Sa’me ol’ La’me

So, you’ve all seen this by now, right?

Ah, so many questions. For one, who thought giving us a one minute clip where the first 20 seconds consist of teenage girls going “love you” was going to make a good impression. Oh wait, that’s Chris Lilley’s patented “insight”, isn’t it. Wow, who knew teenage girls could be mildly self-obsessed?

Of course, where Chris Lilley leads a large segment of the Australian media follow, especially when he’s disappearing up his own backside. Setting a new benchmark in creeping us the fuck out is this particular story: hands up everyone who never wants to see the word “raunchy” used to describe Chris Lilley dressing up as a teenage girl ever again? Nobody’s putting their hands up? Oh, that’s right, you’re all too busy gouging out your own eyes to make sure you never have to see it again:

The first episode shows that Lilley is doing much more than using Ja’mie to revisit past glories.

Instead, Ja’mie is the key to unlocking the world of young women two years after Lilley shone a light on young men with Angry Boys.

“Shone a light on young men”? Yeah, that’s one way of putting it. “Put on blackface” would be another.

The tone is much lighter and less confronting than Angry Boys, which divided audiences, but is still full of razor sharp wit.

Well, not so much “divided audiences” as “lost a million viewers”. But who’s counting.

Ja’mie is trailed by a group of six prefects – Immy, Madison, Olivia, Morgan, Alex and Bell – that hang off her every word. She considers herself the boss of the whole school.

The students at Kelton Boys Grammar, down the road, are a magnet for Ja’mie’s attentions.

Call us when she starts making out with one of them.

The laughs start early on when Ja’mie performs a raunchy routine to Timomatic at a school assembly – and for the most part they don’t let up.

We do all realise by now that “for the most part” is television reviewer-code for “long, loooong stretches where nothing remotely funny happens”, right?

Ja’mie still rolls out non-stop bitchy comments about the other students, particularly the borders, and treats her family – mum Jhyll, dad Marcus and younger sister Courtney – like dirt.

So basically same shit, different day. And unless she’s taken to insulting the demarcation line between two sovereign nations, we’re going to assume Vickery means “boarders”.

We’re very low down on the television review totem pole, but even we’ve heard tell of the extremely impressive press kit the ABC have sent out to promote Ja’mie: Private School Girl. None of those cardboard booklets Upper Middle Bogan and It’s A Date got here: we’re talking a replica hardcover high school yearbook packed with glossy photos of a forty-something man dressed as a seventeen year-old schoolgirl.

It’s also packed with cool facts: did you know that Angry Boys has had over 1.4 million plays on iView? And the various DVD / blu-ray editions have sold over 100,000 copies? Oddly, no mention of the actual free-to-air ratings, but who cares about them? Oh wait, the ABC does, as they go on to mention that Angry Boys tripled Summer Heights High‘s ratings on BBC3.

We’ve also been told this press kit contains a preview of the first episode of Private School Girl. Unfortunately details are sketchy, but we have heard audiences can expect a lot of other girls being called lesbians and being told to “grow some tits”. Hilariously, Ja’mie and her girl gang use the word “Quiche” when something is cooler than cool, occasionally someone who’s not Chris Lilley gets some dialogue, and the general impression we were given was that this was a show just as much about Lilley getting to act out a fantasy of being a teenage girl as it was a comedy about a teenage girl. We can’t wait!

Seriously, at this stage we all know exactly the kind of show Lilley is going to deliver and the only question is whether it’s going to be creepy boring or just pointless boring. Having him focus on just one character (though rumours persist that others from his roster may appear later in the series) for six episodes means that with his firm insistence on covering the same tiny patch of comedy turf over and over – why yes, we hear there is an “inappropriately” sexy high school dance routine in the very first episode – things are going to develop some kind of depth through sheer repetition alone.

We don’t expect to laugh much at Private School Girl. But we’ll take horrified disgust over massive boredom any day of the week.