Any of the fuddiest of duddies who say kids’ TV is in a doldrums of creativity and talent should head over to CBBC these days.
Aside from a criminal lack of Gordon the Gopher, the channel has been on strong form of late, with a roster of drama and comedy including Wolfblood, Wizards vs Aliens, Harriet’s Army and Strange Hill High.
After viewing the first two episodes of CBBC’s new Australian import, Nowhere Boys looks to be another great addition.
Four disparate and incredibly broadly-drawn high school stereotypes are thrown together on a badly managed field-trip (one laid-back teacher to supervise 20 kids?) to the rainforest. They’re a quadrilateral of after-class clichés – moody rock-goth Felix, locker-room jock Jake, nerdy genius Andy, and hungry dude Sam – but the young actors playing them keep things from becoming cartoonish with entirely natural performances.
Eventually, because they’re each different and don’t get along, the four become lost and are forced to survive in the middle of nowhere overnight and outrun a weird storm. When they eventually get back to their home town the next day, they swiftly discover that they’re in an alternate reality where they never existed and no one has ever heard of them.
It’s a simple and terrific mystery made better for being executed at just the right pace. Nowhere Boys is engaging and puzzling: a Twilight Zone quality concept with a mystic core of Australia’s ancient dreamtime mythology running through it.
It’s an ingenious idea not just because of its story potential, but because being erased from the life you knew taps directly into the teenage anxiety of being simultaneously invisible to society and persecuted by it.
One of its great charms is that it feels old-fashioned. Or to put it better, more like the kids dramas you used to get decades back. It’s refreshingly un-obsessed with trends and more interested in what it is, and has always been, to be a teenager. None of the four boys in the first two episodes checks to see if their Facebook account still exists, or texts a mate a string of alarmed Emoji to verify their existence.
The whole thing feels like it could have been made decades ago, meaning that Nowhere Boys is reminiscent of one of those ‘80s or ‘90s CBBC or CITV dramas you’d watch just after the ice cream van had visited your street. By the end of Episode 1 (available right now on iPlayer) I had the urge for a Zap lolly.
The good news is that, ice cream or not, you can watch it with the knowledge it’s not a one-off. The show did so well down under with critics and kids that it’s been given a second season. On the strength of this start, it certainly deserves to do as well on this side of the Equator.
Episode 1 airs on Monday 1 September 2014 on CBBC.
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