"Of course, I never saw the Aussie original. Perhaps if I had, the US version would suffer so badly by comparison that I would be less able to take it on its own terms."

YouTube can solve that - there's this montage of a few moments from one show and lots of other clips.

National tastes in humour do vary - but I suspect that even more significant in this field are the assumptions made by programme planners about what will go down well or badly.