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The same applies to the dialogue, which at first sight consists mostly of people swearing a lot. On closer inspection, however, it bristles with the best kind of sitcom jokes: the ones that the person delivering them has no idea are funny. (Think how insulted Captain Mainwaring would be if he knew we were laughing at him.) On Thursday, for example, Jim the local farmer launched a surprisingly passionate defence of the works of Enid Blyton against the ‘lefties who say they’re racist’. ‘I remember when marmalade had golliwogs on the side,’ he added clinchingly. ‘Now, that was diversity.’
On a more high-minded note, David Stratton’s Stories of Australian Cinema (Sunday) sounded like a perfect BBC Four documentary: an old bloke who knows his subject inside out telling us all about it. In the event, the programme was a definite disappointment. Admittedly, it was by no means terrible: we did learn quite a few interesting things about individual Australian movies. The trouble was that we were promised far more than that.
Stratton is apparently Australia’s most venerable film critic — and to prove it, Sam Neill, Nicole Kidman and Mad Max director George Miller (just three of the impressive array of talking heads on display) all testified to how great he is. So who better to explain, as he assured us he would, how the country ‘found its identity through cinema’?
Except that he never really did — or ever really tried to. Instead, he flitted genially from one film to another without anything much in the way of a central argument beyond a few windy generalisations about ‘the magic of cinema’ and Australia being ‘a nation of storytellers’ (ie, I would suggest, a nation). Nor were his final verdicts on those individual films always as penetrating as you might expect from such an acclaimed figure. Picnic at Hanging Rock, for instance, was ‘an assured foray into arthouse cinema’ that became ‘important to the Australian psyche’ in some unspecified way.
Sunday’s first episode of three did contain some useful ideas for films to watch during lockdown. When they weren’t hymning Stratton himself — or being excessively reverent about all-round Australian fabulousness — the talking heads had their moments of enjoyable indiscretion. (During the filming of My Brilliant Career, Sam Neill told us, Judy Davis ‘made it clear from day one that I was a lightweight’.) Nonetheless, in the almost total absence of any wider social history, the programme never had a chance of living up to its own billing.
Because you read about australia
Also by James Walton
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