ABC series hides a history lesson

The Back In Time series is a perfect example of that.

It masquerades as a bit of light entertainment as the Ferrone family struggles through living in bygone times, making icky foods like pigeon pie.

But hidden underneath is an education on Australian history, and not just how our lifestyles changed.

This debut episode of the series where the family run the corner store touches on Aboriginal relations, the hidden history of slavery in Australia and the rise of anti-Chinese sentiment.

The result is that you turn off at the end of the episode and realise just how much you learned.

Comedy never gets the respect it deserves.

Take the Oscars for instance. There are categories for best film overall, animated film, short film, foreign film and documentary - but nothing for best comedy.

And comedies rarely win the Best Picture Oscar. The last one was Birdman way back in 2014 - though that was tagged "comedy-drama" rather than straight-out comedy.

The reason for this is simple; there is a bias against comedy. People tend to think making people laugh is easy, while telling a dramatic tale is much harder.

I'd suggest it's actually the other way around. Making someone laugh is actually hard work; you can sit in a cinema and immediately tell whether the film is succeeding or not by whether people are laughing.

A silent audience is the death of comedy. With drama, silence is normal - if it's a serious tale no-one expects to hear giggles.

Watching the new sketch comedy series We Interrupt This Broadcast, my response was, sadly, silence.

The show, which is a series of sketches poking fun at real TV shows like The Bachelor or Married at First Sight, just isn't very funny.

I wish it was. I so desperately wanted it to be funny. I wanted to enjoy it as much as the heavy-handed laugh track the show employed does.

But it just isn't. Maybe it will get better and, for the sake of both this show and future sketch comedies, I hope it does.

This show centres around a bold idea of Ali Kadri from Islamic College Brisbane.

He wants to take some of his students and place them in secular schools for a term, while some of those from secular schools get to experience Islamic culture up close.

The aim of the experiment is to show each side how the other lives, and to show that you can disagree with a way of living but still be friendly with the person.

The first episode features some very switched-on kids, especially the small but buff Brynn who is a public school kid with an enlightened view far beyond what you might expect of a teenager.

On the other hand, the kids most resistant to actually learning anything from the Islamic school come from their Catholic counterpart.

Make of that what you will.