We Can Be Heroes » Reviews » Stuff.co.nz

By Jane Clifton

The documentary series 7 Up has been compulsive Most often these days, comedy shows are written by teams of clever joke-spinners and story-liners, who by committee produce never-fail appointment viewing like Friends and Sex and the City.


But it's a joy that occasionally, a single person's genius can do the job of 50 and produce something special. Australian Chris Lilley is so cruelly perceptive in his multi-roles on Monday night's We Can Be Heroes (TV One, 10pm) that the viewer is torn between groaning in recognition and hoping never to meet Lilley personally.

Heroes is a mock-umentary on several ordinary Australians who are nominated for a nauseating rah-rah competition to find the Australian of the Year. Lilley plays them all – from bogan rural teenager to middle-aged mum – with merciless self-regard.

For anyone who can stomach The Office with its remorseless chronicling of all-too-commonplace narcissism and self-delusion, this will be a major treat. Think back to the audacious gimmick used in The League of Gentleman, where a couple of men played a succession of vile but eerily believable characters, plus the acute observational humour of The Games, and you have a flavour of Heroes.

As social satire goes, it's a strong brew – and as such, it's an acquired taste. It's crude and garish, as well as subtle.

You have to get used to the idea that all the characters are on massive ego trips, and all their friends and supporters – portrayed with naturalistic brilliance by other actors – are pathetically deluded.

One character is a policeman who gained brief fame for rescuing children from an out-of-control bouncy castle, and has since left the planet. "Oi can say it, now, foi-nally! Oi am a hero! Oi am a hero, and Oi'll take whatever comes with that!" he chants.

He has since left the force, printed hero T-shirts of himself, is planning a book, and wants to do motivational speaking. And, he mentions, he's hung like a donkey.

Think he's bad? Wait till Lilley gets to the schoolgirl who holds the record for sponsoring famine victims.

She is so monstrous, so shallow and so achingly like the fired-up, self-important teen types who get into do-gooding that I wanted urgently to hide under the sofa.

The casual, recreational way she discusses her wall of photos of sponsored kids – she collects them like Pokemon – is one of the nastiest, cleverest pieces of comic observation you'll ever see.

There's also the teen farm boy who is nominated because he is donating his deaf twin brother an eardrum. Your bog-standard obnoxious oik, he abuses and torments his brother and in the final scene, they scrap over the remote control like nine-year-olds.

His various observations are too crude to relate in this newspaper, but all are wickedly funny.

Best comic timing was the "interview" with the middle-aged housewife, her life plagued by the deformity of having one leg substantially longer than the other, who wondered what to do with her life when the kids grew independent from her.

"And I thought, there's one thing I can do: I can roll." And what ensues is an unintentionally hilarious account of how, to get from one room to another in a hurry, without putting her special shoe on, she learned to roll very efficiently over the years, to the point where she is now a "sportswoman and entrepreneur for the sport of rolling".

She has been nominated for her services to "the sport of rolling" and is about to embark on her biggest roll, from Perth to Uluru, "rolling all the way to the rock!"

Even if it sounds all rather puerile on the page, this is a show too good to miss.

Lilley's impersonations of modern-day Australians are note-perfect. He has their speech patterns, their conceits, their body language all down supernaturally accurately, kicking it all up a few notches to make it into industrial-grade satire.

Just give thanks he's not a New Zealander, or we might not be laughing so hard.