This was a big swing for the ABC. Can Tony Armstrong turn it into a series?

In the promo for Wednesday night’s premiere of ABC news satire Always Was Tonight, host Tony Armstrong promised comedy that was “black, cracked and risking the sack”. He delivered.

The 30-minute special, timed around January 26, ran hard at targets such as Sky News (“announcing a rival to triple J called triple K”), mining magnate Gina Rinehart (“owner of Australia’s biggest hole”) and the ABC itself.

“It’s an honour to be the first black face fronting an ABC comedy show since Chris Lilley,” Armstrong said, opening the show. In character as the ambassador for White Australia, Bjorn Stewart (Black Comedy) later joked about examples of a “white corroboree” including “Adelaide Writers Festival” and an “ABC staff meeting”.

The show ended with a striking version of I Still Call Australia Home sung by children in prison, some of whom are wearing spit hoods, in protest at Australia’s low age of criminal responsibility and the reintroduction of spit hoods in NT youth detention.

It’s the Rinehart bit that made Armstrong – a strong and affable host, at his best embracing the chaos of a live record – crack on air. “I was like, ‘I can’t believe we’re saying this on the telly,’ ” he says on the morning after the show’s premiere. “I’m just really proud of the work everyone did on this show. We didn’t want to be sitting here today going, ‘We wish we went harder.’ ”

This one-off-special, the brainchild of executive producer Rowdie Walden, has been six or seven months in the making. “He took the idea to the ABC and fought really hard for it,” Armstrong says. “When we got more and more people on board [The Bachelorette’s Brooke Blurton also features as newsreader], it became a fait accompli. We had such good talent that we talked them into letting us have a show”.

“We made this for us, but we invited everyone … We knew that we just wanted to make something that we would want to watch.”

The show is a notable commission for the ABC, with the national broadcaster facing considerable critique in the past few years for programming that feels familiar and risk-averse – often skewing to older, white audiences.

While it still has comparable series such as The Weekly with Charlie Pickering (which shares some of its creative team with this show), the ABC has been criticised for not fostering new hosting talent or backing noisy projects that risk drawing the ire of conservative commentators (notably, Andrew Bolt, who wrote a column condemning Always Was Tonight before the show even went to air).

The ghost of Tom Ballard’s Tonightly, axed in 2018, has loomed large for local comedians with many calling for more “radical, risk-taking” work in the intervening years.

But Armstrong is hopeful that this new special could be expanded into a full series next year – which he would love to host.

“It’s that first decision to champion a show like this, which is always the hardest one … I was really rapt that we were given the [freedom] to not pull our punches.”

That’s particularly important, he says, in an environment where younger audiences are getting comedy and politics content on social media.

“Red-hot takes always get bigger traction, and it’s harder to do that when you’ve got ABC guidelines, TV standards and all of that to consider.

“You have to go hard and make a statement, or else it’s just not interesting … I think the appetite grows when TV executives see that it can work.”

That’s certainly the next challenge, with the show clocking a total TV audience of 261,000 – considerably less than its lead-in, The Weekly, on 423,000. But with the gags (including hundreds of jokes on a scrolling news ticker) built for rewatch on ABC iview and the discourse of January 26 approaching, its fate isn’t sealed yet.

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