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A few years back actor-director Rob Sitch was stuck in roadworks on a city freeway. “I reckon I had been driving up and down the freeway for four years through those roadworks. I turned to someone in the car and said, this thing looks like it hasn’t changed. When are they going to finish it?”
While you or I might shrug our shoulders and leave it at that, Sitch set about weaving his frustrations into the new season of Utopia, the long-running sitcom in which he plays Tony, the eternally frustrated head of the Nation Building Authority, which oversees infrastructure projects like freeways.
Tony (Rob Sitch) and Katie (Emma Louise Wilson) in series five of Utopia.Credit: Hwa Goh/ABC
After years of battling both the self-serving powers-that-be upstairs and the willing-but-clueless staff around him, is Tony likely to fare any better this time round? “There’s something Groundhog Day about almost every episode,” Sitch says. “He’s the sort of the guy who has his resignation letter in his top drawer, so he’s always thinking that he’s just about to make the breakthrough. Everyone is buttering you up, everyone is putting the goal just out of reach to keep you in your spot.”
Utopia first hit our screens in 2014, and the new season is the fifth, a marathon for Sitch and his team at Working Dog (Santo Cilauro and Tom Gleisner), whose CV includes critically acclaimed sitcoms Frontline and The Hollowmen. Generally, after a couple of seasons they’d move on to something completely different, like the iconic Australian movie The Castle, the trail-blazing primetime talk show The Panel, or one of their two current hits, Have You Been Paying Attention? and The Cheap Seats.
So what is it that has lured them back to the office of the Nation Building Authority? For one thing, there’s no shortage of fodder, says Emma-Louise Wilson, who plays Tony’s personal assistant Katie in the series. While it plays for laughs, Wilson says viewers have often told her the series accurately portrays what is happening in offices all round the country.
“There’s this idea that Working Dog have got spies somewhere, everywhere, but it’s amazing how people actually just want to talk, they want to spill the beans, so not only do I get, oh it’s just like our office, blah, blah, blah, they are more than happy to share the shenanigans.”
Sitch likens the show to a baseball catcher’s mitt, being the perfect place to field a huge range of jokes. “I often thought, why did Barry Humphries’ Dame Edna survive 50, 60 years. Any joke he ever thought, the best person to say it was Dame Edna.
“After the first series we felt like we wouldn’t do another series. After series two we didn’t think we’d do a third. We found that each time we sat down to a new series it felt like we couldn’t work out how we’d solved the Rubik’s Cube before. We naturally tend to take longer between series, if not double then one-and-a-half times the gap between every series. And the process by which we wrote this series was we would not try to write a single script for at least 12 months. All we’d do is make observations to each other.
“We’d really enjoyed doing Hollowmen but we’ve found almost every observation we made could come through the NBA offices and that’s why we said yes, there is another series. We were fairly sure four was the last, but it just accumulated, and then COVID hit. It crossed so many office issues, HR things, Gen Z, Gen Y, the reinvention of the office became front and centre, and the best home for it was Utopia.”
Getting the gang back together was, Sitch says, a pleasure, and no mean feat given the likes of Kitty Flanagan and Celia Pacquola have TV comedies of their own to consider. “Each series is planned a long way out,” Sitch says. “So we let everyone know a year ago that this was the filming window, fully expecting some of the people to have other jobs, but everyone readjusted their calendars. Getting the same cast back meant we knew the voices we were writing for.”
Wilson was one of those regulars keen to return when shooting commenced earlier this year. “It’s a well-oiled machine,” she says. “Other than the little COVID-y things like masking up and having to do our RAT tests and all that, it was pretty much the same – and that is a good thing because the pacing that you see on the screen is the pace that we’re working at.”
The Working Dog crew have been giving up-and-coming actors and comedians a break going back to the days of The Late Show with Judith Lucy, Mick Molloy and Tony Martin. Eric Bana made his film debut in The Castle, while Working Dog’s quiz and panel shows, as well as their improv comedy show Thank God You’re Here, have given a stage to the likes of Heidi Arena, Sam Pang and Ed Kavalee.
Stand-up comedian Dilruk Jayasinga is another of Utopia’s notable discoveries. “Dilruk in this series is fantastic,” Sitch says. “He was really a stand-up comedian, I don’t know if he’d ever been in front of a camera.” Radio star and comic Anthony Lehmann also made his acting debut in Utopia. His performance as Jim, the relentlessly enthusiastic government liaison, surprised even Sitch.
“Lehmo hadn’t done much acting,” Sitch says, “but he had the bit that we needed, which was that absolute understanding of the cheery person who has no idea of the damage they’re causing. He’s just brilliant, he’s always had that streak in him. ”
Rob Sitch is back for more punishment as infrastructure boss Tony in Utopia.Credit: Hwa Goh/ABC
And Flanagan is back again in Utopia as Rhonda, the straight-talking media manager. “Katie is a little bit scared of Rhonda,” Wilson admits, possibly understating the fear Flanagan’s spin-doctor instils in everyone she encounters. While not wanting to give too much away about the latest series, Wilson confides: “I can say that if you enjoy that little bit of Rhonda, you’re going to get a lot out of season five, she’s on fire.”
The new season of Utopia screens from Wednesday, 8pm, ABC
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