Tim's Article

[pixieDAAS]

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/20...329558691.html

Noise, different, unusual - very funny

[turtle]

The article Tim's responding to is by Steven Butcher in The Age 'Opinion' 11/11/2003

Fudging the fat chick's weight is just not real

By ignoring the realities of Australian society, Kath & Kim has become an inner-city look at outer-suburban life.

Jane Turner in defining her hit TV show, Kath & Kim, suggests the program is "a sort of reality television situation comedy".

It is clear the production values are geared towards creating a sense of reality and this is evident in the use of hand-held cameras, natural light, and the effect of "natural" sound. And yet there is a world of difference between employing the conventions of realism and succesfully constructing realistic characters. Much of the humour is based on characters getting words wrong or using them in inappropriate contexts. Yet, when not mispronouncing them, characters use outdated terms such as "foxy lady", "horn bag", "dud-root", and "moll".

Kath & Kim is comedy at a distance. Presumably the writers find it hard to understand why a suburban butcher would demonstrate anything resembling passion for his trade and hence the piss-take of Kel. While they acknowledge the centrality of sport to suburban culture, here its practitioner is an overweight, injury-prone dunce.

There seems something very dishonest about the representation of Sharon and circulating behind cartoon-like characterisation it is possible to detect the sorts of middle-class sensibilities that seem out of place in Fountain Lakes. For a start, nobody comments on the fat chick's weight and this can perhaps be explained the fact that the outer suburbs are being constructed from an inner-suburban perspective. In the imaginary view from a distance, Sharon becomes desirable rather than being relegated to loneliness or ridicule. It is the absence of cruelty that betrays the lack of affinity with the subject matter and consequently the world Sharon inhabits seems somewhat less than authentic.

If a television show is aiming to be true to contemporary suburban life, it is hard to imagine how it could avoid the phenomenon of multiculturalism. Yet, satirising an ethnic minority obviously proved too problematic - far better to present a world filled with Anglo-Celtic drongos as this maintains the middle-class urban sensitivity to the politics of ethnicity. Given the composition of the suburbs, the absence of migrants is hardly characteristic of reality TV. I reckon both series of Kath & Kim present a superficial and one-dimensional view of Australian suburban life. When critics argue it is a realistic depiction of the world I suspect they are generally responding to what they imagine places like Fountain Lakes to be like.