belinda tries an old trick but persepolis goes one better

 

Australian Womens Mirror 31 March 1925 pp. 52-53

jumping the shark

Can you believe there was a time when 'jumping the shark' was not a thing. I am not entirely sure if D4 was jumping it by 1974 but there are some signs towards this, particularly a prevalence of 'funny old life ain't it' music on key scenes, and the walking of the fine line between actual criminals and funny criminal families. I have to admit, for all the shakiness of the script here in 'Now Be A Good Boy' (24 June 1974), Margaret Christensen as Eleanor O'Donnell is Dickensian if not Shakespearian in her horrifying berating/manipulating. It also has the typically excellent Sally Conabere who is Barbara Fairweather (Crawfords shows got a bit Dickensian in their character names too by the mid-70s) who for reasons not entirely clear became mixed up with the less-horrendous but still criminal member of a crime family. 

Anyway to my mind the shark jumping really started to get a run-up a few episodes earlier with the departure from the show of Policewoman Marg Stewart, left-to-get-married in the episode aired 28 May 1974 after announcing her resignation the previous episode. Very swift dispatch, is my point. 

Patricia Smith was a real asset to the D4 universe (by the way Ted Hamilton, another core member of the cast, had left some months earlier in a situation that frankly just outright confused me, as he was there one minute and gone the next and no discussion of his departure at all unless it was so minor I was doing something else and missed it).* Marg Stewart was not in every story (apparently, she lived in Adelaide and would come to Melbourne periodically to film shows) but she was often used very cleverly to give a whole new dimension to the program, and not just a 'woman's perspective'. The character must have been ground breaking at the time. She wasn't hard, but nor was she a wuss, and she followed procedure to an internal compass we only occasionally glimpsed. On the whole, a very impressive character with gumption. To pack her off to be the wife of some loser moustachioed grazier was not a great idea, and the story told at her farewell that he had seen and liked her while she was working at an agricultural show and so sent his small boy to pretend to be lost so he could claim her and strike up a conversation with Marg, while possibly a sort of joke, who knows, was also creepy and stupid. Long story short, I didn't like it and the character deserved better though on the other hand, she didn't get shot and killed or invalided or any other options that might have occurred to the producers or Channel 9 at the time. 

So for the last year of the show we have Banner, McLeod, Vickers and Peters, aided by two uniformed constables (Roger Wilson played by Andrew McFarland and Bob Parry played by Clive Davies) whose characters are not really allowed to develop much, at least not as far as I've got. I am not against them but with hindsight you can sort of see why there might be a case for not just crawling along and instead for doing a dramatic facelift. I should have more to say about this and in one sense I do but in another sense I'm too tired and too busy. Bye! 

*His last episode was 25 March 1974. 

rozo the roo: a startling discovery

 

when black belinda's brick bounced off blub's brolly

Australian Woman's Mirror 24 March 1925 pp. 52-53

is this how it always goes

 

Just under two years ago I had things to say about a Public Image so-called documentary and this just came up in instagram, a product I really shouldn't use anyway. It just reminded me of how much I am disappointed by Lydon, who was excellent forty years ago and is now not only everything I hate but everything he, forty years ago, would have hated. This by the way is a little bit of footage of some old men playing um... possibly the last half-decent PiL song I can't remember what it's called I never want to hear it again anyway. Jesus fuck, this is so minor in the scheme of things and I don't have to pay any attention obviously, it just makes me feel a bit better to point out how sad, in a bad way, things are for that individual and his art. 

I guess you just can't count on iconoclasts. Maybe that's not really a problem. 

the last of the b&w d4s

Last week, I managed to - I am not even sure what to call it - crack? the top of the fingernail of the middle finger of my left hand. It's not painful, it's not even that horrible to look at, it's just another one of those stupid unintelligent design elements of humanity that inconvenience me for what seems like forever while I try to ensure that the situation doesn't worsen. In this case, I have a bandaid on my finger and that makes typing slightly more difficult than it might otherwise be. Slightly. If it was hugely, that would also make a difference. It has a hugeness of slightitude. 

In the last few days also I have been taking it easy as I was sick earlier in the week and now I'm a lot better and it's mainly fine. I watched the last few black and white episodes of D4 I had up my sleeve. It's been mainly good, though some of them (as mentioned previously) sucked. Just going to wrap them up here. 

This one, 27 February 1974's 'All for One', features Julieanne Newbould in what IMDB seems to be suggesting is her first TV appearance. In the last six months or so of D4 they tried a new opening format, where instead of going straight into the opening credits they gave us a tiny taster of the story with the title imposed over the top:

This episode focuses on three bad teens and one (Carol Lane, played by JN) who gets mixed up with them to her regret. Ultimately I'd have to say that Carol is a bit of a wooden character, through no fault of JN's, but because the mores of 1974 have to make too much of a intricacies of did she deserve to be raped? Also, like too many Crawfords storylines, she gets over this whole incident way too quickly, like a bout of food poisoning or seeing someone in a MAGA cap. But it's still a good episode. Hats off to Alan Wilson, Paul Young and Clare Balmford, who seems to have given up acting entirely in the early 80s and instead illustrated a couple of children's books and then disappeared from the public eye. Or so the internet believes, anyway. 

I wonder what happened to her.

This is an interesting one, called 'Parable', broadcast the following month (18 March). Jon Finlayson is Wayne Fraser, a petty criminal with no little depth. Fraser (funny that they'd use the name of the leader of the opposition although I suppose Malcolm Fraser was just a minister when they made this in '73) assaults a prostitute (played by Lesley Baker, later well-known in Neighbours) to steal her money and is chased off by a naive, almost childlike, godbotherer called Simon Barrett (John Orcsik, very clearly a star-in-the-making). Instead of report Fraser to the police, Barrett tries to reform him. Fraser instead offends again - he needs $500 fast. This time he bashes a girl called Mary (played by Josephine Knur, who was soon to cap off a short TV career with the role of Sally Pickles in the unbelievably short-lived soap The Unisexers). 

Fraser is gay, a fact revealed to no-one and not even slightly hinted at in the show until the police mention it probably about half-way through the episode. This becomes crucial to the plot and perhaps there was a dramaturgical reason why it was hidden from us but it comes off seeming like an afterthought. 

Simon finds Wayne a place to hide, and this is really interesting - I'd love to know where on earth it is. Big wasteland area, factories in the distance, railway line, concrete bunkers of some sort - !

Spoiler: Wayne suddenly becomes drunkenly attracted to Simon, who kills him. 

What surprises me about this is that Simon is then sentenced for manslaughter. Wasn't there a law in Victoria until a few years ago that any man could kill another man who he thought was cracking on to him? There was some assumption in there that the affront inherent in such an act would be enough to engender that sort of overreaction in any straight man. Well, no-one told Simon. 

There are three more b&w episodes after this one. The last of them, 'The Tribunal', is out of its mind. Another, 'Baxter's Son', has amazing paisley wallpaper. 

meander - 3

 Perry having sensory experiences at Cherry Lake, Altona Beach, Helping Hands Sunshine. 

meander - 2

How nice are these junior cats in the garden of a house between the Lions Club and the Helping Hands shop? Rhetorical question.  

meander - 1

 Today Perry and I went for a meander. We went to Sunshine where the former Lions Club building is up for sale. It seems to be in reasonable nick it has been used as a church quite recently. 

This is down one side. 

There seems to be another building at the back which is, like, accommodation or something. Completely walled off. This is me sticking my phone over the wall and just shooting. 

So's this

More later maybe if I intuit you have been good. 

yesterday's bird

 

d4 the battle of waterloo st

It becomes particularly obvious what a high quality series D4 is when you hit the rare dud. This one, from 11 March 1974, has all the ingredients - great cast (Keith Eden, Sheila Florance, Norman Kaye, Jon Finlayson, David Jon, and others) possibly even on paper a decent storyline, almost. But the way the whole is played for comedy (why? why?!) and the type of hamfisted comedy... jeepers. When you consider how many incredibly good, tightly scripted, brilliantly acted episodes they made in '73-'74, well, obviously, there have to be winners and losers. But a flour fight under a hose? Thanks but no thanks.

Possibly the D4 world just wasn't sure how it felt about hot shot property developers and/or the inner city, still in this episode the habitat of old battlers and eccentrics. In this episode some heavies are employed at arm's length by an effete developer who won't actually have the money he needs to buy all the land he's bought for his new high-rise towers until he scores one holdout house, The Briars, owned (sort of) by an elderly lady called Miss Bobby. (I say elderly and perhaps the character is but Sheila Florance was... gulp... younger than I am now, when this show was made). 

The final moment of the show depicts a model of the Briars next to the extensive property development* and we are told that 'Miss Bobby is still living in her house which is now in the centre of a shopping complex,' no doubt a reference to the poor lady in real life who held out against the sale of her home in Camberwell Junction and had people looking into her backyard for years as they went into Target. The model we are shown while hearing these words does not match the description of a house in a shopping centre but oh well. That's the least of anyone's worries with this silly farce. Such a waste.  

* Which btw implies that the developer actually got his way, which is odd, as he went to prison in the story.

 

coming soon

Frankston and Somerville Standard 19 March 1937 p. 2
 

milko

The episode of D4 called 'Approach with Caution' screened 30 January 1974 features, very momentarily, a milkman's horse (and the 'milko'). Surely this was the very end - less than 12 months - before milk deliveries by horse in Melbourne stopped. It's odd they feature so much in D4 and there's obviously a real nostalgia for them. 

Gus Mercurio plays a tremendous villain in this one, too, by the way. 

D4 'sergeant banner'

For no apparent reason there is a double episode of D4 from mid-74, called 'Sergeant Banner', slap-bang in the middle of the late 1973 ones on volume 9. That it is six months ahead of those around it kind of explains why it seems so much in advance of the others.  It weaves an extended tale of the capture of four payroll robbers in with Frank Banner's relationship with the sensitive Jenny (played by Diane Craig) who we've seen a bit of in previous eps. The interesting parts in my opinion is where we get some information about Banner's background. Seems he and Jenny grew up in the same country town - a comfortable drive from Melbourne - and her father was a policeman and a mentor to Banner in some respect. 

This is a slightly odd sequence where Jenny asks Frank if this was his mother's house. She didn't know?! Anyway...

d4 young hennessy

26 September 1973's episode of D4 was called 'Young Hennessy'. It was less worse than it might have been considering the somewhat unpromising storyline and other components (basically, Young Hennessy is an o-o-o-ld boxer who everyone thinks has a lot of money hidden somewhere in his house). The acting is stellar. There's Gus Mercurio actually playing a good guy, and get this, you really don't know if he is good, up till the end. There's Hilda Scurr, playing Mrs Hennessy and really making a meal of a role which is really not much more than a pissed-off old wife. Jeepers, even Simon Drake as a young boy called Luke isn't the terrible kind of child actor that most child actors are. Perhaps best of all - this is like a Logie contender performance, though I don't think it was one - is John Fegan as Young Hennessy. Fegan was four years out of Homicide by this stage, and while he was a compelling presence as Connolly in Homicide he wasn't exactly required to do anything more immense than deliver lines in a fairly pissed off and stern tone, a lot. Here he really puts in the time and gives such a committed performance well, I'm not sure if this is an example of good acting exactly, but... often you can't tell what he's saying. But you feel like you can. 

By the way they go to Puffing Billy including getting off at Clematis.