When 40-year-old man-child Lucky gets a call from his mother in Perth to say she’s dying, he plonks his childhood upright piano in a trailer and heads off from Sydney. Runaway teenager Meg crashes into him in the desert. Thus commences “Upright,” a flowing, unpredictable, wonderful road trip across Australia, peopled with grey nomads, amphetamine-crazed truckies, and gangster women, a journey that slowly reveals the secrets of these two flawed, credible individuals. Tim Minchin is brilliant as Lucky, as is Milly Alcock playing Meg. The backdrops are filmed wonderfully. The plot twists and buckles, nothing is predictable yet all slots into the grand plan, and emotions are wrenched and pure, The eight episodes sit perfectly as mini stories, and the whole is transcendent. Wonderful.
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