“I’ve been very angry – the great Australian dream that I felt like I’d been promised growing up was feeling like a fantasy. I am obviously not alone in this, and that there’s roughly a third of Australians are renters,” Mark Humphries told Mediaweek.
The TV presenter-comedian is fronting a new documentary for streaming service BINGE called Sold! Who Broke the Australian Dream? It seeks to cut through the misconceptions surrounding the housing industry (the problem isn’t international investors and it isn’t a kindly woman named Narelle), to find some answers on why many Australians cannot afford to buy a home to live in.
Throughout his career, Humphries, a self-described “D-list celebrity,” has largely traded in political satire with a shorter-than-intended stint hosting game show Pointless. But with Sold!, Humphries has shifted gears with what is a sort of comedic documentary activism. It’s similar to what Sold! writer-producer Craig Reucassel has been working on with ABC shows War on Waste, Big Weather (and how to survive it), and Fight For Planet A.
At 39 years-old, Humphries is genuine in his anger about how difficult it is to buy a home in Australia. While he’s had some career stumbles here and there, he acknowledges that he’s been relatively fortunate.
“For so many, it just feels completely out of reach. Not just a thing of ‘Well, you put in the hard yards for a few years,’ but it’s reached a point now where it’s like it’s actually not even worth trying. You might as well have that cup of coffee or a piece of avocado toast that you’re told not to because you might as well enjoy yourself rather than punishing yourself on the path to never owning a home,” Humphries said.
Does Humphries believe that he can change the world through comedy?
“I don’t believe that there’s ever one sketch, you know, one piece of comedic material that suddenly creates change. It contributes to the overall conversation. It’s all just part of adding an extra layer to it and keeping the topic front of mind, ideally doing it in a way that, yes, is entertaining, so maybe can, you know, capture a few other people that wouldn’t necessarily engage with the topic because you’ve come at it with humour.
“I don’t have some great hope that the documentary itself will be the thing that finally creates change. It’s just an extra piece in the puzzle and a reminder to those in power that we’re still angry and we’re still going to be loud about it,” Humphries said.
The hope is that the documentary will raise greater consciousness around the causes of Australia’s housing affordability crisis in a similar way to Reucassel’s War on Waste documentary series. That environmentally-focused show, which was based on UK format Hugh’s War on Waste and ran for three seasons on the ABC, is seen by many as a catalyst for changes in Australia such as the plastic bag ban in Australian supermarkets.
A key difference between the shows is that 2017’s War on Waste was impactful because it was broadcast to a mass audience via the ABC. Sold! is instead an on-demand documentary being streamed on subscription service BINGE where it won’t have that immediate viewership tuning in to watch at the same time.
“It is more of a slow burn, because it won’t necessarily be as an event… it was never going to be an event television thing… but rather, it’s something that, I think, people will find over the coming days and weeks.
“I’m not expecting that come Monday, you know, suddenly there’s questions to the Prime Minister… I think I’m a bit more realistic about that,” he said.
A standout moment in the program has ABC finance analyst Alan Kohler appearing in a bathtub to discuss the policies that led to the current crisis. It is an homage to Margot Robbie’s scene in economic political activist film The Big Short, in which Robbie is seen naked in a bathtub discussing subprime mortgages.
Margot Robbie and Alan Kohler. Robbie is pictured left.
While informative, the scene with Kohler is less explicit than some fans may have hoped.
“There was a discussion at one point about whether Alan should actually be nude. He spent much more time in that bathtub than he was anticipating. Because he’s such a pro in terms of what he normally does, he’s used to being in and out quite quickly with his finance reports. I don’t think he was aware of how long it takes to do setups involving bubbles and champagne,” Humphries said.