How do comedy shows source those obscure news clips?

If you’ve ever seen comedy shows like The Weekly with Charlie Pickering or The Cheap Seats, it’s probably crossed your mind: how on earth do they find all those obscure news clips?

Firstly, they do have dedicated researchers for that very task, but secondly there is a little help from technology.

Although it wasn’t always the case, as Charlie Pickering recalls.

“We built a machine that was called The Beast, it was unbelievable,” he tells TV Tonight. “It was a computer and a bunch of hard drives…. I think it did catch fire at one point.

“The idea came from a bit of technology that The Daily Show built a while ago called Snapstream, which is very clever. You set which channels you want to record. It records everything, and as part of the file it records the captions, and the captions become searchable.

“Eventually we communicated to the ABC that the only way to do this properly long term is to subscribe to Snapstream. And they wanted to be doing more things in Australia anyway. So I think we were the first. Now I think there are some other shows at the ABC that use Snapstream.”

The Cheap Seats also thrives on random news and entertainment clips.

“I am familiar with Snapstream. It’s an amazing thing. It sort of records all the telly,” says Melanie Bracewell, who insists it isn’t as simple as typing in ‘funny thing’ to source a clip.

“But sometimes, if you’re trying to look for 10 clips of someone saying, for example, ‘Waiting for the pre-polls’, then you can search that phrase and it will find the things you’ve recorded via the transcript. It’s pretty amazing.

“Quite often I will search the phrase ‘Sorry’ or ‘Apologies’, because that’s often what journos say when something has gone wrong.

“Essentially we have the machine that records all the news we have programmed and it just transcribes it. It means you can search rather than watch everything. For example, if I search Toto the Dog, it’ll just show me the parts of the broadcast and where they talk about Toto.

“It doesn’t completely mean we put our feet on the desk and we do nothing! It just means that if we are trying to find a particular clip, it makes our lives a lot easier. We don’t have to scrub through hours and hours of footage.”