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Star and creator of We Can Be Heroes and Summer Heights High will be back on UK screens this summer. Will you be watching? Neighbours, Kylie, Home and Away, Prisoner Cell Block H, Dame Edna, John Torode. Australia has made its mark on television history, but it hasn’t always been pioneering. Then Chris Lilley came along. And now the creator and star of We Can Be Heroes and the immense Summer Heights High is returning to our screens with a new 12-part series, Angry Boys – you can watch a trailer for it here – a co-production between the Australian network ABC and HBO which will be shown on the BBC in the summer. As with both of his other series, Angry Boys – which the Australian network ABC says “explores what it means to be a 21st century boy by putting the male of the species under the microscope” – sees Lilley playing several characters. These include twin brothers Daniel and Nathan Sims (first seen in We Can Be Heroes) and an ambitious, tyrannical Japanese wife and mother-of-three, Jen Okazaki, whose primary focus is her son Tim who she is pushing into becoming a skateboarding champion. There is also a woefully untalented rapper and a very broad, very hard-faced female prison guard (think: an amalgam of Bad Girls’s Bodybag and Glee’s Shannon Beiste). To many, Lilley is a genius. The close, documentary-style filming of We Can Be Heroes and Summer Heights High lead to some parallels being drawn with The Office, naturally, but Lilley’s head is filled with far murkier stuff. Both We Can Be Heroes and Summer Heights High dive headfirst into some pretty swampy taboos, but all his characters – even the testier ones such as Mr G, Jonah , and Ja’mie are expertly accessible. Ja’mie, a wealthy exchange student from a private school who bullies and bitches her way through her time at a state school, is Lilley’s most notorious creation . She’s horrific; outwardly racist and ignorant, but also completely delicious. Fans of the show gobble up her dialogue like Pacman, and regurgitate it at every opportunity. I have a friend who still only speaks to me in Ja’mie-isms. Of course, it’s shocking how brilliantly a 30-something man can play a waspy teenage girl with such purse-lipped, shiny haired ease, but the beauty of her character is that she represents the universal school bitch. Lilley’s got every blithe insult, every bit of body language down to such terrifyingly accurate detail that every time she pushes her hair out her face and pouts, you’re reminded of the girl that gleefully made people feel shitty about themselves at lunchbreak. Lilley’s work relies on heightened reality – absorbing so many of the weird nuances people have to create characters that, although grotesque, remind us instantly of people we’ve encountered throughout our lives. He reminds me of Julia Davis in the way he works – in fact, the observational, often bleak nature of his comedy feels very British. Perhaps there’s even a little bit of Chris Morris there. Lilley plays with political correctness but doesn’t exploit bad taste just for the sake of a laugh. It’s cleverer than that because, although you’re laughing with your hand over your mouth at how toxic characters such as Ja’mie are, you’re also laughing at the fact that such people are probably also just a few feet away from you. Lilley is said to be a fan of Davis’s work and, when I interviewed her last year, she said she was in complete awe of him. There are parallels between the character P at Mullins in We Can Be Heroes – a middle-aged woman who dreams of rolling on her side from Perth to Uhuru – and Beverley in Davis’s Human Remains. Ja’mie’s blind self-absorption is like a mini Jill Tyrell in a school summer dress, too. Angry Boys is the first Australian product HBO have taken a significant stake in – a huge vote of approval for Lilley’s work – but it’ll be interesting to see just how palatable the characters will be to the Americans. For fans of Lilley, though, Angry Boys can’t come quickly enough. Comedy Television Eleanor Morgan guardian.co.uk