Oz\'s Kath and Kim come to Britain

We may get their sunny soaps and piss-poor lager, but comedy doesn't come high on the list of Antipodean exports. Most Brits would be hard-pressed to know any comics beyond Dame Edna and Paul Hogan.

Truth is, for an entire continent, they don't do sitcom all that well. Or indeed at all.

But four years ago, Jane Turner and Gina Riley created Kath And Kim, a story of a lower-middle-class mother and daughter trapped in suburban hell, which garnered a handful of awards and quickly became the top-rated comedy on Australian TV. And this week it makes its debut on British cable channel Living.

"Australia doesn't really do sitcoms," Turner concedes. "Sketch comedy is pretty well it."

"It's a risky business and networks are scared of sitcoms," agrees Riley. "Even though, if they work, they can be the biggest thing on TV. But networks won't take risks and prefer to hedge their bets, so sitcom is much harder to get on."

Indeed, the character of Kath (Turner's demanding, snobbish fortysomething divorcee) and Kim (Gina's precious misery-guts of a daughter) originated on a mid-Nineties sketch show, ABC's Big Girl's Blouse. Inspired by the first raft of Aussie reality TV shows like Sylvania Waters, the recurring sketches charted the build-up to Kim's wedding.

"We'd have Kim, say, trying on a range of dresses and whining, 'I hayte it'," says Turner. "In the very last one, I appeared as Brett [the husband] with this great big handlebar moustache."

The characters had a second outing, in another sketch show called Something Stupid, this time revolving around Kim's baby a birth conveniently airbrushed out of the subsequent incarnations.

"After that series, ABC asked if we had anything else," said Turner. "And we decided we wanted to do a long-form show based on these characters. It took a while to write it, and it finally appeared in 2000."

For the British launch, the sitcom's being billed, tediously, as "Neighbours on acid" and, desperately, as "an Aussie version of The Office".

Truth is, the larger-than-life characters such as Kath's daggish fiancé Kel and Kim's stout, accident-prone best friend Sharon, mean it is has little in common with the downplayed brilliance of Ricky Gervais's mockumenary ­ other than the fact it's filmed in a more realistic style than the traditional three-camera, studio audience sitcom.

"In the early days we would acknowledge the camera," Turner says. "But you're limited comedically doing that ­ you can't do flashbacks in reality."

Both admit that performing without a studio audience is harder ­ requiring more trust in their instincts that a script's funny ­ but agree it gives the performances a more naturalistic feel.

"We'd try to keep the performances very small," said Turner.

"Yeah, but we were so obsessed with holding back that when we first watched the playbacks the energy was too low," Riley counters. "We had to tell ourselves, 'Remember it's a fucking comedy'."

Despite the early teething problems, Kath And Kim went on to become a runaway success in Australia, with ratings topping two million and their stretched vowels generating catchphrases like "look at moiye" that found their way into pop culture. They even won a fan in Kylie Minogue, who has said she'd love a cameo role.

A third series is now in the pipeline, with Riley and Turner heading back to finish work on the final script just as soon as this publicity tour is over. "It has been sold to the UK," Turner confirms.

In the meantime, the first series is running on Living on Thursday nights, starting this week.

First published: April 7, 2004

Published: 22 Mar 2009