Chris Lilley may not be a household name, but he is well known to comedy connoisseurs. The Australian's work, which he writes, produces and appears in - in several roles, male and female, adult and teenager - is exceptional, and is by turns funny and challenging, offensive and poignant. You may have seen We Can Be Heroes, about teenage identical twins Daniel and Nathan (played by Lilley), and Summer Heights High, set in a secondary school where the egregious fool Mr G taught drama to the self-obsessed Ja’mie (both played by Lilley); now comes Angry Boys, about young men in modern society.
Lilley’s previous work, set in Australia, neatly captured Australian attitudes and obsessions and worked as wonderful pieces of social commentary while making us laugh out loud with frequent profanities and his knowingly cruel characterisations, but his latest series, which has been made in partnership with the American cable network HBO, widens its geographical setting and includes some American characters.
Angry Boys is again a mockumentary, in the style of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s The Office - although it’s doubtful that Gervais would dare to black up for a role (even as David Brent, a man with no social awareness whatsoever). But Lilley does so here, as the talentless and supremely deluded LA hip-hopper S.Mouse - “The name’s revolutionary cos it’s got punctuation in the middle of it” - who appears in episode two (the boys love his music). I was a little discomfited by the blacking up, as there are plenty of white rappers around to parody, but remembered I had the same intake of breath when I first saw Lilley as troubled Tongan teenager Jonah Takalua in Summer Heights High. It was only over the show’s duration that one saw the beautiful sensitivity of his portrayal about a boy who didn’t fit in at home or school, or indeed in Australia, and one has to take it on trust that there’s a purpose in Lilley using the same device here.
In last night’s opener we again met Daniel and Nathan (the latter described as “profoundly deaf and slightly retarded” by his brother), now 17 and residents of the rural outpost Dunt, where Daniel and his friends’ greatest entertainment involves doing “mainies” - skateboarding up and down the main street, cycling up and down the main street and, now, using his mum’s car, driving up and down the main street. One of the show’s delights is its clever editing; as Daniel explained, when his mum won’t let him borrow the car he and his friends do “walking mainies”, and the cutaway shot of four indolent youths walking without purpose along the main street neatly made the point about their vacuousness and how their lives were going nowhere.
We were also introduced to the twins’ grandmother, Gran (played by Lilley seemingly as an homage to warder “Vinegar Tits” Vera in the late, lamented Prisoner: Cell Block H), who works at the local juvenile detention facility. She suffers from her own, rather more dangerous delusions as she regards herself as being in loco parentis to the boys, making them wear superhero-themed pyjamas that she has stitched at the home she shares with her female “flatmate” and several guinea pigs. She is also foul-mouthed and an unreconstructed racist who divides exercise-yard football games into “lights” and darks”.
Not a lot happened in last night’s episode, but over the course of this 12-part series we’ll see Nathan go away to “deaf school”, the introduction of S.Mouse and a surfer dude whom the twins also venerate, and Lilley dragging up again as a Japanese mother. The laughs were there - although perhaps not in as much abundance as they were in Summer Heights High - but this promises to be another funny, dark and touching comedy by a supremely talented performer.
- Watch Angry Boys on BBC iPlayer
Find Chris Lilley on Amazon
Watch a clip from Summer Heights High
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