Something to watch tonight: Monday 9 October

Upright (2019-2022) is streaming on TVNZ+

I’ve spent a lot of the last sev­en days deep in the world of Outback hor­ror movies so when the oppor­tun­ity came up to detox a little with a light­er side of the Australian back coun­try I jumped at it.

Co-created, co-written and co-starring Tim Minchin, Upright is a com­edy drama in two sea­sons of eight epis­odes each.

Minchin is Lucky (!), a musi­cian whose best days appear to be already behind him, tak­ing his piano across coun­try to Perth. In a moment of typ­ic­al inat­ten­tion, he crashes his rent­al car into a ute driv­en by sixteen-year-old Meg (Milly Allcock).

She is also head­ing away from some­thing and – as the piano fits on the tray of the ute – they cut a deal. They’ll travel togeth­er across Australia and try and stay out of trouble.

Trouble is exactly what they fail to stay out of, how­ever, and each epis­ode is a day in the long and event­ful jour­ney across country.

It’s an Aussie pro­duc­tion so there’s a lot of highly invent­ive swear­ing but there’s also a great deal of heart, as you would expect from any­thing involving Minchin, one of the nicest people in show business.

There’s also a bit of music. Wellingtonians of a cer­tain vin­tage will be pleased to see a cameo in epis­ode two from the great comedy-instrumentalist Adam Page who lived among us for a few years in the mid-2000s.

Upright is stream­ing on TVNZ+ in Aotearoa, Binge in Australia and AMC+ in the U.S.

I wouldn’t nor­mally make a recom­mend­a­tion after only watch­ing three epis­odes but I’m pretty con­fid­ant that sea­son one (at least) is going to be worth fol­low­ing to the end. I’ve heard that sea­son two doesn’t quite hit the same heights but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.