Lethal habits

Matthew Newton (Terry Clark)and Bob Trimbole (Roy Billing). Photo / Supplied

Polite smalltalk from drug dealer Terry Clark is: "Rip me off and I'll shoot you in the head, cut your ears off and post them to your mother. Controversial Australian real-life crime drama Underbelly: The Mr Asia Story certainly ain't Shakespeare: "A beer mate, or do you want a woggy wine?" "The bloke's a saint or a poof." "Prove to me you're not just another Aussie wanker."

But if you can keep your ears on, sleaze was never such bloody fun. Not that that has made everyone a fan. Family groups across the Tasman have already protested that Underbelly is not "soft porn" but the real thing and that it idealises a criminal lifestyle. The drama, which debuts this Wednesday on TV3, starts innocuously with shady but colourful 70s characters at the racetrack eating meat pies, but the hedonistic charm and the underworld lifestyle look so sexy that you are almost seduced into thinking being a gangster is an attractive career choice. This moral ambiguity sets Underbelly - a huge hit in Australia - apart from crime dramas where the good guys and bad guys follow the cinematic formula.

"There is an oddly fawning quality to the portrayal of the crims' lifestyle which appears darkly glamorous, although the characters themselves are not likeable," I wrote of the first series. This subtlety was lost on some viewers. They failed to appreciate that being forced to identify with the low-life scum makes it far more powerful - uncomfortable, even - when we then want to condemn them. And the lines of good and evil are blurred. "We have always had good cops and bad cops but in the 1970s we had a helluva lot of bad cops."

Underbelly's first season, about the gang wars of Melbourne in the 1990s, never rated very well here. But the second outing, a prequel of sorts, deserves to get a bigger crowd and might be a smash since it deals with New Zealand's own Mr Asia, heroin dealer Terry Clark, played with menacing restraint by Matthew Newton. Newton has been embroiled in his own scandal. In 2007 he was charged with assaulting his former girlfriend but his conviction was overturned. Presumably none of this harmed his gangster cred. He sure pulls off steely control. "Have you ever tried it?" Mafia tough guy Bob Trimbole (Roy Billing) asks Clark as he looks at a shipment of heroin. To which Clark replies: "You think I'm dumb Bob? I control it - it doesn't control me."

Clark's girlfriend, Alison, is played by New Zealand's Anna Hutchison (Delphi on Shortland Street). This drama captures the tone of the era perfectly. Come to think of it, the 1970s gangster style - beige walkshorts, mutton chop sideboards, jacuzzis and handtooled leather phone covers - is enough to get anyone who fancies a life of crime back on the straight and narrow.

* Underbelly: The Mr Asia Story screens on TV3 Wednesday at 8.30pm.