Kath & Kim mocked the suburbs, then sat down in the back yard

Let me tell you what happened to the house. Kath & Kim shot its exteriors at a place in Patterson Lakes, about 35 kilometres east of Melbourne, which the ABC rented for the entire run and fenced off at the canal so it would look more like a street. The real owners sold it in 2016 for $1,485,000. It was demolished in July 2022, four months before the show’s twentieth anniversary specials went to air.

I mention this because it is the only sentimental thing about Kath & Kim that anybody has ever done in public, and it was done by a bulldozer.

The commissioning is the first joke

Look, the origin story is the best part. Jane Turner and Gina Riley’s mother-and-daughter pair were not invented for the ABC. They drifted through Fast Forward in the early nineties, got a weekly segment on Big Girl’s Blouse in 1994 and 1995 (a show the ABC’s head of comedy, Geoff Portman, considered a failure and wanted to pull the pair from), and reached the ABC more or less because Sandra Levy, then head of television, would not let them die. The show was made by the drama department, which is the sort of administrative accident that sounds like a gag and was, honestly, the making of it. Drama makes things with sets and a straight face.

The first episode, “Sex”, went to air on 15 May 2002. The ABC eventually ran 24 episodes of about twenty-five minutes across three seasons, then a telemovie, then, after the contract ran out, a fourth season on Seven in 2007. A feature film, Kath & Kimderella, followed in 2012. The Americans had a go in 2008 and managed seventeen episodes. (This is a record of a kind.)

What the show is about, and what it is for

On paper the satire is easy. Kath Day-Knight (Turner) is a middle-aged woman in the suburb of Fountain Lakes, a fictional patch of Melbourne, who is getting married to Kel Knight (Glenn Robbins), a butcher. Her only child, Kim Craig (Riley), is a narcissist with a husband, Brett (Peter Rowsthorn), who she thinks of as a dud and a best friend, Sharon Strzelecki (Magda Szubanski), she thinks of as her second best. They go to Fountain Gate. They eat Jatz and Tim Tams. Everybody mispronounces everything and calls it class. They have, in the show’s own pun, gone from affluence to effluence.

It is also, to be fair, a precise piece of class observation. A working class that has acquired money and not yet acquired the manners, or the nerve, to be embarrassed by it. Kath’s clothes came from second-hand shops. Kim’s were current. That is most of the mother-daughter relationship in a wardrobe decision.

But the thing I keep coming back to is the final scene.

The back yard

Most episodes end the same way. Kath and Kim sit in Kath’s back yard and talk over whatever has just happened, and the credits roll over them. Sometimes the conversation finishes the story. Sometimes it is the only honest exchange either of them has had in twenty-five minutes.

It is a quiet, slightly absurd little scene (two women and a pair of chairs, one of them glossing over what she has just done) and it is where the sincerity lives. The jokes are made about the two of them. The scene is made for them. Everything before the back yard is the show laughing at them. The back yard is the show admitting it would rather be there.

I don’t want to oversell it. Kath & Kim is not a hidden drama. Kim is still awful, and the show knows she is. Brett still takes what he is given. The fourth series, which leaned on Sharon (she meets her half-sibling, wins $20,000 on Deal or No Deal, commits adultery with Brett, and finds love, marriage and divorce), was the sound of a show spending the last of what it had. Turner said in 2010 that they felt it was the end two years earlier and that the well was dry. To their credit, they stopped.

The part nobody could copy

What made the show travel, and what the American version could not do, is the voice. ‘Look at moi.’ ‘It’s noice, different and unusual.’ These are malapropisms and mispronunciations that sound like accents, and accents are about where you live. The Americans, from what I can gather, got the jokes and mislaid the suburb.

What they also lost, I suspect, is the back yard. It is easy to write a satire of people with bad taste. It is harder to end every episode by sitting down with them. That is the structure, and it is why a demolished rental in Patterson Lakes can still feel like a loss to people who never went near it.

The show did not love its characters because they were good. It loved them because it had been in the room, and it let them go on talking after the jokes had stopped.