The ‘enormous’ 2023 story Charlie Pickering struggled to satirise

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Prepare to be shocked and confused by the annual round up of the ABC’s satirical current affairs show The Weekly with Charlie Pickering. The host warns that the very act of looking back at what made headlines in 2023 could be disorienting, as our worsening short-term memories misfire, and we grapple with what transfixed us during the last 12 months.

“The Yearly is a great exercise in reminding ourselves of what actually happened this year,” says Pickering. “The number of times I was sitting there [in the writer’s room] going, ‘Oh, that’s right. That was this year’. We forget. Everyone has rewired their brains with social media, which is just this constant rinse and repeat loop. It feels like you are trapped in the present, and it’s just refreshing all the time, until it’s impossible to get any sense of what’s really going on and time loses all meaning.”

Comedian Charlie Pickering on the set of his end-of-year special, The Yearly with Charlie Pickering.

Spoiler alert: the “biggest” news story of the year was not the Gaza conflict, the Leongatha mushroom poisoning, or even the Matildas’ World Cup campaign.

“I’m very happy with the way we deal with this, but, without a doubt, and based on all the media, news footage and newspaper articles, it is indisputable that the biggest story of the year was the Titan submersible that went missing going down to see the Titanic,” says Pickering.

“No story for the entire year had dominated this much. Maybe the Hamas attack on Israel and the ensuing Gaza conflict is [actually] a bigger story than a handful of people on a poorly made submarine. I think that is all the evidence you need that news is what you make of it, a lot of the time.”

Ahead of the program’s 10th anniversary year, Pickering reflects on the evolution of what began as a simple concept of distilling news through a comic lens, alongside then Logie-less panellists Tom Gleeson and Kitty Flanagan.

The hunt for the missing Titan submersible, which was recovered from the ocean floor, was the biggest news story of the year, says Charlie Pickering. Credit: AP

“Look at what Tom and Kitty have gone on to do after those first two seasons,” says Pickering. “If, like me, you like to make jokes about the world, not just yourself, The Weekly’s a great place to do that.”

This year, a new segment called “Instant Expert” extended that platform to emerging talent. Celebrity interviews were reinstated after an absence of several years because, “we had the opportunity to get people like Jimmy Carr and John Cleese, and a few others who you can’t make a decent argument for not having on”. And Australia’s first lady of film critique, Margaret Pomeranz, this year delighted viewers with her reviews of everything from reality TV to the Teletubbies. This Yearly, she will present the inaugural “Margie” award for the greatest contribution to television. Pickering confirms she will return next year. “She is just such a joyous and wonderful part of the show.”

The “Person of the Year” award will be judged a little differently. “We’ve acknowledged that people don’t really matter any more, so we’ll be doing ‘CEO of the Year’ because, really, it’s only the CEOs and billionaires that shape this world. The CEOs of Qantas, Optus, Twitter, they’ve really shone and provided some of the better news stories of the year.”

The most difficult news event to satirise proved to be the Voice referendum.

“Everyone was so exhausted by what was not a particularly edifying public debate, that everyone was very keen to turn the page on it,” says Pickering. “I had Indigenous friends who were gutted, but didn’t want to keep talking about it. So that was an interesting one for us. We were bouncing around for jokes. It was an enormous story this year, but if we were to devote four minutes of the show to it, it would feel way too much.

“We’re in the very privileged position of deciding what makes the cut of summing up the year, and this is why I enjoy doing this show. We get an opportunity to say, ‘This was the story of 2023.’”

The Yearly With Charlie Pickering premieres on Wednesday, December 20, at 8.30pm, ABC.

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