Web Video / The Katering Show

"Hi! I'm Kate McLennan. I spend my days cooking for the people that I love.

"Hi. I'm Kate McCartney. I spend my days not being an arsehole. Welcome to—

"THE KATERING SHOW!"

The The Katering Show Kates, McLennan and McCartney.

Australian cooking show parody in which Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney take a Sassy Swipe™ at cookery show tropes and food trends.

Billed as "The journey of a food intolerant and an intolerable foodie", the show revolves around McLennan's not-very-successful attempts to produce food that intolerance-sufferer McCartney can eat. Whether she actually wants to eat it, is another matter entirely. (Most of the time, the answer is no.) Along the way, the pair overshare, argue Like an Old Married Couple, and snark mightily about food culture and life in general.

The show debuted on YouTube with a run of six episodes in 2015. The "Thermomix" episode in particular went viral, and The ABC stepped in to part-fund a second run, which debuted on ABC's online iView service in 2016.

The Kates would team up again in 2017 for television series Get Krack!n.

Cooking up tropes:

• Affectionate Parody: Of "sugarfree" guru Sarah Wilson in "We Quit Sugar" and celebrity chef Maggie Beer in "The Cook And The Kates". Wilson thought her episode was Actually Pretty Funny; Beer has not responded.
• Aloof Dark-Haired Girl: McCartney is brunette and significantly more dour and dry than the blond and bubbly McLennan.
• Art Shift: Ronnie Chieng's cookery demo in "Chienging Flavours" is shot and edited in a slick quick-cut style with different graphics and music. And it doesn't really have any jokes apart from the sheer Big-Lipped Alligator Moment-ness of it. Basically, for about a minute it actually looks like a real cookery show.
• Bizarre Taste in Food: Averted. Yeah, nobody actually wants to eat lasagne made out of a placenta. Not even the person whose body produced the placenta in the first place.
  • Sure, McCartney can eat the stuff McLennan makes her with all those helpful food substitutes, but more often than not, the substitutes just make it taste like crap, so she doesn't want to. And sometimes they wind up making something where the taste isn't thrown off, but McCartney didn't like it to start with. ("It's fucking dinner porridge!")
• Black Comedy: During the Christmas episode, the Kates offer some potential answers for when one's annoying aunt insists on asking them invasive questions. When 'Aunty Ruth' asks McLennan when she's going to start having children, McLennan chirpily replies, "I had a miscarriage!" and breaks character to excitedly proclaim, "That one gets them every time!"
• Bland-Name Product: "Milk-Eze" stands in for the real product "Lacteeze".
  • But averted with the Thermomix. Also some other products, like Bailey's Irish Cream.
• Blatant Lies: In "The Cook And The Kates", McLennan announces that she will be cooking the meat in a wood-fuelled oven. Then she puts it in the same electric oven they always use.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: The foods that lactose-intolerant McCartney cannot eat include "cream, cheese, cream cheese".
• Call-Back:
  • In "Mexicana Festiana", McCartney mentions that because of her lactose intolerance, she cannot drink Bailey's Irish Cream, "which is a genuine tragedy". When testing medication for lactose intolerance in "It Gets Feta", the first thing she tries is an enormous glass of Bailey's Irish Cream, which she downs in one.
• Captain Obvious: "Cheese is often used in recipes to add the flavour of cheese."
• Christmas Episode: Tick!
• Cooking Show: A parody thereof.
• Continuity Nod:
  • In "Mexicana Festiana", the Kates read out an email supposedly from one Anne Edmonds. Anne Edmonds is referenced again in "Tying The Not" when she asks the Kates to kater at her wedding. ^note They're just using her name for a gag, but Anne Edmonds is a real person, a friend of the Kates from the Melbourne comedy scene. The real Anne Edmonds plays several characters in The Katering Show's Spiritual Successor, Get Krack!n.
  • In "Thermomix", one of the cutaway gags is a hand struggling to replace an electric kettle on its base. In "End Of Days", the cutaway is done again with a different kettle, and this one goes onto its base first time.
• Control Freak: McLennan gets really irritated if McCartney's doing the cooking and there's nothing for her to do.
• Country Matters: In "Yummy Mummies", the Kates are discussing their babies. McLennan asks McCartney how her daughter sleeps, and McCartney smugly replies "Through the night". In response, McLennan replies "Oh! What a little cunt!"
• Credits Gag: Most episodes in S2 have one, or in fact two: a standalone gag, and a funny entry at the end of the "Thanks to" list.
• Diet Episode: In "The Body Issue", McLennan, McCartney, and Beans the cat supposedly attempt the Paleo Diet, the Raw Food Diet and the 5:2 Diet respectively. The Kates are brought to the brink of malnutrition and insanity by their diets, but Beans thrives on the 5:2 Diet, "and her brain cancer is all but gone"! (see Take That! below)
• Digital Piracy Is Okay: They can't say it outright because The ABC is funding the show, but in the promotional videos for S2, the Kates drop clear hints that anyone waiting for the show to arrive in their country should just use a VPN to watch the Australian stream for free.
• Food Porn: Parodied often, especially in the "Food Porn" episode (obviously).
  McLennan: Because food porn is all about style over substance, we're just using an Aldi cake mix we bought last year for $2.95 as the structural base for our Instagram cupcake.
  McCartney: To be honest, we could substitute the cake with a condom full of pins, it does not matter. It's gonna be so heavily decorated, it'll look like unicorn spoof.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: Each episode has a bizarre fridge note in the background.
  • The to-do list in "Thermomix":
    • Pick up kids from school
    • Go to Auskick
    • Put little ones to bed
    • Have kids
  • The shopping list in "Food Porn":
    • White wine
    • Sturdy rope
    • Clean boot
    • Quick lime
  • The fridge list of "Money Saving Ideas" includes ""Sublet kitchen to well-funded terrorist cell".
• Good-Times Montage: The Kates' lives turn into one when they give up sugar in "We Quit Sugar".
• Gross-Up Close-Up: The placenta in the "Yummy Mummies" episode. Apparently the Kates didn't realise quite how gross it was going to look, but left it in when they found out.
• Hair-Contrast Duo: Which enables an hilarious Body Swap gag in The Teaser of "The Body Issue".
• Hypocritical Humour: The final episode is all about cooking with scraps to minimise food wastage. Every episode up until this point has shown the Kates wasting food and in the end McLennan dumps the finished dish in the bin while throwing a tantrum.
• Informed Ability: For a supposedly skilled chef, McLennan rarely manages to make anything edible.
• Insistent Terminology: McClennan always refers to the show by its full title, resulting in sentences like 'Here, in the The Katering Show kitchen' that would make MST3K proud.
• It's All About Me: McLennan's on-screen character edges into this, exaggerating McCartney's Delicate and Sickly state and treating her as Inspirationally Disadvantaged in order to portray herself as the heroine coming to McCartney's aid.
  McLennan: This show is all about me and how I can make delicious recipes that won't make McCartney shit her pants.
• It Tastes Like Feet: In the first episode, one of the ingredients of McClennan's quesadilla is asafoetida, described as "an Indian spice that tastes like farts".
• Jump Cut: A recurring gag is for the camera angle to change, and the Kates turn to face it (a perfectly common edit in real studio shows) - but for the edit to be "off" in some way. Sometimes the angle is only slightly different, but they are seen to turn through 90 degrees or more. At least once, they actually swap places when the angle changes.
• Kindhearted Cat Lover: McCartney, who is also this in real life.
• Kubrick Stare: McCartney will slip into this at the drop of a hat. She gives a really impressive one at one point as she drifts extremely closely past the camera while McLennan is trying to host.
• Lady Drunk: McCartney fits the bitter, misanthropic part of the trope to T, and is the one to handle the Booze Revooze segments.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • In the first episode, McCartney notes that McLennan is so bloated, she looks like she's in her second trimester. She was.
    • Edit-it was McCartney who was in her second trimester, McLennan fell pregnant after McCartney delaying filming of the second season
  • In another, McCartney states "I don't really drink, anyway", which on the face of it is a Blatant Lie... but is also a reference to the fact that the booze in the show is fake (because you just can't drink that much on set without completely derailing the show).
• Like an Old Married Couple: They really are.
• Little Known Facts: "Fun facts" often pop up on screen.
  • Fun fact: The Mexican city of Chihuahua is ruled by tiny, rabid dogs.
  • Fun fact: Parsnips are the ghosts of carrots.
• Metaphorgotten: After establishing 35-year-old McLennan's anxiety that her biological clock is ticking, we get this overstretched analogy:
  McLennan: So I'm going to do the Booze Revooze today... I've chosen this 35-year-old bottle of scotch whisky, and because of its age, it has a depth to it, you know? It has an integrity to it, you know? It knows itself, you know? It's comfortable in its own skin. It's not a fancy drink, you know? You probably wouldn't have invited it to your year 10 deb, but this drink deals with its problems for the most part, yeah? And it is in charge of its mental health, actually. So let's try it. (drinks) That is a feisty, feisty drink. That drink needs to calm itself down a bit, I reckon. I reckon that drink might die alone, if it just doesn't shut the fuck up pretty soon, that is.
• Minimalist Cast: Basically just the Kates, though members of the crew are occasionally mentioned.
• Mundane Made Awesome: The TKS website's recipe for packet mac 'n' cheese is written this way.
• My Biological Clock Is Ticking: Both Kates have this in S1, but especially McLennan.
• Obvious Stunt Double: The person doing a lot of the close-up cooking shots in S2 is a man... with a different shirt and hairy arms.
• Overly Long Gag: The camera lingering a bit too long on an An Insert is a frequent gag. In "Ethical Eating", a static shot of a pressure cooker doing nothing lasts 23 seconds - long enough for the music to run out, and start up again.
• Portmanteau: The placenta lasagne, or "plasagne".
• Punny Name: The show's Punny Name is lampshaded in episode one.
• Reality Is Unrealistic: Invoked in the 'Food Porn' episode, where the Kates make it clear that many photos of food on social media sites are actually just really cheap food that's been decorated to hell and back, often to the point that the resulting product is not actually edible.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Dour, snarky McCartney is the blue to the hyperactive and temperamental McLennan's Red.
• Rule of Three: McLennan is sick three times in the "Food Porn" episode. Each time we get a Vomit Discretion Shot in the form of a Smash Cut to McCartney at the washing line, hanging out whatever McLennan had been wearing before her "accident".
• Running Gag: The Cold Opens always have something weird going on.
• She Cleans Up Nicely: In-Universe, McLennan admiringly responds to McCartney's "Logie Awards" look this way.
• Special Guest: Comedian Ronnie Chieng in "Chienging Flavours".
• Stepford Smiler: McLennan's style of presenting, as the bubbly, chatty and endlessly energetic host. Every so often, however, the mask slips (Once an Episode at least) and McLennan proves she can be just as spiteful and bitter as McCartney.
  • In one episode, McLennan mentions that cutting onions gives her an excuse to cry over things she'd normally bottle up.
  • In the Maggie Beer episode, both Kates are Stepford Smiling throughout. It gets creepy after a while.
• Stepford Snarker: McCartney has just as many personal, professional and financial issues as McLennan, but hides them with many a snide remark and a supreme distaste for anybody that isn't her cat Beans.
• Take That!: A lot of them against food trends. Though the biggest one is "The Cook And The Kates", an episode-long Take That toward Australian celebrity chef Maggie Beer.
  • The bit about curing Beans the cat's brain cancer in "The Body Issue" is a dig at (now convicted) Australian scam artist Belle Gibson, who peddled her diets with claims to have cured her brain cancer with it.
• Talks Like a Simile: A recurring joke is that they'll describe pretty much anything as tasting like something gross.
• Tastes Like Friendship: Taken up a level (if not quite to eleven) by McLennan whose whole ability to relate to other people seems dependent on them sharing her obsession with food. Or at least being willing to indulge hers.
  • Also the basis for a Trade Snark gag on the The Katering Show website: "Friendship™ is a trademark of The Katering Show Horse Dancing Spectacular and Motorboat Hire Pty Ltd."
• They Just Dont Get It: In The Stinger of "Yummy Mummies", McLennan repeatedly fails to grasp how McCartney can be intolerant to her own breast milk.
  McLennan: But you don't have any lactose!
  McCartney: Lactose is the sugar in milk. It doesn't matter if you can't absorb it, you still produce it.
  McLennan: What, so you can make lactose... in your body... but you can't eat lactose... in your body?
  McCartney: Yes. Mmmm-hmm. You good?
  McLennan: Right. Okay... yeah... Okay, right, yeah yeah... no, no, I get it, I get it.
  She thinks it over for a moment.
  McLennan: But you don't have any lactose!
• Too Much Information: A lot of the show's humour comes from the presenters' oversharing.
• Umbrella Drink: The booze revooze in "Mexicana Festiana" includes a blink-and-you'll-miss-it visual gag involving one of these.
• Unreadably Fast Text: McCartney's list of food intolerances in episode one, and some of the Credits Gags, particularly the message to their mums in "Yummy Mummies".
• Vitriolic Best Buds: It's no doubt the Kates have a volatile and unhealthy relationship, both personally and professionally, and do bring out the worst in each other. That being said, it's pretty obvious they are the only real friend the other has - in "It Gets Feta" McCartney is the only one in attendance at McLennan's cheese party, and came despite the fact she said she didn't want to.
  • And in "End of Days" after a tense argument surrounding McLennan's Control Freak issues and McCartney's apathetic attitude toward the show, the two share a small, sweet They Really Do Love Each Other moment when McLennan bandages McCartney's cut hand, apologise and make up.
• World of Snark
• Wraparound Background: The Cold Open of "It Gets Feta" has the Kates walking down the same pharmacy aisle four times.