It’s not too often that Australian television dishes out new musicals, though recent titles include the Aids crisis-themed In Our Blood and the superb psych ward-set drama Wakefield. But the musical parody genre is an even rarer beast, musicalising unexpected subjects such as the housing crisis – in SBS’s short and zippy comedy Time to Buy: A Musical – and now, in the ABC’s six-part series Australian Epic, a collection of “Australia’s most defining stories”.
Here that rather loose criteria essentially means stories the writers – Chris Taylor and Andrew Hansen of the comedy group the Chaser – felt were ripe for satire (albeit of a rather toothless kind; the first couple of episodes in particular play more like musical celebration). Part of the joke is the choice of topics: nobody would seriously suggest that the marriage of Mary Elizabeth Donaldson to Frederik, the Crown Prince of Denmark (the subject of episode two), was one of our most defining moments.
