Bligh

Ted Emery who seems to have thrived on tasteless, puerile and unfunny TV comedy, really directed a stinker with this one. As Executive Producer and script contributor, along with Steve Vizard, he can't blame anyone.

"Absharp" is right, they didn't screen all twenty five episodes due to "lack of public interest." The idea of mocking the life of William Bligh's governorship in NSW in the early eighteen hundreds MIGHT have seemed a good idea at the time. The reality was something less.

Personally, I didn't like THE CRAIC either. His latest project for 2002 (his second feature film), is THE HONORABLE WALLY NORMAN - about a meat worker who gets elected to Government by accident! Puh'lease!!!

Never have I been more ashamed of being Australian than when I look at this utter, utter garbage they allowed on television.

Do you realize that foreign business men, women and diplomats who came to Australia and turned on the television at night in their hotel rooms between business meetings were confronted with such rubbish? Does it not embarrass the rest of us as a nation that this is the dribble we have to offer on a professional level? I mean, this is not cable TV is it. It boggles the mind that is the sort of standard that Australian television sunk to. No wonder it only lasted one season.

We may not pay or budget as much as American television, but surely we could of come up with something better than this??

The only purpose this nonsense served was to validate the stereotype that Australians are mindless beer swilling idiots. No matter how far Australians go as a nation, we can always look back on this and hang our collective heads in shame.

May God himself have mercy upon us.

An oddity of Australian TV that is best left in merciful obscurity. Released on Ch-7 in 1992, this was a pale shadow of the BBC's superb Black-Adder series, a show that Bligh was desperately trying to emulate by choosing a historical setting, in this case Colonial New South Wales in the early 1800s.

25 episodes were filmed (if the rumours are true) but only 13 went to air. Even one of the main cast, Michael Veitch, has recently admitted that he knew the show was a stinker even whilst working on it. In his book 'Flak', Veitch remembered being hurriedly dispatched by Ch-7 on a promotion tour of Australia's state capitals, desperately trying to flog the show before word-of-mouth spread of its awfulness (keep in mind this was back in 1992 in the pre-internet era).

The show was a disaster- a poorly written, over-acted mess with crass jokes and all the subtlety of a primary school Christmas play. Director Ted Emery has had a varied career (to put it politely) and a very prolific one. As some-one wrote recently, 'if you ever wondered why some much of Australian TV looks the same, its because most of it is directed and produced again and again by the same dozen people'.

He has scored some hits- Kath & Kim, The Micallef Program etc. But has had lots of misses. 'Let Loose Live'- his stinker from 2005 which was axed after only 2 episodes went to air- is the first to come to mind.

Trivia note- One episode of Bligh was written by Steve Vizard.

Despite a lot of competition, this must go down as the worst Australian sitcom - even worse than Bingles!

Although many talented people were on board, it never quite came together. It says that 25 episodes were made, but I doubt they were all ever screened.