Rebecca Reddin

Any send up has value. The more intense the continued lived experience, potentially the greater value of the send up, especially in terms of humour. Lack of knowledge as to how to navigate legal, medical, financial, personal rights, culture conflicts, isolation and family relationships, addiction, illiteracy, neighbours who violate other neighbour’s rights, architectural neglect and general government abuse feeds housing malaise…. Thus the intensity of living in subsidised housing and the need to “send it all up” because laughter is the best medicine… if we can look at our enemies (all of the above) and laugh at them, the less of a grip it will have on our lives. BUT in conveying the humour on air please leave out the language aberrations ie the swearing. We know it and are surrounded by it, but in a send up of the housing culture there needs to be a “bleeep” over every swear word BECAUSE it is dead boring to listen to it and because the existence of it in a tv show or in film is a barrier to listening to the show or film, and is a real turn off. The negativity of bad language blocks real listening, and viewers will become bored and switch over to something more interesting. You can communicate really funny stuff and send up a culture that really needs to laugh at itself much more accurately without the bad language, eg using bleeps, using emotion, using body language, using facial expression etc etc. Then we can feel ok about our kids watching the show. Remember, the “Italian Connection” was made without bad language. Bad language is a reflection of poor script writing and is a laziness to be creative in conveying the frustration or anger or whatever of the moment, and as I said before blocks the message and the humour. It just doesn’t work on air, if you want to make a good movie etc. it’s a turn off, and that’s exactly what most viewers will do, turn off to watch something else.