Is There Room In The Current Cultural Climate For A TV Show Like 'Les Norton'?

Is there room in the current cultural climate for a brick shithouse of an Aussie bloke who won’t back down from a blue, wouldn’t say no to a root – he’s not payin’ for it, mind you - and would welcome an ice cold beer? Even if that bloke’s story takes place not in the here and now but that less enlightened era known as the 1980s?

If your answer is “Yeah, I guess”, accompanied by the slightest of shrugs, then ABC’s upcoming Les Norton – premiering Sunday 4 August – may be the show for you. Or at the very least, a show for you.

I have to admit, I was a little skeptical about this show’s chances for success when I first heard it was going into production, then slightly more skeptical when I saw its first trailer a couple of weeks back. And that was mainly because in the late '80s and early '90s we had a fair few paperbacks by the late Robert G Barrett lying around the Davis household, most of them jam-packed with the escapades of Barrett’s signature character, Les Norton.

Kicking off with 1985’s You Wouldn’t Be Dead For Quids, Norton rampaged his way through 20 books over the next couple of decades, and I must admit I probably stopped reading them after the first six or so, mainly because that’s when my Dad probably got jack of them and stopped buying them.

I mean, I was a young snob who wouldn’t be caught dead purchasing a Barrett book, not when there were all those highbrow Bret Easton Ellis novels to snap up (hey, I was a snob – I never said I was smart). But I could still recognise that while the Norton stories may have lacked sophistication, they more than compensated in straight-up storytelling momentum and nous. Barrett knew what his readership was after – a couple of good fights, the odd raunchy interlude, some ridiculously lurid Ocker wordplay, a sense of moral balance restored to the universe by way of Les Norton beating the tar out of some arsehole – and he gave it to them hard and fast.

Talking with my learned chum Dean about Barrett illustrated this well. He said that when he worked with truckies back in the day, the Les Norton books were massive with his co-workers, providing “fun, ideal escapes from the back-breaking drudgery of the work they did”.

But Dean also pointed out that the ABC circa 2019 might not be the most ideal delivery system for such a character’s saga. He thought the late, great John D Lamond, maker of some of Australia’s greatest drive-in exploitation material of the ‘70s and ‘80s (two words: Pacific Banana), should have been “tossed the keys” back in ’88 or so. And to some degree, I agree.

I try not to whine about political correctness or surplus sensitivity putting the kibosh on the way artists express themselves, mainly because I like to think there’s room for everyone to say and do their thing and anyone with any real conviction or courage will state their piece however they want to, consequences or backlash be damned. But it would be naïve to deny that platforms like the ABC and SBS tend to err more on the side of delicacy, and have been doing so to an increasing degree for some time. That’s not a bad thing necessarily. I think it’s done in good faith, and with an eye towards great representation and inclusivity.

But does it make the ABC the proper fit for a character like Les Norton, a chap who tends to slug and screw his way through a world with little regard for the social niceties? (On the page, by the way, Norton tends to be a decent bloke with no time for racism or sexism, although it reads more as good manners than woke politics). Based on the first couple of episodes of the show, I’d have to say close but no Winfield Blue.

(Speaking of which, watching the latest Drive-In Delirium Blu-ray – those collections of exploitation movie trailers from your friends at Umbrella Entertainment – I caught an ad I hadn’t seen since I was a kid: It was a young Paul Hogan pushing Winfield cigarettes. And he struck me as the ideal version of Les Norton – relaxed, slightly cheeky, comfortable in his masculinity.)

Here’s the gist of Les Norton: Musclebound, copper-topped Les (played by newcomer Alexander Bertrand, who certainly has the physique but also has a laid-back, unflappable charm that works a treat) blows into Sydney on the run from some trouble up north, looking to break into the rugby scene but finding himself working as a bouncer at the most happening after-hours club in Kings Cross, which leads to the occasional bit of knuckleman work for elegant but ruthless crime boss Price (David Wenham, doing a nice bit of cat-that-ate-the-cream villainy) and an entanglement with mad-as-a-meat-axe madam Doreen (Rebel Wilson, probably scarier in that Cats trailer, truth be told).

It’s probably just got the right level of outrageousness for regular ABC viewers – that is to say, it has a Guy Ritchie-ish type of knockabout, larrikin likeability but never goes quite far enough to make you laugh or gasp.