High School Musical sickeningly wholesome

Reuters

HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL: Sickeningly wholesome.

Relevant offers

The American writer Dorothy Parker used to review literature in a column called The Constant Reader, and every once in a while, after confronting a particular kind of literature, Constant Reader would affect a lisp, and report: "Constant Weeder fwowed up".

This is pretty much how many Constant Viewers are likely to feel for the first half-hour of High School Musical II, the tele-movie which debuted on Sky's Disney Channel on Saturday. Can they be serious? you think. Isn't this 2007?

How can Disney still be making money out of a sugar-rush mega version of The Partridge Family, without the faintest hint of post-modern irony? It's like watching a Mormon version of the Paris Hilton story. What on earth is the point?

But after the first half-hour, you start to realise that all this ostentatious innnocence is exactly the point.

The phenomenon of High School Musical is its totally unapologetic retro sappiness. It is wholesome to the point of being shocking. There's something heroic about it. Here is a programme in which attractive young people rush about in skimpy clothes, wiggling their bodies a lot and singing about luuurv, and yet it is utterly sexless. There is no swearing. There is no drunkenness, smoking, nor hint of any substance stronger than chewing gum. No tagging. No mindless swigging of water bottles. No piercings, no iPod sullenness. These are teenagers behaving like responsible little angels. For a whole two TV hours. To music. And not even rap music.

We have been beamed back to 1950s Disneyland, where every young teen is wholesome, virginal, clean-cut, good- natured and bound to Do the Right Thing in the end. Even the token naughty girl.

This world never existed, save for Disney movies and family sitcoms from the 50s to 70s. It's a long time since we've had it proposed straight-facedly in a popular entertainment.

There have been plenty of sendups, like The Brady Bunch Movie. There was a solid assault on the nostalgia front with Grease, but at bottom that show was all about sex and knowingness. The heroine ends up getting down and dirty. High School Musical is as unworldly and innocent of lust as a woolly spring lamb to the final frame, and that's what makes it perversely edgy. There's something subversive about its unabashed goody-two-shoesness. After a while, you get a naughty counter-culture feeling watching something so ridiculous and unlikely.

And the music is inanely catchy. Love it or loathe it – there is no in-between – it will get to you. You will quickly see the point of it. It will lodge in your brain. Even while it irritates the living daylights out of you, you will understand that it's well- written, clever pop musical fodder. You will hope devoutly that no member of your household buys the soundtrack, because you will – may God strike you down – inevitably find yourself humming bits of it.

The dancing and choreography are also terrific. Even as you fwow up, you cannot help but admire the synchronised swimmy bits and the leaping about over school desks and the business on the baseball diamond. These kids are sickeningly talented.

For the uninitiated – and may they stay that way – the High School Musical franchise follows a group of middle American high school teens. The first, which came out last year, was a take on Romeo and Juliet, but with plenty of Clueless thrown in. You have a good-looking jock, and a battling Latino girl from the wrong side of the tracks, and they end up singing a duet after many tribulations. (Disney obviously does not do authentic Shakespearean endings.)

High School Musical II follows the same characters on their summer holidays, when they all end up working for a country club, which happens to be the spiritual home and power-hub of the HSM villainness, Sharpay (named phonetically after the dog).

She is a Paris Hilton gimme-girl, rich, pretty, spoilt and calculating. She is still after the hero, Troy, who is really in love with Gabriella. Sharpay, whose parents are handily well- connected, engineers matters so that Troy's head is turned by money and glamour, via the prospect of university talent scouts taking an interest in him. This causes him to neglect his true friend, an adorable shaggy-haired lad by the name of Chad, and his sports team, and his true love.

However, Sharpay's brother Ryan defects from her salon, transferring his loyalties to Troy's friends, and undermining Sharpay's efforts in the end. The details are too infantile to be worth relating, but obviously Troy comes to his senses, apologises to his friends, and Sharpay, though pouty, puts her sulks aside to join the cast for a couple of rousing finales about how absolutely super life and friends and love all are.

For its premiere, the Disney Channel mercilessly spliced the tele-movie with visitations from the perky young actors, all hanging out in a groovy rumpus room somewhere in middle America, from where they commented inanly on how much fun they'd had making the show. This rated very high on the Fwowed Up index.

This cynical reviewer could only wonder at the magnitude of the morality clause in each actor's contract. To carry off a franchise like this, they have somehow to be kept pure plastic Disney all the way through.

HSM is very far from an original idea, but its novelty is an ambitious new artform: staying clean in a showbiz firmament which requires scandal.