BEACHCOMBER - the newspaper column - the TV series

“How do they know which Woy is for ‘deep’ and which Woy is for ‘water’” Spike Miligan when told Woy Woy was the Darkinjung word for Deep Water.

The column – background/history

Beachcomber began life as a tiny column in Friday’s Central Coast lift-out of The Daily Telegraph. Each week, the column would canvass local issues of the day through the lens of a kind-hearted idiot called Beachcomber. The initial construct of the column was to connect the Central Coast with Spikefest (the annual festival celebrating the works of one-time Woy Woy resident, Spike Milligan).

Interestingly, Beachcomber has a rich comic pedigree. It began life as the world’s first surreal column in the UK Daily Express in the 1920s and still runs to this day making it the longest running and most successful column in the world. In 1924 the column was penned by seminal absurdist J.B. Morton (Penguin has published several collections of his columns). Morton’s part surreal, part satirical style directly influenced Spike Milligan - so much so that in 1969 Milligan wrote a little known BBC series dedicated to Morton’s characters called The World of Beachcomber. Subsequently Morton and Milligan influenced Peter Cook who influenced the Pythons who influenced Little Britain and so on. According to the BBC website Beachcomber was indirectly responsible for a great deal of the UK comedy we know today.

As the writer of Australia’s Beachcomber, comic author Dorian Mode’s style of humour is very much influenced by Milligan, Cook and the Pythons, so Beachcomber seemed the ideal moniker for a column about life on the Central Coast. It was also an apt metaphor for trawling through life’s flotsam and bringing to it new meaning.

Eventually Dorian’s Beachcomber column was bumped into the Sydney weekend papers where it drew an even bigger fan base.

Like the newspaper column, the sitcom is sure to find an even bigger audience.

Beachcomber television

On the set during filming of the pilot at the Davistown RSL

Beachcomber is a television series initially comprising eight 45min episodes. The low budget series will be shot on location entirely on the Central Coast and filmed in the snooker rooms of the local RSL club, various secluded beaches and our protagonist’s shantytown domicile: a seedy Woy Woy caravan park.

It is a complex and surreal narrative about an affable loafer and his pensioner neighbour Mary, a suburban psychic who reads teeth. The linear narrative follows their bizarre adventures, offering Australia a unique window into their government-assisted universe and fascinating friendship.

As Woy Woy is predominately a town of retirees, Beachcomber’s neighbour’s wisdom and his interaction with said retirees is a comedic motif throughout the series, placing under the microscope Australia’s inexorable shift from ‘King and Country’ to ‘me generation’. It is the debris from these colliding worlds that is the comic-rich raw materials for Beachcomber. The series also plays another key role: giving a voice to Australia’s under-classes.

Beachcomber people

Our protagonist is a likable fellow: someone who stumbles through life without ambition or drive, content to divine great truths through happenstance and good fellowship, which ultimately shapes his universe and those around him.

He is an underdog who appeals because he is so free of agendas. However he has one obsession in life: snooker. His snooker pals, who are equally disenfranchised, offer him unflinching comradeship and often rather bizarre counsel. They comprise: Snapper Dave (a cross-dressing ex-plumber and former local football star), Squid (a surfing space cadet obsessed with documentaries) and The Gull (a dodgy backyard mechanic with a penchant for showbusiness but no talent). Key antagonists are Norm (Beachcomber’s elderly snooker rival) and Malcolm (Beachcomber’s brother and local right-wing pollie). The brothers are anathema to one another and their tenuous relationship is a reoccurring plot point, with Malcolm’s hapless sibling forever turning up at inopportune times, driving his brother to distraction and therefore much of the comedy. Two Jewish brothers living in a homogenised Anglo community additionally enables the writer to explore the turbid cultural values of provincial Australia.

Another key comedic element is the random narrator Koori Bill. Bill is one of the last of the Darkinjung People – the indigenous people of the Central Coast. He offers viewers wry laconic observations to camera, commenting on the action and lamenting the fact that his people gave up their land to such asinine ferals. Bill is someone we’ve not seen on television before, subtly platforming indigenous sentiment via his dry observations.

Here's a sneak preview:

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