special squad gone for the doctor

This episode of Special Squad, called 'Gone for the Doctor', is I think the actual very last one, and it's a really shameful place to end a series. I think my theory about grabbing the crappy scripts out of the bottom drawer and retooling them to fit the current characters was correct. 

In this episode the team somehow end up camping (I shit you not) and on a whim decide to go for a drive in their jeep, with Smith driving and Anderson in the passenger seat and...

Davis on the bonnet of the vehicle. I'm serious. He's just travelling on the front of the van like that's a normal thing to do. 

Anyway for some reason not necessarily related to that activity, they crash into a tree and Smith is gravely injured. 

To be honest even at this early point you're thinking, why did we bother? Please just all die in the accident. But instead the other two are fine and simply need to get to a town, and they find a weird dystopian family in the bush with what is I guess a father, two more-or-less-adult children (Tina played by Julie Nihill and Yabbie played by David Slingsby) and another person with an eyepatch whose name I am sorry to say I've forgotten, or didn't catch in the first place, either that or it's Errol played by Richard Moir. I am not entirely sure where Errol fits into the story as apparently the father believed that Errol was having an affair with his wife so he killed her and poked Errol's eye out, this is all long ago by the way, but apparently Errol still hangs around talking in a raspy voice.  

I can't be bothered going on. Kudos to all involved that they took this idiotic script and made it into a whole program. I say 'kudos' but I wish they hadn't. But they knew by this stage that no-one would be watching. 

It was mostly nice knowing you Special Squad. 

how great is speed

Speed is, like, one of the great films of all time. It has an incredible cast (the stars and everyone else in the cast), an unbelievably terrifying premise, and a lot of interesting extra bits that just blow me away every time. The tension is incredible. But the way in which the people on the bus are this microcosm of how awful (US) society is (I mean unfortunately because of the stupid way the US is, we have to deal with the fact that most of the bus users are poor people, though Sandra Bullock's character isn't, she just has to take the bus temporarily because she's lost her license, and one other very annoying character, the tourist, is I guess not 'poor' but he is a hick and I guess in a sense outside of the LA/LA-adjacent class system. I suppose on reflection a lot of the passengers we just don't hear much from, but they're a bunch of, you know, not great unwashed but great unheardfroms, still, that kind of tabulates with the real world doesn't it...

That wouldn't be much I suppose, and even the amazing effects wouldn't be much, without the brilliant chemistry between the amazing Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves, who are both completely incredible in every way, and the intense ridiculousness of Dennis Hopper, and even the pathetic straight shootin' norminess of Jeff Daniels. 

This film is almost thirty years old, and please god never let it be remade, it's so exceptional and a real time capsule (pre-9-11, pre-Trump, obvs). I wonder what Speed 2 is like. 

jacqui o'sullivan sometime in the late 1980s

 

That dolphins thing is super stupid. 

special squad: mad mountain mumma

Mary Canny as Bridey and John Diedrich as Davis with Hawkins (Smith) in the background at Spencer St Station

Another uninteresting picture, of Alan Cassell (Anderson) and Hawkins' back. I only took this because there's the famous Spencer Street train mural in the background. I mean it is that. 

I listen to podcasts like Blank Check and The Filmcast and I wonder 'where the hell do these people get the time to be so on top of all these fucking horrendous (sounding) films?' and then it occurs to me that I have watched about forty episodes of Special Squad in the last few weeks. 'Watched' is a slightly problematic term as I have really often just had it on in the background. I have antenna primed for when they go to interesting places, which is what intrigues me most. but also, the bonhomie of the Special Squad trio is, I have to say, pretty infectious. 

In many ways, it's just updated Homicide, ten years later, and not that updated. The difference is that Special Squad don't always have to be investigating murder (a few times on Homicide they weren't investigating murder either - but they almost always were). They just get assigned the troublesome cases that need more in-depth investigation. They work long hours and they sacrifice their personal lives to the job. We don't know too much about them - Joel Davis (John Diedrich, who is probably super-annoyed that his fame is everlasting from being retooled thirty years ago to be 'Glen Twenty' on Bargearse) is a young, swingin' guy who'll go far; Greg Smith (Anthony Hawkins) is a man with a family and a moustache; Don Anderson (Alan Cassell) is their boss whose wife we met once only to see her shot about twenty minutes later by a man whose toyboy Anderson did away with; Anderson is apparently comforted by the news that his late wife was looking forward to a holiday with him (Crawfords don't understand grieving very well, in my experience, except when it's motivation for revenge). 

In an article for the Age published on 31 January 1985, Barry Dickins writes about his experience as a bit part actor on Special Squad. He talks briefly with Diedrich and Hawkins:

‘”They spent five million bucks on this series, mate”’ says John Diedrich, the star of the show. “And now they’re winding it up.”   

‘The other older Special Squad copper is called Tony, a real nice guy who tells me he wishes he was doing comedy. “Oh, they don’t like funny stuff,” he whispers to me in the Crawford caravan, putting on his Special Squad sox. “You can pull a funny face if you like, but you can’t overdo it. I think what Crawford wants to do is capture contemporary violence.”  

What I note is that line about 'now they're winding it up'. I'm not entirely sure I know which episode he's talking about, and in fact he might not even have made it in, but the point is that the show gets axed, they have to keep churning it out and I can well imagine that once a Crawfords show got the chop - notwithstanding it had a life of being repeated a few more times thereafter - they might well have done a sweep of the archives for the sillier scripts that no-one would ever have pitched in a fresh new hot show. This episode, 'Mad Mountain Mumma' (IMDB wants you to think it's 'Mad Mountain Momma' and in its defence, autocorrect does too) is not really properly documented in IMDB which had obviously given up by this point. 

This is just a silly episode, and indicates to me that everyone is going through the motions. A wealthy man, I'm not sure why he's wealthy but guess what he used to be a circus performer, whatever, he dies in the first few minutes, is picked up by his boyfriend (played by Daniel Abinieri) and chauffeur (Roger Ward) and summarily dispensed with (poisoned?). That's all par for the course I guess. But then the murdered man's wife turns up from the country (a town called Mad Mountain) and she's a witch called Bridey, played by Mary Canny in what might actually be the biggest role Canny ever played (Crawfords got her in again eight years later to be in The Flying Doctors). Bridey somehow convinces Abenieri's character ('Dillon') that she's put a curse on him and he has to go to the State Library, which is to Special Squad what the Sunnyvale High library was to Buffy) to find out how to lift the curse. 

Apparently he has to make an axe and cut off her head, and we do spend quite a bit of time with him making an axe and chopping a watermelon in half, but this element of the story goes precisely nowhere thereafter so let's forget about it. 

I'm nearly through these episodes and then I'll have to figure out what precisely I have learnt. The next episode has a small role for Alwyn Kurts (yes his eyes are open! Wide open) as a crook who dies in the first five minutes. Crawfords always had a place for their own. 

the man who died = mies joka kuoli

Mies joka kuoli aka The Man Who Died is a comedy-drama starring Jussi Vatanen who is also in Fallen Leaves (Kuolleet lehdet) which I saw a couple of weeks ago. I didn't recognise him until I looked him up on IMDB so I guess he's good at acting. 

Before I say anything about the show itself I want to say that watching things on SBS catchup or whatever it's called is not easy. Sometimes they just don't load, sometimes you get the episode you want to watch and the audio of another episode. Sometimes while it's playing it gives you the little yellow circle that tells you it's trying to load. 

After a while you come to appreciate it's more trouble than it's worth to do anything but just keep watching it (or stop watching it altogether) because you can't pause it or stop it or anything really. 

So the deal here is that the protagonist, Jaakko, is the owner of a mushroom company who has been told by his doctor that he has a few weeks to live, as he has somehow had a large amount of toxin introduced to his system that has contributed to extensive organ damage. There is a bunch of comedy hoods running a rival company in a surreal kind of way and Jaakko keeps comedy-killing them. I am about half way through. Laura watched the first episode with me and was not adequately engaged, which I completely understand, but I think it has gotten better. That said...

The fantasy sequences kind of get on my wick - Japanese stereotypes, obvious dream sequences etc. 

The town where the show is set, Hanima, looks really cool in the show and it really does have this wild spiderweb at the centre. 

I'll be annoyed if at the ending it turns out the doctor was part of a conspiracy to make him think that he was dying when he actually wasn't dying.

Spoilers below the next picture:

A few hours later: Well, he did actually die, to my surprise. I guess the doctor was in some sense a furphy, because Sixth Sense-like he was always acting alone and even in one case in a rather strange, undoctorlike place, so it was quite plausible that he might be a fake of some sort. But ultimately apparently that was not the situation. The actual 'murder' was a peculiar situation that was semi-flagged early on and might have been obvious - if only because we never really saw the person in question again, until right at the end. 

The whole weird Finland thing for the forest was just a given. I think in the final analysis it was a satisfying show. 

getting sick

So today we went to Essendon and bought some clothes at the op shop for a party we were invited to this evening. At a certain point I had to leave the op shop because the dust was getting up my nose and I got Perry out of the car and we went for a walk around the block and saw this building on the way. 

This is sort of the same building I think but was obviously built later. 

And this is what it looks like inside... 

Anyway by the evening I felt too sick to party so no party. And we had nice clothes and everything. 

danielle carter from richmond hill 1988

So apparently I talked to Danielle Carter who was Ashley Paske's love interest on Richmond Hill (this would have been in the first half of 1988). I have absolutely no recollection of this, whether it was in person or on the phone, but what I do know is sometimes you'd be on set waiting for one actor and then the publicist would say, 'while you're waiting, do you want to talk to so-and-so', and there's every possibility that so-and-so in this case was Danielle Carter. Or, perhaps we were going to do a feature on Ashley Paske and some bright spark said, get a few words from Danielle Carter and we can put a little box in the corner with some quotes. I am sure that what is here is not the only bits I wanted to use out of a long discussion, is my point, and I'm also sure that what's here is a sign of sexist times in the late 80s, but also, does it matter much? No. 

omd in '88

OK so I know you've been loving the soap stars but how about a li'l bit of music. I do actually like OMD quite a bit and it looks like this is from early 1988 when they released their first greatest hits album. Though unlabelled of course this is an interview with Paul Humphreys, it says precisely nothing that would interest anyone who has any particular knowledge of OMD but whatever, I can throw it away or I can stick photographs of it on here and then throw it away. Enjoy. 

ashley paske # 2

 

All pretty self-explanatory really. Well, the one thing that isn't self-explanatory is why Smash Hits then sent me off to interview Ashley Paske a second time even though we had no guarantee he'd ever be on TV again. Or why I, at some point, transcribed this interview. Whatevs. He was a nice guy as I said. I interviewed him a third time at some other point when he was on Neighbours and living in St Kilda. 

ashley paske

 

Stolen from https://www.curnow.org/2004/04/where-is-ashley-paske/

I liked Ashley Paske. He was on Richmond Hill, a channel 10 show that lasted a year, and he was then on Neighbours for a while and then he disappeared, kind of, but not in a leave-me-alone way, he just stopped acting and, apparently, stopped wanting to act, and he seems mainly to be a bar manager now. He seems to be 'in a good place' emotionally which is the thing you first think of, isn't it. 

All of the above was typed on the back of Magazine Promotions letterhead. If memory serves, MP was the Sydney office for the various Fairfax magazines which were all ordered up to Sydney holus bolus in around 1987 and somehow I came into possession of a massive amount of its letterhead which I used as scrap paper for years afterwards. 

Stay tuned for more Ashley Paske soon!!! 

more josephine mitchell just for you: 'it's hard to beat a good lettuce'

EXCLUSIVELY for you. I don't know when I wrote this. So let's just put it here so I can put it in the recycling and there's room for a little more air in the house. 

jo mitchell 31+ years ago

Not only did I write this I put my damn fool name on it. I don't remember what Inside Soap precisely, but I think it was the Attic Futura (where I worked on various magazines) soap opera magazine. But I might be getting that mixed up with something else. 

JM was a very smart person I enjoyed talking to at least once but probably more than once. She's a month younger than me. She has a degree. In Mediaeval and Religious Studies.  

E Street was hilarious. I'd like to see it all again from beginning to end. Please.