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Summer Heights High has struck a particular chord with students aged from eight to eighteen. It would work well in a number of classroom contexts, particularly middle and senior school English, Media Studies, Drama, SOSE (HSIE) and Values Education. It offers many accessible ways to explore (a) the construction of a television drama - showing the importance of narrative and character development; (b) the nature of satire and comedy - understanding how the best comedies offer something more than laughs; and (c) what the varied public and media responses to the series might tell us about society and representation. It offers scope for a number of speaking, listening, viewing and creative learning activities.
'As appalling and disturbing as they are sometimes, it's the naivety of these characters that always redeems them.'
- Laura Waters, co-producer of Summer Heights High
Introduction
CHRIS Lilley's comedy Summer Heights High is about life at a public secondary school over one term in 2007. It has been watched and enjoyed by an authence of 1 .5 million people on Wednesday nights on the ABC and seems to have struck a particular chord with school students, attracting fortyseven per cent of this authence.
The eight-part series has generated lots of talk about when close-to-the-bone comedy is too close. Newspaper letters pages, current affairs shows and online blogs have been buzzing. Summer Heights High is an acutely observed and often hilarious picture of school life, centred around three characters - all played by Lilley, the show's creator and writer. The program has attracted its fair share of controversy, particularly when the school musical was revealed to be about a girl who'd died of an ecstasy overdose. It was taken to be poking fun at a real-life overdose tragedy. While the ecstasy overdose situation in Summer Heights High did inadvertently have parallels with real events (the series was completed well before the tragic overdose death in real life), other scenes deliberately and accurately reflect people in schools. The recognition factor is surely one of the reasons why the program has scored such consistently high ratings.
The series follows the lives of three characters: Jonah Takalua, a Year 8 Tongan student; Ja'mie, a Year 1 1 student spending a term on...