More culture than a penicillin factory

 

Being, by his own admission, Australia's answer to Stephen Fry, David Attenborough and Sir Trevor McDonald, Sir Les Patterson is Australia’s finest diplomat, diversity watchdog and cultural icon, dropping the occasional double innuendo.

He's a stickler for political correctness and openly heterosexual and doesn't care who knows it. As for some courageous folk who claim that they were born in the body of the wrong sex, Les Patterson has this to say: "I've been there, guys. I know. I need to get into the body of the opposite sex on a regular basis."

At eighty-eight years of age, he's outlived most of his more athletic contemporaries who jogged, golfed and squashed themselves into coronary occlusion. He was born with a priceless gift, the ability to laugh at the misfortunes of others, and has more culture than a penicillin factory.

 

Overweight, middle-aged, full-time alcoholic and lifelong politician Sir Les Patterson (Barry Humphries), "former cultural attaché to the Court of St. James" and the "Henry Kissinger of the Antipodes", represents Australia at the UN where his drunken, baked bean-fuelled fart literally incinerates an Arab ambassador. Patterson is reassigned to the Middle East so he can be tortured to death by the ruler of Abu Nivea, a rich US proxy Gulf state, thus ensuring the previously agreed one billion petrodollar loan to Australia. Patterson's arrival triggers a long-planned coup d'etat by the Supreme Commander of the armed forces, and his life is spared. At an illegal backroom tavern bar, Patterson meets a similarly dishevelled and booze-soaked bioweapons scientist who has developed a horrific viral pathogen for the KGB, along with the antidote. Soviet intelligence plans to distribute the pathogen to the Pentagon and other key government and military locations via infected toilet seats and ultimately paralyse the West. Patterson, though far too inebriated and incompetent to fully understand anything happening around him, teams up with Dame Edna Everage, international megastar and top CIA operative (also played by Humphries), to save the world.

 

For all my overseas readers who want to imbibe more of that Australian culture, I suggest watching the (un-)forgettable "Les Patterson Saves the World", included by Australian film critic Michael Adams on his list of the worst-ever Australian films. David Stratton wrote in 1990, "The gala opening was an embarrassing occasion, and it is still rumoured in the industry today that the Federal Treasurer Paul Keating, who attended, was so angry that he decide to end rorts in the film industry."

Enjoy - or not!

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P.S. Couldn't get enough of it? For more, click here.