If your television career has gone to the dogs, never fear: you can always start your own podcast. This appears to be the logic embraced by Chris Lilley, the once sensationally popular Australian comedian best-known for chameleonic performances in sitcoms such as Summer Heights High and We Can Be Heroes.
Lilley would surely prefer it if his new podcast, Mr G’s Room, were a full-blown TV series. But things went awfully quiet in Lilley town following Netflix’s decision in 2020 to remove four of his shows from its library in response to a debate about his use of blackface, brownface and yellowface in Summer Heights High, Angry Boys, We Can be Heroes and Jonah from Tonga.
If that was a nail in the coffin, Mr G’s Room reveals Lilley is still inside the pine box, screaming to be heard. His high school drama teacher Greg Gregson, AKA Mr G, who first appeared in Summer Heights High in 2007, now gets his turn at a podcast. And much like Ja’mie King – another famous Lilley creation who also returned in podcast form a few years ago – Mr G feels like a zombie: neither alive nor dead.
The premise of the podcast is that Mr G, a delusional narcissist, has launched a “tell-all” show to expose how he was “edited to look bad” and “manipulated by the producers” of Summer Heights High (a show that, by the way, is almost 20 years old; does anybody still care?). Introducing himself as Australia’s leading “high school drama teacher slash entertainment industry professional” because ha ha, he’s delusional, Mr G promises to divulge “juicy behind-the-scenes goss” and ominously declares he’ll be “making it up as I go along”.
I tried to keep an open mind, I really did. But 13 or so minutes in, when Mr G began his acting “masterclass” – a terribly unfunny segment about how to put on an American accent – I could feel my cheeks burning in embarrassment as a voice inside me screamed: “Make it stop!”
There are various aural assaults, including an excruciating theme song (the lyrics: “Welcome to Mr G’s Room, G’s Room, G’s Room … ”), a track from Mr G’s production Ikea: The Musical and, in episode two, the equally intolerable There’s No Way it’s Love Dude. This is a song about a computer who falls in love with a man, which begins with a rhyme that, of course, holds its own against anything by TS Eliot or Bob Dylan: “I’m sure I turned you off, before I had my shower / Dad said if you’re on all night, he’ll disconnect the power.”
Comedically, Lilley is insulated. Mr G is supposed to be awful: a hack who believes he’s brilliant. But that hardly makes the podcast more enjoyable. Unlike in Lilley’s TV shows, there’s no other characters to encounter, and thus no reprieve. Summer Heights High has significant issues (including Jonah, a highly problematic Tongan character) – but at the time, at least Lilley’s shapeshifting performance really did feel like a dazzling magic trick rollercoastering in and out of skins, forming and reforming realities. But by the time 2019’s Lunatics arrived, most of us had had enough. Lilley gave the impression of never learning anything from his many controversies; even then, his shtick was looking more than a little old.
The $64,000 question is: why? Why did Lilley decide to make Mr G’s Room? It’s possible he just needs the money (episodes of Mr G’s Room are being released first to subscribers who chose to pay $4.99 a month). But while recovering from the two episodes that are available for free so far, a more charitable thought came to me. My mind recalled a New York Times profile of Gerald Murnane, which described the celebrated Australian author’s “Antipodean Archive” – essentially a cabinet drawer filled with invented details about a fictitious horse-racing game and the fictitious countries where it takes place. Murnane never told anybody about it, even his wife: it was an alternate history – an alternate world – just for him.
Perhaps this is what Lilley has spent the last few years doing – imagining his characters’ worlds and histories, letting them run wild in his mind and accumulating details. Maybe Mr G’s Room is simply a misjudged personal exercise by a person devoted to keeping his creations alive, even when everybody else has moved on. If this is true, perhaps, like Murnane, he should keep them to himself. Lilley was never great at killing his darlings, but his desire to keep his old characters alive through any means possible now feels weird and a little desperate.
