Up on my iPlayer, and also airing on BBC3 this week, is the spoof documentary Summer Heights High, the Beeb’s latest Australian import. This show, which, in the best tradition of The Office, presents itself as a fly-on-the-wall view of a typical Australian high school, has been fairly universally panned by British TV critics.
But screw them, I loved it.
The show is written, directed by, and largely played by one man - Australian comic Chris Lilley. It focuses on the lives of three central characters at the school: Jonah, a thirteen-year-old, under-achieving bully; Mr G, a megalomaniacal and ridiculously camp drama teacher; and, my favourite, Ja’mie, an exchange student from a private school who is at Summer Heights for a semester to see how the underprivileged are educated. Her verdict so far: ‘public schools are so, like, random!’
All three of these main characters are played by Lilley, and it’s a tribute to his skills that I didn’t actually realise this until it occurred to me that Ja’mie was quite mannish-looking. But, like, The Office, the scripting is tight, the staging is complete, and the three main characters are brilliantly and outrageously believable.
My favourite moments from the first episode included Mr G (who once put on a musical entitled Tsunamarama - the story of the 2004 Tsunami set to the music of Bananarama) demonstrating inappropriate touching on a boy with Downs Syndrome. I also particularly enjoyed Ja’mie’s address to the kids of Summer Heights High, which included such inspired lines as, ‘Wife beaters and rapists are nearly all public school educated. Sorry, no offense, but it’s true.’ This diatribe was rounded off with the announcement that ‘I’m up to 1000 friends on MySpace but I could always take more!’
The only character I was slightly disappointed with was Jonah, who just looks too much like a thirty-year-old man in a bad wig to really come off convincingly as a troubled thirteen-year-old bully. But I have high hopes for Summer Heights High. Tune in next week to find out how Ja’mie does at making friends with ‘povvo kids’, whether Jonah will get kicked out of school for drawing penises on the principle’s car, and how Mr G will cope with being promoted to acting head of the drama department.
Summer Heights High airs on BBC3 at 10.30pm every Tuesday.
The idea behind Moving Wallpaper/Echo Beach isn’t at all bad. The first tells the behind-the-scenes story of a popular ’soap’ drama, while the second shows the actual drama itself, a teen-filled Home & Away style show set in Cornwall. We’ve seen something along these lines in The Larry Sanders Show and Rob Brydon’s Annually Retentive, where the off-camera material is woven into the supposed ‘real’ show and the madness of TV gets played to the fore.
