by Nick Place
SITCOMS
Some of our most memorable TV characters and the actors who gave life to them have come from locally produced sitcoms. But for every hit, there’s a litany of misses. Take a stroll through the Australian TV graveyard and you’ll find it filled with that most awkward of inventions – a situation comedy without the comedy.
Playing for laughs
Australian television audiences have long had a love-hate relationship with sitcoms. We love US imports like Roseanne, Cheers and Seinfeld, and the dry, farcical humour of UK offerings like Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em, Fawlty Towers, Mr Bean and Yes Minister. In contrast, laughter in response to homegrown efforts has been much more stifled.
While sketch comedy, from The Mavis Bramston Show to the likes of The D Generation and The Comedy Company, has consistently cracked us up, the Aussie sitcom hasn’t scored as well on the laugh-o-meter. It’s not as though we haven’t tried – over 60 sitcoms have been produced in Australia since the 1960s, but only a select few regularly had us in stitches.
Barley Charlie (1964) is often credited with being Australia’s first TV sitcom, but that honour actually belongs to the Crawfords-produced Take That (1957-59) a schoolroom comedy featuring what would in later years become the schoolroom standard of ratbags students and harrassed teachers.
The first sitcom to warrant anything beyond a titter was My Name’s McGooley, What’s Yours? (1967–70). Considered a comedy classic of its day, the Logie-winning series centred on married couple Rita and Wally and their housemate, Rita’s crusty old father, Dominic McGooley. It featured one of Australian TV’s first genuine comedy stars, Gordon Chater.
‘Wally is a reflection of hundreds of thousands of Australian husbands,’ John Meillon, the actor who played Wally, told TV Week. ‘But no Australian husband – to my knowledge – has ever admitted that he himself is Wally. Wally is never you or me. He is always the bloke who lives next door, or some bloke you know down at the RSL.’
The spin-off series Rita and Wally didn’t capture the same ‘Australian-ness’, unlike one of the genre’s biggest hits, Kingswood Country (1979–84). The first in a run of Gary Reilly sitcoms, Kingswood Country lampooned the ocker in us all. It also uncovered the collective bigot lurking within, as audiences laughed not only at, but with, grumpy patriarch Ted Bullpitt. His famous lines, ‘Pickle me grandmother’, ‘Mind the bloody Kingswood’ and ‘Leave the money on the fridge’ became a part of the vernacular. Sure, today we would wince at the racist and sexist jokes, but these were different times.
If Australian sitcoms had a zenith, the 1970s was it, with over 20 shows produced during the decade, including the bawdy sex-farce, Alvin Purple (1973). Based on the popular film of the same name, the series created mild controversy with its titillating Benny Hill-like narrative, yet lasted only 13 episodes. Other notables of the decade included The Last of the Australians (1974–75), which highlighted yet another bigot-like character in Ted Cook, and Bobby Dazzler (1976), which focused on would-be successful singer Bobby Farrell, played by real-life pop star Johnny Farnham.
The mid-1980s brought us Mother and Son (1984–94) and tapped into a similar ‘living with the family’ vein as McGooley, this time with middle-aged Arthur (Garry McDonald) returning to live an odd-couple existence with his senile mother (Ruth Cracknell). It is still widely regarded as being among the finest comic television this country has produced.
But if Mother and Son is regarded by many as the best, the most popular Australian sitcom to date is the Gary Reilly-produced Hey Dad! (1984–94). This longest running and highest rating local sitcom ventured into relatively new territory, eschewing the Aussie battler stereotype to explore the modern phenomenon of single-parent families. Other Reilly sitcoms with a dysfunctional family at their heart proved popular too, most notably All Together Now (1991–93), starring Rebecca Gibney and Jon English, and My Two Wives (1992), starring Kingswood Country’s Peter Fisher.
Not all sitcoms have been based around the home. Set in a Greek café, Acropolis Now (1989–92) placed the ‘wog’ theme centre stage. It played on Australian-Greek stereotypes and helped launch the careers of Mary ‘Effie’ Coustas and Nick ‘Wog Boy’ Giannapoulos.
More recently, the struggling reputation of Aussie sitcoms has been salvaged by the international success of ABC’s Kath and Kim (2000–), featuring 40-something empty nester Kath (Jane Turner) and her spoilt 20-something daughter Kim (Gina Riley) living in
Melbourne’s outer suburb, Fountain Gate. Unlike many of its predecessors, Kath and Kim underpins its humour with something very real: the fragmented, middle-class suburban family clinging to life’s mediocrities with a passion. Appearing on our screens while we celebrate 50 years of Australian TV, it remains to be seen whether these two hugely popular suburbanite wowsers can spur Aussie sitcoms into anything like a golden age. And if not, well, that’s okay. A sustained period of hilarity will do just fine.
Nineties nightmare – sitcom flops
While the likes of Friends, Seinfeld and Frasier were knockin’ audiences dead with laughter in the nineties, Aussie sitcoms of the era turned belly up one after another. Here are a few gems from the local sitcom graveyard:
> Bligh (1992) – Doomed historical sitcom about Captain Bligh who, after surviving the Mutiny on the Bounty, becomes Governor of Sydney. Viewers performed their own mutiny and the show sank without a trace.
> Bingles (1992) – Exploits of staff working in a crash repair garage. Crashed, burned and sent off to the sitcom wreckers’ yard, never to be recycled.
> Halfway Across the Galaxy and Turn Left (1994) – A weird sci-fi sitcom about an alien family from the planet Zyrgon forced to flee to Earth, their attempt to assimilate hampered by strange behaviour. Lost in sitcom space.
> Wedlocked (1994) – A successful but single marriage expert has to convince the model on the covers of his self-help books to pretend to be married to him when a TV company wants him (and his ‘wife’) to star in a new series. Audiences opted for a divorce.
> Bullpitt (1997) – Kingswood Country’s Ted Bullpitt and his belligerent rants return, only to find a politically correct era audience has moved on. Viewers were unappreciative of his … err, Bullpitt humour.
> Dogs Head Bay (1999) – With David Williamson writing and Gary Sweet in the lead this should have been brilliant. It wasn’t.
1982
Two new dramas, A Country Practice and Sons and Daughters, star for Seven, while big mini-series continue to sweep across our screens. Meanwhile, rival Beauty and the Beasts slug it out, The Love Boat comes down under and morning television is no longer child’s play.
Seven’s dramatic wave of success
April: Seven is riding high on the back of its two new soap operas, Sons and Daughters and A Country Practice, with its double-pronged drama attack challenging programs thought to be unbeatable in the ratings.
After only a few months on air, Sons and Daughters is a ratings juggernaut and is challenging Sale of the Century for most popular program.
Meanwhile, the more gentle bush medical series, A Country Practice, has been out-rating 60 Minutes in Brisbane and beating last year’s second-best rating show, Ford Superquiz, in Sydney. The show has now been signed for an indefinite period by Seven, and it would seem the good folk of Wandin Valley have a long and bright future ahead of them.
Seven’s shows could not be more different from one another. Sons and Daughters trades on classic soap-opera fare, including feuding families and a classic super-bitch character, while A Country Practice deals with social and medical issues with an integrity that has seen several government agencies ask producers for tapes to show in schools and community education programs.
A Country Practice has already been sold to the UK, where it will premiere in November. The US, Italy and Germany have also shown interest.
Sons and Daughters is the story of two families, the Hamiltons and the Palmers, who are intertwined in all sorts of ways. The character that viewers have co
me to love to hate is ‘Pat the Rat’, and even Rowena Wallace, who plays her, admits she is sometimes surprised by how far Pat will go.
‘Of all the bitchy women I’ve played, Patricia is the bitchiest. She is the most continually divisive character I’ve ever played. With Patricia, you never know what the writers are going to come up with next. She is limitless.’
Wallace joked that she might have to leave the country if her character got much more unpleasant. ‘I get sick in the stomach sometimes when I think about the things I have to do as Patricia.’
Everybody’s taking the Kingswood
March: Kingswood Country, the sitcom featuring Ted Bullpitt, a character created in The Naked Vicar Show, is cemented in the top 10 programs in most states.
The show has had a slow build, not featuring heavily in the popularity meters until now because it is screened in different states, sometimes months apart. But writers Gary Reilly and Tony Sattler, who enjoyed success with The Naked Vicar Show, are delighted with how the figures are building for their outrageous comedy, featuring racism, sexism, penny-pinching and other disagreeable attributes.
Certainly Kingswood Country gets away with some red-hot politically incorrect humour. The writers say they ‘get away with murder’ because people are basically bigoted and racist.
Morning TV: the new battleground
June: When it hit our screens last year, Good Morning Australia, hosted by Gordon Elliott and Sue Kellaway, changed morning TV forever. Gone were the cartoons and kids shows, and in their place we found a more adult-friendly blend of news and current affairs.
Now Channel Nine has launched its own morning show, called National News Today, with Steve Liebmann, and in the co-host’s chair, guess who? Sue Kellaway.
Well, at least she will be once the court action between the two stations has been settled. Yep, Kellaway has left Ten to be replaced by blonde, vivacious Kerri-Anne Kennerley, better known for her work on The Restless Years.
So, is there room for two morning shows on Aussie TV? Liebmann certainly seems to think so. ‘I’m inclined to think we’re after different audiences. We’re after the person who is interested in what has happened overnight, and why it’s happened. We’re not into astrology and callisthenics.’
Aussie Love Boat series set to sail
February: Plenty of local faces will be on screen when the first of the Australian Love Boat specials screens on Nine this month. Delvene Delaney, Queenie Ashton, Patrick Ward and Brendon Lunney are among the Australian actors to work on the series.
Strangely, however, the most high-profile Australian character on Love Boat will be played by an Englishman. Upstairs, Downstairs’ Anthony Andrews plays the Australian doctor who proposes to regular Love Boat character Julie McCoy, played by Lauren Tewes.
The episode was shot in Sydney last year – mostly on a P&O cruise liner docked in the Harbour. It also features international guests stars such as Patrick Duffy from Dallas as a New Zealand farmer, ex-Mamas and Papas singer Michelle Phillips and Harry Morgan from MASH.
ON DEBUT
> The Simon Gallagher Show – variety show
> Jonah – period mini-series starring Liddy Clark, Stephen Bisley, Doreen Warburton and Jonathan Sweet about a hunchback orphan who was the leader of a larrikin gang or ‘push’ in Australia during the late 1800s and early 1900s
> National News Today – early-morning news program with Steve Liebmann and Sue Kellaway
> Sara Dane – the brutality and corruption of Australia’s convict days form the backdrop for the new miniseries on Ten
> 1915 – ABC war drama starring Lorraine Bayly, Bill Hunter, Ilona Rodgers, Sigrid Thornton, Andrew McFarlane and Gerard Kennedy
> The Reporters – Ten’s answer to 60 Minutes
> Taurus Rising – drama series telling the story of lust, love and hatred between two Australian families as seen through the eyes of a down-to-earth young girl
> Faces – 0/28 series looking at some of the individuals that make up a multicultural Australia
> The Daryl Somers Show – variety
> The Blainey View – new ABC series examining the claim that Australia is the lucky country, created by historian Professor Geoffrey Blainey and narrated by Graham Kennedy
> Come Midnight Monday – children’s series
> Kicking Around – children’s series about a group of kids who form a soccer team
> Women of the Sun – historical miniseries telling Australia’s Aboriginal history through the eyes of Aboriginal women
> Missing Persons (Special Investigations Bureau) – detective series
> Cornflakes for Tea – children’s mini-series
A beastly year
October: Sydney radio announcer Clive Robertson is the latest man to volunteer to be dubbed ‘The Beast’, taking over from John Laws as host of Beauty and the Beast on Ten.
With Laws off to anchor Ten’s new flagship journalism show, The Reporters, Robertson has taken the hot seat – but even he’s not convinced he can pull off being beastly.
‘I think it’s a bit cute to have a bloke who, on principle, is against women,’ Robbo, as he’s known, told TV Week. ‘I think women on the panel come up with some good and helpful answers. In fact, a couple of times they’ve brought up something which I hadn’t thought of. It’s not a competition and if Ten say that I’ve got to be beastly, I can’t do it. They’ve got the wrong person.’
Robertson is the third beast to grace Australian small screens this year. Laws, on Ten, and Derryn Hinch, on Seven, have also worn the title as the two networks commissioned rival versions of the classic panel show.
It continues Beast’s long association with Australian TV. The show has been around on different networks since 1964 and has featured hosts including Stuart Wagstaff, Noel Ferrier, Rex Mossop, Don Lane, John Laws (twice) and Alwyn Kurts, and the concept still seems to have audience pulling power.
One of the attractions of the show is that it provides a vehicle for power women such as Helen Coonan, a dynamic blonde lawyer who drives a white Porsche and appeared on the Laws version of the show this year.
‘A lot of people thought I was really losing my credibility and was trivialising the sort of work I do, saying it was bad for my “image”,’ she told TV Week. ‘But I don’t really have an image. I’m not a star and I’m not interested in that.’
In fact, with her intelligence and desire to help people, it wouldn’t surprise us if Coonan ended up in politics.
Photo shoots don’t always go according to plan, as Sale of the Century model Simonette Gardner found during a session at the zoo recently, when a possum decided to explore some areas that were meant to remain off-limits.
Jana joins 60 Minutes
ATV-10 newsreader Jana Wendt has joined the 60 Minutes team as its first female reporter. The move is expected to make the show even more popular – a scary thought given that it collected two Logies this year, one for Most Popular Public Affairs Show and another for Outstanding Public Affairs Report.
It’s certainly not good news for Channel 10, which has not only lost Wendt but has also been forced to take steps to arrest the disappointing slide in ratings of its flagship current affairs show, The Reporters.
Even before hitting screens earlier this year, the producers were defending its similarity to 60 Minutes, and playing up its differences. They claimed that although the programs were ‘vaguely similar’, no other country in the world was trying anything like The Reporters.
Unfortunately audiences haven’t yet embraced the concept and John Laws is now being brought in to replace Steve Cosser. With a huge crew, and vast amounts of money and man-hours already invested in the show’s success, Laws is in no doubt about the challenge ahead.
‘People are going to expect me to pull the show out of the quagmire and that’s one of the most appealing things about it,’ Laws said.
Young Talent Time finds another star
October: Johnny Young is celebrating yet anothe
r ‘discovery’ with 10-year-old Danielle Minogue joining the Young Talent Time troupe.
Danielle comes from the Johnny Young Talent School, and is a graduate of the Tiny Tots crew. She is not totally new to TV, having already logged guest roles on Skyways and The Sullivans.
Danielle said she was very nervous about her first YTT concert performance, in front of 65,000 fans in Wollongong, but she needn’t have worried. She wowed the crowd and appears set for big things.
Sexy Rolf shocks Australia
September: Rolf Harris has stunned Australian fans by revealing he wants to star in a sex comedy. The man with the signature glasses, beard and wobble board said the film he was considering was in the vein of Alvin Purple.
‘It’s based on a book about a very sad little man who has no success with women. His wife leaves him and a group of schoolgirls take him under their wings,’ Rolf told TV Week. ‘I’d like to do the film because it would be nice to reveal sex in a normal, real way instead of glamorising it the way James Bond films do.’
MEMORIES
> John Pilger creates a furore when one of his documentaries presents a critical view of Australians.
> Cop Shop couple Paula Duncan and John Orcsik (below) get married in real life.
> ABC’s Patrol Boat begins its second series.
> Dynasty features one of TV’s most spectacular female fight scenes: between Alexis Carrington (Joan Collins) and Krystle (Linda Evans).
> Production on The Sullivans comes to an end after six years on TV.
> The new romance between rugged Aussie hero Bryan Brown and British rose Rachel Ward is the talk of Hollywood.
> After criticising the current affairs show The Reporters in TV Week, John Laws is approached to become the show’s new host.
> Seven makes history when it broadcasts commentary from driver Peter Williamson, racing in the 47th Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne. It is seen as the first step towards putting a lightweight TV camera into an open-wheeler racing car in Australia in the next couple of years.
