How this former ambassador’s show was scuppered by Trump

Diplomats never tell, but a new dark TV comedy created by the former Australian ambassador to France promises to be anything but discreet.

Brendan Berne, our man in Paris from 2017 to 2020, has just filmed the pilot for a sitcom called Rank, inspired by his two decades of service with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Berne, 56, who resigned from DFAT in 2020 to move to Burgundy in France with his husband and to concentrate on creative projects, describes Rank as “The Thick of It updated for the age of Trump, Truss and Thunberg”.

Networks and production houses were interested, but then the US president sued the BBC for defamation and, long story short, corporations shied away from a pointed comedy in the era of Donald Trump, Liz Truss’ short stint as UK prime minister and eco-warrior Greta Thunberg.

“Trump suing the BBC has scorched the earth for political satire, and the joke invigilators and sensitivity readers make transgressive comedy challenging. Five years on, someone laughed it’s been my Odyssey, but I’d say it’s more been the Plodyssey,” Berne says.

“When the rights returned to me, I revisited my more provocative scripts, which resonated with investors, and we have just finished shooting the pilot.”

As Australia’s ambassador, Berne helped to persuade French President Emmanuel Macron to visit Australia – a first. And in 2017, when Australia’s marriage equality legislation became law, he started a video on social media discussing stronger relations between Australia and France and ended it with him proposing to his Swiss-Australian partner of 11 years, Thomas Marti. Millions in France viewed it on social media, which led to Berne appearing on France’s top TV talk show.

Rank is not Berne’s only project. He has helped to develop a cello concerto that tells the largely lost story of a 19th-century French cabin boy being adopted by an Aboriginal tribe on the Cape York Peninsula.

Melissa King, the director of artistic planning for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra (SSO), commissioned the work, by composer Matthew Hindson. It was developed with the support of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies and is scheduled to premiere in NAIDOC Week next year.

The concerto will bring to life the largely untold story of 14-year-old Narcisse Pelletier, who was abandoned by his ship’s crew in Far North Queensland in 1858 and adopted by the Uutaalnganu people, with whom he lived for 17 years.

“This an important concerto for the SSO, as it brings the story of Narcisse and the Uutaalnganu to a wider audience, the first major cultural project dedicated to this incredible true story,” King says.

Berne and French cellist Sebastien Hurtaud, who hails from the same place as Pelletier, travelled last September to the Cape York Peninsula and met members of the Uutaalnganu people, some of whom still had oral accounts of Pelletier passed down from the 19th century. While visiting, Hurtaud played part of the composition for locals.

“They still share stories of the para (white man) who they saved in 1858 and who became part of them. One young woman recounted to me the story of Narcisse killing a crocodile after it had taken a baby, earning the respect of his new community,” Berne says.

Pelletier was later returned to France against his wishes, and his parents forced him to undertake an exorcism.

“As a former ambassador to France, I believed this forgotten chapter of the France-Australia relationship needed to be told, especially as the Indigenous people were the hero of the story,” Berne says.

“I also hoped it might help salve some of the wounds in the immediate wake of the cancellation of the submarine program in a country where culture means a tremendous amount.”

The French embassy in Australia appointed Berne to the French-Australian Culture Exchange Foundation, which is chaired in Melbourne by Myriam Boisbouvier-Wylie.

Berne’s TV program had a circuitous route to existence. In 2022, it was ranked in the top three of a co-production pitching competition, Series Mania, an international TV industry festival staged annually in Lille.

In developing the project, he worked with executive producer Glen Condie, the Emmy Award-nominated producer of Top End Wedding.

Rank, billed as a comedy of diplomatic proportions, was written by Berne and should appeal to disillusioned Gen Xers. It is set in a fictional South Pacific country, where British diplomats decide to give asylum to a rogue state weapons scientist in a misguided attempt to celebrate women in science week. The team is then thrown into turmoil by the appearance of a bumbling British minister.