Poiples, I’ve got some devastating news to run up your flagpoles. Kath & Kim creators Gina Riley and Jane Turner, otherwise known as the foxiest ladies this side of Fountain Lakes, have revealed the ABC wanted to cancel the show just days before shooting began.
No, I’m not talking from your anus. Riley and Turner spilled the beans in a ‘yuge interview with The Age ahead of the premiere of Kath & Kim: Our Effluent Life, a two-part reunion which will mark the show’s twentieth anniversary.
As the story goes, some bloody ignoramuses at the ABC got cold feet before filming began in 2002. Maybe they were blinded by Kim’s unnatural beauty.
“It was all go until the script notes started coming in from the ABC head of comedy, which were just bizarre,” producer Rick McKenna said.
“‘Kim is too unlikable. Kel is implausible, no male would be that much of a nice guy. No one will believe Sharon would tolerate that relationship. Please don’t mention trams or the Nepean Highway because Sydney won’t like that.’
“And the cracker: ‘No one wants to see a mother and daughter argue for half an hour.’ Which is the bedrock of the show.”
Aay-Boi-Cee, I’ve got one word for you, you fewls: rude ‘tude. Drop the attitude! Kel Knight might have shocked us with his seaman’s revelations, but he’s a darn big hunk o’ spunk. And he makes a damn fine pork and dill, to boot.
Riley said the whole thing happened so quickly and it was bloody unfair.
“As I remember it, it was the Friday afternoon and we were going to pre-production the following Monday and we got a call saying, ‘It’s no longer the direction we want to go in’,” she said.
“We were like, ‘What? What does that mean?’ We were completely rocked, but we thought we’ve got a pretty watertight deal memo. And they were like, ‘We’re doing you a favour; you don’t want to do this to yourselves.’
“And then we went, ‘OK, we’ll go somewhere else.’ And they said, ‘Oh, no, you can’t take it anywhere else.’ So that was when we went, ‘You know what? This is very unjust. And we’re going to fight it’.”
Turner said the news was “hard to take” but she and Riley were “determined to make the show we had pitched”.
Aussie television producer Sandra Levy was appointed director of television at the ABC around the time all hell broke loose. She said one of the first things on her to-do list was to contact McKenna and sort it out toot sweet, which they did after going at it hammer and tong.
“It seemed to me that the ABC had made a commitment to it, and from what I could see it was going to be a terrific show,” she said.
“I was just trying to untangle what looked like a debacle, really. It was not bureaucracy at its best, to put it mildly.”
Power, power, power — they bloody love it!
Heterosexuals after they discover there is an LGBT character
— Meh (@Spilling_The_T) November 7, 2022
Kath & Kim: Our Effluent Life will air in two separate parts on November 20 and 21. Just like Melbourne, it’ll have it all, so you better get PiP action on the telly sorted.
Part one will be up to pussy’s bow with newly-filmed scenes, stacks of bloopers and never-before-seen moments from more than 1000 tapes of footage from Kath & Kim.
Part two will feature loads of friends and stars chewing your ear off as they explore all the show’s hidden nooks and crannies.
Apparently it took a bit of convincing to get the reunion off the ground.
“We wanted to celebrate the show at 20, and Jane and I knew that Jane and I talking as Jane and I is not going to do it any justice, sitting there pontificating about what everything means and blah, blah,” Riley said.
“That’s not how we roll. And the only way we thought we could do it was bringing us back together. And in the end, it was a really good decision because when you do a show, you never know what’s going to be the end, and then it sort of ends and you go, ‘Oh, well, that was that’.”
Unfortunately, once Kath & Kim: Our Effluent Life airs, the show will be over, O-V-A-H.
“We are so grateful that it still lives on and people are still watching it, but we can’t recreate that,” Riley said.
“That was a time and place, that is what it is. This is absolutely the end.
“It’s not coming back. That wig has been burned, I’m telling you. This is it.”
It’s deeply upsetting to hear Kath & Kim will soon throw its handbag in the river. All I know is it’s been the bloody bees knees, and I don’t know where my preposterous loife would be without it.
