The other day, my teenage son asked me a question which horrified me to my core: “What’s Kath & Kim?”
“It’s noice, it’s different, it’s unusual…” I said to him, hoping for a flicker of recognition.
Nothing.
How could he have not heard of Kath & Kim, the classic Aussie sitcom created by and starring Jane Turner and Gina Riley as a suburban mother and daughter? Okay, sure, the last season went to air three years before he was born, but surely he should have picked it up by osmosis or something?
This is Australia. This is our culture. This is our HERITAGE.
So I sat him down in front of episode one, from 2002.
As soon as that theme song starts – and Gina Riley has a KILLER voice – I feel the nostalgia wash over me, like a wave of Tia Maria and footy franks. And I have thoughts.
1) Not having watched the show in years, I realise that sometime, in the past couple of decades, without being aware of it… I have become Kath. I am a middle-aged woman who owns a lot of activewear, and what’s so wrong with that? “I like to keep myself trim, Kim. Does it make me a crim to keep myself trim?” No, it does not, Kath.
2) It’s only two minutes into the show and Kath is already eyeballing Kim and saying, “Kimmy, Kimmy, Kimmy, look at moiye, look at moiye, Kim, look at moiye…” I think of all the times I’ve said that line, including to my own kids. I brought them up using a Kath & Kim quote, and they didn’t know it.
3) Tiny Teddies! I want some now!
-(4).jpg?resize=380%2C285&format=auto)
4) You have to hand it to Glenn Robbins for totally committing to the character of Kel Knight, the purveyor of fine meats. That combover! That manbag! Those awkward attempts to make conversation about sausage varieties! Speaking of which…
5) Kim’s belly isn’t even big! That’s what makes Kel’s “When the baby due?” comment so horrifying.
6) MAGDA!!! How fantastic is it to see national treasure Magda Szubanski in her absolute comedy prime as the injury-prone sports nut Sharon Strzelecki, second-best friend to Kim? Love you, Magda.
7) The lines I missed the first time I watched it. When Kim and Sharon are talking about stalking Kim’s husband Brett, and Kim says she couldn’t do it because it would make her look desperate, Sharon asks, totally genuine, “What’s wrong with looking desperate?”
8) …and when Sharon is trying to spy on Brett when she has her one good eye covered with an patch, and she thinks she’s seen Brett with a girl who looks like Kim, when in fact Brett is with a Rottweiler, and Kim tells Kath: “Sharon saw Brett kissing a girl with her very own eye!”
9) The sex! So much sex! Too much sex! Kath and Kel are at it on the breakfast table. Kath tells Kim that Kel “touched me in nooks and in unexplored crannies I never knew I had”. Kim asks Kath where the video camera is, and Kath says, “Oh, I’ll get it. It’s in the bedroom on the tripod.”
10) Kel’s two marriage proposals to Kath are absolute GOLD. The first one, sitting in Kel’s car, “You know you rock my world, Kath Day… and in light of that, how would you like to turn Day into Knight?” and then the second one, at the Fountain Gate shopping centre, in a store, with Kel’s face on dozens of TV sets, “and I want the whole hi-fi department to hear it”.
No wonder the foxy Kath replies with an enthusiastic, “Yes! I say yes! Lock it in, Eddie, yes!”
At the end of the episode, I remembered my teenage son was watching with me. So I turned to him. What did he think of it?
“It was very… Australian.”
Yes. And?
“It was decent, I guess.”
Decent? More like noice, different, unusual.
You can check out Kath & Kim on ABC iview.
