I discovered this weekend that the ABC – in their ongoing attempt to fill up their plethora of channels with anything they can haul out of the archives – have finally run out of episodes of Love Your Garden and George Clarke’s Amazing Spaces and resorted to rebroadcasting 90’s classic (for a certain definition of “classic”) Heartbreak High.
(I am slightly miffed at the absence of Love Your Garden as I have developed quite the crush on Katie Rushworth. There’s nothing quite like a woman who’s willing to get her hands dirty while pronouncing /a/ as /ʊ/…)
As a teen in the 90s I was presumably the target demographic for Heartbreak High, but I considered myself far too cultured to waste time watching it (I was actually nowhere near as cultured as I thought, I was just a contrarian douchebag). So prior to yesterday I’d never seen as much as a single episode. I did catch an episode yesterday however and good lord! It was easily the most awkwardly 90s thing that I have ever seen!
The episode started with a girl rapping in the schoolyard with all the other students gathered around clapping in time. I can categorically state that this is not something that ever actually happened in any Australian high school in the 90s ever (if you remember differently then you are hallucinating). Her rap was about how school sucks, and the teachers don’t like this, and so after a discussion in the staff room about how awful rap music is (naturally including a claim that it’s ‘not even music’) they ban rapping. This upsets the students to the point that they stage a sit-in to protest their right to rap. After some back and forward the teachers back down and the right to rap is restored. The episode ends with an impromptu rock concert, with serious “It’s a party Marge, it doesn’t have to make sense!” vibes, and – of course – rapping.
There was a B-plot involving a guy harassing a girl (the rapping girl? I can’t remember, the characters are all so interchangeable…) to go out with him, and then roping his mates in to harass her as well. These days that would be presented as a bad thing, but this is the 90s when people were stupid. In the end he wins her over by completely changing his personal style, which is just as terrible a lesson in the opposite direction. And the style he chooses – oh good lord!
I did try and take a screenshot of it from the ABC’s iView service, but they’ve cunningly set the screen to blank itself when any kind of capture is attempted, so I’ll need to use the old ‘photograph the monitor’ trick so beloved of the technologically inept. In the meantime simply imagine all the worst excesses of 90s male fashion distilled into one human being. Curly hair with a lock strategically dangling across the forehead, tinted hippy sunglasses, a waistcoat, black baggy pants, fabric that is as close to leopard print as you can get without actually being leopard print, the whole shebang. He looks like a goddamn clown! If anyone had turned up to my 90s high school wearing that, he would have been beaten to a pulp! I can say that with authority because – despite my status as a pathetic nerd – even I would have been lining up to deal out some justly deserved punishment.
Naturally the girl instantly falls for him – presumably because if a guy is desperate enough to dress up like a court jester to get your attention then he’ll do anything you ask.
So that’s Heartbreak High. Overall I don’t think contrarian, douchebag, teenage me missed very much by skipping it.
