What she couldn’t believe, initially, was that anyone would be interested in a television show about life behind embassy doors.
“One of the things having the crew filming us has been the crew saying ‘why didn’t you tell us that”. What we tend to think is run of the mill and boring apparently is good TV,” McGowan says.
But Critchley says the hard thing about four months filming “was knowing when to stop’’.
“The Australian embassy in Bangkok is one of the biggest embassies Australia has, and one of the busiest,” she says. It’s also one of the most varied.
“You have the holiday-maker in Phuket who has just come for a week. You have people who have lived here for a long time, you have ex-patriots who are working, the innocent honeymooner, the seasoned traveller, or the Australians who have been coming for a lot of years and have families here.”
And, you can never predict which of those groups will end up at the embassy.
“Sometimes because we made a mistake, or we could have been in the wrong place at the wrong time or you are OS when something tragic happens to your family — they are all reasons we have an embassy,” says Critchley.
“As much as Thailand is the land of smiles, it’s also the land of surprises.”
McGowan’s embassy team is a mix of Thai nationals and Australians whose biggest skill is making the judgement call: “When does somebody need our help, when should somebody help themselves.”
“The top reasons Australians seek out the embassy are probably to get married because they’ve found the love of their life and they need us to sign off on a piece of paper so they can marry a Thai national; to get a new passport because it’s expired lost or damaged; to ask for help because they’ve run out of money, they have nowhere to go, they don’t have a ticket or they’re destitute of they’ve had an accident or someone has robbed them or if someone in their family has died — either here or over there,” McGowan says.