Colin from Accounts and Britain’s Unique Bond with Aussie TV

Glancing at iPlayer these days, you could be forgiven for thinking you’ve wandered onto the wrong streaming service. The BBC site is currently teeming with Australian drama and comedy. Log on right now and you’ll be greeted with shows as diverse as the 80s-set newsroom drama The Newsreader, the glowering cold-case saga Black Snow, the mystery box thriller High Country, the teen haunted fun fair comedy Crazy Fun Park, and plenty more. And then there’s Colin From Accounts, the global smash-hit comedy whose second series arrives on iPlayer next week.

If this deluge of Aussie content is striking, its presence on UK screens isn’t exactly surprising – or new. For much of UK TV history, Australia has been serving up all manner of series – from soaps and reality TV to murky crime drama – and the UK has eagerly consumed them. It’s a reflection not only of Britain’s escapist longing for sun-dappled vistas and bronzed bodies, but also of Australia’s skill in selling itself to the world.

That skill can be seen in Australian TV’s first notable export to the UK, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, a show deliberately constructed for international markets. The tale of a bowl cut-wearing nine-year-old boy and his intelligent kangaroo pal aired in the UK months before it was shown in Australia, where it was feared that homegrown audiences would find its portrayal cliched. What’s more, Skippy was as much of a novelty to Australian viewers as to those abroad, given that in the 1960s, the vast majority of shows on Australian channels were imported from the US.

Skippy would soon be followed in the 70s and 80s by Australia’s most notable TV export to the UK: the soap opera. This genre wasn’t purely an Australian creation. Reg Watson, who popularised the genre in Australia with shows such as The Young Doctors, Sons and Daughters, and Prisoner Cell Block H, had returned to the southern hemisphere after producing Crossroads and brought some of that soap opera experience back with him. Working for the Reg Grundy Organisation, he popularised a style of light-hearted soap that proved perfect for daytime TV schedules half a world away.

The jewel in Watson’s crown was, of course, Neighbours, a show so popular in the UK that it not only launched pop careers and university appreciation societies but also helped to revive the BBC’s ratings just as the Thatcher government was contemplating scrapping the licence fee.

Neighbours’ success was a savvy act of counterprogramming, showing tanned flesh and sizzling barbies just as the UK was at its coldest. Bruce Gyngell, the Australian TV exec and British breakfast-TV pioneer, had another, more troubling theory: “Neighbours and Home and Away represent a society that existed in Britain in the 60s before people began arriving from the Caribbean and Africa,” he told a conference at Melbourne University in 1993. “The Poms delve into it to get their quiet little racism fix.”

Whatever the reasons for Neighbours’ popularity, it wasn’t alone. The Flying Doctors and, of course, Home and Away also found success, albeit not at the same level as Neighbours. These shows offered a cheerful contrast to dour homegrown soaps like Brookside and EastEnders. They could never be considered essential, but they offered variety and were cheap to import. Better than the soaps were the children’s TV series like the teen drama Heartbreak High (recently rebooted on Netflix), which wasn’t afraid of heavier, real-world subjects, and the gleefully surreal kids’ comedy-drama Round the Twist.

Then something surprising happened. In the late 2000s and into the 2010s, a host of confident shows appeared that seemed more interested in showing Australia as it is to Australians rather than a fantasy version for international audiences. There were excellent comedies like the deadpan mockumentary Kath and Kim, Chris Lilley’s Summer Heights High, the maternity drama The Letdown, and Josh Thomas’s dramedy Please Like Me, which introduced Hannah Gadsby to the world.

There were well-realised dramas like Love My Way and Animal Kingdom, and more recently the sleeper hit Mr Inbetween. There was an influx of Aussie reality franchises on British screens, most notably Married at First Sight, which offered an unfiltered innocence long absent from UK reality shows. And of course, there was the emergence of a planet-straddling family of smiley blue dogs.

Today, British TV’s special relationship with Australian programmes shows no sign of slowing. Earlier this year, BBC Studios acquired Werner Film Productions, creators of The Newsreader and Surviving Summer, as part of their broader investment in Australian television. These series might look a lot different from the pre-packaged Australia of Neighbours and Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, but if they keep making them, we’re likely to keep watching them.

Source: The Guardian