Breakin’

I discovered this weekend that the ABC – in their ongoing attempt to fill up their plethora of channels with anything they can haul out of the archives – have finally run out of episodes of Love Your Garden and George Clarke’s Amazing Spaces and resorted to rebroadcasting 90’s classic (for a certain definition of “classic”) Heartbreak High.

(I am slightly miffed at the absence of Love Your Garden as I have developed quite the crush on Katie Rushworth. There’s nothing quite like a woman who’s willing to get her hands dirty while pronouncing /a/ as /ʊ/…)

As a teen in the 90s I was presumably the target demographic for Heartbreak High, but I considered myself far too cultured to waste time watching it (I was actually nowhere near as cultured as I thought, I was just a contrarian douchebag). So prior to yesterday I’d never seen as much as a single episode. I did catch an episode yesterday however and good lord! It was easily the most awkwardly 90s thing that I have ever seen!

The episode started with a girl rapping in the schoolyard with all the other students gathered around clapping in time. I can categorically state that this is not something that ever actually happened in any Australian high school in the 90s ever (if you remember differently then you are hallucinating). Her rap was about how school sucks, and the teachers don’t like this, and so after a discussion in the staff room about how awful rap music is (naturally including a claim that it’s ‘not even music’) they ban rapping. This upsets the students to the point that they stage a sit-in to protest their right to rap. After some back and forward the teachers back down and the right to rap is restored. The episode ends with an impromptu rock concert, with serious “It’s a party Marge, it doesn’t have to make sense!” vibes, and – of course – rapping.

There was a B-plot involving a guy harassing a girl (the rapping girl? I can’t remember, the characters are all so interchangeable…) to go out with him, and then roping his mates in to harass her as well. These days that would be presented as a bad thing, but this is the 90s when people were stupid. In the end he wins her over by completely changing his personal style, which is just as terrible a lesson in the opposite direction. And the style he chooses – oh good lord!

Urge to punch growing…

I did try and take a screenshot of it from the ABC’s iView service, but they’ve cunningly set the screen to blank itself when any kind of capture is attempted, so I’ll need to use the old ‘photograph the monitor’ trick so beloved of the technologically inept. In the meantime simply imagine all the worst excesses of 90s male fashion distilled into one human being. Curly hair with a lock strategically dangling across the forehead, tinted hippy sunglasses, an embroidered waistcoat, black baggy pants, multiple necklaces, the whole shebang. He looks like a goddamn clown! If anyone had turned up to my 90s high school wearing that, he would have been beaten to a pulp! I can say that with authority because – despite my status as a pathetic nerd – even I would have been lining up to deal out some justly deserved punishment.

Naturally the girl instantly falls for him – presumably because if a guy is desperate enough to dress up like a court jester to get your attention then he’ll do anything you ask.

So that’s Heartbreak High. Overall I don’t think contrarian, douchebag, teenage me missed very much by skipping it.

Walking Arcadia part One

When I was a kid, my parents always went out of their way to watch an extremely boring British soap opera named Howards Way. This was not because they found it particularly compelling, but because it was filmed in the vicinity of the Hampshire village resided in by my Aunt. As such any given episode would feature glimpses of places they knew, with an outside chance of spotting someone they’d met walking past in the background.

The idea that we all eventually turn into our parents is a cliché, however the problem with clichés is that they only become clichés in the first place because they’re true. As such I now find myself in a similar position, making room every Thursday night to watch the ABC’s The Heights, solely because it’s filmed just down the road.

(Excuse me for a minute, I appear to have been bitten on the wrist by a spider or something and have to go put some cream on it. If I never post again you’ll know why.)

Anyway, yes, The Heights. Needing both some exercise and some direction in life I decided yesterday to go on a walking tour of Heights shooting locations, and take some photos along the way.

My first stop was Arcadia High School, which is actually the Mount Lawley TAFE college on Lord Street. I caught the bus down there and arrived just as it started to rain.

A short walk through the drizzle to East Perth train station and an equally short train trip bought me to Arcadia Hospital, which funnily enough is another TAFE college, this time the East Perth branch at Claisebrook. Along the way I realised my camera lens was filthy and cleaned it – hopefully making subsequent pictures a bit sharper.

The fact that it’s directly across the road from Perth’s ABC headquarters is surely a complete coincidence…

A short walk along the reconstructed Claise Brook – which doesn’t seem to have had any maintenance in the last 10 years, seriously, can we do something about that? – takes us to the steps that I think are where Shannon got bawled out for arriving late for community service. It was certainly somewhere along Claise Brook anyway.

Following the steps upwards takes us to the old Boans furniture factory, home to the apartment inhabited by Claudia and Sabine.

By now the rain was starting to get serious. I had plans to walk down to the river and take some shots of the parks and bridges which often show up in episodes, but instead decided to stop in somewhere dry and have some lunch. I had a quite decent pizza at the Royal while drying out and reading the latest Fortean Times, then considered my options.

My original plan included a trip down to Trinity College (AKA Embleton) then across to Wellington Square (location of many open air scenes), hitting up the Towers themselves just behind the Old Mint, then getting a bus across to Iris’s store near Hyde Park. But the weather didn’t look likely to improve much, so I decided discretion was the better park of valour and I’d be better served by taking a quick jaunt directly to Wellington Square, see if I could grab a long shot of the towers, then head home. This turned out to be complicated by massive roadworks all along Wittenoom street, and work being done on the square itself but I did my best.

And thus ended my grand day out.

Sooner or later I’ll get around to some closer shots of the towers, the river parklands and Iris’s store. In the meantime I did take some shots last year covering the old Perth Enterprise Centre that serves at the exterior of the Railway Hotel, and the mural on Moore street that’s often seen as an interstitial with trains rushing past it. I stepped in an actual human turd (the city really needs to do something to support the homeless population) getting these pics, so appreciate them!

And that’s your lot! Be sure to tune in to ABC at 8:00pm Thursdays to see these places on air. Or not, I’m not your dad.

The Slap

I’ll give *you* a slap!

The ABC is going on and on and on about it’s ‘brilliant’ new drama The Slap.

The media are going on and on and on about the ABC’s ‘brilliant’ new drama The Slap.

As far as I can tell the ABC’s ‘brilliant’ new drama (The Slap) consists of…

1) Person slaps child….
2) Everyone gets angsty about it.

Call me autistic but that sounds like the most batshit boring eight hours of television ever envisaged by man.

And what’s all this about La Paglia the Younger being an unknown? He was the star of 7 Days you ignorant savages! Just because you have no interest in giant blue time-travel spheres and oddly cold-war influenced pro-American storylines doesn’t make the guy an unknown!

Sheeze!

Her Mother Teresa Young Humanitarian of the Year Award

It’s even funnier with an Irish accent.

I’ve really been enjoying Misfits lately.

For those not in the know, it’s British series about a bunch of young offenders on community service who get caught in a mysterious lightning storm and develop super-powers. If this were an American series they’d immediately start solving crimes, fighting terrorists and defending Freedom, but this is a British series, so they immediately start f’ing everything up and rather dark hilarity ensues.

I actually heard about the series a few years back and thought it sounded like something worth checking out. Then I didn’t. But then I stumbled onto the premiere of the second season about a month ago, and have been enjoying it ever since.

I won’t post any real spoilers, but will include an example of dialogue (from the most recent episode aired here) as an example of the general tone…

It was an accident! She was rubbing my cock and and then she starts foaming at the mouth and then she tripped and impaled herself on her Mother Teresa Young Humanitarian of the Year Award!

Yeah, Nathan gets all the best lines 🙂

Oh hey, here’s the trailer.

Friday nights on ABC people! Be there or be a rectangular thing!

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