As I type I'm awaiting the 6pm news on TV3. As usual at this time, the Australian soap, Home and Away is on. I've caught enough of it over time to be up to date with it. Apparently it's a runaway ratings success in Oz. I don't suppose it screens outside Oz and NZ, but if it did, I'd set it as homework for SOLOists to help them understand the state of the culture.

Home and Away has the worst acting and lamest scripts ever. I doubt that there's any exception to this. It's just one long, inadvertently hilarious cliche. That's disappointing, given that the story lines can be quite inventive. Most disappointing, however, is the way the stories invariably resolve. Self-blame, self-pity and nauseating, weepy apologies are the order of every day. Everyone unashamedly minds everyone else's business. Altruism at its most mawkish is rife. Characters who display intimations of spunk invariably end up as abject weaklings, sniveling away about their shortcomings. Currently there's a character named Jeff who was introduced to viewers as an aspiring priest. Objectivist objections notwithstanding, this at least set him apart from the mindless uniformity and promiscuity of his peers (most characters in the soap are in their teens). Now he's become just another airhead who gets his girlfriend pregnant, another petulant prat who throws tantrums when things don't go his way. Most scenes in Home and Away end with someone flouncing off in a huff.

Where it is most frighteningly reflective of the state of the culture is in its portrayal of contemporary youngsters as whining, attention-deficient, whim-driven, humorless conformists who quack through their noses. There once was a majestic middle-aged character named Morag Bellingham, a no-nonsense lawyer who expressed her contempt for airheadery in beautiful English but for whom the script-writers couldn't write lines equal to her presence. She seems to have been written out. The airheads rule. "Art" reflects life.

Home and Away really should screen in America. Airhead America deserves it! In fact, Airhead America is it!