Is It Any Good?

Kath and Kim

18 Sep 2007

Just stop it already with the ''Look at Moi!'' thing. Is there anything so moribund, so maudlin, so defunct as catchphrase comedy? No, nothing on god's earth, not even on television. The sight of Kath Day-Knight setting her chin in one of those ''look at moi'' moments is all I need to reach for the remote, a reminder that this is comedy as formulaic and prosaic as anything we've seen since we last glimpsed Mrs Slocum's pussy. Which takes us to the whole issue of whether Kath and Kim, apparently beloved of Australian viewers, will prosper on a commercial network.

So far so good, you'd have to say, with the national audience stabilising at around 2 million. This in itself is a worrying thought of course, the mental image of 2 million Australians simultaneously engrossed by vividly brain dead bogan excess. It's the joy of the medium. Imagine what kind of culture we could have if at 7.30pm on any given Sunday night 2,000,000 Australians of ages and class simultaneously dipped into the same page of the new Don DeLillo. Or Proust. But we digress.

The fact is that TV holds all the aces and the supine attention of the mass population.

This of course won't last for Kath and Kim. Within weeks the migrated ABC audience will tire of the product placements and the mind numbing walls of ads for small cars and toxic hair dye, while the native Seven watchers will twig, eventually and with a growing sense of dumb outrage, that the show is only funny because it's all about them. And that'll be that.

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