"I Straight Up Took the P*** Out of You”: The Kates Talk About Their New Komedy, “Get Krack!n”

“Is she the one who ate a bowl of pasta off someone’s a***?”

Kate McLennan is asking her comedy partner Kate McCartney about Bethenny Frankel, the Real Housewife and former TV host who unwittingly became a muse for their morning-tele takedown, Get Krack!n.

McCartney answers in the affirmative—“Yep”—but this writer, mid-interview, asks for a clarification: “She ate what off what?”

“A bowl of spaghetti off someone’s a***; balancing it on someone’s backside, and then she ate it with a fork,” McCartney elaborates.

Glad we figured that out. Even gladder the Kates, following up their hit webseries The Katering Show, worked the visual into Get Krack!n’s opening credits

.@TheKateringShow girls are back with @getkrackinshow. It's a Kate way to start your day! Starts Wed 30 Aug 9.30pm #GetKrackin pic.twitter.com/BpJYkYTAa1

— ABC TV Australia (@ABCTV) July 31, 2017

The two comedians reprise their roles as the hyper-driven, frustrated “Kate McLennan” and the detached, sardonic “Kate McCartney”, respectively, in the ABC’s new Wednesday night show Get Krack!n, an absolutely brutal parody of Australia’s cottage industry of light entertainment television.

Oh, and Bethenny too.

“[Bethenny] was so awful and we just loved it,” says McLennan.

“We basically the stole the layout of her set, the way she moved in her outfit,” McCartney adds.

Local viewers won’t need to be familiar with the intricacies and subtleties of Bethenny (RIP, 2012 – 2014) to get the joke. Anyone who’s ever glimpsed an Australian breakfast program will instantly recognise the world of Get Krack!n, where “content can be anything”.

“Essentially, it’s just the same thing being repeated every twenty minutes anyway,” McLennan says of morning television.

“They’re kind of just taking everything that’s happened on the internet in the preceding 24 hours and regurgitating it or condensing it all.

“We loved that there was still a format to play with these timeless tropes from those morning breakfast-lifestyle shows. But to be honest, we couldn’t really stomach watching any of those shows,” she says.

“We don’t have time to watch it,” McCartney adds.

Koming up tonight 9.30pm on the late, late show of Australian morning shows #GetKrackin.. 🐓 pic.twitter.com/BcSRUFfyX3

— ABC TV Australia (@ABCTV) August 30, 2017

They’re also doubtful they’ll be invited onto Today or Sunrise anymore.

“We might be cast out,” McLennan predicts.

“I feel like once you start parodying something, you really can’t get too involved in it."

“It’s hard to look [the hosts] in the eye and go, ‘I straight up took the p*** out of you,” McCartney says.

That may change if Get Krack!n matches the heights of The Katering Show, which inspired chefs to call up and beg, “Take the p*** out of me!”, McLennan remembers.

“It was a very successful show,” McCartney says jokingly over McLennan’s laughs, even though it’s the truth. (The Katering Show has clocked up millions of views on YouTube and the ABC's streaming platform, iview.)

However, with expectations high, the Kates are hoping their old fans will follow them to their new timeslot. (Though Get Krack!n will be available on iview too, new episodes will air at 9:30pm on the ABC. However, their less-successful alter egos on the show aren’t so lucky; in the world of Get Krack!n, the best spot in the schedule they could score is 3am.)

“We knew that our fans are very passionate about food, or very passionate about us taking the p*** out of food,” says McLennan.

“There was a concern of, ‘Oh, will they go with us on this?’

“And so we knew within that first episode, we’ll put in a cooking segment straight up the front, just to kind of get it out of the way,” she laughs.

Well... That went well 😂 #GetKrackin @getkrackinshow pic.twitter.com/78HZdHMD4K

— ABC TV Australia (@ABCTV) August 31, 2017

“We really liked the dynamic between us as characters, and we thought that worked well in [The Katering Show], which is why we brought those characters over,” McCartney says.

They also carried over the “formal stuff” too: “The weirdness of the camera angles, the unprofessionalism of our crew, the weird cutaways, the stuff where we play with the conventions of how things are shot.”

This includes the inane, aggressively-catchy pop music jingles by Casey Bennetto, which populate each episode, with banal lyrics like, “Come on girl, you can change the world,” and, slightly more bafflingly, “You should be up on a criminal charge.”

Get Krack!n’s so funny, both ring true.

New episodes of Get Krack!n air Wednesdays at 9:30pm on the ABC. Restream episodes on iview.

Photo: ABC