The Dame Edna Experience - The Complete Series 2

Not just a star, and not simply a shooting star, but a blazing megastar bearing down on London in her personal helicopter, Dame Edna Everage returns for a second season of celebrity interviews and tone-deaf duets. The creation of comedian Barry Humphries, Dame Edna is a Melbourne housewife unleashed with a collection of frightful frocks and hair-raising eyeglasses.

This season's conceit is a set depicting Dame Edna's luxury penthouse, thirty-some stories above the London streets, an arrangement that makes for comic fodder as Dame Edna frets over the unsavory types (Jane Fonda, for example, and the ever-persistent Jeffrey Archer) who are out to "penetrate her lower vestibule." Some guests arrive by lift; others plunge to a gruesome fate in the lift; others are consigned to the aerobic terrors of the stairwell. It all ends in a shower of gladiolas.

Dame Edna's guest list has at least grown a little more toward the "A" side of things. Lauren Bacall, Grace Jones, Liza Minelli, and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. all pay a visit. Really, the wealth of guest material is sometimes an embarrassment, as when Dame Edna wastefully has five of England's talents into her studio at once, including Malcolm McDowell, who scarcely has a chance to say a word amongst the hullabaloo. There are a few gone-and-well-forgotten guests to be seen here. Dolph Lundgren demonstrates his workout regimen with the help of a more sprightly than usual Madge; Edna all but ignores other guests to drool over Jason Donovan and relate anecdotes about his childhood on his behalf ("How do you know all this?" Donovan blurts, forgetting momentarily to keep up the fiction of having been the Dame's neighbor in his youth). Regrettably, Edna has no crystal ball to hand that will inform her of young Mr. Donovan's future exploits posing for gay porn pix and must content herself, and her audience, with a scurrilous story of "nappermancy" -- foretelling the success of Jason Donovan's pop singing career by keeping count of the "Number Ones" and "Number Twos" to be glimpsed in the infant's diapers.

At least the music is a bit better this time around, and even if there is still the odd non-gem among the performances (Liza Minnelli makes a dreadful showing of a dreadful song, and Tony Curtis' ear seems to have turned to tin) there are also surprises: Dusty Springfield treats us to a decent number, Tom Jones delivers a cover of an old chestnut, and Grace Jones previews a video of "Love On Top of Love." (This series was broadcast in 1989, remember.)

As ever, Dame Edna is full of cruelty and smiles. As she puts it herself, she was born with a special gift -- "To find delight in the misfortunes of others." Seeing her give wardrobe advice to Whoopi Goldberg ("You look? -comfortable-," she tells Goldberg, having observed that the American actress was long a fixture on Top Ten Worst Dressed lists) and sic guard dogs on Imelda Marcos (well, a stunt double anyway), one cannot but yearn for a fresh modern version of the show in which she would duet with Sting, drool over Keanu, take on Blair or Russell Crowe, and -- who knows? -- perhaps continue to fend off Jeffrey Archer, all while hewing to her famed command, delivered in terse verse: "The badge, Madge!!"