Sometimes, a TV show can be a little difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t seen it. This can be even harder when the TV show in question isn’t even a TV show. For a certain demographic, telling them that the latest Australian comedy hit is exclusive to TikTok will provoke anything from blank stares to gasps of horror. For another demo, of course, it would provoke a reaction something like, “Well, yeah, what else would it be on?” Nevertheless, it’s liable to cause confusion. And that’s before you even get into the business of trying to explain what the show in question actually is. Which, when you come to Long Head, ain’t the easiest thing to do. But OK, let’s try.
Wherever Long Head goes, chaos follows.
Long Head is a series about a guy called Long Head. Long Head has a long head. Like, an excessively long head. A disturbingly long head. But there is much more to Long Head than his torpedo-shaped melon: he is a genuinely unsettling person whose stupidity is matched only by his inability to integrate into human society. Wherever Long Head goes in space and time, trouble and unease follow, in bite-sized animated chunks of social media content. Or to put it another way, “Long Head is a short sketch series that follows the titular character, Long Head, who is a dark buffoon that travels the land and leaves chaos in his wake.”
These are the words of Long Head creator, comedian and artist Millie Holten, so you can probably take that as reasonably accurate. The series was born from Holten’s popular Instagram comics, and her drive to find innovative ways to build an audience.
“After I started doing the whole festival circuit and doing a lot of improv and sketch shows, I kind of realised that if I was ever going to get work, I would have to put some work out on my Instagram very quickly,” she says, “just so, like, people could see it beyond the 20 people that would come to a show of mine. So I started going really hard on comics on Instagram, and it also meant I wouldn’t have to send them a 30-page script – they could just really get my sense of humour and see that I could tell a joke.”
From there, Long Head emerged: a strange and beguiling presence who “would star in everything almost accidentally”, Holten says. The character caught the eye of Australian entertainment industry dynamo Dan Ilic, whose many writing, producing and performing exploits include stints on Hungry Beast, Tonightly, At Home Alone Together and the hit podcast A Rational Fear. Ilic saw Holten’s work as ideal as the spearhead for his new production company, Not A Real Media Company.
“Dan got in touch, and cold emailed and said, what are your screen plans for Long Head?” says Holten. From here, the Byzantine process of making an Australian comedy clicked into gear.
Millie Holten (left), the creator of Long Head, with co-director Annabelle Ots.
“I had some money left over from a corporate job and it was easy for me to kind of put together the team to make the spec,” says Ilic. “But to actually pay people properly to do (a series), you need a lot more money. We got the money from Screen Australia and we just gave ourselves a very relaxed timeline to kind of produce it all, because our animators work on a bunch of other shows, so they work with real animations with real budgets. They’re kind of doing this in their spare time.”
The fact that Long Head was a bold venture into the new media zeitgeist was helpful in getting that funding. “It took a little while to lock that in,” Holten recalls. “For a little while it was going to be YouTube, or my Instagram or something. Then we actually talked to Screen Australia and they said TikTok is fantastic because it’ll sort of do the work for you, algorithm-wise.”
