Here’s my only gripe with Queen of Oz: shouldn’t a comedy be funny?
And not just a little bit every now and then?
This six-parter features UK comic Catherine Tate having a right royal romp in arguably one of the most offensive characters she’s ever drawn; an obnoxious royal spare so devoid of class and sense of duty (hint: she makes Andrew look marketable) that the King and Queen of the UK and, yes, Australia (thanks Gough!) dispatch her Down Under as, yes, our very own Queen,
Perhaps that’s the reason why this project (ABC, iview) is not quite the gigglefest you’d expect from Tate, a damned fine actress as most top comediennes are – the storyline doesn’t make sense.
Australia under its new female prime minister is threatening to move to a republic and yet somehow the Royal Family thinks the solution to keeping the Commonwealth cobbled together is to let their repulsively arrogant and self-centred party-animal of a daughter loose on Australia?
That makes about as much sense as believing Australia’s real current head of state, the tampon replacing King Charles 3, would put our interests ahead of Great Britain’s if crunch came to crunch.
Another problem for this yarn is that the bit players while mildly interesting seem forever bound to be lost in the shadows of Tate’s monstrous hamming up at the petulant-princess turned monarch.
Niky Wardley as the new Queen’s far-from-bright lady-in-waiting Anabel grabs some brief attention with her inability to understand Oz in January is not winter and Robert Coleby passes muster as her urbane private secretary Bernard despite having pretty average material to play with. As does Jenna Owen as communications officer Zoe, William McKenna as a nervously naive assistant called Matthew and Anthony Brandon Wong as Weiwei Weng whose role I forget. Principle private secretary?
The only good thing to say about Queen of Oz is that it does begin to show some heart if not thigh-slapping laughs towards the end of episode one as Rob Collins as the Queen’s security guy Marc Kenarre seems the only person capable of understanding what makes Queen Georginana tick – or more crucially – permanently ticked off.
The other good news is that some of the folk who have binged the whole six episodes say it does improve from the first one. And bloody hell …. it would want to!
Don Gordon-Brown
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