Big-built redhead Les Norton, an ex-meat worker from Dirranbandi in south-west Queensland, fancies he “sticks out like dog’s balls” when he sees Asian surfers and suited Orthodox Jews while taking his first walk along Sydney’s Bondi beach. Les’s quizzical reactions to non-Anglo Australians feel out of time on television in 2019, even allowing for the fact the scene is set almost 35 years ago.
Naive Les – who only “speaks Australian” – is newly employed as a Kings Cross bouncer. Played by Alexander Bertrand, who has dyed his hair a “blood nut” red to meet the character’s specifications, Les soon finds himself trying to rescue three underage Thai sex slaves from a Surry Hills brothel named Classy As, but is blocked at the bordello doorway by its madam, Doreen Bognor, played by Rebel Wilson in a mussy blonde perm and koala windcheater. Doreen amusingly tells our flummoxed leading man the services for sale include a “penile colada” and a “platypus twist”.
Sex and crudity were often on the menu in the long series of Les Norton books, created by the late prolific pulp comedy fiction writer Robert G Barrett. The stories were replete with dated Anglo-Australian expressions of casual sexism and racism and have been revitalised yet rendered less offensive by the ABC for a modern audience while trying not to lose Les’s characteristic machismo.
Throughout this 10-part series set in 1985, a blokey, anonymous voice guides viewers with an ironic, modern-day narration, using the distance of years to filter what we are seeing. Perhaps this narrator is the ghost of Les’s idiosyncratic creator. Barrett grew up in Bondi and left school at 14, working a variety of jobs, including butchery. Fans of his knockabout writing included prison inmates, police officers and rugby league players who would swap his Norton novels in the locker room. When he died in 2012 in Terrigal on the New South Wales central coast, age 69, the pallbearers included bikies in their club denims.
There is a “nostalgic fondness” for the 1980s, says the series co-producer, John Edwards, who admits he “wasn’t a fan back in the day” of Barrett’s “extremely popular” books, which have required a “huge amount” of reinvention: “They weren’t art, and in fact lots of the characters written as very backward-looking males have become female characters, and they’ve been empowered. The charm of the voice has been maintained and the sketchier elements deleted.”
Some of those sketchier elements included making constant use of the N-word and other racial slurs. These have been ditched; likewise stereotyping of effeminate gay men as “red-hot poofs”.
The television version also avoids the direct misogyny of the books. In the first book for instance, You Wouldn’t Be Dead for Quids, published in 1984 – also the title of the first TV episode – Les contemplates the intentions of a character he has just met: “I wonder if she’s after a root. No, she’s just a cockteaser I reckon. Put a hand on her and she’d probably scream rape.”
“The attraction of the stories is that they’re unpretentious, and that’s a deeply Australian trait,” says the series creator, Morgan O’Neill. “Maybe their attraction now is that we’re a little in danger of becoming self-serious. I don’t know.”
O’Neill shares directorial duties with Jocelyn Moorhouse, David Caesar and Fadia Abboud. The script has added characters: Doreen and Dolores, both played by Rebel Wilson, and Les’s male flatmate Wozza is reworked as Lozza, played by Kate Box.
Several of the series’ remaining male characters were based on amalgams of real “colourful” Sydney identities. The most obvious among these is the illegal casino operator Price Galese, played by David Wenham, whose enemies end up “swimming about five miles off Sydney heads, with a couple of car batteries for swim flippers”. The character, who pays off police and politicians, was based partly on the late illegal Sydney casino operator Perce Galea.
Wenham says he read a biography about Galea in preparation and found it “jaw-dropping, really, when you realise he was allegedly paying the [then] premier of NSW $10,000 a week in brown paper bags”, he says. “It’s extraordinary.”
But Wenham found reading the Les Norton books troubling. “It was a bit of a chore, because although there’s great humour and they’re wonderful source material, there’s a whole heap of stuff that, to put it bluntly, is offensive these days. So the creators have done a pretty fine job taking the jewels out of the piece and letting the rest slide by.”
Alexander Bertrand, who plays Les, says he’s basing his characterisation on an ocker Queenslander he met while shooting a beer commercial last year. He says the show has an “outrageous, heightened reality” and “everything that was wrong with the books is what Les questions in the television series ... The new-age Les is definitely a lot more earnest.”
There are, however, still punch-ups, that Les would call “Balmain folk dancing up and down someone’s rib cage” or a “Woolloomooloo upper-cut to the balls”. People still go missing and end up in concrete footings.
Hunter Page-Lochard is basing his character, the boxer Billy Dunne, on the swagger of African-American boxer Sugar Ray Leonard. Billy is specified as an Indigenous character, but Page-Lochard emphasises: “I get to be a larrikin; I get to be an Aussie. It’s not so much Indigenous. I get to be Billy.”
“Bob Barrett was an equal opportunity shit-stirrer,” says O’Neill, who argues the author’s work personified the Australian notion of larrikinism. “In the books he has a crack at everyone: white guys, black guys, gay, straight, fat, skinny, left, right, men, women. But it’s all done with a sense of kindness, if that makes sense.
“There are parts where you go, ‘Whoa, thank god we’ve moved on from there.’ But that’s part of the thrill of making television in 2019 from books set in 1985. We can subtly comment upon how far we’ve come, in so many good ways.”
• Les Norton premieres on ABC TV at 8.30pm on Sunday 4 August
• This article was amended on 5 August to include David Caesar in the directorial credits
