bro'Town returns as its animation empire expands

bro'Town was the local television success story of 2004.

When David Fane was a kid, he'd run all the way from Ponsonby Primary on Curran St to a lunch bar on Jervois Rd before they threw out the last of the food. Then he'd look up at the lady with his big puppy-dog eyes and wait until she handed over the goods. After that he'd race to a nearby bus stop to meet his mum.

"But my ulterior motive was because she used to buy a Sally Lunn for any of us kids to help her carry the shopping," he says, laughing in the wheezy voice he puts on to portray the bumbling dad on bro'Town.

Fane and his mate Shimpal Lelisi have many food-related memories from these parts. If you've ever wondered where they and the fellow Naked Samoans comedy team come up with ideas for bro'Town, look no further than the streets of Ponsonby, Grey Lynn, Cox's Bay and Westmere where these two grew up.

Today we're doing a tiki tour of the area by car to see if the antics of Sione, Mack, Jeff, Vale and Valea are anything like the real thing. The second series of bro'Town is soon to start on TV3.

Fane eyes up an old shop on Ponsonby Rd that has escaped gentrification. "This is a good one because it's still rotten, it's stink, it's awesome," he says. Before the affluent home-buyers swept in, this was their stomping ground. But unlike today's road trip, they used to walk everywhere.

"They've done quite a bit with the architecture around here," says Fane, "but back in the day it was Scumsville."

"Every suburb had a look, eh? A certain look," adds Lelisi. "All the same jeans going round everyone's clotheslines."

Fane and Lelisi lived just one street apart in their youth - Fane in O'Neill St, Lelisi in Tole St - but they didn't meet until they were teenagers.

That was nearly 20 years ago, when Lelisi befriended Fane's brother.

He also had a friend, a stage manager, who suggested he audition for a show at university. Fane, a drama student, was "sitting on the middle of the floor getting chairs thrown on him," recalls Lelisi. "He was getting a telling-off by a director."

In 1998 they pooled their rebellious sense of humour and formed the Naked Samoans with Oscar Kightley and Mario Gaoa, presenting their first stand-up routine at the International Laugh Festival.

Naked Samoans Talk About their Knives, a success here and at the Edinburgh Festival in 2002, convinced Kightley's friend, producer Elizabeth Mitchell, that the guys would make even better cartoon characters.

Against the odds, bro'Town received $1.45 million from NZ On Air, the remainder coming from private investors and product placement.

Mitchell also brought on board script doctors James Griffin and Dave Armstrong, and started production company Firehorse Films with respected animators Ant Sang and Maka Makatoa on the drawing boards.

This time last year, the prospect of an animated series screening in prime time had many anticipating the worst - the phrase "local television comedy" had become its own running joke.

And as far as cartoons for grown-ups went, for every Simpsons or South Park there's been a pile of also-rans. And experienced animators are rare in New Zealand's small television industry.

But the first series of bro'Town didn't disappoint, attracting an average of 13 per cent of viewers aged 18-49 and 33 per cent of the viewing audience during its 8-8.30pm time slot - enough to convince NZ On Air to increase its contribution for a second series to almost $1.9 million.

The show won two awards last month for Best Comedy and Best Comedy Script at the New Zealand Screen Awards.

The bro'Town empire continues to expand. Following the huge success of the DVD of the first series, there are plans for a bro'Town feature film. There's a bro'Town Annual (think Whizzer & Chips or Jughead) out next month to coincide with the new episodes.

Also, the series has just been picked up by Australia's Comedy Channel and there's more bro'Town merchandise in the pipeline than you could shake a tapa cloth at.

Mitchell always knew the show would be easy to market. "Being a cartoon it lends itself to everything. We always knew it would work - we just didn't know if anyone would like it.

"But it's really cut through. It's entered the lexicon. It seems to have got right into the school curriculum. We get heaps of inquiries from students and teachers. NZ On Air ran an essay competition recently and there were heaps of references to bro'Town. There are lines from the show on Kiwi FM.

"I think it's the recognition, the kind of jokes that people would make at home. And obviously because it's so funny and because the characters are just so cute and endearing."

Fane and Lelisi maintain they're yet to reap the benefits of the show's success but the grins on their faces suggest they may be able to buy their own Ponsonby villa one day soon.

"These weren't here before, these houses," says Fane. "But there was a really cool skateboard shop."

There's a dairy at the Three Lamps end of Ponsonby Rd that Fane remembers fondly, although the owner would beg to differ. Fane had become enterprising in his quest for free food and had glued DIY pockets into the inside of his raincoat.

Then he'd stroll into the shop, pocket as many Crunchie bars as possible and walk out the door singing, "Quick to get your Crunchie bar and fill 'em fulla chock!"

He hoots at the irony that he would later be considered responsible enough to be appointed head boy at high school. He was also pie monitor at Ponsonby Primary, although that was a self-appointed role.

For Lelisi, the school was his introduction to New Zealand life after arriving in New Zealand from Samoa. He didn't speak English, and on his first day of school he saw all the kids getting their lunch from the hall.

"I thought it was free food. I didn't know you had to order it. So I turned up and asked for my pie in my best half-syllable of English and they gave me one. Then my teacher told me the next day, 'You're supposed to pay for your lunch; you can't just turn up and ask for your food'. That was a very valuable lesson in New Zealand - you pay for stuff."

As we pass the young mums power-walking with prams, pavement cafe-goers on their cellphones, boutique fashion stores, expensive delis and beauty spas, it's clear Fane and Lelisi are saddened by the disappearance of their old neighbourhood, although they're not irked by the upmarket developments.

Fane remembers his dad wading into the backyard next door at the slightest sound of trouble. You'd help out your neighbours. You cared what happened next door.

"It was different back then," says Fane. "Now people get outraged whenever youth do anything. They're like, 'Aw, I never did that when I was young'. It's bullshit."

One thing hasn't changed. As the road curves from Herne Bay into Cox's Bay, Lelisi laughs at the sight of the muddy sands exposed by the tide. When they weren't bomb-diving the local girls at the Pt Erin Pools they were serenading them at spots like this.

"They're still scungy but people say 'They've got character'," explains Fane in a poncy voice. "The only difference is we swam in them back then. There might be some spill from the Chelsea sugar factory. That's what they used to say about the place. Strange chemicals. They were scodie-as.

"I once knew a young girl in Westmere," he continues as we reach Garnett Rd. "I was trying to impress her. She told me to get lost. I sat on that beach. Tha-a-t bitch!" he says, sniffing. "She doesn't ... know what she's ... missing!"

Although the real Morningside is little more than an intersection, like The Simpsons' Springfield, bro'Town's fictional town has a generic-sounding name with positive connotations.

They were going to call it "Hopetoun" but Morningside represented a part of Auckland of which they all had happy memories. Kightley, for instance, grew up in Te Atatu but spent holidays in Morningside with his family.

Holiday time was also spent at the zoo, where Fane claims he knew a guy who jumped into the lions' den and lost a leg as a result. The other zoo, says Lelisi, was the high school on the opposite side of the road where the Tongan kids would bully them.

"I was really tiny when I was in third form," says Fane. "But when I grew up and got taller, I started getting back at all those bastards who bullied me. I got them all."

We pull into the zoo carpark. "Lots of Islanders used to come pull up around here," says Fane, breaking into song: "It's lovin' time, it's time for lovin'."

They'd jump a fence from Western Springs Park, he says, straight-faced, and end up scrambling out of the hippo enclosure. "Hippos are actually really fast over 60m. They can go like the wind."

Not everyone finds the Naked Samoans' piss-taking funny. Two high schools in South Auckland have banned bro'Town sayings - such as "Piow piow!" (a reference to breasts) and "Not even ow!" - from being used in the classroom or playground.

Every episode of bro'Town has received complaints, the majority directed at Dad Pepelo's racists remarks, and the sex-ed class with Lucy Lawless.

Fane and Lelisi have heard everything: that characters such as the alcoholic Samoan dad and the Indian dairy owner perpetuate cultural stereotypes, that the jokes are juvenile, that there aren't enough female characters, to this inaccurate quibble from Pakeha: "How come there are no white people in bro'town?"

Fane is unimpressed. "How dumb do you have to be to not understand what satire is? People take things far too literally."

Then he adds, with typical bro'Town humour, "The mum's such a big character, it's hard to bring girls in. She'd just give them a hiding. As all mothers end up doing, y'know?"

Mitchell is surprised the show hasn't pushed more buttons. She was expecting an outcry from the church but the only religious complaint she's heard was someone upset that the Jesus in bro'Town couldn't play rugby.

In Fiji, where Shortland Street is censored, bro'Town screens as is. "Perhaps it's because it's a cartoon, but people just seem to have accepted it."

The second series is going to be darker, says Fane. Along the way the boys attend Morningside Fashion Week, get lost in the bush, adopt a baby and convince their dad to buy a racehorse.

As the Naked Samoans gain notoriety and prepare to do so across the ditch (namely through a character called Abo), they risk coming under fire for something else altogether: selling out.

These days you can purchase the bro'Town DVD, the hoodie and the T-shirt, and coming soon are the sleeping bag, boogie board and a bunch of stationery items.

When they set up a stall at the Armageddon pop culture festival, so many kids asked Fane to record voicemail messages on their cellphones, he started charging them $2 a pop. If he had it his way, he'd sell plastic spoons with bro'Town stickers on them for $40 each.

While Mitchell is cautious about this side of the business, saying they've rejected several merchandising opportunities because they weren't the right fit, Fane isn't about to apologise for his entrepreneurial spirit, even if the kids forking out for their stuff come from modest backgrounds.

"Make hay while the sun shines, I say. You'd be a fool to hide a light under a bushel." Even if your talents mean turning your brainless but endearing teenage antics into a TV series.

The Bullock Track, the notoriously steep road next to the park, for instance, is where they used to get drunk and roll down the hill. But if you want to know exactly where the bro'Town gang were conceived, head to St Paul's College on Richmond Road.

Fane was the first non-Catholic head boy here, a title that would come in handy years later when he and the Naked Samoans realised they had no money for a rehearsal space. The principal was only too happy to oblige.

Class is in so there are no students around to besiege them, but Fane is still well-known around these parts. The minute a teacher strolling through the grounds spots her former student, her eyes light up and she shrieks at him with excitement, grabbing him for a hug and a catch-up.

It's funny, this notion of the bro'Town gang finding fame, considering it's their voices, rather than their faces, that are easily recognised.

"I was at the Otara markets recently," says Fane, "and this woman came up to me and said, 'Hey, I know that voice!' and I thought, 'Here we go' and she said, 'You used to work in a bank down in Wellington didn't you?' I said 'No'.

"[She said] 'Oh, nup, sorry'. I thought that was the best line I'd ever heard."

WHAT: The second series of bro'Town, TV3 mid-September

WRITTEN BY: The Naked Samoans comedy troupe: Oscar Kightley as Vale, Shimpal Lelisi as Valea, Mario Goa as Sione, David Fane as Mack, Jeff da Maori, Dad Pepelo and Mrs Tapili, Brother Ken, Abo and Wong.

THE STORY: Vale, Valea, Jeff da Maori, Sione and Mack are mates living in the fictional suburb of Morningside. Vale and Valea are brothers living with their dad, a forklift driver who loves beer, porn and gambling. Their best mate Sione fancies himself as a bit of a ladies man. Jeff da Maori lives with his mum and eight dads in a car outside the house. Mack is the articulate, cultured one who could be gay and is scared his mates will find out his parents are actually loaded.

BRO'TALK: "Piow piow!" "Not even ow." "Morningside 4 Life!" "Top dogs." "I'm going to the pub, I may be some time." "A cry from my eye."