It's life outside the Oblong

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Down in the valley life is sick. In a sweet sort of way. The valley is where a bunch of mutants called The Oblongs live (TV2, 10.35pm).

They're just like any other family in the valley scheme of things. The valley is where toxic stuff ends up when rich people have got sick of playing around with industrial waste. Everyone is more, or less, a mutant around here.

Up on the hill live the "haves", the rich people who, when they flush their loos, flush their waste down into the bowels of the valley where the "have-nots" live. Up on the hill live the nightmarish Debbies, a bunch of blonde clone girls who dress in pink and twitter like budgies. The Debbie mantra is: "I'm beautiful and popular".

Bob Oblong, head of the Oblong family, works in a factory which belongs to one of the rich guys on the hill. Bob spends his days putting lids on jars of rat poison.

Bob is good at his job; he puts on the lids with his mouth because he's got no arms. Or legs. But he does have a sunny nature. To Bob the jar of rat poison is always half full.

When the conjoined twins, Biff and Chip, fight in the shower about whose turn it is to wash their extra buttock, Bob gives the boys a little pep talk.

"Personal hygiene isn't a chore, it's a privilege. It's what separates our great nation from places like France and the public library."

Bob's wife Pickles once lived on the hill. She married for love. Now her hair has fallen out and she's become a dipso. Her favourite perfume is eau de beer nuts. Pickles spends her time at a bar called the Rusty Bucket where the attractions are booze, rednecks and dwarf-throwing competitions. Rednecks attempt to pick up Pickles in this bar.

A particularly good pick-up line from a redneck is: "Hey, are you a hooker or just a slut?" Bob defends Pickles' honour. He's some gutsy guy, for a mutant. He takes on dwarfs.

Bob loves his family and they're hard to love. Youngest son Milo (he looks a bit like Max Media on a bad hangover day) has a head like a balloon, attention deficit disorder, and every other behavioural disorder known to freaks.

Little Beth looks relatively normal, if you manage to disregard the wormlike warty growth protruding from the top of her head.

Even the cat's a weirdo: it chainsmokes and last week coughed up what looked like a hair ball but turned out to be its lung - which it then played with.

Unfortunately for Bob, his family has had so many accidents that his boss tells him his medical insurance has run out.

So when Milo falls in love with an alien Debbie lookalike and starts getting beaten up by the rich teens from the hill, Bob has to give Milo the bad news: love across the tracks is not for uninsured deformed people like us.

The Oblongs had cult hit written all over it in the States even before Warner Brothers - in a failure of nerve - pulled the series halfway through its first season.

But as social satire The Oblongs is about as subtle as getting knocked down by a truck carrying toxic waste.

It's cute - if watching an alien chick pull out Milo's brain and lick it could be called cute - and The Oblongs are probably the nicest telly family since The Osbournes. But cutting edge, it ain't.