Mick Neven

Equal parts intimate confessional and crude exploration of bullying in days gone by.

Mick Neven’s Bully is a light-hearted account of Neven’s personal experiences with bullying – including the tales of the older boys who teased him on the bus and the childhood best friend that Neven came to bully in high school. Neven paints a hilarious picture of small-mining-town-living in central Queensland and the friendship that developed between two lonely, awkward boys in their formative years. He does well to convey the cruelty of kids, and the ignorance of yesteryear – thinking that bullying was how fat kids got toughened up in 1989.

Neven’s delivery is laidback and punctual, but the jokes sometimes fell flat, and didn’t seem to stir much reaction beyond a cursory chuckle. The best points in the show tended to be when Neven veered off from the constrained topic of the show into something else entirely, like the characters he encountered growing up in Central Queensland. While it may suffer from a slightly limiting theme, Bully is nonetheless an endearing and interesting exploration of the guilt of a former bully, and the comedic fodder he extracted from all the times when a Year 12 bashed him in the locker bay.