Source : the age
Ground Up ★★
Screenwriters usually have to wait for real-world events to play out before they can apply their blowtorches, so kudos to Gary McCaffrie, the creator and writer of Ground Up, for being first to the punch. This scripted six-part ABC comedy is based on the impending arrival of the AFL’s 19th team, the Tasmania Devils, and the construction of a new stadium in Hobart. Given not a single player has been signed up nor a piece of sod turned, he’s at least a few years ahead of the events he’s satirising. Call it the parody-first approach to history.
How the richest sporting code in Australia elicited — or coerced, depending upon your viewpoint — the under-populated Apple Isle to field a team in the national competition on the condition that it build a stadium despite public opposition is a topic crying out for treatment.
In one corner, the AFL with its boardroom of industry captains, on the other the grassroots supporters who don’t give a rat’s about premium dining experiences when their team plays at home and would prefer public money be spent on housing and health.
In Ground Up, the former is represented by Hugh Shen (Sam Pang), a plodding AFL official handed a “poisoned chalice” of launching the Great Southern Football Club, and his toxic boss Alistair Penfold (Josh McConville), who sees Hugh as a threat to his leadership.
Simultaneously thwarting and aiding Hugh’s ambition is his second-in-command Destiny Pitt (Emma Harvie), a local public servant appointed by the government to keep the project on track. Sharp and attentive to the details that the unethical Hugh happily overlooks, both are keen to climb the greasy corporate pole.
With dimwit Jameson (Dylan Murphy) as a bumbling office gofer and his meddling, snotty mother and club president Catherine (Marg Downey) never far away, Ground Up leans into the conventions of the workplace comedy. There are misunderstandings and petty grievances as mismatched personalities are thrust together. There are awkward encounters in the tearoom and “hot mic” phone conversations. Freshly drafted footballers with bad hairdos and ridiculous names (McCaffrie was a writer on Shaun Micallef’s Mad As Hell) and unwitting sponsors bring easy, signposted gags.
Unfortunately, as a workplace comedy, Ground Up is flatfooted. It’s shot like a fly-on-the-wall mockumentary, and most of the withering dialogue is delivered with indifference.
As satire, Ground Up relies on low-hanging fruit: Big Sport that is run like a cut-throat corporation and cares not a jot for the public; self-serving public servants and elected officials who can be bought; footballers who are only a thin line of white powder or a shag away from scandal.
There’s at least two other Australian shows that have traversed similar territory and to which Ground Up will inevitably be compared. Across five seasons, Utopia revealed the clash between bureaucracy and the idealism of “nation building”. Further back, The Games, which like Ground Up took place within the confines of a bland office and a handful of characters, used cracking dialogue and only slightly exaggerated absurdity – a sprinting track that was two metres short – to ridicule Olympic Games officials and their sycophantic hanger-ons.
Compared to the protagonists of Utopia and The Games, Hugh and Destiny aren’t given much to work with here. Destiny fares better, but as Hugh says in an early scene in Ground Up, he was set up to fail. And that’s the role he largely plays here.
Ground Up is eager to please. It will probably find a following. But it doesn’t steer far from the headlines on which it is based. Its punchlines land exactly where you expect.
Ground Up premieres at 8.30pm on Sunday, June 7, on ABC and ABC iview.
