Lawyer-turned-comedian Alice Snedden is now in demand on UK TV, yet returned home to make one last season of her complicated yet beloved Bad News. She tells Duncan Greive why it had to end.
When it emerged in 2018, Alice Snedden’s Bad News was a fully realised embodiment of the zeitgeist. It felt like the id of appalled and activist social media come to life, a gut howl against the shrugging response to the layered inequities which confront us as a society.
Alice Snedden was born to be its host – a lawyer by training and comic by birth, she created a series of set pieces which had an electric audacity to them. The first season featured her trying and failing to be arrested for smoking weed and a confrontation with former Reserve Bank governor and Hobson’s Pledge founder Don Brash which was probably the most entertaining interview of the year.
Two years later she made a follow up which was even more fully realised. It featured her getting forcefully ejected from a “gender critical” event at parliament, a scene in a bondage parlour to expose the unequal treatment of migrant sex workers, but also encounters with multiple MPs and ministers – power being held to account.
It also featured an episode on euthanasia conducted around the proverbial family dinner table, which had Act’s David Seymour debating the right to death with disability advocate Claire Freeman, among others. It was a striking change in tone from prior episodes, in that Snedden, who was raised Catholic, found herself in a moral bind. It was confronting and moving, and still somewhat unresolved by the end.
This ultimately became the foundation of season three, which moves strongly away from the clarity of the early years and into the murk of issues with no uncomplicated resolution. She approaches issues like eating meat or wealth in which she feels there is an obvious answer but one she does not herself practise. Snedden also revisits rugby, taking the bones of an episode which never aired in 2018 and exploring the reasons why.
Bad News once again feels very much of the zeitgeist, because the zeitgeist has changed: away from the unalloyed certainties of 2018, into the less-clear realities of 2022. I spoke to Alice, from London where she now lives much of the time, and got a sense of why she felt like this season of Bad News had to be the last.
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This transcript has been condensed and edited. Also, we have to declare a conflict here: I am an EP on this show.
Duncan Greive: Bad News is about as personal a show as you can get. It’s literally got your name in the title. Tell me how you originally pitched it to TVNZ?
Alice Snedden: I originally pitched it as a show called What? How? Me? It was basically looking into social and political issues. And then how they specifically affected me, I guess to satirise millennial culture. I want to make clear that this was a 2017 pitch.
It was really born out of the fact that I had done a degree and then I got into comedy. And I wasn’t engaging anymore with any of the things I was engaging with at uni. And I kind of missed it, because I love that stuff. So it felt like not an inevitability, but just something I desperately wanted to do.
It’s quite a challenging show, particularly the first season. Especially when you think about TVNZ being unavoidably and probably necessarily the most normie platform that we have. Was there any tension in making this really kind of quite aggro and confrontational show for the big state broadcaster?
Well, I think I was blissfully unaware of a lot of the stuff behind the scenes. I do remember running into a lawyer in the foyer. And he’s like “well, I’ve just got off the phone with New Zealand Blood”. And I said “I thought that they loved me there”. But you know, there was a bit of that, a bit that was probably shielded from because of the producer. But certainly, I had some conversations with people where they weren’t as hot on the content I was making as I was.
This season feels notably different from the rest – you’re less confident in your positions, would you agree?
Yeah, I’d be interested to see how perceptible it was to other people. But I certainly felt it more in the making of it this season than I have in any of the others, is how differently I felt about making it, and the tackling of the issues.
I don’t know if I was more gutsy in the first season, or just less nuanced, or more self-righteous. I don’t think it’s that I’m less passionate about things now. But I feel I can see more sides of things now, in a way that I don’t know is necessarily useful for activism or advocacy.
It just feels different. It feels strange. I think that’s because there are no issues where it’s a clean clap, slam dunk. This is the moral righteous standpoint. And I think, you know, there’s something to be said for maybe I’ve grown up a little bit. And that’s maybe a bad thing. I don’t know how I feel about it.
As someone has watched them all, I find myself really drawn to the kind of moral complexity and ambiguity of the current season. This season is more “man, this is complicated – how should I wrestle with my own kind of complicity in this very complicated thing”. While still being super funny.
I hope that’s the case. I think, honestly, the older you get, and the more successful I’ve got, the more complicit I feel in a lot of the issues.
It’s not that I don’t think those are true. I think those things deserve to be skewered. But recognising these systems of oppression that I’m trying to tear down or draw light to it has been a really interesting, at times confronting, experience. And I think that you’re right about the moral ambiguity – that’s where I just sit on it. But the thing that concerns me a little bit about moral ambiguity on anything is that it allows for inaction because, well, who knows what’s right?
An episode which I think about a lot, which feels predictive of where it went, was the euthanasia episode in season two. Because it almost felt like it crystallised that you didn’t know where you stood going in. And I don’t know if you necessarily did coming out, either.
Euthanasia was kind of the first example of doing something where I wasn’t entirely sure where I stood on it. And then I feel we’ve ended up with all of these topics, this season, where I’m not sure where I stand on it. Or I am sure where I’m standing on it, but my actions are not reflective of that.
And in some ways, I think it is the most personal season, because I feel the most personally implicated. This season, we do one on meat, for example. I think I know that the correct position is not to eat meat, and yet I’m still doing it.
Probably the one where you seem to come up with the most moral confidence and then end up completely ruined again, was the minimum wage exemption for disabled people. It felt like a really important episode, and one that was hard for you to get into in some respects.
It’s hard on lots of different levels. I can’t represent that community. I don’t have a disability, I don’t have a learning disability. I don’t have lived experience of what that’s like. I think anytime somebody is talking about or talking to or having an opinion on any issue that you don’t have lived experience of, it’s innately trickier.
Over the last couple of seasons, people with disabilities have reached out and said, hey, you’ve never done anything on disabilities, and I’ve gone and I thought, oh, yeah, you’re right. I wonder if in the back of my head unconsciously I’ve been going, “that just seems too difficult to touch”. And so this was a response to that. So we worked with incredible researchers who also have lived experiences across the board. We canvassed a bunch of different issues. The minimum wage exemption was one that we landed on, because I don’t think many people know about it.
And it does affect a small portion of the population, but it speaks, I think, to a value system really clearly. Which makes it incredibly interesting. I mean, it sounds bad, it just does – to say, oh, we’re gonna pay these people below minimum wage, because they have a learning disability. And I think I still think that, but then what is the solution to this? Or what is the alternative to this?
Alice Snedden’s Bad News season three is made by Hex Work Productions for The Spinoff and premieres Tuesday 13 September at midday.