Chances are you may have seen Jeff Green on television or read one of his best-selling books on relationships or parenting.
Either way he is a very funny man with 30 years’ comedic experience and his latest show 'Letters Home' is as surprising as he is.
Firstly, 'Letters Home' is completely different to what you’d expect from this acclaimed comedian. Unlike Jeff’s trademark rapid-fire stand-up, 'Letters Home' is more subdued and ordered as he explores the Australian psyche and our odd relationship with authority figures and each other.
Despite our famed larrikinism, Australians fear authority and acquiesce to its powers very easily and it is from this perspective that 'Letters Home' is borne – a monologue delivered via a series of ten letters he has sent back to his family in the UK.
To give the show some context, Jeff provides a quick history lesson. Between 1947 and 1982 over a million poms moved to Australia under the Ten Pound Assisted Passage scheme. Known as, “Ten quid Poms”, these new arrivals kept in touch with their loved ones back home by sending letter and postcard requests to the long-running hit BBC radio show Two-Way Family Favourites.
'Letters Home' pays homage to those times when Jeff’s family would gather around the radio on a Sunday, listening to requests from people living in exotic far flung places, wondering what they looked like and imagining sun bleached places similar to the countryside he’d seen on TV shows like Skippy or Walkabout.
In deference to the memories of those separated souls – and reflecting on his own experience as an immigrant – 'Letters Home' is built around the correspondence – read aloud as letters sent to his family back in Britain. Jeff’s quirky sensibilities and admirable commitment to timing, means the show is peppered with hilarious anecdotes and side-splitting one-liners delivered at pace.
Jeff writes in a disarmingly familiar and homely fashion, while offering a fresh perspective on Australia’s casual, laid-back lifestyle. Fully owning his status as a Pommie immigrant, Jeff packs in several sharp and savvy insights built on real-life observations from the dynamics of the average Australian marriage to our Arachnophobia-inducing encounters with giant spiders to our love/hate relationship with budget airline Jetstar.
The show is still very fresh and on opening night there were some minor glitches but that is to be expected given this wonderfully funny show only made its debut a few short weeks ago. 'Letters Home' sits in that challenging – albeit awkward spot – between whinging Pom and home crowd pleaser. Luckily for Jeff, Australians love laughing at themselves.
★★★★☆
