You Can’t Ask That: May 25

You Can’t Ask That returns to ABC tonight, and its first subject: Bogans.

With a discourse that spans from mullets and tracky-dacks to the difference between patriotism and racism, this episode on Bogans strikes at the heart of old fashioned Australiana.

With his beer gut and missing teeth, Benny resembles the quintessential bogan and he’s got the platitudes to match. “When things go wrong you say, ‘She’ll be right, mate,’” he says.

As tired a cliche as that is, Benny’s life has been anything but. At different times he’s played the church organ at funeral services, demolished houses, worked in an abattoir and as a carer for the disabled. He even has a handle on certain esoteric, eastern belief systems.

“Who wants to see someone struggling? One day I’ll need help and hopefully someone will help me. Bit of karma,” he says.

If there’s one take away from tonight’s episode it’s that bogan is not a synonym for simpleton. Simplified or simply put, maybe, but what’s so good about being complicated anyway?

“Why do you sound so unsophisticated? Simple answer because I am f***ing unsophisticated,” says Benny.

“I use swearing as joining words. I can’t put together a sentence without swearing,” he says.

At their core these salt of the earth characters subscribe to some of the oldest, truest, most tried and tested values humans have come up with. “Jesus was probably a bogan because he had a mullet, he went fishing all the time and he turned water into wine,” says Marc Ryan. Or as Bonnie Tonic explains, “(true bogans) will give you the shirt off their back if you needed it.”

9:05pm tonight on ABC.