The show has been a huge hit in Australia since its first season (it has just finished its third). Here, it has built such a dedicated fanbase, on ftn and Living, that when Turner and Riley, who also created the show, came to the UK last year they were inundated with offers to meet them at the airport.

Kath and Kim live in Fountain Gate, a fictional Melbourne suburb. The comedy lies in their frequent breakdowns of communication, their self-deluding snobbery, their appalling drunken behaviour and their screwed-up relationships with two fundamentally sweet, if sexually questionable, men: Kel (for Kath) and Brett (for Kim). Much of their frustration, meanwhile, is taken out on their housekeeper, Sharon (Magda Szubanski).

Kath and Kim already feels like a classic — it pulls off the trick of being popular and cool. It has been endangered (ABC did not have much faith in it in the beginning); it has spawned catchphrases (“look at moiii”, Kath says to Kim when she wants her attention); and it delights in absurdity (men wrestle in playpens, runaway horses endanger weddings). But most of it all, it glories in campy, lurid wordplay.

Kath, confused about her daughter’s attitude towards sex, tells her: “You’re a Dutch seawall.”

Kim: “What mum?”

Kath: “A dyke.”

Kath and Kim, Thur, BBC Two, 10pm

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