A minor bleat: can the commissioning producers at the ABC please stop funding Miriam Margolyes content?

I find it hard to believe that Miriam Margolyes has found yet more queer and eccentric Australians to hang out with and hug as a fellow queer and eccentric (and very unhealthy looking) character.

But according to promos on the ABC, yes, there is yet another series of the same stuff.   

Look, she can be a mildly amusing raconteur, but there is such a repetitive sameness to this type of content (she has done the same in visiting Scotland, and America) that it really is pretty tedious. 

While I am in the mood to criticise the love affair that a certain social class (I don't even know how to categorise them) has with queer comedy, I have been meaning to note that Hannah Gadsby has been running a short season of a new stand up stage show, and I have seen exactly one review for it (in The Guardian, of course) that seemed to be struggling a bit to be encouraging.  Here, for example:

Woof! is a mixed experience, partly because Gadsby is chasing their new topic of interest and working out bits onstage; there’s even standard comedy gear still waiting for their Gadsbian spin; at one point, they actually do compare their recent misfortunes to a country song. Gadsby’s shows are typically written to tight narrative complication and subversion, seeding setups for punchlines an hour later, and that keen narrative structure and craft isn’t fully developed here.

But maybe that’s the point. For a show built on resistance and refusal, there’s a surprising amount of openness to form, structure, and play. They’ve been microdosing testosterone, and their voice has changed; we’re seeing them find new ways to experiment with tenor and tone and cadence. And for a show about worry, there are clear attempts to combat the gloom.

As a long term skeptic of the quality of Gadsby's work (so I would say this wouldn't I?), it does seem to me that she has "peaked"; but also, she seems such a clear example of the "stand up comedian who does stand up as a form of public therapy that doesn't actually help in the long run" that I feel a tad sorry for her.