I’m not
embarrassed to admit I’m quite a fan of the recent television series Puberty Blues. Perhaps for no other
reason than because it is so good, because it stands out from the crowd, head
and shoulders above the rest of the mediocrity on offer; because it is an
engrossing piece of Television.
Recently seen on Channel Ten, it is an
adaptation of the 1979 book by Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey. Written when they
were just shy of twenty, Puberty Blues
is a brutal and unsanitised portrait of seventies youth culture, a window onto
a despairingly misogynistic world where (young) women were something worse than
second-class citizens. In an episode of Australian Story
from 2002, Kathy Lette describes the boys she grew up with in Cronulla as
“[disproving] the
theory of evolution. They were kind of evolving into apes. It would have looked
much more natural if they squatted on their haunches and groomed each other.”
It shows, both in the book and the television series. As an example of the
vernacular of the time, especially in the surfing fraternity, the terms for sex
were “‘rooting’, ‘tooling’, ‘plugging’, ‘poking’, ‘stabbing’ and ‘meat
injecting’… And the terms for women were ‘bush pigs’ or ‘swamp hogs’; if you
were very good-looking you got called a ‘glamour maggot’.” But as brutal as the
book is in its depiction of the times and the attitudes towards women, it
almost seems to be a caricature, the briefest of sketches. Maybe I’m too old or
perhaps too cynical, but there is almost a lack of depth to the book which I
was surprised at, considering its status as a ‘classic’, an important part of
our cultural maturation. It focuses squarely on the (mis)adventures of the kids
– whose ages are described as being thirteen in the book, but in the film and
television series have been raised to sixteen – and everything life throws at
them, with barely a mention of their parents or the adults in their lives.
The television series however,
constructs the story as a set of two parallel narratives – that of the kids,
and that of their parents – mirroring and contrasting one with the other.
Produced by John
Edwards and Imogen Banks, the pair responsible for much of the critically
acclaimed television drama series’ of the early twenty-first century – The Secret Life of Us, Love My Way, Spirited, Tangle, Offspring – the series does not
flinch away from depicting the times as they were, complete with their
mannerisms, vocabulary, actions, and values systems, no matter how crude or
backward they seem to us now. If anything, it perhaps works to its advantage,
not to show us how far we’d like to think we have come, but to show us how far
we haven’t. (Full points are also awarded for reintroducing the word ‘moll’ to
the vernacular.) But the show belongs to the young cast who seem so uninhibited
and natural; there’s an unadorned charm and intrinsic honesty to their
performances, something that is definitely not acting so much as Being.