March 1, 2007.

Children's comedy Mortified - recipient of many awards - is in a class of its own, writes Michael Dwyer.
MY DAD sang too loud at mass. There, it's out. He did have a fabulous, warm, booming tenor voice, and the parish ladies would lavish compliments as we made our agonisingly slow escape past the prickle bushes every Sunday.
But me, I was mortified simply to be noticed, to stand out from the crowd at that insecure age when a fleeting moment of conspicuousness was only barely removed from your full-blown naked-at-assembly nightmare.
This apparently universal rite of parental humiliation is the cornerstone of Mortified.
It's a children's series aimed at the permanently embarrassed prepubescent market, but its sitcom format, snappy comic dialogue and cartoonish pace and devices make it a guilty pleasure for adults who happen to tidy the living room between 4 and 4.30pm on Wednesdays.
The key to its broad appeal is creator Angela Webber's dual perspective as a mother very much in touch with her squirming inner-child. She says the idea first occurred to her when she spontaneously leapt to her feet to dance with her horrified 10-year-old daughter in 2002.
"It wasn't just another idea," says producer Phillip Bowman, who began developing the series with Webber that year.
"There was a very strong voice evident in the first treatment she gave me, which only ran to a page and a half. I knew in many ways that what I was buying was Angela's childhood, and also her adulthood as a parent with her own daughters. Really, it was what every producer is always looking for, which is a take on life."
This vivid first-person focus is crystallised in the narration of 11-year-old Taylor Fry (Marny Kennedy). She reveals her aspirations and anxieties to camera, the latter usually beginning with her immediate family. Her father is a local men's wear battler known as the Underpant King; her mother an intense New Age throwback; her sister Layla a glamour-obsessed boy-magnet.
With her acute consciousness of the combined pressures of school academia and popularity, the sometimes questionable support of best friend Hector and the impossible perfection of her next-door neighbour, Brittany, Taylor effectively mines her own seam of comic-drama.
"Taylor speaking directly to camera was really important," says Bowman, who admits that Malcolm in the Middle was an early reference point. "It gives you direct access to her inner world and how she feels about it. Her true feelings about any situation we could use, as and when required, as a way of exposition. It's also a very big comic tool."
A good example is when Taylor gives a bored, shorthand commentary over breakfast as her mother and sister have a silent but ferocious argument over her shoulder: "First, the helicopter arms . . . followed by the forehead smack . . . yelling over each other . . . pleading . . . memory loss . . . finally, the door slam. No surprises," she sighs.
Direct access to Taylor's imagination also brings a heightened realism to proceedings: talking animals and dramatised daydream sequences are standard. When a CGI-assisted mouse confides he's a reincarnated pacifist named Mahatma, he becomes a secret moral accomplice in Taylor's plan to outfox the pest exterminator.
Young Melbourne actor Marny Kennedy shoulders her responsibility with significant aplomb, especially considering the intense five-days-per-episode shooting schedule on location on the Gold Coast, with breaks for on-set tutoring. She won the AFI Young Actor Award for her pains in November.
"I knew it was a big ask," Bowman says. "One little girl on screen in almost every scene is atypical of kids' series. Blue Water High, Saddle Club - they're terrific, but they tend to have an ensemble cast. So I saw this as a potential problem, but it became the strength because she is such a little star."
The adult talent is also pretty conspicuous, on screen and off. For early script development, Bowman employed feature film writer Paul Leadon, now an executive producer at Channel Ten. A more visible trump card is veteran director Pino Amenta (The Sullivans, Flying Doctors, All Saints), whose striking touch earned Mortified another nomination at last year's AFIs.
Such industry accolades are piling up. Mortified won first prize in the Live Action section at the Chicago International Children's Film Festival in November, and days before the second series premiered on Channel Nine in February, it won two New York Festivals Television Programming and Promotion Awards, including the Grand Award for Best Youth Program out of 29 countries.
Co-production deals with Disney and the BBC have helped ease the series into Italy, Canada, Ireland, Sweden, the UK and numerous networks through Asia and the Middle East. "It's selling well," Bowman says.
That's partly due, one suspects, to the highly unlikely exoticism of the humble Fry household. If there's a significant criticism to be made of the otherwise realistic reflection of the travails of the Aussie everykid, it's in the family's outrageously privileged beachfront real estate. For all the admirable values Mortified espouses, this undertow of unattainable aspiration must surely jar with the average, struggling suburban mortgagee.
"That's an interesting observation and one we were hoping you wouldn't make," Bowman says with a chuckle. "OK, look, you might have noticed the house is pretty shabby? The back story we had was that they were left the house by a grandparent. They don't have any disposable income. They do struggle with their rates and taxes. We did hope people didn't read the wrong message.
"When you're making a series in Australia, you don't want kangaroos hopping down Collins Street, but you do want to show the best of what we've got, and I think we did that."
Given the essential transience of its cast and target audience, however, no amount of international attention can guarantee an open-ended run for Mortified. Twenty-six episodes are in the can so far but, perhaps mercifully, prepubescent angst is a finite commodity.
"We do have a little girl who's nearing puberty and so going to change quite dramatically," Bowman says. "If we move forward reasonably quickly we can manage that, but two years down the track, if we were still shooting, we might have a problem. But we could still be Mortified. We could still find 26 more good reasons to be mortified by mum and dad at 14, believe me."

Source: The Age