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The Magda carta

Magda Szubanski, netballing nerd of TV's Kath and Kim, tells Karl Quinn about her life's worthy purpose.

It's the closing session of the 1993 St Kilda Film Festival, and Magda Szubanski, local girl and rising star of TV comedy, takes the stage of the National Theatre. She's supposed to tell everyone what a brilliant selection of films it's been and how wonderful St Kilda is before announcing the awards. Instead, she harangues the film-makers in the audience about how pathetic they are for not creating roles for people like her.

Fast forward a decade, and the woman most of us know simply as Magda sticks by what she said that night. "Sometimes I feel like a generation of talent was squandered," says Szubanski, resplendent in a red and gold kaftan-style suit, her hair short, spiky and blonde, her famously large frame settled into an armchair. "We did the TV thing and then it kind of stopped. I'm not saying we're all homeless or living on the breadline. But in America, look at the people who have come out of Saturday Night Live, and the way they are then given roles and their careers go on. Whereas none of us really got picked out. There wasn't someone saying, 'Oh we'll take you and put you in this film'. Nothing. It just pretty much stopped."

Still, there's stopping and then there's stopping. Szubanski's downtime since her Fast Forward days has included the TV series Big Girl's Blouse, Something Stupid and Dogwoman, the two Babe films and the Crocodile Hunter movie, plus the odd bit of theatre. And starting next week on the ABC, she's back as Sharon, the netballing nerd in the second series of Kath and Kim.

Szubanski turned down a film with Richard Gere to make the series, written and produced by and starring her long-time collaborators Jane Turner (Kath) and Gina Riley (Kim). And what thanks does she get? A panning from critic Ross Warneke, that's what. "Kath & Kim has lost its pizazz," he wrote in the Green Guide after previewing the first two episodes. "What a disappointment it is."

Magda Szubanski: "I get sick of this attitude that only middle-class people can laugh at themselves."

Such a response is unlikely to faze any of the principals, though. Szubanski, Riley and Turner have been working together since Fast Forward days and are used to being hailed as comic geniuses one minute and duds the next. "There's a cycle of criticism that goes like this," Szubanski says. "It's terrible, it's derivative, it's having a go at the lower classes, it's not very well written and it's patchy—it's always patchy. But the audience don't care, they watch it in droves. So the critics go: 'Started off shaky, but it's starting to improve'; 'I didn't like it to begin with, but now I have to confess I quite like it'; then 'I love it'; then 'It's a classic'. Apply that rule of thumb and you'll see it happens all the time."

What the trio hadn't expected, though, was the snobbery charge the first series of Kath and Kim attracted. The middle-class creators were taking the mickey out of the lower classes, the critics claimed. What right did these university-educated women have to poke fun at people who shopped at Fountain Gate and urged each other to "look at moy, ployse"?

To Szubanski the attack smacked of hypocrisy. "Where do they think we come from, for God's sake? That suburban element, you can't do that unless you know it. Particularly those of us in the twittering classes, we're either from or not far from the lower-middle or upper-working classes. I get sick of this attitude that only middle-class people can laugh at themselves and their foibles. Working-class and lower-middle-class people love it, because for once they're seeing their world represented. Fountain Gate wanted it to be filmed out there. It's really only middle-class people who go into conniptions about that."

Magda Szubanski came to Australia when she was five. It took a few years more before Australia came to her.

Her mother, Margaret, is Scottish; her father, Zbigniew (known to his Australian friends as Peter), is a Pole, though Magda says he's also "the world's greatest Anglophile". He'd been in the Polish resistance during the war, was in a POW camp when the war ended, was released by the Russians, didn't like the look of them, bolted towards the Americans and eventually fetched up in Scotland, where he met Margaret. They had a daughter, Barbara. A couple of years later, they had a son, Chris. Eight years after that, Magda was born.

Zbigniew was a textile chemist, and work took the family first to England and then to Australia. They arrived in 1966, and ICI put the Szubanskis up in a house in Bayswater.

There were a lot of other immigrant families around, so working out what exactly it might mean to be Australian took some time. The defining moment for Szubanski came, she says, when she was about nine or 10. She was playing cricket with the kids next door, who were English. "We used to fight over who got to be England," she recalls. "The loser always got to be Australia. And I was very defiant this day when I came out and, before anyone had said anything, said 'I want to be the Australian team'."

But the sense of not quite fitting in has never left her. Shedding the way she spoke and developing a new voice is, she has said, the bedrock on which her ability to mimic was built. "I always did accents, always, and I can't stand it when people do bad accents, it drives me mad… I'm an absolute f---ing total accent Nazi. The worst one is bad Scottish accents. That's a hanging offence."

She never set out to be a comedian, though she always wanted to be funny. In part, it was how she and her mother bonded (at 79, she says, Margaret is still the funniest person in the family) and in part it was a response to the huge age gap between Magda and her siblings. "You're a little bit like an only child because by the time I was growing up my brother and sister had left home. I think I was put on set-and-forget… And I think that's possibly why the performer comes out, as a survival mechanism. It's like, 'I'm here'."

She fell into comedy at university. In 1983, she did the law revue; the following year, she was in the Melbourne Uni Revue Too Cool For Sandals alongside Michael Veitch and Tom Gleisner. "I'd never even seen a revue until I was in one," she says. "I thought they were a bit bourgeois, to be honest."

"Bourgeois" was the ultimate insult back then. Szubanski studied fine arts and philosophy—"I just copied what my friends were doing"—and was "quite a political lefty". In 1982, she travelled in south-east Asia. "And I was going 'British colonial, the white man, what have we done, nah nah nah', and got myself all in a knot."

She'd been raised a Catholic, and had well and truly lapsed. But its absence left a hole in her soul, which she sought, and continues to seek, to fill. "In some way you want a unifying system that explains everything, that is coherent, that answers all your questions," she says. "And after Catholicism, you need something else."

For a while, it was Marxism and the post-Marxist thinkers of French philosophy. Today, she says she is "a huge fan" of Christianity—but as a philosophy rather than a religion. "Turn the other cheek—the fact that someone could hit you, and then you'd turn the other cheek and let them hit the other cheek, which is what Gandhi did—I love that for its genius." She says she is spiritual rather than religious. She does a bit of meditation. "Really, I'm just a dirty old grab-bag, like most of us are these days, with bits from the East and bits from the West."

Ultimately, what she seeks is optimism. "I get very weary and cynical about people who are weary and cynical. I've never really been a nihilist. I like to think that the world is about something and we are here for a purpose."

Largely, she has found that purpose in the idea of community. She's lived in and around St Kilda since 1983, and feels deeply connected to the area. "Community is a very important thing; it's what keeps you sane," she says, before bemoaning the pastellising of the area. "It used to be a lot tougher living there. We used to play count the syringes when I lived just off Fitzroy Street. We had prostitutes coming into the back garden with their clients. One day I came out and there was a man around the side of the house with his pants around his ankles. I said, 'What the f--- are you doing?' And he went, pulling up his pants, 'Oh oh is John here?' Oh right, fine. I'll go and get him for you."

She accepts that things change, but she doesn't like the fact that money is so often the only motivator. "I'm cautious about going to auctions, because they like to pick out a celebrity; you feel they're going to put you in the prospectus. Once they turn community into a commodity, it makes you angry.

"Instinctively, you know it's a sane way to live, having some form of contact with your neighbours, a sense of connectedness. Having been relocated here at the age of five, having no ties, no connections—to me, that sense of connectedness, I love that."

These days, former lefty Magda Szubanski says she's getting in touch with her "inner right-winger". She's getting better with money, she claims, but frankly she had to. "I borrowed a book from Gina Riley about managing your money," she says, "and gave it back not realising that in it was an unopened cheque I hadn't even cashed."

She's improved a bit since then. She's even started to pay more attention to the stock market.

Still, the inner lefty hasn't disappeared entirely. She worries, she says, about the growing disparity between the haves and the have-nots. It's just not good for us. "I heard this great Taoist thing: When one group becomes too wealthy, it makes thieves of the rest."

The difference is she no longer feels she has any answers: the world today, as The Temptations once sang, is a great big ball of confusion. "For a while I think I used to feel that there had to be some sort of solution rather than the unending chaos. Now I think I've kind of eased up on myself. That sounds so ridiculous; I hate that sort of talk—'Oh how terrible for me, I had to sit there and think about it; oh how awful; how I suffered'—but I think it is that thing of trying to act local and think global."

Szubanski is single—or footloose and fancy free, as she likes to put it. She jokes that maybe this article could serve as a giant personals ad. She doesn't beat herself up over it, though. "If you are single there's no point in being wretched about it, you just have to enjoy it for what it is. But that doesn't mean I'll settle into singlehood and remain stuck there. I would hope not."

Children, though, might be off the agenda. In a way, it seems a shame—someone with such a strong sense of the joy of family, of the value of community, of the desirability of being connected, would surely make a great parent. But again, she isn't going to waste time crying over what might have been. Anyway, it might still be. "But I'd say the chances are getting a bit more slim as I get older," she observes. "I don't have this harrowing sense of rue about not having done it, because I think that ultimately it's about giving love and nurturing, and there are a lot of ways that can be expressed, not only through kids. I think there really is a small miracle when a kid is born, having been present at births. But everyone's life has a different purpose."

And what is yours? "Mine is to tell jokes. No more worthy purpose than that."

Really? "No. But making people laugh is worthwhile. Helping people to release those endorphins is a good thing. There is something in me that likes to make people happy. I've been like that since I was a kid. I like to make people laugh, and not in an ego way, I don't think it's about that. I just like that vibe."

By Karl Quinn
Picture: Jerry Galea
September 14, 2003
The Age