New comedy horror series Gnomes understands just how delightfully daggy good Aussie TV should be

Stan There’s a rich tradition of daggy humour in Australian film and television, running from Alvin Purple (1973) to Muriel’s Wedding (1994) to the inimitable ABC series Dog’s Head Bay (1999).

These works embrace the cultural cringe of Australianness in a way that’s thoroughly disarming.

It’s great to see Stan keeping this tradition alive and kicking, first with The F Ward and now with the comedy horror series Gnomes.

Gnomes is, undeniably, extremely silly.

The series opens with Nazis trying to resurrect the evil Gnome Queen – a larger than human statue resembling a garden gnome – in order to win the second world war.

We then jump ahead to the garden-gnome obsessed small Victorian town, Nompton, population a touch over 4,000.

We follow local constable Arnold Kipps (Asa Butterfield) as the town’s yearly “Gnome-a-Palooza” is run aground when the show’s “ pièce de résistance ”, to quote Mayor Lachlan (brilliantly played by Darren Gilshenan) – yep, the evil Gnome Queen – comes to life after Kipps accidentally touches the queen’s magic hatchet with his bloody hand.

Alas, magic dust brings to life the rest of garden gnomes of Nompton.

They proceed to run amok, creating havoc and slaughtering people in macabre ways.

A zealous video store (“Videozone”) clerk, for example, played by TV comedy favourite Luke McGregor, is murdered by DVDs.

More Gremlins than Hellraiser This narrative trajectory develops alongside the individual stories of the panoply of cliched characters who populate the town.

There is the disaffected teen, trying to please his hardboiled dad; the ferocious young policewoman; the ex-girlfriend who’s returned to town with unfinished personal business; the horny housewife, and so on.

While there’s plenty of blood and plenty of coarse language, it feels as light as an episode of a kids’ show like Round the Twist, definitely more Gremlins than Hellraiser in its horror.

Garden gnomes are pretty weird things.