Offspring: Whether or not that’s the last episode…

Posted on 7 August, 2014

Five minutes before the start of the season (possibly ‘series’) finale of Offspring last night, a friend messaged me with a serious problem. It’s the kind of problem so worrying that she hadn’t slept at all the night before.

Picture me, the World’s Biggest Offspring Fan (in the same way that my daughter deludedly thinks she’s the world’s biggest Niall Horan fan), facing the kind of dilemma Billie faced at the airport: talk to sister or get on plane …

Except that my crossroads was of course pathetic in comparison: talk to friend or watch finale of a TV show… Oh, hang on. Friend vs fiction. No competition.

So of course I responded to her and I was prepared to continue, or come over, or whatever was needed (which is not as selfless as it seems, given the episode is repeated in iView an hour later). But, four minutes later, with no prompting whatsoever from me, she cut the conversation short and said: “Let’s go and enjoy Offspring.”

And that’s when it hit me. This is more than a TV show. It’s more than brilliant writing and brilliant acting. It’s more than Clegg’s hilarity and Nina’s leading men and her wardrobe and the babies she delivers and the Proudman family’s gorgeous dysfunction.

This is a fantasy world not far from our own reality. It’s where many of us have been going to escape for five years.

My grandmother (who died before colour television was invented) was so addicted to Days of Our Lives that if she was in Lismore shopping, she’d go to the electricals store and the staff would set her up with a chair in front of the display TV to watch it. (What hope do I have when genes like this are pitted against Debra Oswald’s screenwriting wit?)

Offspring is the place where I went to forget my morning sickness four years ago. It’s where I went when my mum was diagnosed with dementia. It’s where I went when my ex-husband told me he was moving to Melbourne and we had to tell our children. It’s where I went when I was nervous about a work thing or worried about money or mean girls or cyber bullying or plane crashes or bombings or poverty or stolen girls …

It didn’t make any of those things go away. It didn’t make any of it better. It didn’t stop me dealing in an adult way with what I could about those problems in my non-Offspring hours.

It sheltered me from them for an hour. It let me switch the whirring off in my brain. It lit up my imagination.

Someone said last night that there are two types of people in the world: people who watch Offspring and people who watch Game of Thrones (I’m sure there are people who watch both, though I don’t know any personally). I think there’s really only one type of person: someone who needs somewhere fun and exciting and ‘pretend’ to visit occasionally because real life is harsh and complicated and scary and difficult, and it doesn’t have an ‘off’ button.

If it’s not Offspring and/or GoT, it’s books or movies or the garden or sport or craft or writing or painting or music or girls’ nights out or something else … it’s just somewhere to go that isn’t here.

The future of Offspring is uncertain. Many of us may be in the market for another haven … but I can’t worry about that now. It’s the cold light of day again. I have to talk to my friend. About Offspring. And life.