flook 31 january 1952

 

Ok we got to the end of January I'll start ombusing them after this. Monthly? OK, monthly. 

flook 30 jan 1952

 

thea early 2012

I can't quite remember when I took these pictures but it was clearly such a delight to see Thea and Clarkey at Ti Amo's in January.

Sorry my finger or something pink was in the way of part of the picture but what can you do. Shows it's real. Like a cryogenically frozen person with luck when this photograph is finally 'published' in 2022 we can digitally enhance it to get rid of the finger.

Later: I saw Thea again in the second week of February. Everything is going very well. She is a gem. No words but talks with an intonation and lilt like she really is talking.

flook 29 jan 1952

This is all interesting because of the parallels with Colonel Pewter (which came after it. The 'eggs for char, George' guy turns out to be a mirage, for instance). But I thought you might also be interested in how these pages in the Ottawa Citizen actually looked - they looked insane!!!

flook 28 jan 1952

 

flook 26 jan 1952

 

flook 25 jan 1952

 

homicide episode #38, 'let's have a funeral'

Another Homicide episode which in all honesty could have been an entertaining, if not riveting, film, if it had slightly different pacing and structure. Christopher Lodge is a failed businessman; his wife Margret is, I guess, a kind of a doorstop and their lodger Alec Thompson is a smart-aleck in a Kenneth Williams-y way. It's hard to tell whether Alec thinks of himself as the son they don't have or the husband Margret ought to have, maybe it's both (it's interesting too how there is a lot of parodying of English people in this episode; Thompson keeps implying the police are doing things wrong because they're not doing things they way they do them in the UK; acts like he has a special relationship with them; they mimic his accent at one point, etc). (Remember this was the only Australian-made weekly drama on Australian TV at the time; where else are you going to see Australians sending English people up?!) In any case the dynamic is good, although Beverley Dunn as Margret is woefully underutilised and her character frankly a bit ambiguous, though she shows a bit of gumption very occasionally when she's pushed. Beverley Dunn died only a few months ago. 

There's actually no murder in this episode, though there's an attempted murder right at the end, just in case you felt cheated. Essentially Lodge is getting death threats in the form of, for instance, the funeral director being called to his house or someone sending a wreath, and so on. He is a recent bankrupt and it transpires there are a couple of people who'd invested in his business who were irritated about losing large sums of money (£5,000).

Terry Norris as Christopher Lodge. Norris had already appeared in Homicide umpteen times previously, when the format was to end the show with five or so minutes of court case; Norris was usually the prosecuting counsel if I remember correctly. In any case, he had a standard role. And now here he is in what I think are his (character's) pyjamas. The Lodges live in Glen Iris (Kerferd St as I recall) although I have no idea if the place we see as their home, a corner house at I think no. 10, is actually in that street. There is a Kerferd St Glen Iris in real life btw; I had stopped checking the addresses they give out in the show because I figured they were usually made up. Not this time, at least, the address is real. 

Mac (Leonard Teale) and Alec Thompson (Stanley Walsh). I have started a bit of a collection of the art on Homicide set walls, too, and there's some good looking stuff in the Lodges' house but nothing you can really get a good shot of. 

After a bit of the practical joking about Lodge's death, he goes missing and the house is in disarray as a result. Here's Margret poking around in the mess. 

Bettine Kauffman has one scene as Rita Dalton, one of Lodge's debtors. It's a strangely gratuitous scene with no real connection to anything else in the episode, but she does a good job. You almost wonder whether she's been put in here to pad out the show, I don't know how much of Homicide was done on the fly. I'd like to know more about her career (like I'd like to know more about practically everyone I see on Homicide) but all I can find out at this point is that she was born on 21 September 1927 in Melbourne and her middle name is Rosalind.  

Also, in 1951 she played Eliza in Portrait of a Gentleman on ABC radio (ABC weekly Vol. 13 No. 3, 20 January 1951, p. 26).

Oh, and that in 1984 she was in a radio play by Astrid Saalbach called Footsteps in the Sand, according to the Age 'Green Guide' 23 August 1984 p. 19. 

Oddly enough I was scanning around that page of the Green Guide looking for the show they used to have on Sunday nights on I think 3AR where people in England and Australia sent each other messages, and instead my own name, misspelled, jumped out at me lol. 

So, Bettine and I were on radio on the same day. Who'd have thought. She's 95 this year if she's still alive. I am about as glamorous now as I was in 1966, I wonder if she is.

Alec boasts to the detectives that Margret brings him breakfast in bed and this is him expostulating during one of those times. It's clear that Alec is hoping that, when Christopher goes missing, he is either dead or at least permanently disappeared though Alec seems less keen after Christopher empties Margret's bank account and cash-around-the-house-supplies. 

Things are a bit easy for the Homicide squad after this (by the way, they shouldn't even be looking into this case - no-one's dead). Margret gives them some vague advice that Christopher is staying with a friend elsewhere in Glen Iris. So they go towards the friend's house and instead spot Christopher on the way. I think they claimed this was High St Glen Iris and I'd like to know but I can't find any detail. 

This is him coming out of a bank. 

And this is where they waylay him. 

This is what he has in his case. 

One of the only really identifiable businesses in this grainy film is what I'm almost certain is 'Chatfield's Four Square'. Can't find any mention of it in the papers though. I might try and look it up in the Sands and McDougall when I'm in the State Library tomorrow though. Or, even better, the 1966 phone book! Anyway, long story short, the detectives deliver Christopher back to Margret (and Alec), and she says she's going to use this massive amount of money to pay off his debts, and then he is going to be beholden to her and Alec, seemingly, I get the sense there is going to be a sort of Joe Orton world for him thereafter, except...

In a weird little twist, Christopher goes into the garden shed and puts a whopping dose of weed killer into Alec's tea, a crime he could not possibly hope to get away with and as it transpires Alec goes to hospital (and lives) and Christopher goes to jail for 5-8 years for attempted murder (we don't see any of this happen, we're just told about it). So everything's left up in the air. If it were me, I'd bring the Margret-Alec story back for another episode, but that's not generally how Homicide does things. 

By the way, Beverley Dunn was, like Colette Mann, a success at the South Street competitions. Much earlier though (1950). 

This is from the Age 13 October 1950 if you really beg me I'll find the page number for you. I mean she went on to do a lot of other things and playing Margret Lodge was, trust me, not her career highlight. 

flook 24 january 1952

 

Ok guys just remember Pierre Boulle published La planète des singes in 1963 eleven years after this...

flook 23 january 1952

 

flook 22 january 1952

 

just one more thing about wild life

I recognise I have become the one thing I said I would never be, a Wild Life bore. So I'll keep this short, really just 'putting it out there' on the off chance, message in a bottle style, that someone who can answer my curiosity sees it and lets me know wtf. 

So. Wild Life is often panned for being scrappy, in fact (as my post from late last year showed) it was disliked by 'the critics' from the outset. Whatever it might seem like, I actually don't think that Paul McCartney needs me to defend his work and he can generally speaking look after himself. But Wild Life fascinates me, not just because I really like it, but also because of strangeness. 

Wild Life is notoriously a bit of a slapdash affair, and it's up to you whether you find this appealing or disgusting; most people seemed to think it was the latter. One of the strangest things about it is the song 'Some People Never Know', which I really like, but which is mixed in such a way that in one section of the song (for instance) a whole vocal section (around 4:05) is knocked down in volume in a manner that really sounds like an error. 

If it's an error, it's been replicated through at least 154 versions of the album (alright, I admit I haven't listened to them all). A recent remaster neither restores nor eliminates this 20 seconds of ghost vocal, just pushes it even further down in the mix, which makes it even stranger when the vocal comes back in solidly at 4:33. 

A few months ago, to celebrate the 50th anniversary, I purchased the Wild Life box set which alongside the remastered album and a short DVD of not very exciting footage etc and the track with PMcC later recycled into his hit with Kanye in 2014, has a disc called the 'Rough Mixes'. What is weird about these (finally I'm getting to it!) is that these rough mixes are, by and large, much more robust and thought-through than what was released. For instance, not only is the full vocal present in 'Some People Never Know' but there's also trumpet in it (no bullroarer though). I just don't understand what happened and that's all I have to say. 

flook 21 jan 1952

 

flook 19 jan 1952

 

flook 18 jan 1952

I gathered all of these together a few years ago and set them to post exactly 70 years later. Don't feel you have to read them. Do admit the art is sumptuous (if sometimes imperfectly reproduced). 

I set it up to post one a day in January, then monthly thereafter. 

nearly 8

It probably is something close to Nancy's 8th birthday. She was pretty certainly born in 2014, maybe around this time, going by the fact that she seemed to be a kitten around mid-year but the vet who desexed her said she was almost certainly older, just malnourished and stunted. We will never know anything about her birth, but on the plus side, who wants to know anything about a cat's birth? 

There are a few things that remind me sometimes that Nancy is a cat. One is that she often cleans herself on the couch on this nice crocheted rug, and then she forgets where she ends and the rug begins, and she gets the rug caught in her tooth (or something). If she is really full-on doing that I usually pick her up and put her on part of the couch without the rug, an action she accepts entirely as her due and she just goes on washing herself. But it is a little depressing to me that she apparently has no volition when it comes to rearranging her circumstances: everything that is, is, unless someone or something changes it. 

The other thing is that even though I tell her and Helmi that they have to become friends, they refuse to do so. It pisses me off. Though I was reminded (by a grody photo exhibition my phone made for me) that at one point they did bond over a toy where something that looked a bit like a mouse tail popped out of a unit. I suppose I should resurrect that and keep it going, though Nancy generally has a short attention span for new things.  

flook 17 january 1952

 I really hope you wanted to know what Flook was doing seventy years ago. 

whatever next

 

Melbourne Age 16 Jan 1957 p. 8

homicide 'catapult'

I guess it needs to be said: if you're going to cast Leonard Teale as a criminal twice, then as a policeman pretending to be a criminal, then as a policeman, is it wise to then cast someone as a criminal who does not look a million miles different from Leonard Teale, if a bit younger maybe? I'm talking about Kerry Francis, who was an up-and-coming Sydney actor who seemed to get some decent second-tier roles in interesting theatre but apart from the ABC play of Rusty Bugles didn't seem to crack TV too often (he was Judith Arthy's husband, and it looks like they went to the UK together in the late 60s; I can only find evidence of him in radio plays in Britain up until the mid-70s). The woman he's with is Vivienne Lincoln. The man in the middle is Jon Ewing as Dennis Flynn (Ewing was a producer as well as an actor; he took on The Mavis Bramston Show in 1968 and told the SMH it had to be about 'pace, pace, pace'). Kudos to him age 30 being able to pull off a part that is surely meant to be about ten years younger. Part of the schtick here, not very well developed but a kind of commentary on appropriation of 'American culture' is that these people, young people ostensibly, talk in a kind of swing-jive manner and Flynn likes to sing some kind of line from what is supposed to be a popular song. 

Francis as Johnny Parke, John Morgan as Cliff Hogan and Lincoln as Candy Green (great name). The story is drawn out and not in itself all that engaging except for the little details; that Johnny Parke is from a wealthy background for instance, has been denied nothing in his life by his indulgent mother, and is now kind of mad/deluded. 

Vivienne Lincoln had already been in Homicide once this year (1965) as the wife of a man in the fashion industry who faked his death. It's not impossible I suppose that she got her entree into Crawfords by dint of being in the TV play The Hungry Ones alongside Leonard Teale and another Homicide occasional, Fay Kelton. Strangely whatever Lincoln did after Homicide she wasn't on tv much again. She was in a 70-minute play on the BBC called All Out for Kangaroo Valley in 1969. She is thanked in Christine Wallace's 1999 unauthorised biography Germaine Greer: Untamed Shrew though it is not made clear why.

The main element of importance here is that they are outside the Macedon Hotel. And by 'importance' I mean... I don't really know what I mean. 

You don't need to know who Sam Preedy is, it doesn't matter that much, just know that this is his Woodend home and his wife, Selma played by Golda Prince. I just l-o-v-e the name 'Golda'. Whatever happened to Golda Prince (Prince delivers some good, natural sounding lines in here but Selma is not exactly a major character) she seems primarily to have been a Shakespeare actor around Melbourne in the 60s (she was Olivia in Twelfth Night in 1960, a performance described in the Age as 'completely adequate')** though she also had a couple of stints in Consider Your Verdict earlier in the decade. This is the scene where she tells Johnny and Dennis they are having pork chops for dinner and Dennis delights in what he says will be a night of 'pork chops and songs!' 

Dennis obviously has a face to be seen smaller between two other people. Anyway, there is a pretty interesting closing chase sequence, on a very steep prospect where there appears to be major roadworks going on. I am going to guess this is the building of the South-Eastern Freeway somewhere in the Toorak area, I suppose. A steep rocky face going down to a boulevard of sorts - it has to be round there but I can't place it. 

Also, the power lines seem to set it in that part of the world. Maybe south of Burnley on the far side of the river?  (BTW every inch of my being is telling me this is early construction/ vicinity of the Eastern Freeway, but that wasn't happening in 1965-6 as far as I know). 

Here's an early-ish print mention of Kerry Francis when he appeared in a notable play, the first Sydney performances of The Season at Sarsaparilla which had debuted at Adelaide the year before with, I'm imagining, a completely different cast. This is from the Sydney Sun-Herald 12 May 1963 p. 86. 

*Harry Robinson, 'Jon v. John' Sydney Morning Herald 4 September 1968 p. 6

**'Made his debut with seven stitches' Melbourne Age 11 July 1960 p. 3