8 September 2011
At Home With Julia: inane drivel of the most idiotic kind
There can't be many people even in masochistic Melbourne who went from watching a numbing Bell Shakespeare production of Julius Caesar to the experience of looking at At Home With Julia, the much-dreaded (but Truly Dreadful) homage to our own imperatrix.
Julius Caesar at least had Alex Menglet's richly Russian Caesar and, against the odds, the actor channelled some ancient tradition of Russian classical acting, so that he put the rest of the cast to shame. Caesar, alas, is killed at half time. Julia Gillard in this horrible TV homage to her unloveliness is killed in the first five minutes and so is the reputation of the ABC for producing firecracker political satire and a high level of TV comedy.
You may think that Julia Gillard is the most hapless Australian Prime Minister since Billy McMahon. You may think that she has presided over the demise of a once great political party out of nothing but a lean hungriness for power and that she believes in nothing. You may even think that her assassination of Kevin Rudd had little to do with the viability of the Labor Party or the Government of the Commonwealth: it was simply that, like Cassius, she could not behold a greater than herself and if the troops marched under her and not unlovable Kevin Rudd - well, what price knives and conspiracy?
You may believe all this and more. That Julia Gillard does not really care about a carbon tax or genuinely oppose gay marriage. You may take the dimmest possible view of a Prime Minister who can attempt to ship children and poor harried seekers of refuge to be flogged and desolated in Malaysia (the country that hanged Barlow and Chambers, the Australian drug dealers, an action Bob Hawke, then in power, described as "barbaric"). You may abhor the way she attacked the Chief Justice when the High Court of Australia rebuffed her on the Malaysia solution in a resounding six to one decision.
Even so, taking the dimmest possible view, Julia Gillard did not deserve this and nor did the nation. At Home With Julia is inane drivel of the most idiotic kind. Had it not been so long in the planning it would look like a blatant attempt to arouse compassion for a Prime Minister whose support had fallen to 25 per cent in the polls.
It is a sorry thing when the nation that produced Barry Humphries, that provoked the political satire of the Gillies Report and gave a harbour to John Clarke could sink to this. Is the land of Edna Everage and Kath and Kym, the culture that nurtured Magda Szubanski, shrunk to this little measure?
Has Julia Gillard's Australia sunk so low that we are expected to laugh at this idiot rehearsal of snobbery which has the weird effect – because it is so lugubrious and rubbery and bad – of making the Prime Minister look, by comparison, like Dame Maggie Smith at the height of her powers, all grace and style and flawless timing?
The first episode of At Home With Julia revolved around Tim, the first dude, having to cook dinner for the independents – Bob Katter, Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott – and their preference for home-grown ingredients (by way of mince, tomatoes etc).
Julia is preoccupied with her single-minded political agenda of pleasing everyone and, with mild misgiving, is willing to usurp and ruin their date night despite the fact that she's about to get on a plane.
This threadbare situation comedy plotline in fact sounds immeasurably more promising in its hackneyed way than what in fact ensues.
Amanda Bishop's Julia – she also wrote the criminal script – has a rough (though not intricately accurate) version of Gillard's terrible voice, though it has too much hammy vibrato and too little hesitation. But the dialogue is ghastly beyond belief and the detail of the comic set up would disgrace a student revue.
So we get Julia mixing designer beers and serving them up to the fruitloops as Tim's "home brooow". Unable to use the wagyu beef (which has been served up to the small terrier, Bill Shorten – a wan and ghostly gleam of humour there) he ransacks the rubbish bin for last October's discarded chipolatas and makes them into a bolognaise sauce.
There are ho ho scenes with the local kids who simulate enviable laughter as he digs in the Lodge's rubbish bin by moonlight.
Is there some comic consequence – botulism, fruitloop diarrhoea of a convulsively ghastly kind, some massacre of the newer gross out comedy - that the young love and their sober middle-aged parents fear and loathe?
Nothing so interesting. We end up, for heaven's sake, with Tim falling asleep from exhaustion, just as the PM was going to deem him a quickie.
It's hard to say whether At Home with Julia is more of an open provocation to revoke the ABC's charter or a dire indictment of the current policy of buying in outsourced comedy.
I used to think that the ABC's short-lived cultural panel show The Vulture, the brainchild of that mercurial Renaissance man Guy Rundle - and a show, alas, in which I was a permanent panel member for the whole eight-and-a-half weeks of the run – had high claims to be considered the worst bit of television the ABC had ever put to air. Well, At Home With Julia makes it look like The Late Clive James or John Freeman's BBC interviews with Nehru and Evelyn Waugh.
It is appalling television which should never have gone to air. The idea of making Julia and Tim the subject of a TV show was bad from the start. The only kind of political figures you can get away with mawkishly softening into lovable sitcom figures –providing gentle hilarities are political figures of more or less vast objective glamour – the Kennedys, say, or the Obamas.
Otherwise you're better off sticking to the much safer territory of outright political satire. So At Home With Julia was rooted in (and by) a category mistake in the first place. Julia Gillard has never been a figure of film star-like charisma, as the Clintons were (or in a lesser way the Blairs, maybe the Keatings). She occupies a funny place in the pantheon of the national mythology of those who reach political Olympus. She is not, still not, I suspect, widely loathed, as Hawke and Howard, Fraser and Keating, not to mention Rudd and Abbott were at various stages.
We see her, on the surface, as a cartoon of what the national mannerisms can produce by way of nasal stridency, and we also have grave doubts about her lack of deeper political conviction and prowess. But, oddly enough, we perceive this as a form of personal frailty.
Can anyone tell Julia Gillard who she is? There is a pathos in that as the plight of a political leader not least when she looks hapless.
But At Home With Julia is such a trite bit of assassination, such a flummery mess of a show, that you oscillate between feeling sympathy for the Prime Minister and blaming her for bringing it into being.
At Home With Julia has far less colour and movement than the Julius Caesar I gave up on when the big florid Russian was knocked off. It did not, however, compare well with David and Margaret doing their shtick about the movies. As it happened they were talking about Fred Schepisi’s splendid film The Eye Of The Storm and Vince Colosimo and Sigrid Thornton in a fine film Face To Face from a David Williamson script. Yes and they ended with a discussion of the Ingmar Bergman masterpiece Cries And Whispers.
It was enough to make you think the ABC had a function and Julia Gillard's Australia was capable of more than butchering any attempt at comedy or drama.
Peter Craven is one of Australia's best known critics and cultural commentators.