Back in the mid-80s
when I was a kid, TV was a grey miserable place, filled with
bad-cockernee-accented kids wearing big coats and taking heroin,
drowning in swimming pools or dying of an aneurysm in the back of
teacher's cars. The psychedelic joy of the Magic Roundabout, Jamie
and the Magic Torch and the Clangers were long gone. Yet inexplicably
Blue fucking Peter survived to make you get up and do something less
boring instead. Well, it was either that or American cartoons filled
with rippling muscles, inexplicably sexualised cats and thinly veiled
toy advertising. Welcome to Thatcher's TV Times. Then, with almost no
warning, the sunshine from down under started to peek through and
before you knew it the playground was filled with the sound of 'G'Day
mate,' 'Bonzer,' 'you drongo,' and people being 'dobbed in.'
Australian TV had hit the UK.
First we were warmed
up by the
Young Doctors, then came Paul Hogan and Crocodile
Dundee (which was on this weekend, I still really want his boots)
then came the soap operas, millions of us rushed home from school so
as not to miss our fix of Neighbours and Home and Away, (other than
my wife, I have never loved another woman as much as I loved
Stephanie Scully off of Neighbours – right up until she cheated on
Toady with Rivers out of Heartbreak
High) insomniacs became irrationally attached to the covert
lesbianism of Prisoner
Cell Block H. Eventually
the Doctors were flying, but still pretty young. It all came to a
head in the early 90s, with Round
The Twist, when surely it couldn't get any better, the pinnacle
of inventive Aussie brilliance. Nay, the pinnacle of televisual
entertainment itself.
It could. The
greatest television program ever made nearly slid by unnoticed in the
summer holiday mornings – Pugwall. He had a dream, he was going to
make it. So did I, and Peter Unwin George Wall made it come true for
me.
Seriously,
I was unhealthily obsessed with this show, I still am
A lot of people
believe the Charlene and Scott wedding from Neighbours is the high
point of late twentieth century Aussie culture, but they weren't
lying in front of the TV on a sunny summer morning just waiting to
see if the Orange Organics got a gig, and if Pugwall could get to
snog Jenny, so they were wrong. Don't misunderstand me, the
Neighbours wedding gave us Angry Anderson and the best power-ballad
of the year - Suddenly, without which I would never have found out
about Rose Tattoo, who are fucking awesome.
Yeah,
I know, but he did this as well
There was a point
when you could have been forgiven for thinking the UK was Australia,
the charts were filled with Kylie, Jason, Craig McLaughlin, INXS,
Midnight Oil, Crowded House, The Birthday Party, Cosmic Psychos
(alright, maybe not the charts at this point) Peter fucking Andre
even. And then it all went to shit, Jet, Delta Goodrem, Savage
Garden? Anybody remember them? No, of course not. Those days are gone
now, and the only big names from down under are hiding their roots as
Canadian
super-heroes and Norse
gods.
What can have
brought about the collapse though? Neighbours and Home and Away both
relegated to Channel Five, where nobody is going to bother, Paul
Hogan reduced to an obscure reference on Family
Guy, and Prisoner but a distant memory of a badly
produced mushroom scene. What do we get from modern Australia? A
love of xenophobic immigration controls? The joy of casual racism? An
indifferent response to claims of historic genocide? Some unhelpful
stereotypes involving domestic abuse and dangerous blood alcohol
levels. Pretty much, but then we already had them. Before my
Australian friends get all up in arms about this, remember I am
British, we are not merely nonchalant about historic genocide, most
of us seem pretty fucking proud of it most of the time. Or remarkably
blinkered about how you get an empire that the sun never sets on.
I am at a loss to
explain how Aussie culture nose-dived as it did, from the giddy highs
of Dame Edna Everage and Stefan Dennis's pop career down to that
girl you don't recognise now
who used to be
in Neighbours
being Harley Quinn in Suicide Squad (I google this shit so you don't
have to). Did it begin with Kylie (Minogue, the original one, not
Jenner, whoever she is, and why is she above Minogue on google
autocomplete?) losing the plot and deciding to sell bedding rather
than be the queen of the disco? Or does it go further back to poor
old Michael Hutchence (star of the greatest motion picture ever made
– Dogs In Space) succumbing to a cheeky stranglewank in a hotel
room?
There
was a year or two in the 90s when I watched this film at least once a
week
Maybe there was a
brief moment in the late 80s and early 90s when Australia laid off
the booze just long enough to capture the zeitgeist in a flash of
exciting youth tv. Maybe this is how it is, Aussies were just the
fidget spinners of their day? Is Australia even still there? Who can
say? It might just be covfefe. But given that during my (very
minimal) research for this piece I found a
page of Australian Celebrities that described Rolf Harris as a
beloved Australian personality, I can only assume they took their
eye off the ball, and went down with Rolf.
How
the hell do you go from this to this and expect nobody to notice?
It could just be the
death of all originality, as we get spin-off after spin-off of things
we have seen before until they become as unrecognisable as the Twist
family were by series three of Round the Twist. I wish I had the
answers, but I don't. Just a hope that some day soon, my clothes will
be referred to as daggy again by someone with ludicrously sunbleached
hair wearing lovebeads, a day-glo vest, board shorts, sunnies
(sunglasses to you and me) and thongs (flip-flops). Or I could just
listen to Courtney Barnett make Australia sound as cool as it once
was.
N.B. In the
interests of taste and decency this piece has blithely ignored the
careers of both Mel Gibson and Russell Crowe, I think it's for the
best.
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