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A fresh bunch of (Chris) Lilleys
thestar.com | April 4, 2010

By Rob Salem

Summer Heights High kind of snuck up on me last year — the delightfully deadpan, entirely out-there Australian mockumentary — a hit at home, then on the Internet, and finally HBO — features comedian Chris Lilley in multiple character roles, in that case, the students (and significantly, one teacher) of the titular suburban school.

The DVD screeners had been sitting, gathering dust on my desk until the kids next door heard I had them, and promptly commandeered them, and I eventually had to request replacements. And once I screened those, I got it. The show was hilarious, and Lilley brilliant, and as it went on it just got weirder and weirder, until. .. any words I could offer at this point could never really do it justice.

Summer Heights High and its star(s) and creator did not emerge whole from the Aussie ether. Lilley’s career pre-TV was as a character-oriented stand-up comic, and there have been several short-run series since 2003 — notably, in 2005, We Can Be Heroes, which preceded Summer Heights and arrives here belatedly on our Comedy Network, debuting the first of six episodes Sunday night at 10.

The somewhat simpler Heroes chronicles the lives of five nominees for Australian of the Year, including a former police officer who saved nine children from a runaway inflatable kiddie castle, a housewife who pioneered the sport of rolling on your side, and an over-achieving, egomaniacal high-school student, Ja’mie, who would return to become one of the most popular characters on Summer Heights High.

Lilley is currently busy finishing up a new series, Angry Boys, for HBO, the BBC and the Australian ABC. So busy, in fact, that he only had time to dash off these few, albeit enthusiastic answers to the following emailed questions:

Q: Certain, particularly popular characters, like the Summer Heights drama teacher, Mr. G, and Queen Bee student, Ja’mie, have carried over from show to show. What makes them special?

A: It is my fondness for them that made me want to keep bringing them back. I was always keen to write a series around Mr. G, who I had played on stage and had as a stand up character for many years. I had also played Mr. G in a few sketch comedy series in Australia, but was never allowed enough time to flesh out the character and explore his whole world.

And I felt like after We Can Be Heroes that Ja'mie had a lot more to say, and it would be good to see her as a fish out of water in an environment where she had to climb the social ladder.

Q: Where do these incredibly odd people come from?

A: I started by introducing characters in my stand-up performances. But since I moved into writing characters for television, they usually just arrive in some form as an idea and then evolve into something bigger once I have researched and thought about them for a long time.

I usually meet similar types of people while writing the shows, but never base characters on one particular person. I also invent characters that I think I will be able to pull off and who I have a lot of fun playing. I have to really love them in order to spend so much time in their world and writing for them.

Q: How much of the material is written, and how much, if any, is improvised?

A: The scripts are very thorough, but in some cases we put them aside and expand on the scenes. It depends on which characters and what scenarios. With Ja'mie and her school friends there was a lot of overlapping banter that went beyond the script. But the dialogue is also there on the page, and in the edit I usually end up reverting back to what was originally planned.

Q: Was making Heroes a different experience to later making Summer Heights High?

A: We Can Be Heroes was much more outrageous and harder to get through the censors because it was my first full series. The network was more sensitive about some of the themes, but ultimately backed it and allowed me to get away with a lot.

I felt like I had a little more freedom with Summer Heights High, as the network was confident that it was going to work. And I wanted to push things a little further in order to surprise audiences.

The same can be said for my new show, Angry Boys, that I am working on at the moment. You can't help but push things to the next level.

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