Glancing at iPlayer these days, you could be forgiven for thinking you’ve wandered on to the wrong streaming service. The BBC site is teeming with Australian drama and comedy. Log on right now and you’ll be greeted with shows as diverse as 80s-set newsroom drama The Newsreader, glowering cold-case saga Black Snow, mystery box thriller High Country, teen haunted fun fair comedy Crazy Fun Park and plenty of shows that we don’t have the space to get into here. Oh, and there’s also the small matter of the glorious 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 we’ve been scarfing them down. It’s a reflection not only of Britain’s escapist longing for sun-dappled vistas and bronzed bodies, but also of Australia’s skill for 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 that was deliberately constructed for international markets. So much so, in fact, that the tale of a bowl cut-wearing nine-year-old boy and his intelligent and thankfully docile roo pal aired in the UK months before it was shown in Australia, where it was feared that homegrown audiences would be insulted by its pat, cliched depiction of their nation. What’s more, Skippy would be as much of a novelty to Australian viewers as to those abroad, given that in the 1960s the vast majority of shows broadcast 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. Even that wasn’t a purely 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 our soap smarts back with him. Working for the Reg Grundy Organisation, he popularised a form of bright, broad, substance-light soap that proved perfect for daytime TV schedules half a world away.
The jewel in Watson’s cork-strung crown was, of course, Neighbours, a show so popular in the UK that it not only launched pop careers and numerous university appreciation societies, but also helped to revive the BBC’s ratings just as the Thatcher government was making noises about removing the licence fee.
Neighbours’ success was a savvy act of counterprogramming, showing tanned flesh and sizzling barbies right as UK was at its coldest – although Bruce Gyngell, the Australian TV exec and British breakfast-TV pioneer, had another, more troubling theory: “Neighbours and Home and Away represent a society which existed in Britain in the 60s before people began arriving from the Caribbean and Africa. The Poms delve into it to get their quiet little racism fix,” he told a conference at Melbourne University in 1993.
Whatever the reasons for Neighbours’ popularity, it wasn’t alone: The Flying Doctors and, of course, Home and Away found success – if not Neighbours-level success – around the same time on various TV channels in the UK. What characterised these shows was a cheapness and cheerfulness at odds with dour homegrown soaps such as Brookside and EastEnders. These shows could never be considered essential – and their place in the daytime schedules reflected that – but they offered variety and, crucially, were cheap to import. Better than the soaps were the children’s TV series: the likes of teen drama Heartbreak High (recently rebooted on Netflix) which, in contrast to Neighbours, 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 on our screens – ones seemingly more interested in showing Australia as it is to Australians rather than the fantasy version packaged for international audiences. There were excellent comedies: deadpan mockumentary Kath and Kim, Chris Lilley’s Summer Heights High, maternity drama The Letdown, and Josh Thomas’s dramedy Please Like Me, which introduced Hannah Gadsby to the world.
There were well realised dramas: Love My Way, Animal Kingdom, most recently the sleeper hit Mr Inbetween. There was an influx, too, of Aussie reality franchises onto British screens – most notably Married at First Sight – which offered an unfiltered innocence long absent from our own 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. Tellingly, earlier this year, BBC Studios acquired Werner Film Productions, creators of The Newsreader and Surviving Summer, as part of a broader investment in Australian television. These series might look a lot different from the pretend pre-packaged Australia of Neighbours and Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, but if they keep making them, we’re likely to keep watching them.
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