Jasmine Sahu is well suited with this new American drama exclusive to Dave.
Lois Cameron explains why this series is much more than your average cosy period drama.
The last episode of this series sees Sherlock and Moriarty attempt to solve the final problem with devastating consequences.
With major cast changes afoot, Jacob Martin ponders whether Being Human can live up to its own scarily high standard.
Angry Boys is the latest invention of Australian comic Chris Lilley. Lilley was the man behind Summer Heights High, one of the ABC network’s most watched and exported shows in recent times, which saw him heralded by many as something of a comedy genius. This is why Angry Boys, airing four years after Summer Heights High, has been so eagerly anticipated both in Australia and abroad.
And it is because of these high expectations that Angry Boys is so disappointing.
Whilst its comedy is, mercifully, different from our own Little Britain, Angry Boys has a vaguely similar premise. The show aims to document modern life in the writer’s homeland, focussing mainly on the male population, with Lilley playing all of the main characters (á la Lucas and Walliams). The central characters appear to be 17-year-old twins Daniel and Nathan, who feature heavily in the two opening episodes. Daniel and his partially-deaf brother Nathan showcase the best and worst of the series so far. On the one hand, Lilley uses them to make his characteristic sharp and acerbic observations - lampooning Daniel’s obsession with his profile picture and his particular pride in coming up with the ‘pussy fingers’ pose, for example.
On the other hand the twins reveal one of the show’s main problems: a reliance on profanity and vulgarity. I don’t want to come across all Mary Whitehouse, not least because I don’t find swearing offensive, but too often Lilley uses it as a punch line. Similarly, listening to Nathan’s toilet noises was juvenile and not particularly funny. In his previous work, Lilley has been excellent at making fun of the warped sense of humour of his various characters, but here the line becomes all too blurred - are we laughing at Daniel’s stupidity or the ‘toilet noises’?
A more successful character is Ruth ‘Gran’ Sims, a warden in Garginal Juvenile Centre for Boys. Here Lilley uses his double-layered comedy more effectively, as it is clearly not Gran’s racism that provides the punch line, but how up front she is about it - such as when she organises the inmates’ football teams into light skins and dark skins. Gran’s ‘gotchas’, in addition to the superhero pyjamas she makes for the boys, provide some of the highlights of the episode and actually raised a laugh or two.
The major misstep, for me, came in the second episode with S.Mouse, a sort-of-successful African-American rapper. It wasn’t Lilley ‘blacking up’ that worried me, though undoubtedly it will others, it was that the character’s scenes were chronically unfunny. Perhaps rap artists are so much larger-than-life that they’re almost beyond parody, which meant whilst I could relate to Lilley’s observations, I never really found any of them funny.
Angry Boys was a real mixed bag. It offered some genuinely well-observed and funny moments, but too often these were lost amongst unfunny sketches and a proliferation of ‘fag’ and ‘knob’ gags. Ultimately, whether you find these funny or not, it is all too clear that Lilley hasn’t matched those previous heights.
You must log in to submit a comment.
