Hey, Hey, It’s Lockdown

Hey, Hey, It’s Lockdown (HHIL) is a ‘variety’ show that went out live, via YouTube, for only three Friday nights during the 2021 Fringe Festival.  It was different each night and included prominent use of the YouTube Chat Room facility.  Basically, the target of the Game Boys, Josh and Eden Porter, is the very long-running, very popular television show (1971–1999) Hey, Hey, It’s Saturday, hosted and produced by Daryl Sommers.  Indeed, if you kept an eye on the chat room, frequently on screen, you’d see entries from ‘Daryl Sommers’ legal team’ objecting to the Game Boys ‘copying’ Mr Sommers’ material. 

HHIL doesn’t have the budget of its predecessor.  Their stage, often revealed, is miniscule. But the show uses the resources to hand extremely well: split screens, green screen, video inserts, clips from the original Hey, Hey, interviews on Zoom, and totally if deliberately unbelievable character switches.  It’s all – again deliberately (heedlessly?) – rough, rushed, amateurish and ingratiating.

The framework of this one-hour show plays off the most popular segments of the original: Celebrity Head, The Great Aussie Joke (appallingly bad jokes), Red Faces (with clips from the original of celebrity judging panels and Red Symons hitting the gong), Plucka Duck (Plucka Nug?) and Chook Lotto (which changes frozen chickens to Chicken Nuggets) and there’s a hapless contestant on a dodgy video link.  ‘Dickie Knee’ pops up just as he did in the original show, but minus John Blackman’s acid wit.  There are also two ‘poetry’ segments in which Eden, in beret and hey-look-at-me jacket, reads emotive doggerel verse in grandiloquent tones, with plenty of scurrilous contemporary references, while Josh, off-camera, cracks up - loudly. 

I’m left wondering how many of HHIL’s fans – especially the enthusiastic contributors to the chat room – ever saw the original show and so appreciate the ‘satire’, or do most now just enjoy the clunko, childish humour for its own sake?  The original made clever use of a faux amateur, anything goes tone.  I’m not sure that by being genuinely amateur you say anything at all about the original. And why, anyway?  It’s already been sent up rather more pointedly than this.  Nevertheless, you have to admire the Game Boys for their confidence, their relentless energy, their invention and a degree of real charm.  Perhaps the major flaw here is that Josh and Eden are just not as funny as they think they are.  Or maybe that’s just me.

Michael Brindley