Helen Dallimore pleads guilty to the charge of stirring up antagonism against a cultural minority in the new Channel Nine series Here Come the Habibs. She has no shame about perpetuating an offensive stereotype in her portrayal of Olivia O'Neil, a spoiled WASP princess who objects when a Lebanese family moves in next door to her waterfront mansion.
"I think there's going to be some rich suburban matrons terribly offended by my performance," Dallimore says. "She's a terribly xenophobic, uptight, self-centred woman. Apart from that, she's lovely."
Dallimore looks forward to offending that matronly minority, because it means she's doing her job. It makes a nice change from playing the "good" witch Glinda in the musical Wicked on the London stage and the bubbly manicurist Paulette in Legally Blonde The Musical on the Melbourne stage.
"Everyone loves to play a villain – you get to say things you're never normally allowed to say," she says. "It's like the Shakespearean villains – they've got all the best lines. I should have some sort of disclaimer printed on a T-shirt: 'I am not Olivia!' "
Based on a sensationalist promo put out by Channel Nine, Here Come the Habibs has been accused of stereotyping Lebanese people. Dallimore hopes that suspicion will disappear when people see the show. The Lebanese are the heroes, she says, while her snobby villain is taught a lesson.
"Nine's intention was to say, 'Here's a new TV family and they're not your conventional TV family, they're Middle Eastern people, they're fish out of water'. Hopefully people will have a look and see it's more complex and satirical than perhaps the first promo suggested.
"It's ironic: people have complained so often that there aren't enough people of different cultural backgrounds on Australian commercial television, then when it happens, they say, 'You're culturally stereotyping them'. You can't win."
Rob Shehadie, one of the creators of Here Come the Habibs, says there was never a plan to make the show about "Anglos versus Lebs". He just wanted to make a "clean family comedy" that would appeal to the same diverse audiences that attend his stand-up comedy shows.
"I've seen all types of nationalities at my shows, and I've seen them all laugh," he says. "People are starved for comedy these days. We grew up in an era of Paul Hogan making fun of everybody – no one had any issues. I make fun of Lebanese, and of all other nationalities, but I don't do it in a degrading way. I touch on their childhood growing up in an ethnic family with lots of food, and that touches their emotions and they really enjoy it."
As a child he watched Acropolis Now, a slapstick sitcom about a Greek family, and after a brief career as a rugby league player wrote scripts for Fat Pizza, a slapstick sitcom about all sorts of immigrant groups.
"I remember our whole family would sit down together and watch Acropolis Now. It was a Greek show, we were of Lebanese background, but we would sit there and laugh because we could relate to it. In this day and age, people don't sit down as a family. A lot of multicultural parents don't even watch commercial television.
"If this was on SBS or ABC, everyone would be embracing it. When it goes to a major network, people are quick to knock. That's our style, I guess, in Australia now: to be a nation of knockers.
"People need to look at the most important thing here, which is that [co-creator] Tahir Bilgic and myself have created a lot of jobs, kept the work in Australia, and Channel Nine are supporting local talent and not buying shows from overseas.
"This whingeing is just bizarre. When the Habibs comes out, a lot of these guys will be silenced."
Here Come the Habibs starts on Tuesday, February 9, at 8.30pm on Channel Nine.
Wed, bed, dead
Amanda Ianna, the NSW Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages, has been previewing the episodes of the new ABC series Hatch, Match and Dispatch to make sure they are accurate. She has trouble retaining her objectivity.
"Watching it, I've been through every different emotion," she says. "I think it's beautiful. I've been able to laugh, cry, everything. I reviewed an episode last night and I had tears running down my face."
That's partly because she's seeing the lives of her colleagues on screen. During the four months the camera crew spent at the registry, Ianna's assistant Monika married her sweetheart Duane. That was filmed, and went into an episode.
"There are several funerals in the show as well," Ianna says. "We lost a staff member during the filming, and there will be an episode that's dedicated to him, because his wife works here. It was a really hard time for all of us."
Mostly the show is about the joyful moments of the customers of the registry. "There's almost 100,000 births every year, and we celebrate everybody's babies," she says. "We register about 42,000 marriages every year, and we perform about 4500 of them at the registry.
"There are certain things we have to say under the Marriage Act, but we try and personalise it to each couple as much as we can. We've got really lovely marriage rooms here in our city office. We've got a beautiful red wall in here that is a symbol of love and also a lucky colour for a lot of Asian cultures."
If ever the term "reality show" was appropriate, it's with Hatch, Match and Dispatch. All life is here.
Hatch, Match and Dispatch starts on Thursday, February 11, at 8pm on ABC.
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