Sunday, July 09, 2023

My Review of Queen Of Oz (2023, BBC1 series)

 


Written by Catherine Tate And Jeff Gutheim And Zoe Norton Lodge And Aschlin Ditta
Directed by Christiaan Van Vuuren

Georgiana (to her staff): "I hate Australia."

In a post Doctor Who (and pre return for the 60th anniversary specials) world, Catherine Tate has definitely leaned more into her comedy bread and butter with often mixed results. For every regular role in the final few seasons of the US version of The Office, there has been less successful choices.

Namely the overextension of her foul mouthed Nan character in an unsuccessful box office attempt and of course, the very short lived mockumentary show, Hard Cell. That show belonged to the early 2000s and Netflix were quick enough to bin it after one series. 

Comedy has become something of a different landscape in the last few years and much as I do enjoy Catherine Tate, her comedy has not evolved with the times. That's something that's all too clear with this six part series, recently released on BBC iPlayer and barely scraping by on BBC1 every Friday until July 21st. The trailer alone did not make this an enticing sell.

However I was bored, at a loose end and decided to give it a go and funnily enough, while there are a lot of flaws with this show, it's a bit of a step up from Tate's previous efforts. Saying that though, the premise is something else, isn't it?

Basically we have Tate, playing Princess Georgiana or Georgie as she's largely known as throughout the series. Anyways, Georgie's a royal fuck up, constantly providing a blitz of embarrassment to her family. Their solution? Send her to Australia and make her their Queen, something which Georgie wasn't remotely pleased about.

Aided by a dim witted relative/Lady in Waiting named Annabel (Niky Wardley), Private Secretary Bernard (Robert Coleby), Georgie finds herself having to be responsible, attending weekly meetings with the Aussie PM Rebecca (Rachel Gordon) and of course, the task of getting married to avoid being cut off altogether by her family. We did get two episodes where Georgie's rivalry with her perfect brother, Prince Frederick (Daniel Lapaine) was on full display.

In the case of marriage, Georgie did somewhat make it to the aisle with a philanthropist named Teddy (Rodger Corser) while the show largely hinted at a mutual attraction between George and her bodyguard Marc (Rob Collins), one of the few people that she allowed herself to be kinder towards. The marriage didn't exactly go to plan and that ending certainly felt like bait for a second series.

Despite some massive logic gaps with the general premise, Tate to her credit does give one of her better recent performances and the casting for the staff compliment her well enough. I found the likes of Mathew (William McKenna), Zoe (Jenna Owen) and Weiwei (Anthony Brandon Wong) rather funny as they all had to deal with Georgie's general disregard for them and the rules as a whole. Still though, by the end of the series, Georgie had come to respect them in her own roundabout way. 

- Catherine Tate wrote this series with her real life partner, Jeff Gutheim but admitted that the original idea was for Canada instead of Australia.
- Good few cameos in here from the likes of Carol Vorderman, Greg James, Zoe Ball, Patrick Kielty, Amanda Keller and Brendan Jones to name a few. 
- Standout music: Nice use of Olivia Newton-John's Physical in the fifth episode.
- Chronology: Very much the present day, though there was a six month gap between the third and fourth episodes.

Queen Of Oz certainly feels like a mixed bag of a series. It's a bit better than the trailers led it to be but it's not something that has clearly caught on, given it's meagre ratings. I'll be shocked if it gets a second series but to her credit, Catherine Tate does manage to cut a fine line with the character of Georgiana. It's not a must see but neither does it feel like a time waster either.

Rating: 6 out of 10

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