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.