IT’S refreshing to come across a TV program that gives viewers all they need to know in the title. Antiques Roadshow is, unsurprisingly, an antique roadshow.
The producers of The Farmer Wants A Wife will help him find one. And no surprises for guessing what Wife Swap, Please Marry My Boy and my personal favourite, Swamp People, are about.
On the surface, new ABC2 series Dumb, Drunk & Racist appears to be just as straightforward. Surely it’s either a wacky new sitcom – that or a behind-the-scenes expose of a football club.
Think again. The six-part factual series, fronted by outspoken Sydney journalist Joe Hildebrand (pictured) serves as something of a companion piece to last year’s brilliant Go Back to Where You Came From. In that three-part SBS documentary, a group of diverse Australians traced the steps of asylum-seekers via rickity boats, detention centres and heartbreaking stories from those who had lived them.
In Dumb, Drunk & Racist, Hildebrand has invited four Indians (a student, a newsreader, an educational trainer and a call centre worker) out here to introduce them to the ‘‘real’’ Australia – warts and all. It sounds inflammatory, and it is.
In the first episode, the four meet the artist behind a controversial inner-Sydney mural emblazoned with ‘‘Say no to burqas’’ (defaced no less than 64 times over the past 18 months). Next week one of the participants (sensitive law student Amer) is brought to tears watching footage of the 2005 Cronulla riots.
A lot of footage is both disturbing and confronting – including some of the captured abuse dished out to Mahima and her fellow call centre workers – yet Hildebrand manages to inject some humour and warmth to ensure it is not always grim.
Future episodes will explore the spate of attacks on Indian students, the way Australia treats its indigenous population and the relationship between Australian culture and alcohol. The statistics Hildebrand reels off at the start of the show are telling – according to a survey conducted by the ABC, almost 50 per cent of the Indian population believe Australians are of ‘‘average or below average’’ intelligence, and 40 per cent are too scared to travel here.
You can only hope that Hildebrand does expose his visitors to some light among the darkness, for what he’s shown so far is enough to have most of the show’s intended audience hanging their heads
in shame.
ABC2, Wednesday, 9.30pm
