Quit Laughing, I'm Grumpy

The Age

Thursday August 7, 2008

Larry Schwartz

Those certain-aged women are back, and Larry Schwartz cops the lot.

PRODUCER Judith Holder did her homework on Australia before embarking on a Grumpy Old Women stage show a few years ago. She knew there were similarities to Britain but wanted to be sure audiences would understand the humour on the "Cardiff to Canberra" tour.

So she substituted a local identity for a veteran British entertainer in a joke about the shock realisation that you no longer "scrub up OK".

"One day, you look at yourself in the mirror," British audiences had been told, "and you think, crikey, what's Jimmy Savile doing in the bathroom?".

Would Australians be familiar with Savile? "He's an appalling, older DJ and he's absolutely addled looking, really terrible," the producer says of the 81-year-old who once presented the BBC show Top of the Pops.

"Obviously we had to (have) somebody you would recognise, and we changed it to Jeannie Little. On the opening night in Sydney, we came to that line and there was a great guffaw in the audience because, of course, Jeannie Little was there. We didn't recognise her."

The Australian entertainer and TV personality "took it very well", Holder says.

Holder created the Grumpy Old Women TV series with comedian Jenny Eclair. They followed the successful Grumpy Old Men series, in which middle-aged men talk about some of things that irk them. It had taken its title from a 1993 movie starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau.

"I can't claim we invented it," Holder says. "But I suppose I was desperate to do it. Once I had persuaded Jenny, I knew that we'd have a funny story."

The third series screens on ABC TV from next week.

Holder says she is "astonished that no one (in Australia) has decided to buy the format".

"When Jenny and I went there, we both felt that it would really work well. Obviously you'd do it in a completely different way."

Some in the cast, notably Germaine Greer, are well-known to Australian viewers; others relatively little-known here, if at all.

There is a big age range in the cast, with some "old" women, including TV journalists Jane Moore and Fiona Phillips, still in their 40s. The oldest - "the head girl", Holder says - is actress Sheila Hancock, 75.

"She said, 'I can't believe I am the age I am'," Holder says of Hancock. "I am now an old woman and how could that be? I feel exactly the same way as I did when I was in my 20s."

Holder wonders if we ever accept the way we are perceived by others as we age. "Inside they probably feel as spicy, as edgy, as funny as they did," she says.

They? She turned 53 a few weeks ago. "I haven't reached that horrible tipping point which means I'm heading towards 60," she says. "So I can still say I'm just in my 50s."

She has taken over from Alison Steadman, who narrated the first two series. "I'm a complete control freak," she explains. "This is what happens when you get older. I feel I have to take over."

There are more scenes with her in a now familiar "grumpy old woman" role. "It's got bigger and bigger and bigger," Holder says of her increasing onscreen presence.

"In the first series that was me waxing my moustache and trying on bras and doing all sorts of stuff. I've used my husband and my mother and my home more and more and more."

Email, eBay, cleaners, receipts, recycling and naps are among the things to whinge about in the new series.

Holder says she'll generally come up with about 10 themes, then workshop them with Eclair, Hancock and others in the cast. It was difficult initially to interest women she approached in a role in a show with "grumpy" and "old" in the title but increasingly easy once it became successful. She has some new faces in mind but won't name them.

Others may be surprised at the way the phenomenon has evolved. There are now related books, DVDs, audio books and the producers have used the format in other shows.

Holder is continuing to collaborate with Eclair. "Even if it doesn't continue in its current form," she says, "we'll continue whatever happens. I think we have a sense of what makes people of a certain age laugh." Women, in particular, who have reached "the invisible years", and are still "quite wicked and quite mischievous and quite funny and up for it in a way that the image of a middle-aged woman doesn't really convey".

The self-styled grumps agonising over grey hair and sagging selves were once among the first to go on the pill and be sexually liberated.

"We're not going quietly into old age," Holder says.

Meanwhile, it's good to laugh at the dimming of the light. "Absolutely," Holder says. "Grumpy without laughing is just moaning."

The third series of Grumpy Old Women starts on Tuesday at 8pm on ABC1. Critic's View, page 42

© 2008 The Age

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