The Dame Edna Experience: The Complete Series 1

Hullo, Possums! Yes, it?s me, Dame Edna! I've been a busy old Megastar, haven't I, with coast-to-coast Broadway appearances and now, long at last, an honest to goodness DVD of the first season of my legendary 1987 talk show, The Dame Edna Experience?

(Kaff, kaff!) Okay, not really, it's just your humble EDGE reviewer trying to imitate Edna's famous crow-like caw. The creation of comedian Barry Humphries, Dame Edna Everage is the prototype for self-absorbed talk show hosts like Space Ghost (on "Space Ghost Coast to Coast") and Jiminy Glick; she's also, according to her web page (http://www.dame-edna.com/index2.htm), a "housewife, investigative journalist, social anthropologist," and even, er, "swami." According to Humphries, who is himself interviewed by Dame Edna on one of the disc's special feature selections, she's "a housewife who finds herself suddenly a queen -- a goddess." She's also something of a nasty ol' bitch, given her propensity for verbally disemboweling her guests with a bright smile and an exclamation of, "I mean that lovingly, I really do!" Take her comment to Jeffrey Archer, an author an Minister of Parliament who had been involved in a scandal: "Mud sticks, Jeffrey!", a comment flung as an aside while talking to another guest about, well, the difficulties of getting mud out of one's clothing.

No one escapes Edna's razor-sharp tongue, or her ego. Both Sean Connery and Charlton Heston are confronted by Edna with an early job "taking your clothes off for money!" (They had modeled for art students early in their careers.) Larry Hagman, after trotting on stage with a ten-gallon hat full of money that he proceeded to throw into the air, finds himself tumbling through a trap door -- "aborted," as several of Dame Edna's guests are, thanks to an always-ready lever, for offending Edna's sensibilities. Only Zsa Zsa Gabor seems to have the presence of mind to outflank Edna and avoid a skewering: rather than allow Edna to hoist her on the petard of her eight "highly successful" marriages, Gabor preemptively declares, "I am just a hausfrau [housewife]," clarifying that, "With each divorce, I get the house!"

But no one endures as much abuse as poor, hang-dog looking Madge Allsop (played by Emily Perry), Edna's long-suffering bridesmaid whose job is to catch gifts brought by guests as Edna carelessly flings them her way, and to provide name tags to prevent Edna forgetting with whom she's chatting. (It's always a special highlight to hear Edna snap, "The badge, Madge!") The bridesmaid -- evidently never a bride in her own right -- serves as the butt of many of Edna's cruelest digs, which, for Edna, is saying a lot. "My bridesmaid was a pioneer of feminism in New Zealand," Edna confides to Germaine Greer. "That's why it never took off. She didn?t burn her bra, the neighbors did!" (Note: on the menu for disc two you'll see a button marked Madge Allsop. Click it for an Easter Egg hidden feature you won't soon forget!)

Americans may find Edna's choice of guests puzzling -- they are often doddering old men no one this side of the Atlantic has ever heard of, or else faded Greek pop singers -- but there are enough recognizable celebrities make the show accessible for a U.S. audience, and while Americans and Brits may laugh at different things (we poke fun at the obese, hence Jiminy Glick's fat suit; the English mysteriously find a man in drag hilariously funny, and so, ergo, Dame Edna with her purple hair, hideous designer frocks, and outrageous eyeglasses) it's hard to resist the cruel spell Edna casts. She's truly larger than life. It's a shame about her dreadful singing, though, and even those guests she hosts whose day job is to sing -- Cliff Richards, for example -- are uniformly awful. This, I must inform the curious, is the very definition of that inscrutable English term, "naff."

To sum up: if you feel like taking a little camping trip, there's no better guide to the back woods of talk show farce than Dame Edna. Just be careful: there's bears out there.