The Micallef Program

Australian comedy Sketch Comedy program named after (and hosted by) Shaun Micallef.

The Framing Device was of a Variety Show hosted by an extremely smarmy host named Shaun Micallef. The show played on the banality of middle-of-the-road Variety Shows, with Obligatory Game Show Segments featuring increasingly bizarre games and contestants, interviews Shaun would ruin with his inflated ego, and a constant stream of incomprehensible three-second variety acts.

In-between all of these segments were various sketches which employed a great deal of surreal, observational humour- often played completely straight- that subverted, even deconstructed various expectations and media genres. The amount of surreal humour greatly increased with each season, to the point where Series 3 bears little resemblance to reality.

The show was renamed The Micallef Programme for its second series in response to a number of viewer complaints that they were spelling "program" incorrectly ("Certainly don't get that level of pedantry from viewers of commercial television.") For the third series, they changed the name again to The Micallef Pogram, which is arguably far more offensive.

It would end after its third season, but later received a Spiritual Successor in Micallef Tonight, a prime-time talk show that took aim at... well, prime-time talk shows in the mould of The Tonight Show or The Late Show With David Letterman.

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This show contains examples of

 * Bad Bad Acting
 * Butt Monkey
 * The Comically Serious
 * Faux Documentary
 * Game Show
 * Inherited Illiteracy Title
 * Opening Monologue
 * Painting the Fourth Wall
 * Product Placement
 * Refuge in Audacity
 * Sound Proof Booth
 * Talk Show
 * Those Wacky Nazis
 * Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist
 * Variety Show