It’s sporadically very funny, but the tone of this blackly comic murder-mystery is all over the place. It wants to tackle big issues, but seems afraid of its own politics
‘But I can’t get an F,” wails Elise (Lydia West) in the first episode of the Australian campus comedy He Had It Coming, shoulders slumping like soufflés as her tutor peers pityingly at her terrible paintings. “I’m here on a scholarship? I’m here to be an artist?!” Alas, poor Elise. No amount of wounded upspeak can disguise the fact that she is an aspiring artist in much the same way a bag of flour is an aspiring pastry. Her “work”, bless it, consists of daubing clothes on to impressionist nudes – a “protest”, apparently, against the patriarchy and its preoccupation with “ancient bush”. Unctuous Professor Phoenix (Harry Greenwood) is unimpressed. “Hmm,” he sighs, pouting affectedly at Elise’s “feminist reimagining” of Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe; the picnic’s enigmatic nude now sporting a pair of jeans and oversized novelty spectacles. Mon Dieu! The problem, explains Phoenix, slowly, is a lack of ambition. Feminist art isn’t for amateurs. “Be radical,” he smirks, as Elise quietly broils with rage. “Don’t settle for mediocrity.”
The nerve! “These men are holding us back,” she roars later at new pal Barbara (Natasha Liu Bordizzo), a prickly fashion influencer who is being slut-shamed by the campus jocks for having tipsily humped a stranger’s thigh at a party. “Yes,” agrees Barbara. “Let’s go vandalise something!” And so to the quadrant, where, in the dead of night, a mallet is applied to the genitals of the statue of the university’s hopelessly male namesake.
He Had It Coming aired on BBC Three and is available on iPlayer
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