![]() Like his eldest daughter, Mr King is deaf, dumb and blind to his fortunate position. In her school, there is a clear hierarchy boarders (hilariously dismissed as “vagatarians”) and Asians are losers and can be insulted and bullied at will. One lesson Ja’mie has learnt well is how to identify winners and losers, between schools, in gender politics, even in her own family. Tell your loser wife to stop bitching in my face. She even enlisted him in bullying her mother: Ja’mie was clear-eyed about who was the powerful member of her family and accordingly flirted (in an astonishingly creepy fashion) with the man who ruled the roost. Her father, however, was a different kettle of fish. Mrs King received nothing but insults and contempt from her daughter from the beginning of the program to the end.Īs she ineffectually tried to rein in the monster daughter she had created, Ja’mie carelessly flicked her mother (and younger sister) away as if they were flies. The relationship between Ja’mie and her parents was particularly revealing. “I hear it’s a very good school!” says the horrified private school mother, with a ghastly fake smile, as she reacts to the startling news that the perfectly reasonable looking woman she’s just met is actually a creature from another planet entirely – planet public.Īs a lifetime resident of that planet, it is - I have to admit - deeply satisfying to watch the hypocrisy and smugness of our critics called to account, particularly if you’ve ever had to put up with someone lecturing you about the better “values” inculcated by private schools.Īpart from what Private School Girl says about schools and the sense of entitlement that we are busy nurturing in many of our young, last night it also made some profound observations about how power and privilege in general are still distributed in our society. Most public school parents have probably found themselves either attacked or – more commonly – patronised. They are like our secret selves let loose in all their venal snobbery and self-aggrandising narcissism – and what a relief it is to see our hypocrisy run free. That’s the endearing part of both Everage and King, they say what they mean – which is often what most people think.īut unlike the rest of us, they feel absolutely no need to apologise for it. ![]() In Summer Heights High, Lilley’s most recent show featuring Ja'mie, her disdain for the public school she suddenly found herself in was refreshingly frank and honest. It is now simply accepted that if you are a good parent, particularly with aspirations to identify as part of an upper class, you will send your children to the most expensive fee charging school you can afford. As I have experienced personally, it has become an act of some courage for a relatively prosperous family to actually choose a public, comprehensive school for their children. Indeed, I recently ran a creative writing workshop in a school not a million metaphorical miles from Ja'mie’s fictional Hillford Girls Grammar School, and before I began the teacher who had organised it sighed deeply and asked if I could somehow disabuse the girls of the notion that they were all going to end up CEOs of major corporations one day.īecause, as Private School Girl makes abundantly clear, Australia is rapidly creating a class system via the mechanism most of the rest of the world has at least attempted to use to dismantle theirs - school education. ![]() Ja’mie accepts her privilege as nothing less than her right and her due as, I suspect, do most of the offspring of the well-to-do. I’m not sure I want to think too hard about what that means - except to say that the distance it creates between the performers and their characters probably helps them to see so acutely. It is interesting that both female characters are played by men. Ja'mie is who she is, and not only does she not apologise for it, she expects to receive nothing but applause. Clearly the granddaughter of Dame Edna, Ja’mie King has exactly the same blind self-satisfaction that makes both Aussie females so horrifying, hilarious and strangely admirable. The show’s writer, Chris Lilley, who also plays Ja'mie, has created a monster of privilege and ego in this character – a magnificent comic creation with just enough truth about her to make us squirm as we laugh. The new comedy series, which premiered last night on ABC1, fed all my prejudices and biases, unconscious or otherwise. I admit it I loved Ja'mie: Private School Girl. ![]()
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