In the first episode of Growing Up Gracefully, co-host Hannah Reilly meets June Dally-Watkins, Australia’s etiquette queen.
In 1950, Dally-Watkins founded a Sydney school training young women in deportment, and since then has maintained a career as a public commentator. Now into her 90s, her courses – barely changed in more than 60 years – teach a grandmotherly variety of prim and patriarchal manners, and she wastes no time on her visitor.
Hannah is criticised almost immediately about everything from wearing shorts (“cheap”, Dally-Watkins calls them), to how her legs rest against the chair. She responds by introducing the older woman to the term “slut-shaming”.
“Slut-shaming,” Dally-Watkins replies, testing out the phrase. “I love that! … Thank you for teaching me ‘slut-shaming’. I just learned something! Don’t be a slut.”
It’s a skit made for social media, one of many that feature through the ABC series, which premiered in July and is now available on iView.
Hosted by comedian sisters Hannah and Eliza Reilly, the premise is an eponymous 1950s conduct book the pair received as children and promptly discarded, until – in their 20s – they needed a bit of guidance. Hannah cracks open books from bygone decades that preach the virtues of being a meek, mild, day-drinking housewife, while Eliza scrolls through Thought Catalog, Cosmopolitan, Vice and countless other modern-day outlets that promote the unspoken politics of being a “cool” woman in 2017.
The show interrogates the standards placed on women’s appearance, behaviour and reputation, and proves they are far from just a thing of the past.
Later in that first episode, Hannah conducts a social experiment in the middle of Sydney’s Pitt Street Mall: with strings and pulleys, she puppeteers a contraption which lifts up her skirt, and challenges passers-by to tell her when, in their opinion, it has gotten too high.
While Dally-Watkins can be dismissed as a relic from the past, Hannah’s “skirt test” shows us that standards she preaches haven’t gone anywhere. In fact, they flow out into the streets around us.
At the end of this first episode, Hannah and Eliza compete in The Beauty Game, which challenges them to collect “self-esteem points” necessary to take them from “notties to hotties” through obstacles, such as dressing for approval from an opinionated male, and crawling through a mountain of foundation.
As the girls run through a fabric vagina, host Peter FitzSimons declares they’ve “exited the womb, and that’s where the scrutiny begins”. They gather the tokens, until they reach the final obstacle – an unattainable sign high in the air reading “Beauty”.
“You wanna just stop?” Eliza asks.
While Growing Up Gracefully never fully leaves the realm of the absurd, there are moments that cut deeper. In the fourth episode, the focus is on how far culture still has to come: Eliza goes to an S&M expert, and Hannah visits a “purity coach” who extolls the value of celibacy.
“If I don’t meet someone I want to get married to, I might never have sex again?” Hannah asks him.
“That’s a reality, yes,” he replies, straight-faced.
After she first had sex as a teenager, Hannah recalls, the boy passed her a note saying that she could still say she was a virgin. It may be 2017 now, but that pressure, and the judgement, hasn’t gone anywhere.
Social media-ready satire has become a key tool for commentary – and after those Saturday Night Live and Samantha Bee skits that go viral each week, it’s refreshing to have it presented with an Australian accent. Growing Up Gracefully aims to sink into the public consciousness in a similar way: amidst the never ending stream of Facebook posts.
One of the series’ show tune-inspired numbers, Leave at 3.43, takes to task the 16% discrepancy in pay between men and women across Australia. Since being posted on 10 August, it’s racked up millions of views.
“On a national average, women are only being paid until 3.43, so we’re gonna go do some fun stuff,” Hannah happily says. “It’s probably not a viable long term solution, but it just feels good,” says Eliza.
Marching through Sydney, they gather a band of women who feel the same: they’re getting paid 16% less, so therefore will work 16% less.
Hannah and Eliza are holding up a mirror; hopefully, the world sees itself in it.
• Growing Up Gracefully is available to stream in full on iView
