I'm wondering if I should tell FOM about Kalgoorlie Cops.
Kalgoorlie Cops is one of those television shows about lawlessness that rational thinkers notice only when channel-switching.
Because all these shows about drugs, cops and border patrols have pixilated faces. Would a rational thinker watch Qi if everyone was sitting behind a wall? Of course not. Kalgoorlie Cops does not pixilate. This is why I sat through an entire episode on January 2.
Kalgoorlie Cops opens with wild orange burning skies, and straight away you know you are headed for evil. The first Mad Max movie springs immediately to mind. The voice-over man salaciously sets the scene.
Kalgoorlie, he says, sits on the edge of Australia's biggest gold mine, it's a fly-in fly-out town where cashed-up miners blow off steam and spend up big on booze, cars, girls and Bruce Willis DVDs.
Actually, he doesn't say anything about Bruce Willis DVDs, but I betcha they buy them up large. They are blind drunk after all.
Kalgoorlie, says the voice, is a powder keg that's guaranteed to go off. Bwahahahah!All hail then the puny police force of 100 who have to deal with the behavioural gunpowder in each and every one of the town's many many pubs.
Their job is insuperably difficult because just about every witness is too drunk to tell them what happened after a fight. A woman from New Zealand, the North Island, wearing little more than a cleaning cloth, no underwear, is pulled out of a bar after a skirmish.
She is screaming unintelligibly so they take her home, where, 10 minutes later, there is a report she and her boyfriend, who had not been at the pub (one wonders why), were beating each other senseless.
The Kalgoorlie Cops return, armed now with the information that back in the bar, she had started the whole shebang by taking on four men, sinking her stiletto into one of their heads. They whang her in stir and she finishes up getting nine months. She was, I repeat, from the North Island.
I had to come back for more on January 9, and I was quickly sucked into the terror that is a teen party. Constables Tony and Charlie are sent to sort out a gathering that had gone feral.
The child as the father of the man. "I'd rather go to a biker party than a teenage party," says Tony.
A woman whose face suggested a life lived to the full assures the camera you won't know Kalgoorlie until you've been to one of their brothels.
And a stripper with a girlie swot face, by which I mean she wore glasses, said she once made 24 grand in four days in tips. There is equal pay in Kalgoorlie; the women can become cashed-up too.
Marty and Bear are the only man-dog cop team in Kalgoorlie. One feels 10 man-dog teams would clean the town up in a day. You can raise your middle finger to a cop, but do that to Bear and you will lose your arm.
Marty sends Bear into the forest to drag a fleeing bogan back to the van, the bouncing hand-held camera recalling The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But the bogan deserved it.
"It's pretty clear their drive out here wasn't fuelled by petrol," says Marty, pointing at a nearly finished bottle of rum in the front seat of their Holden.
Finally, we meet Tegan, a girl Kalgoorlie cop, one year out of police college. "You never know what's going to come falling out of the pubs," she says. "It's a massive drawcard for me."
Will Kalgoorlie prove a massive drawcard for FOM? That's the question. I'm not saying a word.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
