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With a light touch and electric performances, the series marries melancholy with comedy to deliver an odd-couple narrative that goes beyond the norm
Positioning a piano outside its natural environment has a way of making the instrument visually arresting. If in doubt, consult the famous beach scene in the director Jane Campion’s 1993 masterpiece The Piano, with Holly Hunter tapping away as waves roll into the shore and night turns to day.
Consult, also, Foxtel’s addictively good eight-part series Upright, an on-the-road dramedy revolving around a musician’s journey from Sydney to Perth, to return home to his dying mother. Created by Chris Taylor (of The Chaser) and directed by Matthew Saville (whose recent work includes TV productions Friday on My Mind and Seven Types of Ambiguity), the show spans many outback locations, from a good old bikie-infested pub to a beautiful pink salt lake which, one character speculates, must surely be coloured by “flamingo shit”. Continue reading...