The Age from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia • Page 40

Green Guide 8 Thursday 30 April 1987 ZL-i. PeupPfeiime ideas, iney tena urgetattirtoo Drave. some jy 1 4Mej. f- By PAMELA BONE DESPITE the name, members of The Generation are not degenerates. Nor are they drop-outs or D-grade students.

In fact, and although the show originated out of reviews they performed at Melbourne University, they are a little tired of it being referred to as "undergraduate After all, at least four of them have either struggled or sailed their way through final exams since the first series went to air. Santo Ciiauro and John Harrison both have completed law degrees, Robert Sitch has continued his final year of medicine and Magda Szubanski thinks she has completed Arts, although she still has nightmares in which her mother rings her up and tells her she has one more subject to sit for. The other members, Michael Veitch and Margaret Downey, are either still studying or have deferred. Of course all young university graduates-cum-talented comedians don't look the same. Nevertheless, interviewing the six members of The Generation all together along with supporting actors Sue Yardley, Tony Marton, Jane Turner and Tom Gleisner (who is also a script writer and editor) and their director and executive producer Kris Noble it was difficult to remember exactly who was whom.

They do all have that similar fresh-faced, intelligent look about them. But they promised that they would not be offended if I quoted one of them as saying something that another had said. "Did you all meet at university?" I asked. "Yes" and "No" they chorused back. "Actually.

I met Marg at tennis when I was 11," said Magda. (I remember Magda because she was sitting next to me.) "Do you have many arguments about your material?" I asked. A short silence, then a vehement "No, no, never," from, I think, Michael. "It hardly ever gets violent, anyway," someone else says. A new series of The Generation begins on the ABC tonight, after the unexpected (for them) success of the first series last year, which rated particularly well, so the team says, with "We attract a daggy audience and that basically because we're dags ourselves.

Also a lot of little kids watch us. When I was in Alice Springs recently, the only people who recognised me from the television series were eight-year-old kids," Michael said. All the six cast members, and most of the writers, did meet at some stage at Melbourne University, where they all acted with each other in various reviews going back to times I have to say, no, you can't do that" In the end it comes down to my personal view of public taste. Sometimes, the only way you can tell it's too bad is when it's already been done, and I have been slapped on the wrist a couple of times for the things I've let through. But the aim of our copyright and legal departments is to let us get to air and 99 percent of it does." The sketches reflect current, but not immediate issues the show has a longer shelf life and is less sharply political than, for example.

The Gillies Report. The subjects range from the trivial one hilarious segment about a supermarket clerk named Wayne searching for the price of a packet of Scotch-Brite will hit home to anyone who has ever waited in a supermarket queue to the serious a sketch in the first series, about Aborigines dying in police cells had the West Australian police very, very upset with them, Kris Noble says. But when in a recent sketch about police, John Harrison decided to ad lib in his role of a policeman by cutting open a Red Cross tin in the background, it was taken out not because It libelled the police but because it was "undercutting the point of the Noble says. Another sketch, which the team insists is based on no particular person, features "Gina Hard-faced Bitch" a right-wing political commentator, Another has a brief appearance by the ABCs managing-director David Hill, acting as a newsreader. One of their favorites, the philosophy sketch, was rejected as too obscure "maybe because it was all in One of their new sketches is about a rich couple who want to sponsor a Third World child but only one of the right class and type.

"We only send up people who deserve to be sent up we don't send up the underdogs because we're usually on their side," Magda says. Tom Gleisner did most of the writing (in-between sitting for his final university exams) but the ideas come from all the cast "You almost dont have to look for them," Magda says. At the end of this series, the team will have made 16 episodes and the consensus of opinion is that there will be no more, at least by this team. It is too great a consumer of time and energy, and there are too many competing Interests. The only way more episodes could be made would be.

with a different cast and different writers, they say. But the ideas will always be there. "There will always be a Wayne looking for a Scotch-Brite," says Magda. The members of The Generation', from the left: Santo Ciiauro, Robert Sitch, John Harrison, Michael Veitch, Margaret Downey and Magda Szubanski. EDy air in if mo teirsiQD(0)ini might be 45 different sketches.

The six episodes will be followed by some compilation shows of "the least worst" of all the programs. Although the first series was well received, people remember it as being better than it really was, Tom says. Sometimes they cringe looking at the tapes of their old shows. The new series is much faster, funnier and wittier "if got more nudity and more bum someone quips. The Generation does not in fact have nudity, at least in the samples I have seen.

It does not have the outrageous bad taste of The Young Ones or The Dingo Principle. The arbiter of taste is ultimately the executive producer, Kris Noble, but there is a general consensus among the cast to scrap a sketch that seems too "off "as long as it doesn't make us laugh too much," says Michael. "Sketch comedy has to be in bad taste to a certain extent," says Kris Noble. "And when 1982. Kris Noble then saw a group of them after they had to The Last Laugh Theatre Restaurant and decided to prepare a pilot for the ABC.

At this stage they lost one of their cast, Nick Bufalo, who accepted the part of the vet in A Ceumtry Practice, and gained two new members, Magda and Michael, who joined after the pilot was made. They have "lived in each others' pockets" for years, without ever really falling out, they see each other socially, and two of them share a house "a purely sexual they say. There are only six episodes in the new series, and making them has taken a vast amount of time and energy, with meetings, rehearsals and actual filming at the ABC's studios at Rlpponlea. It takes an eight-hour day to produce about six minutes of onscreen time. The essence of the sketches is their brevity and In a 30-minute show there AMSTRAD HAS THE ANSWER COME IN FOR A SPECIAL DEAL PC 1512 Affordable IBM Compatibility PCW 8512 Affordable Word-Processor COMPUTERS tts fcssistss wistion Shop 13, 300 Toorak.Rd.

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