Love Island Australia

To what extent is showing a 2018 season of Love Island Australia an adequate replacement for a new series of summer Love Island in the UK?

While this is a question I could ask ITV, it’s actually the essay question I have set myself for this week’s blog entry.  No, sadly I’ve not completed an impressive foreign boxset that I’m going to tell you all about this week (though a third and final series of Dark has dropped).  So we’re turning to what is fast becoming my favourite lockdown viewing.  Let’s be honest, this pandemic has a lot to answer for.  We’re not allowed to have strangers invade our personal space on public transport.  We can’t spend all day in an office wondering what the dog is doing while we’re not home.  We can no longer speculate whether our elected (no, really) government could cope with a national crisis (they can’t).  These are all things we can live with (or without).  But when ITV pointed out that a socially-distanced version of our favourite reality dating show might not fulfil our expectations (you can’t watch a couple under a twitching duvet via night vision if they have to be two metres apart), all while having no clue whether foreign travel would be in any way possible, it felt like the final straw.  This pandemic might just be a bad thing.

However, in a stroke of genius, they decided to whack on another nation’s first series, probably reasoning it was close enough.  The good news about Australia is that we’re super familiar with it.  It doesn’t suffer from the gloss of the US’s TV output (the scripted dramas, I mean, not the dross of their political news).  Generations of Brits grew up on Ozzie soaps – every weekday dinner of mine after primary school in the early 90s was accompanied by Home & Away and Neighbours.  We swap our populations back and forth, nowhere more so than in the media industry (where I work (from home)).  Australiana is pretty easy to get used to.  In addition, the Australian version has all the familiarity of also being filmed in Majorca.  Not in the same villa, mind, but near enough.  I’m struck by the imagined statistic that 80% of this Balearic island’s GDP comes from various nations filming their versions of Love Island on it.  These two points made Love Island Australia a much more obvious choice than the US version, whose departures from key format points and inclusion of actual Americans means it loses all the charm of the original.

Alongside the classic setting, we also have the characteristically irreverent voiceover, though the Celt of choice here is an Irishman instead of a Scot.  The stray cats that visit the villa provide most of the ammo for his humour but I think we can all agree there is nothing funnier than a cat.  Just look at the reason for the internet’s invention: cat videos.  We also have a glamorous hostess entering the villa with bad news for the couples at random junctures.  Sadly, we lost the UK’s OG presenter earlier this year after our vile tabloids hounded Caroline Flack to her death yet faced no consequences, with Laura Whitmore taking over from her dear friend.  In the Australian version, former popstar Sophie Monk proves a feisty equivalent, and her antipodean vowels are so wonderful that I can’t help but suspect she may be a new character from Kath & Kim.  There are still texts with hashtags in them.  In summary, it’s similar enough then…

So, in order to answer the question (and if I learnt anything from GCSE it’s that’s you must make sure you answer the question) we need to look at the contestants.  This was perhaps my greatest stumbling block when it came to convincing myself that I had been provided with a worthy replacement.  They didn’t do much to grab me in the first episode, though the girls’ reluctance to step forth for anyone at all was amusing.  There was a major lack of diversity.  But then, with any season, it takes a few days to marinade and, before long, I began to look forward to catching up on the previous night’s shenanigans with all my new pals after a videocall-heavy day at the laptop.

Somehow, then, this can become an adequate replacement.  But there are certain rules that I must impart when it comes to being able to enjoy it as much as a brand new series of our own.  The first is that you mustn’t look ahead online to find out what the future held in store for these young Australians who are so full of hope in 2018.  To do so would deflate any of the tension that makes the show so compelling.  The second is that you need to attune to a different vibe on the behaviour.  So far, the Australian girls have proven much quicker to attack one another, never hiding their mutual dislike (split along hair colour lines) which, while a contrast to the British besties that emerge, is actually palatable as a more honest approach to the villa’s interpersonal relationships.  The boys seem to be predominantly from the socio-economic group that Australians describe as bogan, but on the whole are a slightly gruffer and less flamboyant equivalent of our own tattooed chaps.

I’ll conclude my essay with the answer to my own question.  Love Island Australia is quite an adequate replacement, offering charm and entertainment in its own way.  To illustrate, we’ll touch on my favourites of each gender.  From the boys, it’s Josh who, while one of the slenderer and under-tattoeed specimens, wins out consistently on personality simply because he speaks with the authority of someone who knows that confidence is the same as, if not better than, intelligence.  When the boys ask him for wisdom, he’s happy to fabricate his responses with the hilarious consequence that they almost always believe him.  From the girls, it’s Millie.  Shrugging off any nonsense from those of her own gender when it comes to disagreements, she’s practical and resilient, and would much rather be writhing around in the pool on an inflated flamingo than getting into arguments.  Wouldn’t we all.

Kath & Kim

I thought I was getting really good at this working from home, but I’m now in the midst of a full-on spiral having finally bought a monitor and forked out for instant delivery, only to discover it doesn’t have an HDMI port.  So, back to straining my neck to look down at my dirty old laptop screen.  I don’t want to complain though – I’m having quite a nice pandemic.  Greatest current concerns: not having office AC in my flat and the fact that baking powder can’t be found in any nearby supermarket.  Either way, if I damage my eyesight writing this, I now know it’s within the rules to drive to a castle to test my vision.  If I crash into people and cause further deaths, then I’ll know something isn’t right.  Luckily for everyone, I don’t have a car, I’m not a bigoted Tory (bad-)advisor and I don’t hold the British public in contempt (only those that clap the NHS to assuage their own guilt at voting rightwing).  The point in, in these pandemical times, we’re looking for comfort.  And I’ve found a great deal of it in old sitcoms.  My full re-watch of Friends continues, I’m this close to another run through of dinnerladies and, days after I saw it appear in the Netflix menu, I’ve just devoured the four seasons of Kath & Kim that aired between 2002 and 2007.

Just One More Episode has previously extolled the delights of Australian comedy.  But unlike Summer Heights High and Lunatics, this show doesn’t include Chris Lilley.  There’s no way of recalling how I came across this show, but, until now, I had only ever seen the first season.  Nevertheless, its effect stayed with me for subsequent years.  I don’t know how familiar you are with the working-class speech patterns of suburban housewives from Melbourne, but it doesn’t even matter.  So much of this sitcom’s ability to spark joy comes from its use of language.  Sure, there are some Little Britain-esque catchphrases, but these are mere chunks in a rich creamy spread of the silly misuse of the ever-malleable, ever-unruly English idiom.  Achieving near-native fluency in English is nigh-on impossible for most foreign learners, yet Kath’s mishandlings of her mother tongue are persistently charming.  Her forthcoming wedding is referred to as her “connubials” while both she and daughter Kim lament anything that “gets up [their] goat.”  A quick swap of a preposition and suddenly the banal becomes delightfully silly.  More than any of this, though, it is their way of responding to anything they like in the world of (bad) fashion and beyond by saying “that’s nice, that’s different, that’s unusual” that stays with me.  Of course, I would get the order and word choices wrong whenever I tried to wield this phrase facetiously when asked to comment on a colleague’s online shopping (back when we were allowed in our offices) but I’ve worked with many a beloved Australian over the years who was only too happy to correct my language.

Let’s forgive this diversion while I pause to explain who indeed Kath and Kim are.  Played by actors of roughly the same age, Kath and Kim are a mother and daughter team.  Kath (Jane Turner) is the permed older lady, embracing her empty nest (she wishes) while keeping herself trim and indulging a love for shopping at the mall in Fountain Lakes.  Kim (Gina Riley) is her spoiled adult daughter who can’t stop eating Dippity Bix, abandons her marriage to long-suffering Brett at the drop of a hat, is too lazy to hold down a job but who maintains a deep love for shopping at the mall in Fountain Lakes.  Locked in a cycle of co-dependency (and numerous eggcornings of the English language) our story starts when Kim interrupts her mother’s blissful retirement and declares she’s moving back in, jeopardising Kath’s burgeoning romance with local purveyor of fine meats (a vile phrase if ever there was one) and manbag-fan, Kel Knight.

Kath and Kim are the mother-daughter combo that taste forgot, but you root for them as their turns of phrase continue to charm.  Further comedy comes from Kim’s second-best friend, Sharon, whose uninvited arrival at Kath’s is announced every time by the unmistakable squeak of her French windows being slid open.  Sharon is at her best when suffering visible skin complaints or arguing with Kim about eating the last Dippity Bix (“Well, I didn’t know, Kim!” – the classic self-defence of a scoffer), but her penchants for indoor cricket and netball also sparkle.  That’s pretty much it for four series.  There’s a reassuring polyester cheapness throughout, not a great deal happens, but their humdrum lives bumble along and veer between the ridiculous and the plausible.

Its specific style makes it a hard show to recommend to newcomers, and I have many a time played it to pals who have felt lukewarm at best.  But I will carry on regardless in my love for it.  Its creators are talented (not least because Gina Riley actually belts out the theme tune to the opening sequence, something I never once skipped on Netflix) and deserve their cult status.  Sure, they lampoon class, but they also go for the posher snobs – every time Prue and Trude appear (also played by Turner and Riley), sneering at Kath’s jumpers or Kim’s muffin top in their snooty store, I can’t help but smile at their obscene diphthongisations and frankly more disgraceful murder of the English language.  I’m sad each time an episode ends, but while the credits roll, we are treated to wine time, a single-take scene of Kath and Kim quaffing cardonnay [sic] in their garden while wittering on with their usual gubbins.  In lockdown, I can’t tell you what I wouldn’t give for a garden and a family member to drink bad wine with while talking nonsense.

So, join the cult.  Kylie Minogue, Shane Warne and Matt Lucas can’t be wrong.  If you find the idea of a lazy mother telling her newborn baby (Epponnee-Rae) to stop whingeing because it’s mummy’s turn to whinge funny, then you’ll be in the right place.  There’s always a joker in the pack, and that joker is Kath.  And Kim.

Lunatics

If you’re a person who makes telly, and you’re going to make some more telly, the chances are that the new bit of telly you make will be on Netflix.  Everyone’s heading over there it seems.  Even Sir David Attenborough (and the tumbling walruses) of Our Planet.  What if my new obsession and national treasure, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, gets on the Flix with a follow-up to Fleabag?  Well, that would be fine, actually, as I have acceptable access to Netflix so consuming anything she ever does again won’t be a problem.  Though I have no idea what’s she doing next, but fingers crossed it involves being my best friend.  Anyway, this week, we are talking about Chris Lilley.  You’ll remember a popular blogpost of mine about Summer Heights High.  A lot of you read that one.  Sometimes barely anyone cares to hear my witterings (Disenchantment, 90210), sometimes everyone piles in (Shipwrecked, Love Island) and sometimes it’s somewhere in between, but then suddenly there are weird bursts of reading months or years later which I cannot account for (Bo’ Selecta!, F Is For Family).  What I’m getting around to saying is that my post about him seemed to gratify my constant need for attention, so let’s look at his new Netflix Original series as well (maybe it will get lots of life-affirming reads).

Weak as we know I am, the minute I spotted Lunatics I abandoned all prior commitments and dived into a world I hoped would be built from sick humour and spot-on human observations.  Let’s meet each lunatic in turn, noting that there is almost nothing linking them together (whereas the characters of Summer Heights High all attended or worked at the same hilarious school).  We are going in ascending order, from my least favourite to my most chucklesome.

Gavin McGregor

This lad is a monstrosity at the age of 12, but it’s clear his awful personality and paunch are both the results of spoiling by his parents.  Raised by YouTube and Instagram, he can speak only in social media phraseology, with most things being dope as f*ck.  Gavin has delusions of his current and future grandeur, trying to initiate sexual conquests with most females as a result of behaviour he is aping.  As a creation, he’s a damning indictment, and therefore unpleasant to watch.  His story arc is even less appealing, transported to England from Australia, where he is groomed by relatives to become the next Earl of Gayford (not a real place, not even a funny place) while corrupting his cousins.  I was distracted by trying to work out whether this was filmed on location in actual England, or just a wet, green bit of Australia.  I began to suspect accent inconsistency whilst working out if the grass looked Antipodean or not.

Keith Dick

Donning a goatee and horrible old-man pony, Lilley becomes Keith, a long-serving department store worker who opens his own fashion emporium.  While the business initially falters, Keith’s self-obsession prevents reality from dawning, as does his sexual preclusion for objects.  A vacuum cleaner and a cash register both come in for his unique love making, but you’ve got to admire his openness about his preferences.

Quentin Cook

I’m sensing a theme where each character is based on two jokes.  The first about Quentin is that he, and all the men in his family, have massive arses.  This is puerile, but that’s fine by me, especially when his bottom knocks things over.  He is a tacky real estate agent who, like Keith and Dick, is deluded about his talents in other areas, and I mean any other areas: art, music, DJing.  His parents’ blind support and favouritism add a subtler dimension, while you can enjoy the two actors playing his brothers adlibbing.  His rivalry with Harrison, an employee who is better than Quentin at everything, also sizzles well.

Jana Melhoopen-Jonks

Cue the jokes: she is Zimbabwean, she is a lesbian whose love for her assistant is unrequited, she is a pet psychic.  Only one of these, though, is a ridiculous thing to be.  Potentially the most fun to play, she lets Lilley laugh at the pretentions of those who provide pointless services to the stupidly wealthy, becoming stupidly wealthy in the process.  She also harbours all the character traits of humans who are obsessed with dogs, something I’ll never understand (note to other Tube users: get your hound’s wet nose off my fresh trainers).

Joyce Jeffries

The mock-ups of Chris Lilley as an adult film actress on the covers of Joyce’s VHSs are almost funny enough in their own right.  Joyce, in later life, has become a hoarder.  Her anguish at the loss of her father (and potentially at the hands of the porn industry) causes her struggle to deal with reality, using a whiteboard to illustrate other friends in her home that only she can see.  She is overall the most richly imagined, and we seem only to scratch the surface, but, deeper down, she is Chris Lilley rolling around and showing off in women’s clothes while we watch.  We can all enjoy that.

Becky Douglas

There are two things that made me love this character.  She becomes a YouTuber, specialising in craft: pointless, ghastly craftwork voiced over with excessive enthusiasm.  Having watched hours of CookieSwirlC unboxing LOL Dolls with my niece, I believe there is a special place in aural hell for these people, and Lilley captures their inanity perfectly.  Secondly, she pursues boys with clearly no interest in her.  Lilley plays the fawning, hair-twirling, hint-ignoring determination with full dexterity.  And this is no mean feat when Becky’s biggest quirk is her big legs, causing her to be seven foot three and get her hair stuck in ceiling fans.

It’s a motley crew, then.  Do we root for them, or are we laughing at their misfortune?  It’s called Lunatics, though: a pejorative term of the past denoting those with mental health issues.  For some of the episodes, the humour veers dangerously close to mocking others’ emotional and physical differences.  As Joyce’s eviction looms, her panic’s urgency piques and elicits genuine sympathy, yet each moment is still played for laughs.

Criticism of Lunatics has compared it to a cheap freakshow that redeems itself only inasmuch as a token effort requires, with a final episode of relatively happy endings.  I, for one, am torn.  An awakening is occurring in how we treat those whose brains work differently to ours.  While my department is predominantly jazz-handsing attention seekers, we are actively recruiting for brain diversity.  In wider society, we are welcoming open conversations about mental health, rather than pointing, laughing and locking away.  In this context, then, these character creations feel at times insensitive.  I’m all for bad taste and believe humour can genuinely be found in anything, but my view would be that Lilley is capable of more than simple cruelty.  We just shouldn’t have to look so hard for it.

Make your own mind up.  I’m taking it in the vein of what he is known for: dressing up in silly costumes, letting the cameras roll and showing off.  To borrow the improper term, each lunatic is simply looking to be accepted for who they are.  And this makes us all lunatics.

Summer Heights High

After all these stupid posts, I’ve just realised something.  I’ve only ever written about shows produced in the UK or the US.  It’s as if nowhere else in the world can make any good boxsets.  But, there’s a whole international body of content out there.  Don’t think I won’t sit through something just because it’s got subtitles.  I bloody will.  And let’s not forget the other countries that speak English.  To be fair, everywhere does, if you shout loud enough.  So which proud nation will join the two Uniteds?  Step forward, Australia.  It couldn’t be further away, but its culture and Great Britain’s are like two old friends who hardly ever see each other, but, whenever they do, they pick up right where they left off.  If you don’t have any Australians in your life, get some now.  I can highly recommend them.  In the time it takes me to agonise at the weekend over the fat content of hummus in Sainsbury’s, your average Australian has visited three different European cities and attended an orphans’ event somewhere in London.  They are having too much fun to need to go to bed at all.  They willingly leave behind the glorious weather and space of their homeland, just so disgruntled Brits can shove them on the Tube before they head out into the drizzle, and yet they still appear to have the best time.  So, there they are, coming over here and being awesome.  And they’ve only gone and brought a banging comedy with them.

Summer Heights High’s brilliance comes from its credibility.  It’s a mockumentary, like The Office, so we can’t help but feel it’s a real place of education.  The school is in another country, so our lack of knowledge about schools there allows us to stifle our scepticism even more.  Without a closer frame of reference, you’ll swallow anything; admit it.  For all you know, every Australian school really is like this.  But, most importantly, Summer Heights High’s believability comes from the performances.  Sure, most of the supporting cast seem like innocent passers-by who’ve had scripts thrust into their hands and still don’t know how they ended up in front of a camera.  But that doesn’t matter.  It just pulls the focus even more sharply onto the show’s creator, writer and star.

It’s not for me to be sycophantic (though I have gone around declaring national treasures willy nilly – see the posts on Chewing Gum and Nighty Night) but let’s give Chris Lilley a big hand.  This is a fully-grown man whose portrayal of a year 11 girl is the most realistic portrayal of a year 11 girl anyone anywhere has ever seen, done or imagined.  I didn’t want to resort to exaggeration, but I’ve been driven to it simply by the way Chris Lilley looks in a school dress.  On that note, let’s examine the three main characters of Summer Heights High, and bask in these comic creations.

Ja’mie King

Note the pronunciation, with the emphasis on the second syllable.  Take one Chris Lilley, add a wig, some pop socks and one of those summer dresses that schoolgirls wear in hot weather, and you’ve got yourself every teenage girl tantrum ever.  Ja’mie offers a unique perspective on the school, as she is on an exchange from her beloved private academy, experiencing the harsh realities of a public education for the first time.  Self-assured to a fault, she rates herself as the smartest non-Asian in year 11 (but she finds disabled people so cool) and doesn’t let anything stand in her way when it comes to being the most popular girl in her new year group (because she doesn’t want to look slut, she wants to look semi-slut, and that’s fair enough).  You’ll be shocked by her manipulative approach to relationships, and she actually appears in a previous Chris Lilley show, We Can Be Heroes: Finding The Australian Of The Year, exemplifying this perfectly by trying to get the African school boys she sponsors for charity to send her dick pics.

Jonah Takalua

I’ve always struggled with this character the most.  He’s basically your naughty lad at school, learning to use inappropriate humour to offend teachers while not being clever enough to carry it off.  His main feature, however, is being Tongan, which isn’t a place lots of Brits come from (so Tongans, please come to London in large numbers so you can join in with everyone being welcome here, despite the fact our mums and dads voted for Brexit) so I’ve had to infer that this seems to signify his status as part of a social underclass.  He can be charming and sensitive, so there is depth to this character, but I secretly always willed his bits to be over, and these days, the sensitivities about dressing up as another racial group mean that he is a bit dated as a concept.

Mr G

But two out of three ain’t bad.  Along with Ja’mie, Mr G is a hoot, everyone.  With a similar level of self-interest, Mr G is the camp drama teacher who believes no subject holds more value than Performing Arts, simply because that’s what he teaches.  He’s happiest at the centre of attention, and the scene where he explains that he often just spends whole lessons performing to the kids has me nearly wetting myself every time I watch it.  He defines the quotable comic creation, with his sexual meowing in the sequence just mentioned shattering the peace and reverence of a many a temple visit during a recent trip to Japan.  Mr G is perfectly at ease with exploiting tragedy for personal gain, turning a student’s death from a drug overdose into a school musical (one of the wow shows, as opposed to the traditionals that have to be endured every second year).

Each of the eight episodes in the single series works back and forth and back again among these three terrible people, but you’ll really only be able to love them.  Originally shown on BBC Three in the UK, you’ll be able to join the Summer Heights High-quoting community once you have tracked the programme down and consumed it in full.  And you should.  If you’re unlucky enough to lack Australians in your daily life, this will go some way to helping you get your RDA of vitamin Oz.  Also, carry on reading this blog each week, as I’ve now covered off three different countries’ telly programmes, demonstrating the wokeness of Just One More Episode.