大象传媒

Few could fail to love Kenny, a blue-collar hero who keeps smiling even whilst up to his neck in the brown stuff. Of course, a mockumentary about the daily exploits of a portaloo plumber mightn't sound like a great accompaniment to a bucket of popcorn, but Aussie writer/director Clayton Jacobson unearths plenty of comedy diamonds from the muck. His brother Shane Jacobson is simply brilliant in the title role, liberally spouting hilarious one-liners like a goose spouts poop.

Despite the subject matter - that is to say, faecal matter - this isn't a simple gross-out comedy. The gags are more carefully considered, with Kenny musing on his place in the world, ie, "If you're a fireman, all the kids wanna jump on the back of the truck... There's gonna be no kids willing to do that with me." Kenny is especially eager to get the approval of his son (Jesse Jacobson) and clean-freak dad (Ronald Jacobson), who makes him strip before allowing him in the house.

"FULL OF BEANS"

It's Kenny's irrepressible spirit, regardless of upturned noses that makes him so loveable, and his philosophy that 'the porcelain throne' makes us all equals. A few madcap set-pieces up the tempo, like a scene where Kenny, in his dump truck, accidentally veers onto a racetrack to save his portaloos from flame-throwing gearheads. However, that full-of-beans energy threatens to putter out in a long-winded episode at a US convention of toilet mongers. For a while it's a fish-out-of-water comedy, even though the biggest laughs come from his scathing matter-of-factness as he goes about business in Melbourne. The family ties in Oz also pull harder on the heartstrings than his romance with a stewardess. Thankfully, the detached documentary style keeps things from getting too mushy. More importantly, Kenny is so funny that bowel-loosening could be a very real danger.

Kenny is out in the UK on 28th September 2007.