Tonight at the Museum ★ ★ ★
Sometimes, Australian TV seems on a never-ending quest to invent new comedy panel quiz show formats. We’ve done all right. Recent decades have delivered Hard Quiz, RocKwiz, Gruen, Have You Been Paying Attention?, Spicks & Specks and more. All gems, all quintessentially their own thing.
Coming up with new varieties on such a tried-and-true formula is a hard nut to crack. Existing comedy quiz shows – imported or adapted from the original – fill screens, particularly QI, Would I Lie To You? and 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown (also, thanks to British free-to-air channel TLC UK, via YouTube, the resuscitation of Mock the Week four years after it was cancelled by the BBC).
The ABC’s new take is Tonight at the Museum, a comedy quiz show hosted by Alex Lee and filmed after hours inside the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in front of a studio audience. Each episode features a panel of four comedians, from Takashi Wakasugi to Susie Youssef, Mark Humphries, Nikki Britton, Steph Tisdell, Emma Holland, Luke McGregor and Geraldine Hickey, among others. It is 100 per cent all ages, together-on-the-couch family viewing.
It follows the – highly successful – formula of plonking a group of comedians onto a panel to shoot quiz questions at them, set in-studio tasks and hope for laughs generated by their live chemistry.
But because it’s set inside a museum, a raft of invaluable and intriguing artefacts are displayed firsthand, something less likely to happen in a TV studio. After leaving their glass display cabinets, these priceless, often fragile, objects are respectfully observed by the comedians – a band of amiable non-experts who make jokes and mock their lack of knowledge while delighting in discovering new things.
There are segments called Nerd Alert, in which experts, brandishing examples from years of specialist research, quiz the comedians about what their objects are and do; Exhibitionists, in which comedians show peculiar objects from their personal history; and Put A Label On It, where the panel try to convince each other that their explanation of a displayed historical object is the real one.
It’s easy to compare Tonight at the Museum to other British shows, specifically QI, Would I Lie To You? or BBC Radio 4’s The Unbelievable Truth, and a dash of Taskmaster, but the show’s museum location adds a new dimension.
It is fun watching Alan Davies (a special overseas guest) confront a historical blubber press from an Antarctic island, or Brett Blake thrill to bong-like earthen vessels, or Zoe Coombs Marr meet a cute stuffed Eastern barred bandicoot while suggesting it could be a great key ring for 14-year-olds.
The best bit – and excuse me for sounding worthy – is how the show laces science, culture, history, research and the conserving of objects with humour. Facts stick in the mind when delivered amid jokes. After watching several episodes, I can still recall that – brace yourselves – kangaroos have three vaginas, female dolphins have a vagina shield, and a specific lichen, dubbed “sexy pavement lichen”, has Viagra-like qualities. The series’ experts, all professors, researchers and academics, are charming, and it makes you want to visit a museum, just like the 2006 movie its title is based on did.
The show does, however, feel stiff. There’s an element of host and panel seeming tentative and on their best behaviour. There’s good banter and jokes but not the unrestrained hilarity of Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont-Spelling Bee, say, or Spicks & Specks in its early years. Plus, the live audience’s laughter sounds distant, probably because it’s an acoustic nightmare filming in a real museum. The “liveness” of the night felt muffled.
Tonight at the Museum has heart, a smart-thinking foundation and genuine curiosity and charm from the panel. It needs to relax and add more silliness, or even some outright controlled calamity, to make it unmissable.