Despite some comparisons to John Oliver and HBO‘s Last Week Tonight, there’s certainly no denying that Charlie Pickering and The Weekly got off to a fairly strong start last week in their debut episode, taking on the topic of internet piracy in Australia with a fairly sharp knife and stamping their intentions for the programme fairly firmly.
The show returned for episode two last night and began to show signs of asserting its own identity, which by the looks of things will help establish a firm place among Australian TV’s best shows. In particular, Charlie Pickering‘s well-established individual voice was far more present than the week before, and as the role gains more airtime – and the lingering shackles of commercial TV are fully shaken off – the possibilities that that presents are certainly worth paying attention to.
Case in point, on last night’s episode Pickering and the team took a much closer look at the gathering momentum of Brisbane‘s potential bid to host the 2028 Olympic Games. The rising astronomical cost of hosting the games, particularly within the current global economic climate, is scaring off a lot of the other bidding nations who are withdrawing en masse, forcing the IOC to actually court – to a certain degree – bidding nations.
Pickering’s sharp wit and detailed exploration of the issue took a look at Brisbane’s potential bid and asked the most important question any Olympic bid could ever face:
Is the juice really worth the squeeze?
We’ve got ’til 2021 until we find out if any bid is successful. It seems on paper that Australia’s in the box seat to nab our third Olympiad, but would it be worth it?
Obviously the answer is yes because sports are totally mad.
Either way, if Pickering and The Weekly keep rubbing those two sticks together in the way they have been across two episodes, pretty damned soon they’re going to catch fire.
