Barry's Beef

Greetings from Australia: the land of sun; convicts and sickenly good cricketers. Yes, it's Barry Down Under. G'day! Where to start? As with everything the beginning. The flight. On the Bahrain-Sydney stretch of the flight, I scanned the television channels and happened upon a quite wonderful little soap opera/film. Sadly, I didn't catch the title, my Arabic in all honesty not being quite what it should be. However, I caught the protaganist's name: Basyuni Basyuni among his colleagues was the hapless Hazim Hazim. Has someone got a stutter around here? I was half-expecting Boutros Boutros Ghali, but alas no.
Basyuni Basyuni (Basyuni as he is known to his friends) is a policeman or customs officer - some low-life like that - and he is charged by his boss to infiltrate an improbably Western looking gaggle of students some of whom are involved in filtering drugs into the University. Drugs in university whatever next? Fundamentalists in Finsbury Park? Anyway Basyuni sports a whopping great moustache, but to be down with the kids he has a shave and digs out some funky t-shirts, so funky that they're the kind donated to charity shops that you see the poor refugees in harrowing news reports wearing.
Confused? Trust me, I'm simplifying this now. Our now clean-shaven hero embarks on a friendly little coach trip with these university types into the dessert, where they improbably disembark to continue on foot. At this point I should say that it is subtitled but I might as well have been on speed for the amount of sense I can make out of it. Luckilly for me sense and fun are not necessary bed partners. Eventually, the gang are around a camp fire (as in encampment rather than effeminate) and like any bunch of 20-something horndogs in the middle of the dessert, they play truth or dare. And the bottle falls to the obligatory fat girl (I give you no camels for this woman) who has a quick mental breakdown saying that all her male friends like her like a sister and she really wants to love and to be loved. Like a woman! Well put the fork down love, you're the size of a truck. Suddenly, it becomes apparent that there's a love traingle involving Boutros Boutros Ghali, I mean Basyuni Basyuni, Tarek (who sports a beautifully clipped goatee) and Anji, the femme fatale with a nose reminiscent of a ski slope in the Alps. How do these love triangles sort themselves out? A drunken heart-to-heart? One male finding out a heinous secret about the other bloke and telling the woman? No sir! Not here. Tarek tries to rape Anji in the ocean (no euphemism, I promise) and Basyuni Basyuni happens upon the scene to save the day and whoop Tarek's ass.
So eventually bored out the their brains by this ludicrous script nad plot, they get back on the coach and get to the university where the head honcho policeman, a shady looking character if ever I have seen one, is furious that there are no drugs on the coach and Basyuni Basyuni is outed as a copper. The fact that he is suddenly walking around looking like an extra out of An Officer and a Gentleman offering a subtle clue. Anji flips. Quite why nobody knows. Maya (the fat girl) consoles herself by eating. Tarek laughs.
In the next scene one of the students is laughing maniacally about how he fooled the police and how he has the drug shipment coming in any minute. The bastard. Then Basyuni Basyuni storms the area and puts a gun up to the villains head. Enter stage left another baddie with gun to the head of Anji. Oh no. Basyuni Bayuni is fucked. Not quite because here is Tarek, the former attempted rapist who has completed his volte-face in the eyes of decent people by decking baddie number 2. It's then happily ever after. And I'm done. What an experience. Makes Eastenders look like the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Well I'm off out in a minute, bu rest assured there'll be more to come including: humiliation and sunburn at the SCG and retro Qantas trolley-dollies.

Labels: Barry Down Under, Basyuni Basyuni, Boutros Boutros Ghali