This is a tale of modern Australia - well, relatively modern - told through the eyes of some quintessential Australians... Dame Edna Everage, our cultural ambassador Sir Les Patterson, and a deceased but still-vocal visitor, Sandy Stone.
It is Barry Humphries' own special spin on our history, told in four 45-minute episodes. Each episode is devoted to a decade. So here is Humphries' spin on the 1950s, the decade which saw espresso coffee change our lives. Then we sample the 'swinging sixties', when we desperately tried to prove ourselves just as swinging as anything happening 'over there'.
In comes the bad-taste 1970s, full of lurid flares and technicolour suits and yawns. And finally, the 1980s, when Big Business worked hand-in-hand with venal politicians to sell our country to the world as being as totally modern and as corrupt as anywhere else. As we know, they succeeded.
Barry Humphries' wit is occasionally tinged by nostalgic affection, but it is more often darkly mordant. This is not a history for the faint-hearted. At the same time, the great Australian entertainer knows that when he is spinning the blackest tale, he must keep it sugar-coated to help us register these unpalatable home-truths about our Great Country's past.
Besides the commentaries from Barry, Edna, Les and Sandy, the four chapters on this disc are enlivened by the astute selection of video and film clips from each decade, both hysterical and historical. There's such a wealth of material here that 45 minutes seems hardly enough for each decade.
Quite simply, Barry Humphries is a genius. And his illumination of our past is fully as rich as any of the weighty history tomes that tell our nation's tale, and benefits considerably from its pithiness. This presentation is for those who lived through the decades he describes, and equally for those who were lucky enough to have been born late enough to escape the arid ghastliness which was our lot for so long in mid-century Australia.
Picture quality does of course vary according to the quality of the archival footage which makes up the bulk of the presentation.
But that's a minor quibble. There's footage here that you will have never seen before. Some of it you may never want to see again - as when our young Queen, visiting Australia in 1954, visibly cringes as Bob Menzies covers her with vomituous adulation.
The DVD quality is certainly as good as, or most probably superior, to the original ABC television broadcasts. There's nothing to fault at all.
Overall brilliance, from an outstanding Australian.
Most people tend to underestimate Barry Humphries because... well, after all, he is just an actor and a comedian, you know, the boring farts proclaim.
But in reality, Barry Humphries is one of the few authentic geniuses to have emerged (or escaped) from the mid-century cultural desert which was Australia. His is a voice which must be heard. Often.
