MovieChat Forums > The Secret Life of Us (2001) Discussion > RICHIE - TV'S BIGGEST LOSER?

RICHIE - TV'S BIGGEST LOSER?

posted 18 years ago by emuboy
2 replies | jump to latest

I used to watch this show mainly to see what misfortune would befall Richie that week. These were some of the standouts:

1. Richie has an affair with another man, realises he is gay, and makes a terrible mess of things with his girlfrind, Miranda, and they break up.
2. Richie shows a sex tape of him and Miranda to his gay friends. The tape makes its way onto the internet.
3. Richie has an acting job on a really bad soap opera and is chosen to do an interview on Rove Live. His friends Jason and Evan humiliate him from the audience by pretending to be gay, although this is not their intention.
4. Richie asks to leave the soap opera, but is held to his contract by the producers. Richie is unhappy at first, but then changes his mind and is happy to stay. Then he is sacked.
5. Unemployed, Richie gets some casual work gardening with Christian. Richie is seduced in the pool by a girl who lives at the house, until her gay brother walks in on them. Word of this gets back to Miranda who is very upset. Worse is to follow when the girl's brother and his boyfriend find Richie and beat him up.
6. Richie gets a new job - wearing a dog suit and dancing around and singing on a children's show. The girl on the show with Richie is a precocious brat.

Did you watch this show and shake your head at the stupid situations Richie got himself into? Can you think of any other of these moments? Or can you name another TV character who was an even bigger loser than Richie?

[–] Mark_Y 18 years ago

very very funny.

I'd been blinded to this throughout the first 2 seasons because St. Kilda looked like such a great place to live and he still had lots of friends and a reasonable social life etc. but by the time he's in that *beep* dogsuit he must have been toying with the notion of suicide quite a bit or at least found himself listening to those old Smiths albums much more frequently.

It really was the final humiliation wasn't it? We meet him and he lives with his girlfriend and his best mate and everything's great but he winds up ostracized from the group, he has ONE, ...ONE!!! storyline thoughout the whole tedious third series ( a very boring one at that) and he winds up begging for scraps of work in a bloodhound costume.

Had he not left before the fourth season (which I have never bothered to watch), fate would surely have seen him dancing on street corners for spare change with his trousers round his ankles or swearing and drinking through a mangey beard living out of a cave.

signatures are so self-indulgent.

[–] matineeidyll 18 years ago

I adored Richie (Spencer McLaren)! I appreciated that the Secret Life writers avoided the rags-to-riches story, preferring to show people how hard it actually is to break into the entertainment industry. Richie almost never got a break, and he had to take some pretty crap jobs to pay the rent.

When you think about it, he wasn't so successful in his personal life either, so I can see where the 'TV's Biggest Loser' title comes in. But I have to use that horrible Aussie cliche` of "give 'im a go!"