Outrageous Fortune all in the family

New Zealand television's most outrageous family are back by popular demand.

Dad gives 18-year-old Pascalle the once-over.

"Our beautiful daughter," he says to her mother, "is a bloody two-bit slut."

It's episode one of the second season of Outrageous Fortune and another great one-liner has spilled from the Wolf's mouth.

You'll have to wait until Tuesday to hear more - and find out why the show was named New Zealand's best drama programme and series at the Screen Awards last week.

"It's a family drama," says writer James Griffin, when asked to explain the show's success. "It's irreverent and it's un-PC and it has a joy for life."

For Griffin, who has drummed up an impressive CV in New Zealand TV, this is the one show that has captured people's imaginations, and caused people he barely knows to ring him out of the blue in admiration. Outrageous Fortune has also found audiences in Australia, Britain and Ireland.

It could be because the show has found a natural balance between suburban drama and situation comedy.

Aside from the odd reference to deep-fried parts of the male anatomy, there are few forced punchlines. But Griffin suspects it's because the Wests, a family of petty crims whose capers include burglary, piracy and infidelity, are "dreadfully amoral".

By the end of the first series, dad Wolf had gone to jail; Pascalle's modelling career had veered into stripping; younger daughter Loretta's film hobby had turned to a black-market business, son Van had slept and stumbled his way into all kinds of strife; his twin, lawyer Jethro had got into trouble for masquerading as a Maori; and matriarch Cheryl, the one family member desperate to go straight, had started an affair with the cop who was trying to bring the family down.

Even Grandpa Ted was up to no good, hamming up his Alzheimer's.

They should have been the world's worst neighbours, and as viewers, we should have judged them.

But it was hard not to like the Wests. They had their own code of honour that meant they didn't resort to violence, and if someone in the family was in trouble, Clan West would attempt to get them out. And as Cheryl discovered when she took a job at the local supermarket, the real world was often as corrupt as theirs.

Even the house, with its tacky wallpaper, 70s furniture and dated facade became a character, or as Griffin puts it, "their turangawaewae".