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Harvey McHugh: pants-wetting, god-fearing, animal-loving, home-living, mother-doting, sex-thinking virgin and public servant. Played by an actor with distracting facial spots and eyes which have a disconcerting habit of doing spontaneous Marty Feldman impressions. If ever there was a character ripe for an offbeat ABC drama, this is it. The heady fusion of religious doctrine and torment, sexual frustration and awakening, political deception and intrigue - held together with generous dollops of very black humor - has all the surreal hallmarks of the late Dennis Potter's work.
Yet John Misto's The Damnation of Harvey McHugh manages to also be distinctly Australian which, almost by definition, somehow keeps weird situations on the reality side of the fence. Stranger things have happened, we know, than public funds being misdirected or quality scares occurring in the meat industry. Within these eerie corridors of power, where the Young Mathildans choir serenades Philip Quast's splendidly sinister minister to his office, young McHugh knows he will fail to get a promotion when he sees the competition: an Aborigine, a woman and a man in a wheelchair. "Oh no, the equal opportunity trifecta," he sighs.
But McHugh (odd newcomer Aaron Blabey) has two things on his side: innocence and honesty, rare qualities which work to his advantage as he stumbles across a string of ministerial wrongdoings. A plot to kill McHugh not only fails but sees him promoted and involved in a bizarre experiment where part of the minister's brain is implanted in his own. Whether such quirks can sustain attention over another 10 weeks is the question but Harvey McHugh has certainly made a bold start.
