The Angus Project: Diversity meets comedy in groundbreaking ABC TV pilot

We’ve all done it, slumped in front of the TV with our hilarious friends after a day of achieving not very much and thought “I can do that”.

Angus Thompson and Nina Oyama certainly did. In fact, they did it so much during their university days they are slightly shocked they graduated.

Unlike other idle dreamers, the firm friends actually got off the couch, picked up a camera and got to work.

The end result is The Angus Project, a ground-breaking TV pilot, which they hope will change the way Australians see people with disabilities.

Angus (Angus Thompson) is an aspiring sports journalist with cerebral palsy, who works for a shonky local paper.

He wastes his days with his carer Nina (Nina Oyama), a flailing university student who has a knack for blowing even the most mundane tasks out of proportion.

Assisted by their eclectic drug dealer Kane (Sammy J), the two find colourful ways to shirk their responsibilities, and undermine their mean boss Kath (Veronica Milsom), who runs the regional disability service provider.

Before it became a pilot, The Angus Project was a web series and both incarnations drew heavily on Thompson and Oyama’s time at Charles Sturt University in the regional NSW town of Bathurst.

“The web series is 100% real life,” Oyama said in a joint Skype conversation with Thompson ahead of the pilot’s debut on ABC iView on Tuesday.

“We used to just hang out and watch TV all the time and one day we were like ‘why don’t we make a show about our life’ because our life is pretty weird.”

That weirdness included using Thompson’s wheelchair to shoplift clothes from local stores and frantically writing last-minute university essays while high, both of which feature in the web series.

“We’ve got a great rapport with each other,” Thompson said of spending time on set with Oyama.

“Hanging out on camera is exactly the same as hanging out in real life.

“The character Angus and I are pretty similar but he is a lot more eager to please people around him to achieve his overall goals whereas I think it is too much trouble.”

First and foremost the two friends want to make their audience laugh with a pilot that is a mix of edginess of Broad City and the quirky charm of Rosehaven.

However, they also hope it plays a part in making the Australia depicted on the small screen representative of real life.

“There is a lot of diversity being seen in Australia but it’s still got a long way to go,” Thompson said.

“Growing up it was always a fight to prove to people I can achieve what everyone else can and that I want to be successful like the rest of the population.

“Having a disabled main character on national TV really help bring to light disabilities in the community.”

As well as the challenges people with disability can face, the pilot also shows how much fun they have.

Thompson and Oyama admit they took plenty of recreational drugs when they were university students writing what would become the Angus Project.

“The general public assume that if you have a disability you’re not likely to take recreational drugs and clearly that’s not the case because Angus took more drugs than I do.” Oyama said.

“Obviously now that we are professionals, Angus is an actor and I’m a full time writer we don’t engage in the lifestyle anymore but we wanted to smash perceptions of what it is like to have a disability.”

At the risk of getting all Sex and the City, the pilot’s third main character in town of Bathurst.

It’s a location primarily known for its popular V8 race and Oyama sees it as the perfect place for a comedy series.

“People go a bit rogue in the country because they are not monitored,” she said.

“Angus and Nina can get away with a lot more weird stuff than if they were trying to navigate the train network in the city.

“We want people to get outside an inner-city bubble to see what it is like to live in regional Australia, to see what it is like to have cerebral palsy, to have an experience outside their own.”

The Angus Project is available on ABC iView on November 20 and will be broadcast on ABC TV on December 4.