Creating A Filthy Sit-Com For Nannas

Comedy’s most celebrated skinny man and purple puppet are about to wave goodbye to the precious child they’ve borne together. Sammy J & Randy have turned in a six-episode ABC sitcom, Ricketts Lane, slated to air sometime in the middle of the year.

“We’ll find out once and for all if Australia has an appetite for Stinky and Pinky,” Sammy J says. “If we don’t see cuts to ABC funding as a result of our show, then we haven’t done our job.”

The sitcom – which will feature three songs an episode, some old, some brand new – has its roots in one of the duo’s hit live shows, with which it shares a title. Ricketts Lane won MICF’s prestigious Barry Award in 2010 and, like the sitcom, it saw unlikely housemates Sammy J as an overworked, useless lawyer and Randy as an unemployed, divorced slob.

“We were actually going to title that show Ricketts Lane: A Blatant Sitcom Pitch,” Sammy recalls. “People who have seen our shows will recognise a few threads in the TV show but for the most part it’s new material. You want to create something for your fans, so it has to be filthy enough and stupid enough, and immature, and lowbrow, and devoid of any artistic merit – but unlike a live show where people are paying to come and see you, in a TV show you’re actually invading people’s homes whether they like it or not. Hopefully the nannas will like it too – but we’re not under any illusions that we’ll be everyone’s cup of tea. Unless someone’s seen one of our live shows it’s impossible to describe what we do without it sounding quite shit. ‘A guy and a puppet on stage singing songs’ – it’s not 1977, you know.”

After two years immersed in TV world, the unlikely “couple” are looking forward to getting back on stage together for a festival run with An Evening With Sammy J & Randy. No narratives, no boundaries, just “an hour with us and our brains. This live show is coming out of that idea that every joke we say doesn’t have to be vetted by an ABC network executive and a lawyer and then the ABC head honcho, and filtered back down to us for the green light! So this will be completely uncensored in that regard.”

Fans of the pair will know they sometimes get narky with each other but, “We’re lucky because the purple dude does his own shows, and I do my own thing occasionally, so if we ever had a spat we’d just say, ‘I’m writing my own show, you fuckhead,’ and storm out of the room, and then we’ll come back together. I like to think we’ll never ever break up. We might have a couple of decades of simmering resentment and then come back together for a Simon and Garfunkel-style cash grab reunion. That should be the name of a show! ‘Sammy J & Randy In The Simon & Garfunkel-Style Cash Grab Reunion’ – you heard it here first!”