Fast Forward and the high broadcast moment: television sketch comedy and the conditions for democratic nationalism

Abstract

This paper examines the affordances of Australian television sketch comedy of the 1980s and 1990s through a case study of one of its leading examples, Fast Forward. We argue that the show exemplified a fertile three-way relationship between democratic nationalism, broadcast media and comedy as an artform. First, we situate the ‘high broadcast moment’ as a historically specific media ecology of shared address. Second, we reconstruct the commissioning context and industrial environment that made a prime-time, nationally scaled sketch format both possible and valuable. Third, we analyse how Fast Forward used parody and satire to convert political strain into collectively intelligible recognition, allowing tensions to be contained within a civic national frame. Finally, we use the example to raise questions about comedy in the post-broadcast environment, where it is more difficult to identify durable spaces of shared address in which disagreement remains intelligible as part of a common conversation.