NAKED CITY: KENTUCKY FRIED HISTORY

When the Nine Network’s Underbelly franchise ran out of modern day stories it had only one direction to go and that was backwards – back to the days of the Great Depression and the criminal milieu of Sydney’s roaring twenties.

It’s an era in Sydney that has been well documented of late with excellent exhibitions at the Justice & Police Museum,  publications like Peter Doyle’s City Of Shadows and Crooks Like Us and websites such as the NSW State Records. Prep yourself with this background and you are in for a shock, if not a giggle when confronted with Nine’s current rehash of this turbulent era – Underbelly Razor.

Certainly a bit of licence is on the cards with any interpretation of history and when Mental As Anything’s The Nips Are Getting Bigger (circa 1979) rang out in one of the opening scenes you knew it was game on. The pavlovian triggers of the whole Underbelly franchise had been subliminally implanted and dared you dash off to the dunny in case you missed the first gratuitous flash of naked mammaries.

Unlike Underbelly The Golden Mile, where a less than convincing cardboard cut-out of the Darlinghurst Road strip was recreated in a Lane Cove shopping centre, the producers of Razor at least had a few remaining historical locations to call upon – well chosen in a city where much of our history has been pulverised by the wreckers ball. However we couldn’t help ignore the mish mash of awkward accents on the part of the leading characters and the strangely revisionist dialogue to scout for a whole series of historical bloopers and inaccuracies.

Sure this is nit-picking but these days most historical re-enactments of the television variety strive for a genuine authenticity, essential to which is faithfully recreating the actual mood of the period. We weren’t around in the mid to late 1920s but from all the photographs and historical material available it was a bleak and poverty stricken time leading to the absolute squalor of the Great Depression. It was just this economic malaise that spurned hard boiled characters like the combatants Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh. In Underbelly Razor, Tilly looks like a glammed-up flapper out of some early Hollywood talkie and Kate Leigh nothing like the less-than-flattering mugshots that have survived her fearsome reputation.

Ah, what the heck! This is television circa 2011, and it’s all about keeping the franchise alive and bringing home another ratings winner, coupled with endless cross promotion right across the Nine Network. Do we really care about historical accuracy when we all know there’ll be a flash of salacious nudity every twenty minutes. And if the jazz band in the speakeasy is playing a ragtime version of a Cold Chisel song who are we to object?

Maybe Nine could even extend the insidious product placement that has characterised shows like Masterchef and The Block to include its latest crime rehash. Gillette and Schick would certainly come on board if the old style cut throat was replaced with the latest fusion model. And what about a complete rewriting of history where the Sydney street gangs of the 1920s were equipped with portable power shavers which they used to clobber each other to death. Underbelly Shaver – by golly it does have a ring to it!