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

In Australia in the late 1980s and early 1990s, television comedy sketch shows were among the most popular and influential of any media form. The Comedy Company on Channel Ten, Fast Forward on Channel Seven and The D-Generation on ABC attracted audiences in the millions and were key anchors in the programming and business strategies of the country's most powerful media organisations (Burchill, 1990: 35). Comic figures such as the Comedy Company's Con the Fruiterer and Kylie Mole or Fast Forward's Chenille, Hunch and Pixie-Anne became touchstones for national conversations in a way that has become increasingly difficult in today's more fragmented media environment. The shows offered a carnivalesque tableau of everyday life and public affairs that crossed lines of age, class, gender, geographic location and ethnic background. Diverse identities encountered each other in a playful, experimental space of interaction and exchange.

Popular memories of this moment have tended towards polarisation. On one side is nostalgia, for example, in YouTube comment threads that represent the period as a lost paradise of ‘classic Aussie comedy’ – ‘Those were the days’, ‘Miss those old shows’ (THEbenpri, n.d.) – often serving as a proxy critique of the present. On the other side is disapproval or condemnation, directed especially at impersonation, caricature and the uneven ethics of representation – an unease now sometimes echoed by performers reflecting on earlier work. If, in the 1980s, Con the Fruiterer was a national icon, the creator of the character Mark Mitchell looks back now through the prism of more recent sensibilities: ‘It would definitely be seen as racist now’ (qtd Hornery, 2020).

But to remember the high moment of Australian sketch comedy only to celebrate or condemn is to miss an opportunity for a more analytic reflection on the media ecology that made it possible. The moment was an inflection point in media and culture, the reverberations of which are still playing out in the mid-2020s. Standing at the zenith of television's cultural power, sketch comedy was also the popular form which, more than any other, enabled critical reflection on that power. As American comedy scholar Nick Marx (2019: 2) has argued, television sketch comedy has been ‘first and foremost about television and sketch comedy’. As such, it has established a certain distance from television, making of it an object to be observed. At the same time, sketch comedy has been highly malleable and modular, ‘swapping out guests, cast members, and subject matter in order to address current events’. This manipulability could be seen as foreshadowing the development of online media.

In this article, we seek to understand this moment through a case study of Fast Forward, which aired from 1989 to 1992 and was the highest-rating and most awarded comedy of its time. Written and performed by an ensemble including Steve Vizard, Peter Moon, Alan Pentland, Geoff Brooks, Steve Blackburn, Jane Turner, Gina Riley, Magda Szubanski, Marg Downey and Ernie Dingo, with director Ted Emery and writer-producer Andrew Knight, the show employed a fast-cut, unsentimental grammar that made television itself both medium and object. Fast Forward was both an enormously valuable commercial media franchise and a free-wheeling experimental space which processed the period's volatility – economic collapse and corporate scandal, leadership turmoil and institutional distrust, Mabo, multicultural address and the renegotiation of national story – by turning the forms of media into the material of satire.

We make three interlinked arguments in relation to Fast Forward. The first is that the show embodied a form of democratic nationalism – by which we mean a shared social imaginary that is nevertheless oriented towards ethical openness, plural interpretation and participatory self-revision. Nationalism in this sense is explicitly grounded in normative commitments such as fairness, democratic accountability and equal dignity yet does not presume a single authorised expression. It differs from nationalism defined as ethnic closure, approaching it rather as a practical problem of solidarity among strangers – a problem that persists even in liberal democracies and must be managed rather than wished away (Calhoun, 2007). The idea aligns with liberal-nationalist arguments that national belonging can provide a framework for egalitarian obligation and democratic solidarity while also preserving respect for diversity and open contestation (Kymlicka, 1989; Miller, 1995; Tamir, 2019).

Democratic nationalism frames meanings as openly contestable rather than inviolable, permitting debates over national history, reinterpretation of national symbols and revision of national priorities. In this respect, it is consistent with agonistic models of democratic life (Mouffe, 2000; Taylor, 1994), legitimising adversarial contest over the nation's meanings, priorities and values. At the same time, it sustains mutual intelligibility across difference, allowing disagreement to be processed through shared recognition rather than routed immediately into factional exit. It rests crucially here on the reproduction and reinterpretation of social reality through cultural practice. Nations are historically layered, symbolically mediated, affectively charged and institutionally organised. In Michael Billig's (1995) terms, they endure through banal, repeated cues and habits – forms of everyday address that quietly reproduce the ‘we’ of national life.

Second, we argue that this kind of nationalism was shaped and sustained by the high broadcast moment – a historically unique configuration of near-universal household penetration, limited channel choice, appointment viewing and a commercial imperative towards demographic indiscrimination. Broadcast television intensified a quotidian reproduction of national co-presence, not by dictating national meaning but by making the nation continuously available as a shared object of recognition and argument. Building on Benedict Anderson's (1983) account of nationalism as a product of mediated simultaneity, we suggest that broadcast television represented a peak infrastructure of collective address: near-universal reach, ritual repetition and a common cultural literacy. The commercial imperative to reach ‘everyone’ did not guarantee progressive outcomes but did generate a shared publicness in which national stories, symbols and authorities could be subjected to common scrutiny and response.

Third, we argue that sketch comedy provided an affective register that enabled the potential of this moment to be realised in particularly powerful ways. It offered critique without dissipation: the capacity to mock authority while keeping audiences inside a national civic frame. It regulated affect in moments of strain, converting anxiety and disillusion into shared recognition rather than factional escalation. And it pluralised meaning, staging competing interpretations of ‘Australia’ without fixing any single authorised version. In this respect, sketch comedy can be understood not merely as a reflection of the state of the nation, but as a recurrent practice through which the nation is performed, nurtured and made meaningful to itself.

Television, comedy and national identity

As Brett Mills (2010) has argued, humour is particularly important to the way in which nations come together as imagined communities. Writing from the UK, Mills’ example is national mythmaking around the idea of the ‘British sense of humour’: ‘To be British is to be funny – or, to be more accurate, to be British is to wish to be thought of as funny, as having a sense of humour’ (p. 64). As he further points out, the idea is one that has dovetailed closely with broadcasting. The Royal Charter of the BBC makes explicit reference to ideas of the nation and places the UK ‘within the context of the communities of which it consists, and the global context of which it is part’ (p. 66). Comedy has been seen, in this context, as playing a major role. As the BBC's Director of Television of the early 2000s, Jana Bennett, put it in 2006: ‘Comedy, particularly the British variety, has a unique ability to be subversive, to reflect the state of the nation and bring people together all at once. People identify and define themselves by their comedy’ (qtd Mills, 2010: 67).

A similar line of analysis has been developed in Australia by screen and media scholars such as Sue Turnbull (2004), Susan Bye (2007a, 2007b, 2010) and Felicity Collins et al. (2010). As in the UK, this work has tended to focus on public service broadcasting – in Australia's case, the ABC – with its formal mandate in relation to nation-building. However, the argument can also be widened to the commercial networks. It is worth remembering that Anderson highlighted the distribution and consumption of media rather than any conscious programme as to how these might be used. In fact, the conditions for nationalism in the modern sense were found in a commercial phenomenon – ‘print capitalism’ – rather than in any state-directed initiative (Anderson, 1983: 43–45). By standardising language and connecting people to unfolding events in a defined geographic region, commercial publications – most specifically newspapers – made the abstract idea of the ‘nation’ feel real and tangible for millions.

In Australia, the media infrastructure for national imagining was provided first by the telegraph (Livingston, 1996) and later by the press, cinema, radio and television (Turner, 1993) – much of which has always been commercial. It could be argued that it was in broadcast television that the relationship between nation and media reached its highest form. In Imagined Communities, Anderson (1983: 39) asks rhetorically of the newspaper: ‘What more vivid figure for the secular, historically clocked, imagined community can be envisioned?’ Four years later, John Hartley (1987: 124) offered an obvious answer: ‘Of course, a more vivid metaphorical figure for the imagined communities of nations can indeed be envisioned. It's called television’.

What broadcast television uniquely supplied in the late 20th century was not ideological unity, but a shared symbolic arena. In classic accounts of broadcast's civic function, such shared simultaneity and ritual repetition operate as a kind of mediated social ceremony: television brings dispersed viewers into a moment of common attention, renewing the reality of a public through repeated acts of co-presence (Dayan and Katz, 1992). Media do not merely represent social life; they help organise it, conferring visibility, legitimacy and mutual intelligibility through the recurrent experience of common attention (Couldry, 2003). In the case of broadcast television, near-universal reach, temporal simultaneity and ritual repetition produced conditions of collective address in which national symbols, stories and authorities remained mutually visible and collectively negotiable. The medium sustained a common communicative frame in which contest over national meaning could occur without dissolving the sense of a shared ‘we’. In this respect, broadcast television functioned as a civic infrastructure for democratic nationalism: not by enforcing consensus, but by maintaining mutual intelligibility across difference (Anderson, 1983; Billig, 1995).

As Mills suggests, comedy occupies a distinctive position within this ecology (see also Medhurst, 2007). As a cultural form, sketch comedy in particular enables what might be called critique without exit. By this, we mean a pragmatic effect rather than a moral virtue. Fast Forward made authority available for judgement – by exposing its styles, rituals and scripts – while keeping viewers inside a continuing scene of shared reference. Parody did not call for audiences to abandon television; it invited them to notice television. Satire did not ask audiences to renounce the nation; it asked them to see national life as disputable, open to revision and sometimes ridiculous.

Comedy regulates affect at moments of social strain, converting anxiety, anger and disillusion into shared recognition rather than factional escalation. It also pluralises meaning, staging multiple and competing interpretations of national life without insisting on a single authorised reading. In this way, comedy does not resolve national tensions; it renders them collectively manageable, sustaining an agonistic national conversation rather than foreclosing it. Comedy here functions as a mode of political communication: it circulates critique and moral judgement through affective form, allowing political perceptions to travel widely without requiring explicit ideological allegiance.

In Australia, television comedy has drawn on an everyday repertoire of irreverence and self-mockery through which national identity is made recognisable and negotiable in public culture (Vizard, 2025). Key examples include a succession of situation and sketch comedies from the 1960s to the 1980s, including The Mavis Bramston Show, My Name's McGooley, The Paul Hogan Show, The Aunty Jack Show, Kingswood Country and Australia You’re Standing In It (Barrett and Kirkpatrick, 2023; Bye et al., 2007; Pender, 2014). These programmes built on cinema and live-performance comedy such as the ‘ocker’ comedy cycle of the 1970s film renaissance (Moore, 2005) and the work of Barry Humphries, the Australian Performance Group and writers and directors such as Bruce Beresford, David Williamson and Tim Burstall. The phenomenon has also been enriched by recurrent challenges from outsiders to established ideas of national identity – from the pathbreaking 1970s Indigenous sketch programme Basically Black to Acropolis Now of the Wogs out of Work team, Paul Fenech's ethnically diverse comedies (Pizza, Housos) and the female-centred suburban world of Kath and Kim.

Fast Forward emerged from what can now be seen as the golden age of Australian television comedy – the late 1980s and early 1990s when, as Graeme Turner (1990) observed, the commercial networks ‘finally acknowledged that comedy can be produced in Australia, that it might be able to develop its own formats, and that it has to be given more than a couple of weeks to secure its audience’. Like many popular Australian commercial television shows, Fast Forward has never received sustained scholarly analysis. At the height of its success, it was perhaps too ‘obvious’, and as attention has turned to digital media, it has been lost in the rear-view mirror of historical memory. It is worth revisiting the show now, however, as it offers particularly revealing insights – as we have begun to outline above – into these questions of nationhood, media form and comedy.

Fast rewind – Australia at the turn of the 1990s

It should be remembered that the period in which Fast Forward emerged was unstable and uncertain, a volatile time marked by fracture and disillusion. Many idols of the 1980s boom collapsed: interest rates peaked at 17.5%, repossessions doubled and unemployment rose from 6% in 1989 to more than 11% in 1992, with youth joblessness being much higher (Forrest, 1995). Icons of enterprise such as Alan Bond and Christopher Skase unravelled in scandal, while the State Banks of Victoria and South Australia collapsed under billions in bad debt (Bongiorno, 2015). Many of the most egregious oligopolists were media tycoons – or would-be tycoons – failing spectacularly. For many Australians, this was not free-market dynamism but public austerity underwriting private excess (Burgmann, 2003).

Political authority fared little better. Bob Hawke's leadership faltered as Paul Keating challenged him twice and finally seized the prime ministership in 1991. Across the aisle in the federal parliament, John Hewson's policy manifesto Fightback! threatened a 15% consumption tax on families already under strain. There were widespread revelations of endemic corruption: Queensland's Fitzgerald Inquiry toppled Joh Bjelke-Petersen, while WA Inc exposed government complicity in corporate losses in Western Australia. Leadership became spectacle, governance a theatre of betrayal.

Foundational truths of Australia were also unsettled. The 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody revealed the systemic over-incarceration and deaths of Indigenous Australians. In 1992, Mabo v Queensland (No 2) overturned the legal fiction of terra nullius and recognised native title, prompting widespread anxiety, while Keating's Redfern Speech named colonisation's violence with rare candour. Immigration policy oscillated between generosity – granting residency to 42,000 Chinese students after the government crackdown at Tiananmen Square – and new exclusions, as mandatory detention for asylum seekers was introduced in 1992.

The period was a stress test of Australian national identity. Economic collapse, political betrayal, institutional failure and the destabilisation of foundational legal myths placed intense pressure on the narratives through which the nation understood itself. It is precisely under such conditions that democratic nationalism matters most: when national stories risk hardening into resentment or fracturing into antagonistic camps.

Conceived within this climate, Fast Forward acted as a cultural shock absorber – maintaining a collective address while permitting sustained critique and contestation within the national frame. It took the theatre of the age – Hawke's tears, Keating's ambition, Hewson's monotone, Bond's bankruptcy, Skase's brace, a recession ‘we had to have’ – and replayed and subverted it through parody and satire. It exposed tabloid journalism's synthetic gravitas, the corruption of moguls and the absurdities of political spectacle. Commissioned at the height of disillusion, it promised a weekly reckoning: a cultural form capable of metabolising national crisis into recognition and laughter. In an interview looking back at the role of comedy in the recession of the early 1990s, then Victorian Premier Joan Kirner (qtd Neales, 1992: 33), herself the object of a parody by Magda Szubanski, reflected that the explosion in comedy was not surprising: ‘(w)hen politicians muck things up, it's important to be able to laugh at yourselves’.

By the end of the 1980s, comedy had become a staple of broadcast television, offering a platform from which to respond to national affairs. Following the success on the commercial networks of the Paul Hogan Show, The Naked Vicar Show and Kingswood Country, it was increasingly making claims on prime time. These programmes confirmed that commercial sketch and sitcom could not only stabilise a network but create stars who transcended television.

An important precursor for Fast Forward was a 1985 late-night sketch comedy experiment – The Eleventh Hour – by Channel Seven. It was commissioned for only eight episodes and produced on a shoestring budget, using little more than Seven's cameras, tape machines and a handful of borrowed staff. Yet despite its lack of polish, it was a proving ground. It allowed those involved to see the potential in a fast-moving, improvised sketch hour that stitched together news parodies, character pieces and pastiches (Colbert, 1994: 3). The Eleventh Hour built on an earlier Australian Film Commission workshop experiment which brought together a cluster of young writer-performers – Mary-Anne Fahey, Ian McFadyen, Peter Moon, Mark Mitchell, Glenn Robbins, Alan Pentland and Steve Vizard – who discovered a creative chemistry and shared instinct for turning the forms of television back on themselves, a literacy derived from being the first generation exposed from birth to its grammar and history.

The Eleventh Hour was also significant in offering a bridge from the vibrant theatre-restaurant scene of Melbourne in the 1970s and 1980s – where a generation of mostly university-educated comedians emerging from student revue had honed their comedic timing before intimate, live audiences – and the much larger stage of national television (Moore et al., 2024: 119–123). The creative team had been immersed in the edgy fringe comedy scene of Carlton, with its roots in the Australian Performance Group and the Pram Factory and its porosity to the social movements of the 1980s around environmental, unemployment, feminist and Indigenous self-determination and gay rights. This formation contributed to an understanding of politics as social and cultural rather than merely instrumental.

The off-Broadway broadcast space of late-night TV allowed The Eleventh Hour group to test how their characters, material and sensibilities would survive translation to the small screen; it exposed them to the craft of television-making, to the choreography of cameras and to the discipline of scripts and rehearsals. From this brief experiment, two of the most influential programmes of the decade emerged. The Comedy Company (Ten, 1988–1990) domesticated suburban caricature for mass audiences and Fast Forward (Seven, 1989–1992) inherited and radicalised The Eleventh Hour's media-parodic DNA, making it the organising principle of the prime-time sketch series.

Network strategy and the commissioning of Fast Forward

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, free-to-air television was at its zenith. In Australia, 99% of households had a set by 1991 (Cunningham, 2000: 29) – about six million homes – making television all but universal. Cable and internet fragmentation were still years away. Subscription TV would not arrive until 1995 and remained marginal through the decade (∼12% penetration by 1999); home internet reached only 13% of households by 1998 (ABS, 1998). The dominance of broadcast governed the economics: commercial free-to-air television booked $1.86 billion in gross revenue in 1991/1992 (ABA, 1993), the overwhelming majority of which came from advertising. Near-universal household penetration, combined with a shared nightly ritual of appointment viewing and an advertising machine that translated small shifts in audience share into revenue swings of hundreds of thousands of dollars, defined this ecology. This was the ecology in which parodying television itself became not just possible but potent.

A handful of proprietors dominated newspapers, radio and television, a concentration assisted by the fact the majority of the population resided in the capital cities. Two further structural dynamics framed commissioning: regional aggregation in March 1989 aligned country affiliates with metropolitan brands – Prime with Seven, WIN with Nine, Capital with Ten – instantly extending network reach; and the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 replaced tribunal micromanagement with codes enforced by the Australian Broadcast Authority – lighter oversight combined with content quotas and advertising caps that favoured agile, short-form local production. The free-to-air television hierarchy was stark. Nine, under Kerry Packer, sat atop audience share and advertiser confidence, buoyed by ritual franchises (60 Minutes, A Current Affair, summer cricket). Ten cultivated youth via soaps and U.S. imports, even as it slid into receivership. Seven occupied the exposed middle: broad licences, less definition and no commanding ‘share engines’.

Seven was also reeling from corporate instability. The network had been seized in 1987 by Christopher Skase's Qintex, but the latter imploded in late 1989, declaring bankruptcy in the U.S., being suspended by the Australian Stock Exchange and going into receivership with debts of $1.6 billion. Seven was for sale, with affiliates to reassure and advertisers to calm, just as aggregation raised the stakes of national brand coherence. In this precarious context, the case for a lean, promotable, advertising-friendly, fast-moving local format was compelling. While drama could cost up to $500,000 per hour (FACTS, 1999), light entertainment could be produced for less than half that amount.

As Seven struggled to outbid Nine for sport or out-import Ten, it had to ‘out-Australian’ them both. By late 1988, the success of The Comedy Company on Ten had shaken the competitive balance. For the first time, a sketch comedy was consistently outrating Nine's flagship Sunday night current affairs programme 60 Minutes, bringing in advertising revenues of $420,000 nationally for each weekly episode against a cost of only $200,000 to produce (Burchill, 1990: 35). At Seven, the conclusion was obvious: the network needed its own comedy flagship. The commissioning of Fast Forward – a series with the potential to appeal to both families and the youth audience – was therefore strategic. Seven's punt paid off, with the show achieving a weekly national audience reach of 2.5 to 3.5 million with sustained ratings of 30% to 39% (Courier Mail, 1991).

There were, of course, international points of reference too. Fast Forward was influenced by the reflexive style of Monty Python's Flying Circus in the UK and the television shows that worked a similar seam (Not the Nine O’Clock News, Saturday Night Live). Its creative team was also thoroughly immersed in self-reflexive American television of the 1960s and 1970s, including Batman, The Monkees, Bewitched, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Mike Myers’ 1980s breakout segment ‘Wayne's World’ on SNL. So potent was television at the time that it became the subject of cinema, notably Network (1976), Shock Treatment (1982), Broadcast News (1987) and Hairspray (1988).

In response to Seven's brief for its own but different version of Ten's Comedy Company, Vizard proposed a weekly one hour sketch-comedy series that treated television as both its form and its subject: an intercut hour ‘summarising’ a week of TV through rapid channel-surf edits, recurring film and TV spine parodies, fake commercials and media characters – designed for prime-time velocity, modular production and national recognisability. Where Comedy Company drew on suburbia, Fast Forward was conceived as a show not only on television but about television – its formats, genres, news, advertising and the entire machinery of the medium.

The programme embraced not only TV's flow but also the technologies of cordless remote channel surfing and home VCRs, structurally playing with the changing viewing patterns kindled by the capacity to record, playback and study television – the tools of the editor in the palm of viewers’ hands. In a single hour, Fast Forward would rifle through genres, formats, personalities and backroom cultures as if with a restless remote. This premise liberated it to travel across all channels and demographics, to mock not just the shows but also the medium's grammar. The change was noted in the media at the time. As Dennis Pryor (1989) observed in The Age, Fast Forward was ‘a show conceived entirely in television terms, independent of theatrical or film conventions’.

Two editorial devices rewrote the rules for television sketch. First, the ‘fast-forward’ cut, borrowed from the domestic VCR, allowed sketches to be abandoned midstream and resumed later, breaking the naturalised sketch contract inherited from vaudeville and music hall of beginning, middle and end. Second, the channel-change static cut gave the show both velocity and jeopardy: any sketch could be interrupted, any moment switched away from. In these techniques, Fast Forward transformed the phenomenology of television – distraction, simultaneity, perpetual scanning – into the grammar of its own comedy. What would make Fast Forward distinctive was not that it added another parody to the global archive but that it totalised the conceit: every sketch, every cut, every interlude was about television, advertising, cinema or the machinery of broadcast. Much of the programme's impact on the nation's civic conversation was through this use of the media frame to critique the key ills facing Australians at a tumultuous time.

Mimicry and national assertion

One of Fast Forward's most distinctive devices was its deployment of a major parody as the spine of each weekly episode: an international film or television franchise was used as a medium for lampooning Australian public figures and institutions. More than a hundred classics were retrofitted in this way – including Casablanca, Star Wars, Kung Fu, Gilligan's Island, Dallas, E.T., Happy Days, The Brady Bunch, Miami Vice, The Six Million Dollar Man, Are You Being Served?, Chariots of Fire, King Kong, The Rocky Horror Show and Apocalypse Now. Each parody was cut away from, fragmented, interrupted – and resumed in different ways in four or five excerpts across the hour. The ‘channel-surfing’ conceit allowed sketches to be disrupted mid-story, endings withheld, resolution deferred.

Much of the success of these parodies lay in the pleasure of recognition. The spine text was always one that was familiar in the media-saturated culture of the late 20th century, and the behind-the-scenes creative team gave detailed attention to reproducing the production values, look and exact media texture of the originating text. But there was always also a dialectic of theme and variation, the gap between original and parodic copy opening a space for creative play. Two uses of this space deserve particular attention. The first is what might be called ‘national assertion’ – a making Australian of material whose origins were generally not. The second is satire – the embedding of a political barb within the cultural skin of a recognisable text.

An example of national assertion is a parodic remake of scenes from the 1970s American supernatural horror film The Exorcist as a satire on the leadership crisis in the Labor government. On being called to the house of a distraught mother (Gina Riley) whose daughter has been behaving strangely, the exorcist priests deliver terrible news. To the mother's question ‘you think she is possessed by the devil?’, their answer is ‘Worse! Father Kennedy and I believe … that she is possessed by a force even darker, even more offensive, from whose mouth pours the most vile filth. We believe your daughter may be possessed by … Paul Keating!’ The awful hypothesis is confirmed as the daughter descends the stairs from her bedroom mouthing abuse in the voice and style of Keating: ‘Shut your gob you maggot-drenched bucket of sheep's guts. You wouldn’t know a J-curve from a jacuzzi, you fart-breathing scum’. After an unsuccessful attempt at exorcism, the priests summon an ‘even greater force’: ‘Oh holiest of holies, oh highest of the high … oh immortal one, save us!’. From amid the sound of thunder and a puff of smoke emerges the wheedling figure of Prime Minister Bob Hawke addressing the room in his exaggerated Australian drawl: ‘Aah … you called?’

To make sense of the sketch, the audience needed to be familiar with both the original American text and a host of contemporary Australian references and details – most obviously, that Hawke is Prime Minister, that his one-time Treasurer (Keating) is trying to dislodge him from the leadership and that Keating has a reputation for colourful invective and Hawke for self-regarding messianic tendencies. A rich seam of popular caricature at the time meant that this knowledge could be assumed, even among those who were not particularly politically engaged. But it is not only through the substitution of figures that the Australianisation occurs. The high gothic seriousness of The Exorcist is repeatedly punctured by down-to-earth Australianisms. Despite being confronted with supernatural events, the mother speaks in blunt Australian tones, and her lines are littered with references drawn from everyday suburban life. When the daughter begins to levitate, the priests surmise the actions of the devil. The mother: ‘Oh, that's not the devil; she's been eating Burger Rings again’.

We might appeal here to Homi Bhabha's (1994) theories of mimicry in colonial discourse, in which the colonised subject reproduces the culture of the imperial centre in a way that is ‘almost the same, but not quite’ (p. 86). The Exorcist sketch was certainly subversive of the power of the centre – the U.S. – in the way that Bhabha identifies. But it also goes further than mere subversion, coming closer to the sentiment of Paul Keating's claim – well after he succeeded in toppling Hawke, indeed at the time of the first U.S. election of Donald Trump – that ‘this society of ours is a better society than the United States’ (7.30 Report, 2016). Australia's relation to the imperial centre is made complex by its own history as a White settler society and agent of colonialism, a relation that has often meant that the country has figured as a ‘subimperial power’ (Fernandes, 2022). At other times, however, it has allowed a pushback against metropolitan pretension from a position of assumed equality – a kind of national assertion.

Fast Forward might be described in a certain sense as populist. It made repeated use of suburban consumer idioms – mortgages, shopping, fast food, tabloid television, lifestyle advice – as a common vernacular through which politics becomes discussable without requiring specialist competence. Yet the recurring appeal to ordinary consumption did not trivialise public life so much as provide a shared entry point: a demographically indiscriminate language that allowed audiences to recognise ways in which macro-events (recession, bank collapse, corruption scandals) play out at the level of everyday life, as a comedic form of Michael Billig's (1995) ‘banal nationalism’.

To put this another way, the show's national assertion, with its base in shared laughter, had a very different quality from the more aggressive forms of nationalism that have come to claim attention since the early 2000s. There are superficial similarities, particularly in the mocking of those who have come to be identified in right-wing populist discourses as ‘elites’. But there is still a certain warmth in Fast Forward's parodic representations. The Exorcist sketch lays bare the human folly of political leaders but in a way that leaves room for sympathy and even affection. We might compare here with the comedy animations of ‘Please Explain’, the online video channel of Pauline Hanson's One Nation (n.d.), in which political figures appear as utterly venal and self-serving. Where the comedy of Fast Forward is pluralist and inclusive, reaching out to a broadcast audience imagined as universal, ‘Please Explain’ incites a laughter that is more brittle and exclusionary, seeking to address only a cult online niche.

Satire disguised as entertainment

A second use of the gap between original and copy in Fast Forward's parodic spines was politically laced satire. If parody works in the space of imitation, exaggerating recognisable features for comic effect, satire injects an element of social or political critique. Classically, satire has often been thought of as simply an attack on vice or folly, but the sense we mean here is more the one suggested by Dustin Griffin (1994) for contexts in which the ground for moral judgements has become uncertain. Satire includes ‘inquiry and provocation, play and display’ (p. 14); it is ‘problematic, open-ended, essayistic, ambiguous in its relationship to history, uncertain in its political effect, resistant to formal closure’ (p. 16).

An example is a Star Wars parody which addresses the 1990s greed of Australia's major banks. The sketch opens with the iconic Star Wars theme music and familiar scrolling on-screen text:

Long ago in a galaxy far far away, people borrowed money from banks so they could buy their homes, clothes for their children, that sort of thing. The banks charged a nominal interest rate and the world was happy. So something had to change. It is now the 53^rd Century and Princess Lilo has been seized from the planet Listerine by the Dark Lord of the Overdraft, Large Banker.

The suggestion affirms what many Australians were feeling amid the bank collapses and financial instability of the time, and in other contexts, it might have appeared as politically incendiary. Yet the embedding of satire within parody disguises the critique as entertainment. And in so doing, it enables it to circulate more widely than would otherwise be possible. A line of analysis that would usually be restricted to fringe progressive magazines could be openly voiced in national prime time.

Another example is a sketch on a street auction for a renovated inner-city terrace – a ‘magnificent property with parking for two Volvos’ – in which an Aboriginal neighbour (Ernie Dingo) suddenly appears, leaning nonchalantly over an adjoining wall and offering commentary on the proceedings:

Nice house alright. We love good neighbour. We quiet mob, us mob, you ask the local policeman … No trouble round here, no drinkin’, no fightin’ … We gotta get up 5 o’clock for corroboree. Got the Townsville mob comin’ down. And next weekend, Alice Springs mob…

In context, again, the sketch touches on highly volatile political issues. It is not even the dig at White racism that is most relevant here; the interruption of a property transaction by a Black man wearing an ‘Aboriginal Australia’ T-shirt plays directly into the turmoil, division and soul searching at the time over the High Court's ruling on native title. As in the case of the Star Wars parody, however, the suggestion is floated rather than forced. At the end of the sketch, the house buyer greets the neighbour/Ernie Dingo – ‘Thank you brother!’ – and it becomes clear that the two are in cahoots. Dingo (scanning newspaper listings): ‘Now, the next auction's in half an hour…’ The moral and political gravity dissolves as it is revealed that the Aboriginal men are cheekily gaming the property system.

Besides the spine parodies, a mainstay of satire on Fast Forward was a series of recurring sketch characters – including Magda Szubanski's sports reporter ‘Pixie-Anne’ and daytime beauty consultant ‘Chenille’; Vizard's ‘Hunch’, a parody of tabloid current affairs host Derryn Hinch; and Marg Downey's ‘SBS woman’, a hilariously impassive film presenter for the multicultural and multilingual broadcaster. More than incidental grotesques, these figures were embodiments of the apparatus, allegories of the systems through which authority, truth and desire circulated in late-1980s Australia. To return to them each week was to re-enter the theatre where media power was staged and satirically disassembled. Parody supplied the form; satire supplied the incision. In their repetition lay ritual, what Victor Turner (1974) calls ‘social drama’: the weekly re-enactment of categories by which Australians recognised and misrecognised themselves.

These characters further illustrate Fast Forward's strategy of embedding hard-edged satire in familiar parody. For example, Downey's SBS woman condensed the ambivalence of multiculturalism at a time when the national imaginary was struggling to absorb it. SBS had been founded as a gesture of pluralism, a broadcast mandate to expand beyond the Anglo-Celtic monoculture, to bring subtitled cinema and migrant voices into domestic living rooms. Yet in Downey's mimicry, that fragile pluralism was compressed into the homogenising cadences of broadcast speech. A tension was also exposed between the art house cinema pretensions of SBS programmers and the earthier entertainment most migrants might actually prefer. Here was hybridity in Bhabha's sense: a third space that unsettled the authority of the dominant but also revealed its capacity to co-opt difference into its own forms. The laughter arose from the doubleness: SBS as rupture, SBS as assimilation.

Szubanski's Pixie-Anne Wheatley was another example of this apparatus: a shrill non-expert, a sports ‘reporter’ with no knowledge of sport, whose obsession with celebrity, trivia and the provincial dramatised society's shift from substance to spectacle. At a time when households staggered under crippling mortgage rates and youth unemployment edged close to 20%, television increasingly offered a compensatory theatre of distraction. Wheatley embodied the media's complicity in the distraction of voyeurism, a culture that surveilled the private lives of athletes and celebrities while oblivious to structural crises.

Chenille (Szubanski) and Janelle (Downey), ensconced in their beauty salon, lampooned the rise of advertorial television. Their inane banter about miracle creams and beauty fads was grotesque, and yet the grotesquerie was exact: it mirrored the new hybrid form of morning television, where lifestyle, consumption and pseudo-information bled into a continuous promotional flow. The pair enacted weekly what theorist of postmodernism Jean Baudrillard (1983: 1–61) identified as the ‘implosion of meaning into the commodity’: women's talk, consumer desire and the televisual medium itself collapsed into one commodified spectacle.

Vizard's Hunch was a satire of power masquerading as truth. Notorious journalist turned king of talkback, Derryn Hinch, styled himself ‘the human headline,’ a figure of tabloid indignation who blurred journalism, activism and theatrical performance. Vizard's parody exaggerated the sanctimony and moral outrage, but its target went beyond Hinch himself to the epistemological crisis of the age: when confession and exposure, orchestrated through microphones and studio lights, claimed the authority of truth. Hunch was the parody of an entire apparatus, exposing how authority had migrated from parliament to talkback, from policy to performance. The sketch does not require audiences to abandon tabloid current affairs; it requires them to recognise its performance conventions – moral outrage, confessional theatre, the claim to speak for ‘ordinary people’ – as conventions.

None of this implies that Fast Forward was without limits or blind spots. Its humour drew boundaries as well as opened spaces; some caricatures aged unevenly; and comedy itself has the capacity to wound as well as bind. These ambivalences are not anomalies but features of national culture itself. Democratic nationalism does not eradicate such tensions; it manages them. Comedy's civic role lies precisely in its ability to hold contradiction in play, rendering the nation neither wholly sacred nor disposable, but available for ongoing negotiation.

Fast forward to the future

We have made a case in this article, through the example of Fast Forward, that Australian sketch comedy of the late 1980s and 1990s embodied a fertile three-way relationship between broadcast television, comedy and democratic nationalism. The drive by broadcast television to seek the largest possible audience dovetailed closely with a pluralist imagining of national identity. Through its parodic repurposing of international media texts, Fast Forward asserted a distinctive Australian identity in a global context still overwhelmingly dominated by American, and to a lesser extent British, cultural influences. At the same time, it sought to integrate diverse Australian communities and types, reaching across lines of class, ethnicity, Indigenous/settler identities and political persuasions. In doing so, it did not shy away from sharp satirical observations about misuses of public position and structures of power in Australia or from questioning the very terms of national belonging.

What might this argument have to say about the possibilities for media, nationalism and comedy today? It would be easy to fall prey to nostalgia here, echoing the YouTube lament of an older generation of fans over the passing of the golden moment of Australian sketch comedy – ‘Such a shame our Aussie humour has gone to shit’ (THEbenpri, n.d.). The conditions of possibility for the complex we have analysed have clearly dissolved in the 30 years since Fast Forward and it would be easy to draw depressing conclusions about where its three corners – which we now need to name more abstractly as media, comedy and nationalism – have now moved.

In the case of media, we have become only too aware in recent years of negative effects of the post-broadcast ecology – from the algorithmic amplification of division and conflict and the unaccountable power of the international platforms to social disconnection and alienation. Alongside these developments, nationalism has been widely recruited to intolerance and outrage. There have been increasing suggestions too, as American comedy scholar Christopher Gilbert (2025: 5) puts it, that ‘comedy has gone wrong’, many of the forms emerging from the dark recesses of the internet thriving ‘on degradation without any concessions, and laughter without responsibility’.

But it has not been our intention to suggest that the high broadcast moment was some kind of Eden from which the digital present can represent only a fall. While Fast Forward was of the broadcast era, it was already in a certain sense post-broadcast, distancing itself from broadcast forms by revealing their artifice and bringing attention to their follies, oppressions and complacencies. The same might be said of other television comedies of the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s – from Fast Forward's siblings The Comedy Company and The D-Generation to Frontline, Kath and Kim and the fierce satirical wit of John Clarke and Bryan Dawe. One of the reasons these programmes are remembered is that they offered mordant responses to the often far-from-Edenic media cultures that surrounded them – cultures that included the bombast of Derryn Hinch, the blithe commercial blather of the Pixie-Annes and Chenilles and the po-faced humourlessness and civic rectitude of too much public service broadcasting.

Through this more complex perspective, we hope to make of television sketch comedy a ‘usable past’, in the sense given to the term by the American cultural critic and literary scholar Van Wyck Brook (1918) – a selectively interpreted and revitalised tradition that those who undertake creative work might continue to draw upon. It is a perspective that emphasises contingency and pluralism. Fast Forward was not structurally determined by a media matrix or national settlement but emerged as a series of creative responses to chance conjunctures – a commercial logic briefly favouring prime-time comedy, the creative ferment spiralling out from institutions such as the Australian Performance Group and the Pram Factory, the destabilisation of established ideas of nationhood by the social and political crises of the 1990s and unusual one-off opportunities such as Seven's experiment with The Eleventh Hour.

There is no reason to think that because this set of conjunctures has passed, others cannot emerge. We should be wary, perhaps, of swinging from despair to blithe optimism: the critical perspectives on the digital present that we have indicated above point to real problems that clearly need to be taken seriously. At the same time, these perspectives are themselves a source of new energies, and they are energies that are circulating widely in the culture – not least in comedy. Most experimentation at the juncture of media and comedy is now to be found online, from the absurdist sketch of Aunty Donna and the ethnic-based humour of Sooshi Mango to the music parodies on YouTube and TikTok of Melbourne trio Swag on the Beat or the podcast repartee of Little Dum Dum Club. Yet most of these projects reach back to broadcast in the same way as broadcast itself once reached back to vaudeville. There is no absolute break between ‘legacy’ media and online; there is rather a continuous living tradition.

The broadcast era was never Eden. But it did, at its best, produce programmes capable of making a nation visible to itself – sceptical, affectionate and still in argument. That capacity is worth recovering, and the medium through which it re-emerges matters far less than the civic imagination it requires.

Comedy has always found its medium. The Pram Factory and The Last Laugh gave way to The Eleventh Hour; The Eleventh Hour gave way to Fast Forward. The forms change. The civic need does not.