Caffeinated Clint
Who can forget sitting around the telly at 7:30 to watch “Hey Dad”? Now, who longs to forget that they spent so many hours logging off on such locally-produced nonsense?
Martin Hughes, Julie McGregor, Christopher Truswell, Paul Smith, Simone Buchanan, Sara Monahan
Who can forget sitting around the telly at 7:30 to watch “Hey Dad”? Now, who longs to forget that they spent so many hours logging off on such locally-produced nonsense?
“Hey Dad” was Australia’s “Full House” – actually, it was quite popular in Germany too – the sitcom you believed was funny. When it wasn’t. (It also lasted near as long as the chunky-blend-vomit that was Mary Kate & Ashley Olsen’s big break. And yes, it was our entire fault. We kept watching it – even after Nudge packed his bags (which, if anything, should’ve been the indication that the polish had worn from the turd)).
The tacky HSV7 sitcom centred on the long-suffering Martin Kelly (Robert Hughes), a successful architect in Sydney bringing up his three children – and their dropkick friend, Nudge – alone while working from home. Adding to the “madness” was Kelly’s dim-witted assistant, Betty (Julie White), a woman who’d forget to pack her ‘brain’ when she moved from Walgett to the big smoke.
Most episodes usually centred on Kelly battling with the numbskull Betty, or Nudge eating the family out of house and home. And yeah, at times there were some rather funny moments (the early days of the sitcom showed evidence of on-hand scriptwriters) to be hand – usually thanks to Chris Truswell’s dorky drop-in.
Looking back on it now though, it’s pretty clear just how ‘bad’ this show was. Either we’ve been spoilt by such better-written much-funnier sitcoms since, or there was just plain-and-simple nothing else on TV at the moment, but it’s a mystery why we all tuned in each and every week (I understand why we tuned in to see the ABC’s “Mother & Son”, that was great, but this?).
This “Best Of” DVD features a dozen or so episodes from the show’s early days. Some of it’s funny… but most if it is well, pretty damn lame.
Nice trip down memory lane, all the same.
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Reviewer : Clint Morris
