trip to europe (a month ago)

31 Jan - The first really hard thing for the trip to Europe was sending Perry away to the 'pet resort' for three weeks. He definitely knew something was up, though I'm going to guess his five months of existence to date hadn't prepared him for what. 

I was expecting him to do something super cutely heartbreaking just before they came to take him away, but instead he just looked at me accusatorially a few times and also when we went to a cafe so I could have breakfast, he threw up (well, tbh I don't know if he threw up, the pat of vomit there did not seem to me to contain anything I knew him to have eaten the previous 12+ hours, but if it wasn't him, who was it?). But he didn't need to do anything super cutely anything because of course I already miss him incredibly (less than an hour after he left) and I am in a limbo between where I have surrendered my boy and the upside hasn't started yet, just 48 hours of downside (prep for travel, then travel) before I start to appreciate the worthwhileness. 

The woman who came to pick him up asked if she could use the toilet (always weird, imo, but I suppose I'm glad she isn't going to leave Perry unsupervised in a little transporter van while she ducks into a Maccas in Malvern) and - this is entirely between you and me, and I admit I did have the dishwasher running - I am not sure she flushed. I went and flushed anyway after she left and didn't look so only one person (her) will ever know. While she was upstairs using the toilet Perry stole her keys. 

Excellent plan but unfortunately didn't work. 

Now I just have a few hours to do a bunch of dumb things before the end of the day. OK. Going to be fine. 

me kaksi no. 8 1962 - rikoksentekijän rakkaus

 

I am looking forward to translating this issue of ME Kaksi into English for myself and perhaps you too. The bulk of the magazine is taken up with a story called 'The Love of a Criminal'.  

Australia had a lot of these kinds of publications, too, and I think in my country they were essentially long American comic-strip stories reformatted to paperback size for a small local market, though I don't know why they had to be redone in this way although in some instances there was local censorship at play (my grandmother worked in the 1950s on these kinds of publications, where she took the sex out of American romances, though I don't know if she did it for comics or just text stories). What I particularly like though is when a local artist has taken work and put it in differently shaped panels, which means (as is very obvious here) there is a lot of blank space. Sometimes there's a half-hearted attempt to fit this space (in the last panel above, I'm pretty sure that the leftmost section has been instituted by a different artist for ME Kaksi). The talks balloon in that last panel is grotesque, a slapdash perversion. (The text means 'follow me'.) As you see as well the text in the balloon on the top right-hand side ('where are we going?') has been so poorly placed that the question mark has had to sit outside the balloon.

Apparently the woman in the story is a doctor, Doctor Anni Barton, unless I've misunderstood. I have to get to the bottom of this. If nothing else, it distracts me from Homicide, which I'm sure you're thoroughly sick of. I mean I was reading about people with gambling addictions today and how gambling strokes or massages or inflames some neurone they have, I bet Homicide does that for me. DW I have some really great Finnish records, and some others, to write about, as well as things like the above. 

one too many

Series 10, episode 34 (aired 9 October 1973), ‘One Too Many’, marks the final appearance of George Mallaby’s character Peter Barnes in Homicide after 268 episodes.

I have written elsewhere about the difficulties Australian television drama had with character development – for instance, Class of ’74 is a real collage of non-starter, unresolved/unresolvable scenarios where (it seems) actors’ contracts ended before their storylines even got started. 

 

But what I didn’t realise when I was watching Co74 was that repeats were a big deal for commercial TV in the 60s/70s (probably still are) and one of the ways TV justified the much greater expense for television made in Australia was the repeatability. This meant (I guess) every, or almost every, episode had to be self-contained. That must surely be one of the main reasons there’s so little character development in Homicide. That’s then the reason why when George Mallaby (for instance) was written out of the show, they had to kind of retroactively work a storyline of sorts – that he’d been under stress for some time – into his character’s departure (as well as telling the usual solvin’-a-crime story of the episode). So Peter is gloomy and moody for the whole ep, and when he finally breaks down and admits he has a problem,* he cites one previous case we’ve seen and another which (to my knowledge/memory) we didn’t see, as examples of the horrors he’s witnessed as a policeman. 

 

It's a shame to see Mallaby go because he’s really the last of what I presently consider to be the classic line-up of Homiciders, although I suppose that’s a fluid cohort to some extent, certainly he was around so long that only Leonard Teale, I’m guessing, was there longer. 

 

Peter Barnes didn’t really grow as a character (funnily, even he admits that in this episode, when he suggests to Pat Kelly that he became a policeman straight out of high school and feels a lack because he has never been anything else; he is going to resign from the force and perhaps become a schoolteacher) but he was always at odds somewhat with the conservative, old fashioned force, always hinting that he had a somewhat countercultural view – though never really demonstrating what that was. By 1973 it must have been years, four or five, since he picked up his guitar. 

 

There aren’t too many more Homicide episodes to go. I haven’t actually watched them all, as I think I have mentioned – for a few the premises were just too grisly, or I was just sick of ‘a young girl is killed when…’ I don’t know what I’ll do when I run out though. I’m not saying it’s hopeless. I’m just saying… do I go straight on to Division 4? Probably! 

* and accidentally solves the case by being so weird the murderer thinks he's been rumbled and Barnes is just playing with him

Homicide September 1973

So this is the Homicide line-up in late '73 as per the opening credits. The police car still gets a lot of prominence. 

Even though it's still really based around the four detectives, the opening credits tries to give a sense that they're at the heart of a big operation of coworkers (who are never seen at any other time). Here's a guy who we never see in the actual show - 'D24' I guess - the heart of communications for the police. 

Then the men: 

These episodes are excellent, and each of them could have been a movie really. One of them, 'To Tell You the Truth', has a young and groovy Michael Caton in it. 

the end of inspector fox

Sorry to break it to you but Inspector Fox died, on 17 July 1973 in episode S10E22. There is a slightly bizarre account of the episode on IMDB where the writer uses the actors' names instead of the characters ('It is the last couple of days on the Homicide squad for Detective Leonard Teale. He has been promoted to Inspector and transferred to lead a new unit...'). Anyway there's a weirdo around modelling himself on Lee Harvey Oswald who wants to kill David Mackay but instead he shoots Colin Fox and there you have it.* Alwyn Kurts went on to host Beauty and the Beast and his departure was the end of that particular show, until it was rebooted umpteen times. 

Melbourne Age 12 July 1973 p. 35

Inspector Fox's replacement is Reg Lawson, played by Bud Tingwell. 

Sydney Sun-Herald 8 July 1973 p. 81

Whole new set of opening credits - whereas the first colour shows with Kurts/Teale had an opener that was modelled very closely on the original (Ds in a car, all get out together) now the opener is very tech-heavy with a lot of communications imagery featuring people who I'm pretty sure are not and never will be in the show itself, mainly D24 -  the communications hub of the force. This episode also features the debut of John Stanton.

Melbourne Age Green Guide Section 20 July 1973 p.3

* That Kurts and Teale left at the same time was used by Crawfords/Channel 7, I'm sure, to surprise viewers - the show is full of suggestions that Mackay was going to be killed, but of course at the last minute it's Fox. They used the same trick when they wrote Bronson out of the show - that time Mackay got shot early, and Bronson late in the episode. 

new cop for homicide

Melbourne Age 'Green Guide' section, 7 September 1972 p. 3

george makes a stand

...or something. In the 15 May 1973 episode of Homicide, entitled 'Yes, That's Sandra', suddenly George Mallaby, who's been a margin figure for a long time, suddenly becomes virtually the star of Homicide. Sorry for the 50-year-old spoiler but Mike Preston was about to leave the show, so possibly they felt the need to establish another young putative bit of eye candy there - the one you'd forgotten had been there all along.*

I know you think I'm crazy to care but anyway, this particular episode, remarkably, has a very subtly different beginning, adding a couple of little extra shots, not just of George but also of Alwyn Kurts being active. Go figure!!! What did Leonard Teale think? He was virtually out of the opening sequence which made it look like the Mike Preston show... and the weirdest thing is this was the second last black and white episode, so it was they only used this particular opening credit sequence twice - and then Preston left (because his character died) in the following episode... 

Looking forward to seeing what comes next.** 

* Except a super-camp ballet instructor says he is a 'bit soft around the rum-tiddly'. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing, I suspect a bad thing and not something you say about someone who's meant to be hot. It was certainly an unwelcome come-on. 

** I'll have some things to say about Gary Day who replaced Mike Preston, but I'm processing the 'excerpts from a memoir' I found on a Homicide website... 

memory lane

This is one of the weirdest Homicide moments ever for me. Delaney and Mac pile into their vehicle with an informant (played by Max Osbiston) to find a house in Carlton. What do you know, they end up in the street I 'grew up in', which is actually in Hawthorn not anywhere near Carlton, but there you go. We don't see any more of the street except the street sign - very obvious, unusually obvious for Homicide (and I don't know much about the old postcode system in Melbourne, but I do know that 'E2' is definitely not Carlton). But... 

We do get a shot of Auburn road, the main road that Scott St led off, and the gasometer at the end of the street, which really towers over the area in a way I genuinely don't remember, but I'm sure that's it. 

That's all I know. But it's something. 

 

death car (from 11 Feb 2013)

Last Saturday (9th of February, 2013) we went to a picnic for Catherine McCarthy - a birthday/farewell I'm going to Japan kind of picnic - in the Carlton Gardens, and while we were there a dead person was discovered in a little black car very close to where we were. The paramedics came, then the fire brigade, then an ambulance, then the police. We were there for some time and the police also hung around a long time, I don't know why. It was amazing how many gawkers there were - kids in party hats for instance, though they probably can be excused insofar as they were headed for the car parked immediately behind. Also a long haired man in green who just wanted to hang there looking at the action until he was moved on. Clearly the person (apparently, a woman) was totally dead in the back seat of the car - at least, there was no attempt to revive her or even get her out. I don't know what the police were waiting for. 

tullamarine 1972

A lot of the eps of Homicide shown in 1972/73 have endings with people trying to escape at the airport. I suppose it was a glamorous place then. This is an episode from February 1973 known as 'The Herring'. In fact, quite a bit of the airport you see here seems to still be intact fifty years later (either that or weirdly replicated in newer buildings but that seems less likely). 

skeleton found in bush grave at mt. dandenong

Hmm by the way although I do love Homicide I just want to add that this kind of ridiculous bad prop - particularly when they've shown how good their newspaper fakes can be - leaves me feeling a little ripped off. I wonder if the work experience kid did that headline with letraset.  

Pretty sure this is from episode 361 which I think might be called 'Skeleton Key'. 

all the great men were in the video age - 3

 I must read this one day I bet it's hilair. 

homicide episode 350 new opening credits

After episode 350 of Homicide they gave it a new opening sequence which was kind of exciting. Up until then (i.e. all through 1964-1972) the basic opening shots had just been variations on the idea of the men (whoever they were at the time) driving to Russell Street in a car and getting out of it. The new sequence is little action shots from the show - so - wrestling fighting and chasing. 

Alwyn Kurts comes first and yeah, he's great and he's the boss of Homicide, but...

Leonard Teale was surely by this stage the man most closely associated with the program in the public's mind, so I'm kind of surprised he wasn't giving star billing. I suppose it was no one actor's show. 

It surprises me that they put Mike Preston up next, as he'd only been in a show a couple of months (he features in a lot of the action sequences in the opener) whereas... 

George Mallaby (who Laura suggested, and I think correctly, looks a bit pissed off here) had been in the show for five years (that's a guess) longer than Preston, but he was listed/shown last. 

Go figure! Hey by the way if you were ever in any doubt, let me just confirm, I fuckin' love Homicide. For all kinds of reasons. 

flook february 1953