell her, it’ll make for good television.’”
Adds McDonald: That’s the level of research we do, ‘How do I pronounce that name?’ ‘Nobody tell her.’”
The Cheap Seats, 9pm Tuesdays, on Ten.
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