TV Review: Ja'mie - Private School Girl

Ja’mie, We Already Knew You

Eight years on, is our homegrown queen teen bitch still (to use her own parlance) Ja’miezing?

Ja’mie King was back in the day. She was fresh, funny and fantastic when she burst onto our screens in We Can Be Heroes in 2005 and still had it going on in the follow up Summer Heights High as the ultimate grotesque with alter ego, the uber talented Chris Lilley pulling the strings.

"There’s nothing really new in her school bag of tricks."

But take away the new pop culture references and abbreviated teen slang and it’s as if time has stood still in Ja’mie’s third outing Private School Girl.

She’s still a fan of humpy dance moves, still fires off abusive quips like a firecracker, still spoilt rotten, still a cradle snatcher, still politically incorrect, still delusional, still the ultimate grotesque.

There’s nothing really new in her school bag of tricks.

And the laughs have become scarce. They’re more like scoffs at just how horrible she’s become and just how low she’ll go. Last week she concocted the ‘A Boy In Need Is A Boy Indeed’ program, shamelessly parading around her ‘povo’ African project Kwami and her Christian values in a bid to win The Hilford Medal.

Twerk that Miley

Sure that was always the gag. Lilley’s characters’ foibles most often shine a light on society’s own prejudices. But with her own show, Ja’mie is pretty much in every scene and the act is starting to feel as stale as last week’s ‘quiche’. Borrowed that term too, Ja’mie.

It can’t be easy to find something new in a well established, well loved character even if you are the exceptionally talented Lilley, though Barry Humphries has managed to keep his Dame Edna Everage endearing for well over half a century. You can’t help thinking that after the mixed response to Lilley’s last project, the bold Angry Boys that he’s retreated to safer ground.

Miss King could well do with another fish-out-of water interlude a la Summer Heights High. Perhaps her mooted gap year in 'povo' Africa where she could really get those bangs dirty, or a comeuppance in the cut throat world of PR?