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An oddball comedy plays to a time-honoured national tradition
COOLUM beach, situated halfway between Noosa and Mooloolaba on Queensland's Sunshine Coast, is the unlikely setting for a new comedy commissioned for ABC2, starring showbiz legend Barry Crocker and rising comic actor Toby Truslove.
Created, directed, produced and written by Daley Pearson, who made the comedy feature film $quid, based on the Tropfest short of the same name, The Strange Calls is affecting in its low-key, oddly earnest way; not laugh out loud funny but endearingly funny. The Strange Calls started last week but because we were inundated by a number of new series, it slipped under First Watch's radar. It's worth attention from those of us who care about the local product and it's worthy of a round of applause for the innovative, underfunded ABC2.
Recently disgraced young city cop Toby Banks, played by the acerbic Truslove (Laid), arrives in Coolum, Queensland's surfie paradise, to begin a new life on the local police night duty desk. His office is a derelict caravan on the town's outskirts. His job is to answer the late phone calls from the disturbed, the afraid, the stoned and the plain loony; and just maybe from beyond Coolum's bright stars. They are known in the town as "the strange calls". Played against the great mound of Mount Coolum, an isolated volcanic dome, a massive boulder 208m in heightand roughly circular in outline, the comedy has a sly supernatural element, too. "Some say she's a strange magnet drawing strange things to the town," a local says of the mountain.
Abandoned by his boofhead colleagues -- disdainful and lazy to a uniform -- Banks is joined at night by the town's wide-eyed, eccentric gatekeeper, Gregor, played by the grizzled, white-bearded Crocker; Gregor believes his wife who left him 30 years ago was the victim of a giant squid attack.
The great entertainer, sprightly and still full of tricks, reprises something of his Bazza McKenzie shtick with lots of eye acting, those massive nervous hands and that outrageous sense of comic literalism. If a joke is to be had, Crocker will find it. But he also does the show's naturalistic character humour nicely. This emanates from Gregor's encyclopedic knowledge of the little beach...