Outrageous Week continues as Alex Casey celebrates Aotearoa’s sweariest show.
Content note: This article contains many, many, many swear words. You have been warned.
When co-creator of Outrageous Fortune James Griffin stood up to address the cast and crew at the series wrap of the beloved show in 2010, he had some crucial numbers to present to the crowd. It wasn’t the stratospheric ratings of the final season, nor the extraordinary amount of TV awards they had received in their tenure, but a tally of how many times the word “fuck” (and variations on the word “fuck”) had been uttered on the show over its six seasons. The grand total? 2,039 fucks. The main culprit? One Cheryl “cheer the fuck up” West.
The first “fuck” in Outrageous Fortune happens quickly – so to speak – just 39 seconds into the series. Cheryl and Wolf are in bed together, and he is listing off things to get done for the day. “Would you shut up and fuck me?” she whispers. Where Cheryl kicks things off with a literal bang, the final “fuck” goes to Hayden who, in the throes of West house party jubilation, says “fuck it, let’s dance” in the closing moments of the series finale. Between those two bookends are all manner of dipshits and slutty pants, cocks and dickwads, bitches, bastards and buggers.
Co-creator James Griffin says that bad language was always going to be an important part of the Outrageous Fortune DNA. “It would have been weird to do a show set in West Auckland without any swearing,” he laughs. “It was such a big part of that world.” While writing the series, he made a habit of going for lunch at the WestCity Mall foodcourt in Henderson and parking himself up next to the biggest and rowdiest group to eavesdrop. “Honestly, the level of swearing that we had on the show was actually nothing compared to real life.”
But data linguist Dr Andreea Calude says that the swearing on Outrageous Fortune feels pretty representative of everyday conversation in New Zealand. “It’s not sanitised, but it’s not overdone or exaggerated,” she says. As in real life, she says swearing on the show is often used as a way of coping (“It’s all shit, Munt. It’s a big bitch, and then you die” – Van), venting (“If you’re that offended why don’t you fuck off home?” – Cheryl), humour (“I wouldn’t fuck him for practice” – Pascalle) and bonding (“I’m only trying to help you, you dumb bitch” – Loretta).
To get that authenticity just right, Griffin and co-creator Rachel Lang gave themselves limits when it came to naughty words. “Right before the scripts went off to publish, one of us would go through and do a cull of the unnecessary swear words, because we knew the actors were going to add more anyway,” he explains. “There was one episode in the later seasons where we actually forgot to do this job, and it had about two and a half minutes of swearing in it. It’s fine for effect and it’s fine to make a point, but too much and it just gets boring.”
There was another limitation in place that restricted their florid language use. Outrageous Fortune began its life airing at 9.30pm on TV3, but its success saw it brought forward to the 8.30pm time slot in the later seasons. “There was a quite a lot of discussion about what would that time slot shift would mean to the earthy language of the West family,” says Griffin. “We were basically told that if we were going to swear, to try and put it in the back end of the episode after nine o’clock. I don’t know how rigorously anyone actually policed that, mind you.”
But just like the Wests themselves, it wasn’t long before Outrageous Fortune itself ended up on the wrong side of the rules. Despite local audiences not blinking an eye at Pascalle’s catchphrase “fuckity, fuckity, fuck” or Grandpa Ted’s beloved “slutty pants”, it was an utterance in season five that garnered 21 separate complaints made to the Broadcasting Standards Authority and made up 10% of their total complaints for the year. The offending sentence? “You are not giving that cunt a cent”, said Cheryl West sometime around 8.40pm on October 12, 2010.
Up until that point, Griffin says the writers had been sparing with how they deployed their cunts. “The c-word was very contentious,” he explains, delicately avoiding saying the word in full. “The first time we tried to use it was in season one, when Pascalle was outlining her plan to Loretta about how she was going to go about bagging this rich guy. As a part of the plan, she was going to say ‘he’ll be so c-struck that he won’t be able to say no’. Well, that didn’t fly.” Instead, the first utterance later went to Munter’s mum while she was yelling at Van and Munter.
While that c-bomb was scripted, Cheryl’s soon-to-be controversial use of the word in season six was actually completely improvised by Robyn Malcolm in the scene. “She totally ad-libbed it,” says Griffin. “I remember because in the edit, Rachel and I talked for quite a while about whether we should cut it out, but we decided to let Robyn have it – she deserved to join the party.” As Malcolm herself described recently on the Between Two Beers podcast: “I added that word and I looked at Murray [Keane, director] and said ‘can I do that?’ and he went ‘yeah, why not?’”
The problem is that this c-bomb was also preceded by a flurry of other foul language in the first 10 minutes of the episode, including but not limited to “shit” (twice), “retard” (five times), “fucking” (six times) and a character asking “do you want to lick my clit?” It’s the sheer volume, and the earlier time slot, that led to the complaints being upheld, says BSA CEO Stacey Wood. “Even though Outrageous Fortune was correctly classified as adults only and came with a language warning, it was decided that it was still unleashing too much, too soon after the watershed.”
For those 10 minutes of profanity, the network was ordered to broadcast a statement about the upheld complaints and pay $3,000 to the crown. It remains one of the most complained-about sequences in New Zealand TV history, but was also the only complaint upheld in Outrageous Fortune history – not bad for 107 episodes of sex, swears and general salaciousness. “My favourite BSA ruling was the one where they basically said to the complainant: ‘look, it’s Outrageous Fortune, what were you expecting?’” laughs Griffin. “The show became its own defence, which I was very proud of.”
And would the language of Outrageous cause the same level of pearl clutching now? Wood at the BSA expects yes, but for quite different reasons. “Our research shows that people tend to be less offended now by your fucks and your shits,” she explains. “People tend now to care more about words that have a bad, malicious intent behind them, like slurs and things that attack people’s identity.” For example, Griffin recently rewatched an episode of Outrageous where Wolf used the term “coconut” in relation to his best friend, Falani. “I don’t think that’d fly these days,” he says.
While some of the language used on the show might not have aged well over the last two decades, Griffin says the swearing on Outrageous Fortune represented a maturing of New Zealand language on screen. “I think the country grew up a lot in the early 2000s, and we just kind of rode in on that wave,” he says. “Shows like The Sopranos had come along and established that if you’re going to write a proper adult show, then you can use adult words. It also reflected how the world was changing and growing up, and we how had more things to worry about than than a few linguistic flaws.”
And, 20 years on, Griffin reckons it would probably take more than a few swear words to rattle most audience members. “I mean, hell. Look at what’s happening in our own parliament these days.” he says. “Everyone’s dropping swear words everywhere – it’s not cool anymore.”
Click here to read the rest of our Outrageous Week coverage as we celebrate the 20th anniversary of the series. Watch Outrageous Fortune here on TVNZ+ or on the Outrageous Fortune YouTube channel.
