Television industry'Anyone for dippity-bix?'
Classic sitcom is finally returning to the BBC - and it's all thanks to a couple of suburban Australians. Rupert Smith reportsIf you've been anywhere near an Australian, or a gay man, in the past 12 months, you've probably heard about Kath and Kim. It's a sitcom in the tradition of Steptoe and Son and Absolutely Fabulous: a tiny cast of characters, based around a central family relationship, and lethal with satirical edge. It's also the biggest hit on Australian TV of the decade: it's just completed its third series back home, and the show's catchphrases (particularly "Look at me" in a Melbourne drawl) are ubiquitous. Kylie Minogue appeared in the final episode, and there's now talk of the inevitable feature-film spin-off.
The show is very reminiscent of the stonking great sitcom hits at which British TV is supposed to excel, but that have been in such short supply in recent years. Perhaps that's why, after low-profile runs on ftn and Living TV, the BBC has booked Kath and Kim for next month. Such is the confidence of the corporation's comedy department that it is putting the show straight on to BBC2, without any kind of digital trial period. And there's little reason to believe that Kath and Kim won't conquer British audiences as it has Australian.
At a time when TV comedy is diverging into either family-friendly blandness or sketch shows that can only be understood by the under-25s, Kath and Kim has gone back to basics. It's about a suburban Melbourne mother (Kath) and daughter (Kim), both lovable and ghastly in equal measure. There's a feckless boyfriend, a slob husband and a fat comedy neighbour, and that's about it. Most of the time is spent in the kitchen, fretting over table arrangements and snacking on "dippity-bix" and other Australian cuisine. Occasionally they go to the local shopping centre, Fountaingate, to stock up on nasty leisurewear. There's the odd outing to a club or bar, usually ending in drug-induced disaster. At the end of each episode, mother and daughter discuss what they've learned over a glass of wine on the patio. And that's it. Out of these simple ingredients, though, writers/stars Gina Riley and Jane Turner have created a show that yokes the traditional form of My Family to the satirical content of Little Britain and come up with something that's funnier - and more enduring - than both.
Riley and Turner were already stars in Australia when they created Kath and Kim, which sprang, like The Simpsons and Absolutely Fabulous before it, from a small sketch in a larger show. "We'd been working on a sketch show called Big Girl's Blouse," says Gina Riley, who plays mean, sulky daughter Kim, "and we came up with the characters of Kath and Kim for a series of sketches about hen nights. We knew they were easy to write for, and we thought they were worthy of another airing, so we approached the ABC." The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is the country's public-service broadcaster and usually assures viewers a certain level of quality. "We went to the ABC because even though they're famous for not paying very well, they do have a reputation of sticking with programmes and finding audiences, rather than just being obsessed by ratings and adverts. Character comedy isn't something we've done very well in Australia in the past, so we thought it might take a while to catch on. In fact, it was a hit from the very start."
Riley and Turner admit to specifically Australian influences like Sylvania Waters, Paul Watson's toe-curling fly-on-the-wall series about housewife anti-star Noeline Baker, and a more recent reality show called Weddings. "One of the brides-to-be was a real pussybum princess who hated absolutely everything - the dress, the ring, the reception - and she was a great inspiration." But the real roots of Kath and Kim are in the British comedy tradition. "Everyone in Australia grew up watching Fawlty Towers, Monty Python and Benny Hill," says Riley. "We were huge French and Saunders fans, huge Ab Fab fans - how could we not be? The mother-daughter relationship is a gift to writers. It's a very simple premise, but endlessly variable. Pretty much everything we learned about sitcom, we learned from the Brits."
So how come it takes a couple of Aussie upstarts to breathe new life into what is starting to look like a moribund formula? The only recent British sitcoms worthy of the title, The Office and The Royle Family, have ended. The Vicar of Dibley and Only Fools and Horses return for occasional specials. The comedy output that really mattered in 2004 was sketch-based, specifically Little Britain - and that's really for the kids. Kath and Kim is unusual in that it appeals to audiences from nine to 90 without sacrificing comic edge.
"It's true that Little Britain has been this year's breakthrough show," says Kenton Allen, the BBC's comedy editor, "but that doesn't mean there isn't life in sitcoms. What we're seeing now is the development of distinctive types of TV comedy for different audiences. There's the traditional, proscenium-arch sitcom on BBC1, like My Family, which appeals to older viewers and families. Then there are writer-performer led single-camera shows with no laugh track on BBC2, usually dealing with darker material and appealing to a younger audience. We're seeing a great deal of activity in the latter area, and not so much in the former."
Conscious of the BBC's need to deliver crossover shows that will carry on the great sitcom tradition, Allen and his colleagues are nurturing a new style of writing that they hope will bring standards closer to those enjoyed by the huge audiences for American imports like Friends, Will and Grace, and Sex and the City. Fred Barrett, the American creator of BBC1's My Family, has come inhouse to develop group-written comedies for the channel, foster young, mainstream writers and deliver the kind of success that recent flops have failed to do. "You can't have untrained talent in that BBC1 prime-time spotlight," says Allen, "because the expectations are too high. A new sitcom makes a unique promise to an audience: I'm going to make you laugh for half an hour. When it fails, it's a huge disappointment. Writers can't face that challenge alone."
As a result of this initiative, established shows like My Family and My Hero are now team-written by people who, Allen hopes, will form the talent pool from which tomorrow's hit shows will come. "There's no shortage of writer-performers out there, but they tend to come to us through the independent production companies. We have a well-established route through the BBC, from Radio 4 to BBC3 to BBC1; it's what Little Britain did, and it's what plenty more shows will do in the future. What we need, however, is a way of bringing on the writers who don't want to do that dark stuff. They've been out in the cold for a while, and we're trying to bring them in."
It remains to be seen whether the BBC's School for Sitcom will bear fruit, when there is so much competition from writer-performer shows like Kath and Kim. The fact that it's Australian is secondary to the fact that it's got a handful of the most vivid characters seen in sitcom for a decade - and that sort of quality springs not from committees but from individual talents with the experience to know what works with audiences. It's hard for the BBC to foster individual writing talent without making a few slip-ups. Last year's disastrous bingo comedy Eyes Down, starring Paul O'Grady, was by a writer, Angela Clarke, who just wasn't ready for the spotlight. The new group-writing initiative is an attempt to avoid such pratfalls without letting the new John Sullivan (Only Fools and Horses) or Roy Clarke (Keeping Up Appearances) slip through the net. The surefire success of such a rank outsider as Kath and Kim shouldn't be used as a stick with which to beat the rest of the UK's comedy output; it should, rather, be held up as a model of traditional, economic laugh-getting towards which producers and writers can strive.
· Kath and Kim starts on BBC2 next month.
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