Jono and Ben always 'go for the bum'

Titular hosts Jono Pryor (left) and Ben Boyce like a good bum joke.

TV3’s promotion of Jono and Ben to prime time has yet to pay off, writes Duncan Greive.

They had the pick of a week's worth of global events. The continuing fallout from Ponytail-gate, the British election - even the Anzac centenary, if they were feeling edgy. Jono and Ben, TV3's weekly sketch comedy show, assessed the sum total of last week's human activity - and went with a jockey's pants falling down.

"We're going with the bum," said Jono and Ben sidekick Guy Williams, resignedly. That encapsulates the best and the worst of Jono and Ben - a show which is versatile enough in its construction to tackle almost anything, but when faced with a choice will mostly go for the bum.

The show recently began its fourth season in a new timeslot - 7.30pm - and expanded to a full hour. It's a brave move for TV3, whose Friday night lineup has been stable for several years, with reliable and consistent performers in The Graham Norton Show and 7Days. For three years Jono and Ben at Ten was towed in their slipstream. Now it's charged with leading the pack.

They've been given a huge new set to help achieve this, but not a lot else, and the strain is showing. The new Jono and Ben feels more piecemeal than ever: a mixture of regular and one-off sketches, studio interviews, off-site celebrity interviews, field reporting and Daily Show-style news satire.

It sounds like a little much - like filling up the hour, rather than curating it. To a certain extent this is no doubt driven by lack of resources: it appears much the same team is being asked to create an extra half-hour of television. But it's also a function of the tension between two different sets of sensibility and humour which co-exist, sometimes uneasily, within the show.

The first is that of the titular hosts. Ben Boyce and Jono Pryor host a radio show on The Rock, a station which seems to exist solely to assure pale suburban men that they never have to change. The culture of the station is, charitably, sub-Jackass pranking. Boyce and Pryor don't seem to embrace the misogynist worst of it, but their antic humour is the show's bedrock.

Pryor currently has a broken collarbone, received in a piece where he was repeatedly tackled by the Blues. In retaliation, he had Boyce set in a full-body cast. Cue toilet jokes, face-drawing and roadside abandonment.

The other strand of comedy is driven by co-hosts Guy Williams and Rose Matafeo, Billy T-winning comics who are younger, more sophisticated in their humour and far more liberal in their sensibilities. That doesn't mean that each isn't frequently dancing in a leotard alongside Boyce and Pryor - just that when they get the wheel of their own sketch it tends to be smarter and weirder.

Last year, over a half hour, the show got increasingly slick. The Pryor and Boyce-driven segments such as Next Actor (celebrities play shop assistants) and Sux to Be (general punking) were dumb fun. Williams' field reports capitalised on his quick wit and winning capacity for self-humiliation. And Matafeo's sketches, like creepy minor masterpiece Speed Dating, gave the show a good strange edge.

So far this year feels flabby. The studio interviews can't decide whether they're semi-serious or just an opportunity for more cheap gags.

Recreating YouTube tricks on You Do Tube is mostly banal - Jamie McDell popping balloons with (what else?) her bum, Mike King vacuuming ponytails. And a new segment featuring ordinary people picking up Trade Me packages from staged locations, like a fake meth lab, is a cute idea which mostly falls down thanks to either execution or the targets' bemusement.

It's unfortunate, because all the ingredients are there. Pryor and Boyce have developed a very engaging chemistry, and their willingness to sacrifice all dignity for a laugh can be infectious. Williams showed in Guy Time - a withering infomercial-style takedown of Key's apology wine - that he retains a very sharp eye for politicised satire. Perhaps the problem is that Matafeo's been largely absent this year: her slightly manic, character-driven humour nicely balances the boorishness.

The main problem is they haven't figured out how to use the extra space. Sketches run too long, and inferior guest talent gets too much screentime. In some ways they're trying to retain too much of the aesthetic of the half-hour version, rather than embracing the possibilities of the flash new set. Bands could play. Comedians could do short sets. Earnest interviews could occur. It would fill the space more naturally.

The great thing is they're six weeks into a giant 40-week season. The show we're watching now is not the same one we'll see come December - and with key writers stuck in comedy festival season, we're still not seeing the show at full capacity.

Here's hoping it can figure out the new slot. Because there are few local comedies in slots this prominent, and fewer still that hit the highs Jono and Ben does at its peak.