Randle with care: ABC's tragic night of comedy

What's wrong with Randling? In brief, the show contradicts much of what we have said about good comedy.

1. The show doesn't address anything of general importance.

2. It looks like a private dinner party among a group of friends, of little interest to the rest of us.

3. The humour is small stuff.

4. It's undercut by the insistence that participants are funny.

5. It smacks of self-indulgence. Participants seem to be exclaiming "wasn't that funny! Aren't I clever!"

6. A lot of it just seems trivial or pointless: who cares if team X or Team Y gets 5 or 8 or 10.5 points?

7. The repeated promos undercut any humour that there is.

The BBC radio show My Word was very funny. But the format was clever. It evolved with positive audience responses to the ad libs. And there were two real stars in Dennis Norden and Frank Muir. QI arguably has three or four talented and clever people, and it has a following.Randling looks like a weaker version of both these shows. It can't evolve or improve as all the shows have (it's said) been taped already.

And after all this, we will be amused, apparently, by two shows (Laid and Agony Aunts) promoting women's cleverness and mocking male stupidity.

So we have a tedious evening of people trying to be funny, and then more political correctness. Women have made tremendous progress in the last fifty years, and there's more advances to come, no doubt. We all have points to make about gender. Probably, some are more valid than others. But I don't see why the ABC needs to belt us over the head with offensive stereotypes about men and women.

Are people watching ABC's 'Night of Comedy? David Dale's article about 'who's watching what' shows audiences shrinking week after week. People seem to switch on Randling and might dip briefly into Laid or Agony Aunts. But mainly, they are switching ABC off. The blogs tell the same story: "ABC Struggling on Wednesdays", says David Knox. Nearly a million tuned in to ABC News, and a few watched the cute animals at Taronga Park (Wildlife at the Zoo) . But people progressively switched off ABC on the Wednesday surveyed, until only 262,000 were watching. I can't wait to see how many chose ABC on May 23^rd over a dramatic State of Origin match.

If these shows were on the commercial channels, as Dale says, they would all have been axed by now. Yet apparently we have months of it to go (Randling, it is said, has already been made into over 25 episodes).

Please, ABC, just stop the embarrassingly awful promos. It's not funny to say something is "funnerer". The joke doesn't become more funny the 698^th time. It just underlines how unfunny Randling is. Most intelligent people I know are turning the TV off after the news, or looking for a DVD. So much for an intelligent alternative to the commercial stations.