RadiRadiRah

[size=133:bg874gcg]New views for new year
4:00AM Thursday Oct 22, 2009
By Scott Kara

[size=100:bg874gcg]TV3
The two best TV picks for next year are likely to give you a good laugh. The first, RadiRadiRah, is a local sketch show from the makers of bro'Town and the other, Modern Family, is a mockumentary starring Ed O'Neill, best known as Al Bundy from 80s show Married With Children.

[size=133:bg874gcg]RadiRadiRah stars many of the Naked Samoans, including Oscar Kightley and David Fane, along with comedian and star-for-hire Rhys Darby and director Taika Waititi, in a show that pokes fun at popular culture and modern life while "
pushing the boundaries of prime time television"
. ...

[size=100:7n54qham]rhysiedarby: Day 1 of new tv shoot and I'm wearing tights... not a good sign? Actually my legs look good, like Connery's in Thunderball...only in tights

[size=100:7n54qham]rhysiedarby: End of day 1 filming and my leggies hurt from all the standing around in gum boots. Fun though. The costumes are a riot - yes... a riot!

[size=133:jegpaw38]Rhys Darby talks standup, spacesuits and yetis
Wed, 04 Nov 2009 5:31p.m.
By David Farrier



[size=100:jegpaw38]New Zealand comic Rhys Darby may appear to spend the bulk of his time acting in American movies but he says he is still a stand up guy when it comes to keeping things local.

Darby has now embarked on a comedy tour of the North and South Islands, with a brand of humour that is sometimes out of this world.

Darby has rocketed in fame in recent years, ascending to heights of an international movie star. But the comic says he prefers to keep things local…and a bit weird.

When Darby is not hosting a George FM radio show about yetis, he can be found in a spacesuit, or doing stand up in Pukekohe.

It's hard to take a man in a spacesuit seriously, but Darby says the suit has its uses.

“This is not a dress, it’s my space uniform,” he says.

Darby’s appeal stretches worldwide, the comedian managing to sell out shows wherever he goes, whether it is Edinburgh or Dunedin.

“It was a great show - the biggest I’ve ever done in New Zealand,” he says of the Dunedin show.

Darby says he likes to think of himself as an actor that practises “realism”, even sometimes to his detriment.

“I have an issue with realism, and I go too strongly into the belief what I am doing is actual, so I’ve knocked over the odd set wall thinking it was real,” he says.

His latest movie Coming and Going is currently in post production in the US, and the bust Kiwi is now working on a new TV show called Ra De Ra De Ra with other talented New Zealanders like Taika Waititi.

As for the stand up, Darby says he is looking forward to hitting more locations like Christchurch and Pukekohe and enjoying the excited faces in the audience.
“Some are a little too excited, one sicked up,"
says Darby.

Darby taking refuge in the fact that a show must be good if the audience is vomiting.

gezyka wrote:Ahh!!! There's a video!! OMG and Taika is in it!!!!

[size=133:w8ar52jn][url=CLICK!][/url]

onlyalways wrote:

gezyka wrote:Ahh!!! There's a video!! OMG and Taika is in it!!!!

[size=133:xmeijgsh][url=CLICK!][/url]

"
What? You don't have a picture with Rhys?! This guy's cool!"



I don't.

tanfastic wrote:I don't know what that makes me -- I've seen him, but have no picture. Cool or not cool? Thanks gez for the video link. I will have to play it a few zillion times to learn how to pronounce Taika's name (months ago I posted the "
how to pronounce it"
thread, but how the announcer said it takes it to a whole new dimension).

onlyalways wrote:

gezyka wrote:Ahh!!! There's a video!! OMG and Taika is in it!!!!

[size=133:qktq593c][url=CLICK!][/url]

"
What? You don't have a picture with Rhys?! This guy's cool!"



I don't.

[size=100:yonkw9ys]TV Listings

Radiradirah
Friday, May 21
9.30pm, TV3

Brought to you by the makers of bro'Town, this new local sketch comedy bills itself as riffing on the twisted reality of modern day life, mixing local with global, past with future, poking fun at popular culture and pushing the boundaries of prime time TV. The star-studded ensemble includes Rhys Darby, David Fane, Oscar Kightley, Madeleine Sami, Taika Waititi and [size=133:yonkw9ys]special guests Jemaine Clement and John Clarke

[size=150:7k3aiddh]Radiradirah: A pack of jokers
By Jacqueline Smith
4:00 AM Thursday May 20, 2010

[size=100:7k3aiddh]New show Radiradirah has assembled a comedy dream team in a cast where Boy goes bro'Town and it's Fred Dagg v Flight of the Conchords. But is putting them all in a sketch show a good idea?


_{The creators of Radiradirah have assembled a comedy dream team for their new sketch show. Photo / Supplied}

Rewind to this time last week. Producer Elizabeth Mitchell pores over notes and images for Radiradirah and casually lets slip that her workday is 10am until 4am. Coffee helps, but it's mostly passion that keeps her charging.

Between the exposed-brick walls of production company Firehorse Films, where bro'Town came to life in 2003, the show's editor is cutting together animated segments as they are fed through by the designers - a duck, a piece of cheese and Da Vinci's Renaissance Man.

Tucked behind the black polyurethane curtains are the plasticine stars of the stop-motion sheep cartoon The Pen, created by Jemaine Clement and Guy Capper.

Clement is acting abroad, but Capper is meticulously honing the final product, which sees Sheepy and Robert roaming the Bay of Islands at sunset and talking about bleating.

A few seconds of footage equates to several days' work. Capper likens his patience to that of the Italians who think nothing about taking days to prepare a meal, because the finished product makes it all worth it.

His comment sums up the buzz at Firehorse last Friday when Mitchell and her team showed friends a rough cut of Radiradirah's first episode which goes to air tomorrow night: 39 comedy sketches, 22 minutes of air-time.

Twelve months in the making.

This time last year Mitchell and bro'Town co-creator Oscar Kightley bid the kids of Morningside "
laterz"
, wiped their brows, and asked each other, "
what next?"


Kightley was keen to get his sketch comedy group the Naked Samoans back on television. Mitchell was a bit hesitant. Sketch is just one of those genres that screams "
risky"
.

"
I was like 'hmm ... sketch show'. I don't know, there was something about the phrase, and we kept trying to think of a new word for sketch but couldn't really find one. But then you look at things like Little Britain and Monty Python and you don't really think of them as sketch shows,"
she says.

One meeting with TV3 later she was convinced to go ahead with the format, which quickly evolved from being a solely Naked Samoans show into a collage of what she calls sub-shows.

It was named Radiradirah because bro'Town's Mack (the gay character) was particularly fond of the phrase and, as Mitchell says, it's kind of silly and open to anything.

She and Kightley began writing, commissioning (and sometimes shelving) concepts for serials, and managed to get some of the biggest names in local comedy involved - Rhys Darby, Jemaine Clement, Taika Waititi and - the godfather of them all - John Clarke.

"
It was one hell of a wish-list - we were lucky that they were available,"
Kightley says.

But for Waititi it was more a case of being willing to juggle than having a free schedule. He flew from Wellington to Auckland in the morning to film Radiradirah, and returned to Wellington at night to edit the soundtrack to Boy, every day for five days. He stole sleep on the plane and in the makeup chair.

Waititi plays Captain Hemi T. Cook in the segment Space Waltz, a serial that will run across the eight episodes.

It's set in the year 3010 and Captain Cook and his team are searching for a new galaxy to house the 10 million New Zealanders who have been evacuated to the South Island as the country sinks into the Pacific Ocean. The sketch also stars Darby who is in love with Teuila Blakely's character, and John Clarke (his bits were filmed in Melbourne, where he now lives) who plays the Prime Minister, Hone.

"
I like doing that sort of thing, it's having fun with a bunch of guys you like,"
Waititi says from New York while on a break from filming in New Orleans.

He met Kightley 15 years ago when he was working on Skitz and Telly Laughs, and the pair have bounced about ideas for films, sketches and shows ever since.

Kightley thought it was about time Waititi brought back the alien character that was part of his stand-up routines six years ago. The bushy-browed creature with an under-bite now acts as the putty between segments on Radiradirah.

"
He's an immature alien. It's like, what if the earth was being taken over by aliens but the aliens were just teenagers just doing it for fun,"
Waititi explains.

"
He does some weird commentaries. I'm surprised it's even been allowed to come back, he's so weird."


The alien is odd, yes, but not the most offbeat aspect of the show.

This week's episode sees male-love among the roadworkers in the Naked Samoans' Roadeez, a centaur-gone-wrong on Gavin Hoode (a sketch about New Zealand's first gang of merry men, starring Darby), and a round of Brie cheese in bed with a wedge of blue cheese in Cheese in the City, which is an animation about four cheese pals living in New York featuring the voice of Madeleine Sami.

Radiradirah, according to Kightley, is a cobbling together of some talented people just doing their own thing.

It may also serve as a platform for animations like Darby's FOT (Funny Orange Thing) and Australian creation Beached Whale (better known as Beached Az, a sketch mocking Kiwi accents that went viral in 2008) to reach a wider prime-time audience - much like the Tracey Ullman show was to The Simpsons when it was introduced in segments in the late 1980s.

For Kightley, Radiradirah presented the challenge of getting back in shape - he's not only back in front of the camera but he's in stubbie shorts and singlets.

"
We had to, for the first time, care about how fat we were, or what we looked like, because when you turn up to the studio to do your voice it doesn't matter what you wear or what you look like. It meant losing weight, exercising,"
he says.

In Radiradirah the Roadeez are joined by up-and-coming performers including 23-year-old Jordaan Tuitama, who caught Kightley's eye during the comedy festival three years ago.

Tuitama and his mates have a sketch comedy group called the ElectroKokoZoids, and it's pretty much modelled on the Naked Samoans. Tuitama has idolised Kightley and the boys since he was a kid growing up in Tuakau - he would tape episodes from the TV and watch them every day until he could recite the lines.

When Kightley approached him and handed over his business card, Tuitama told everyone he knew. They didn't believe him. And they really didn't believe him when he was asked to join the Naked Samoans for Radiradirah. Tuitama also performs alongside Darby and Waititi in Space Waltz and Gavin Hoode.

So Firehorse are, once again, widening the scope of comedy, giving new talent a chance to shine, anchoring well-known faces to episodes and packaging it all in format that, judge it as you will, has been successful in the past.

"
People are quick to diss [New Zealand's] past comedy as saying it didn't work, but at the time it did and people liked it. I think we very easily believe that we are not funny and that our comedy is stink but actually if you look back at the last 20 years and all the stuff that people have enjoyed, I think we need to ease off on that a little,"
Kightley says, referencing the Gibson Group's sketch shows of the 1990s.

He puts the arrival of Radiradirah down to serendipity.

Mitchell? She describes it as a happy mistake.

LOWDOWN

What: Radiradirah
Starring: Taika Waititi, Rhys Darby, John Clarke and the Naked Samoans star in a sketch show by bro'Town creators Elizabeth Mitchell and Oscar Kightley
When and where: Friday, 9.30pm on TV3

Amily wrote:

[size=100:twfznlcx]rhysiedarby: Loving kiwi comedy? Follow @RadiRadiRahTV3 for sneaky previews and insider goss! FOT rulz.

[size=150:70mrvpli]Give this one a bit of time to grow
Last updated 11:20 27/05/2010

[size=100:70mrvpli]Radiradirah TV3, Fridays, 9.30pm Reviewed by Victoria Guild

New Zealand-made comedies can be a bit of a hit-or-miss affair. For every Flight of the Conchords or Moon TV, there's a Melody Rules or Welcome to Paradise.

It's too early to tell what category Radiradirah falls into, but there were more laughs in our house during the first 30 seconds of 7 Days, which followed.

Brought to us by the people who made bro'Town (it gets its name from a bro'Town character's favourite saying), Radiradirah is made up of a series of sketches, some acted and some animated.

There are heavyweights of the New Zealand comedy world involved: Rhys Darby, the Naked Samoans, man-of-the-moment Taika Waititi, and the biggest of them all, John Clarke (aka Fred Dagg).

Jemaine Clement of Conchords fame lends one of the funnier sketches with his plasticine sheep and their daily schedule discussion (eating grass, bleating etc). Dry, but good.

Less appealing, despite being wonderfully drawn, was the dialogue between the kiwi, the shag and various ducks. Put shag, duck and another word that rhymes with duck together and you get the general idea of how clever the humour was. I actually found it so distasteful that it nearly put me off the whole show. Nearly.

The teddy bear sitting at the computer, writing about how awful his life was with a toddler (covered in snot, and if he had to listen to another Wiggles song, he was going to lose it), was fun.

New Zealand's first gang – Gavin Hoode (Darby) and his Mongrel Mob of Merry Men – and Space Waltz, with Hemi T Cooke (Waititi) and his team searching for a new galaxy to house 10 million Kiwis who have had to move to the South Island because the north is sinking, could yet prove to be winners.

But it was disappointing when Beached Whale of Beached Az fame popped up. This did the rounds on YouTube in 2008, and is written by a couple of Aussies taking the mickey out of Kiwi accents. Good-oh – put it on Aussie TV, then.

And, I'll admit it, I'm a bit ambivalent about Oscar Kightley's humour. He might be a good writer, but his delivery never has me in stitches.

It is sometimes suggested that Kiwi audiences suffer a form of cultural cringe when it comes to homegrown comedy and tend to be super-critical, but if the writing is good enough, then we will be entertained and will want to see more.

Sketch shows by their very nature take some time to develop, as we get used to recurring characters. They are also a bit of a pick-and-mix, the variety hopefully enough to have something for everyone's tastebuds. I guess even if there's one gem out of this, it'll be worth it.

iaga wrote:i really wish i could watch these videos. i cannot because it's private. =(