Here's the article by Patrick West:

Friday 9 March 2007
Patrick West
Life in Oz: nothing like Neighbours

Answer me this - if things are so great Down Under,
why do so many Aussies leave?

Last week I pointed out that the Americans now like to
portray us Britons as the underclass on television,
and that the Yanks simultaneously represent themselves
as rather erudite, polite and classy fellows. Although
this does mirror reality – Americans are unfailingly
polite and us Brits have regressed to an Elizabethan
state of barbarism – I thought it unfair, because
Australians deserve a bit of a bashing on television,
too.

Now don’t get me wrong, Aussies. I’ve had many a good
‘tinny’ and ‘scooner’ with Australians. They get drunk
in the same way as the Dutch: they become infantile,
anarchic and generally loveable – and rarely do they
get hostile and nasty like us Brits. But there are
plenty of misconceptions about Australians, many of
which have been perpetuated by television.

The obvious culprits are those late twentieth-century
phenomena, Neighbours and Home and Away, which invaded
Britain’s living rooms in the 1980s and which, after a
shaky start when the protagonists all had mullet
haircuts and drove bad Datsuns, came into their
element in the 1990s. Britain’s other errant children
of the Empire were shown to be cheery folks living in
the sun, a people who had seemingly found the promised
land, inhabiting what almost seemed like a utopia.

During the same period, Britain was producing gloomy
soap operas such as EastEnders, in which the
characters were all murdering each other, barging into
each other’s room and exclaiming ‘Wos goin on?’ or
breaking up fights with the interdict ‘He’s not worth
it!’ American soaps of the time, such as Dallas and
Dynasty, had preposterous pseudo-Shakespearean epics
between competing, incredibly rich families, in which
the leitmotivs were envy, malice and the lust for
power.

In Neighbours, the Ramsays and the Robinsons argued
over things like who was responsible for leaving
leaves in the swimming pool. Or there was the episode
when it was feared that Ramsay Street’s Korean
inhabitants had eaten Bouncer the dog. And let us not
forget the time when Lou and Harold took magic
mushrooms in the outback.

It was all very silly and surreal, but us Brits loved
it, because all the characters were bronzed and looked
generally happy. But it was a distortion of reality.

I work with a few Australian journalists and there are
many Aussies who ply their wares on Fleet Street.
There are lots of Aussies in Britain in general and in
London in particular. This begs the question: if
Australia is so great, why do so many Australians come
and live over here?

It’s because Australia is not the paradise it is
portrayed to be on Neighbours. One of my Aussie
colleagues is often asked why she chose to live in
miserable, rainy Britain. I asked her the same
question the other day. Her answer was simply:

‘Australia is nothing like Neighbours. It’s more like
Kath & Kim.’

She went on to explain that the Land Down Under is not
populated by the hearty, the gregarious and the
welcoming, but by white trash (I don’t particularly
like that phrase because no-one has the courage to use
its equivalent, ‘black trash’, but you get the point).
Australians are some of the most coarse, racist people
on earth, as Kath & Kim rightly portrays. For example,
an American girl who seeks courtship will tentatively
ask you for a meal and weeks of getting to know you;
an Australian girl will come up to you at the
Walkabout bar in London’s densely Aussie-populated
Shepherds Bush and inquire ‘Would you like a f**k?’

This is why so many Australians, especially the clever
ones, move to Britain or elsewhere. Because despite
all of their protestations against Barry Humphries’s
character Sir Les Patterson, Oz’s own farting,
swearing reprobate ‘cultural attaché’, Australia
remains a philistine country. Think about it. Who do
the Americans celebrate as national heroes? George
Washington, George Gershwin, Ernest Hemingway,
Franklin D. Roosevelt and so on. We Brits revere
Chaucer, Shakespeare, Elgar, Nelson and Churchill. And
who do the Australians put on their postal stamps? Ned
Kelly, a murderous bandit who famously put a metal
dustbin on his head and tried to kill coppers. Can you
imagine Britain having Harry Roberts as a national
hero?

This is why all the most cerebral Australians, such as
Clive James, Germaine Greer, John Pilger and Peter
Singer have lived for so long either in the UK or the
USA. They all wanted to get away from the land of Kath
& Kim.

I don’t mean to be rude to the Australians, who are
really quite charming and part of me does warm to
their earthy sense of humour and childlike joie de
vivre.

And I apologise for going on about re-runs on
satellite television. It’s only because, what with the
advent of Sky Plus, I don’t seem to know anybody who
watches the main five channels anymore, apart from the
news, football and late night gambling shows that
contain such questions as: ‘What “G” is the study of
the world’s topography and its people? Is it A)
Geography B) Gynaecology, or C) Geoff Hurst in the
1966 World Cup final?’

But I will address current television shows shortly,
in particular Life on Mars and its peculiar,
disturbing nostalgia for the days when the Old Bill
could go round beating up Irish people and blacks with
impunity. And saying ‘guv’ a lot.

Source:
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/2946/





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