When GoggleBox Australia won Best Structured Reality Program at the TV Week Logies the other night, I wasn’t at all surprised. While my inner ABC snob would have voted – if I deigned to vote – for classy worthwhile factual shows like Muster Dogs or Old People’s Home for Teenagers, I have to admit that Gogglebox does what no other reality show does, and now in its 20th season it just keeps on doing it.
Warm, inclusive and, crucially, non competitive, Gogglebox has no judges, no stressful elimination rounds and no real point except for getting together to watch and gossip. As a viewer, there’s something uniquely relaxing about sitting on the couch, watching other people sit on their couches, all looking at the box and reacting to what’s on screen – the way we used to in the olden days before Netflix.
Gogglebox: saving us from ourselves
One good reason to check out Gogglebox is the way it saves you from watching a whole lot of other mostly terrible TV shows (FBoy Island Australia, I’m looking at you). At the same time, it allows to viewer to stay up to date and participate in that fun, social, watercooler conversation that’s so much rarer these days with the decline of appointment television.
Want to know why people are talking about ‘the black bathtub’ on The Block? Or Lisa McCune’s winning performance on Dancing with the Stars? Or ‘Gigi’ the adorable French lifeguard on Bondi Rescue? Gogglebox has you covered.
Produced by Endemol Shine and shown on Foxtel, Binge and Network Ten, Gogglebox Australia works from the format developed in Britain for Channel 4, where families, couples and groups of friends are filmed reacting to other TV shows that broadcast in the last seven days.
ScreenHub: Logie Awards – all the winners
Inclusive casting
The first episode of the 20th season of Gogglebox Australia premiered last week. The casting skews towards ‘average’ ocker-accented Aussies, who include a diversity in class, age, ethnicity and sexual orientation.
Gogglebox cast members returning for the 20th season include cricket-mad fans, The Delpechitra Family; happily grouchy married couple and grandparents Lee and Keith; best friends Anastasia and Faye, and best mates and larrikins, Adam and Symon. My favourites are mother and daughter Kerry and Izzy, along with the fast-growing baby Ruby; and newest additions, sisters Mia and Bree and their good friend Lainey, who love a good screech.
We see their snacks, their sofas, their semi-natural banter and their attempts at humour – because cracking jokes is always part of the agenda for these self-selecting couch potatoes who obviously love to ham it up for the camera.
This week’s episode of the perennial show covered a bunch of other enduring formatted TV shows, with an expected but perhaps unhealthy dose of other Ten and Foxtel Binge shows.
The Goggleboxers reacted to Season 3 of the boring-looking fugitive competition show Hunted (Ten), Season 2 of FBoy Island Australia (Binge), Season 21 of Dancing with the Stars (Seven), Season 20 of The Block (Nine), and Season 20 of Bondi Rescue (Ten). The sheer longevity of these shows’ formats is something to ponder, and perhaps bemoan. It’s a tough old world out there in broadcast television, and doing what has been done before – and what must be tuned into each season for currency – is one way of surviving the onslaught of streamed drama.
What will we do without David Attenborough?
Another perennial favourite with the Goggleboxers is David Attenborough’s nature documentaries, and this week they watched Secret World of Sound (Netflix). The longevity of the world’s favourite naturalist is always a subject of conversation, along with worry about what we’ll do when he’s gone.
‘What will we do without you, David?’ says one of the women, because someone has to say it every time.
Tune in for the well-edited nature sequences, the predictable gasps as the baby meerkat is almost but not quite scooped up by a bird of prey. The stunning close-ups of animal mating, nesting and birthing brings forth more oohs and ahhs, and gentle sexual innuendo.
It’s enough to make you consider our own strange nesting habits: our tendency as apes to sit around watching other apes, who are themselves watching … well, clownfish laying eggs and getting them fertilised externally in this instance.
Novelty is overrated
Good drama is dramatic, exciting, fresh. So too, new documentaries. The Goggleboxers dutifully watched Netflix doco Sprint, about athletes preparing for the Paris Olympics. But their hearts didn’t seem to be in it, even as they ogled and admired the muscled athletes and the tense moments of their wins and losses.
Sometimes we crave repetition. It’s another New Year’s Day, another batch of stupid tourists getting caught in Bondi’s rip and rescued by the ‘genuine Aussie heroes’.
As one of the Goggleboxers says at the close of this episode’s Bondi coverage: ‘The same every year. But I love it just as much.’
Gogglebox Australia – Season 20 is currently showing on Foxtel/Binge and on 10 and 10 Play.
