new order's shell-shock

Like so many similar things* I am very interested (not obsessed) in/with New Order but I actually think they only ever really reached about 10% of their potential. I mean, yeah, 'Blue Monday' was pretty good, 'Temptation' was OK, I always had a soft spot for 'Procession' which was I have to say only heightened when I read in one of Peter Hook's memoirs that Bernard Sumner once had an angry outburst (did it get physical?) insisting that the single didn't exist. I'd like to get another copy of 'Procession' as I think I have mislaid the one I bought when it came out. 

Yeah, I know I'm talking about records of 40 years ago as if that's all NO ever did and of course they have made thousands of records since many all of them not as good, and as I have already pointed out, the good ones could have been better. If I'd made them they would have been much better, lol. Anyway the only reason I bring this up is I bought a 12" of 'Shell-shock' in Ballina (alongside the Cure's Pornography) and it's you know, really just OK isn't it. The A-side seems to just get tinnier and tinnier and the b-side tracks - a dub version of the A and I guess a kind of similarly dub version of 'Thieves Like Us' is a better side but I will never forget that, yes, when I saw them play the Palais in St Kilda in fuckknowswhen - um - 1983? they left the stage and the instruments carried on playing and at the time I thought that was amazing, I mean, it was amazing but now when I play their records I feel the way I feel when I read student work that's been flagged for AI - I'm reading this, did the person who submitted it read it? Did NO hang around for the whole recording or did they just set it to go in the studio and wait to get a call when it was done? It's kind of OK if they did, but it's kind of annoying as well. I guess the end of the 'Shell-shock' dub does have some funny rock out guitar so presumably a person did that. 

This is what you get when you search for 'New Order Shellshock Fan Art' on Etsy. 

*I hope to win an award for these five words, in the Most Fatuous Sentence category please

homicide - crime against nature

This Homicide (aired 21 Jan 1974 in Sydney / 5 February 1974) is a messy show structurally but if any Homicide gets to be called 'ahead of its time' perhaps this one could. First, just want to mention... 

The episode opens at the Hazienda Steakhouse. Whatever that was (I mean, I can guess). There's an article in the Age from 1980 that says it's a hang for celebrities. Satisfyingly for me (progress!) this building is now a very good vegetarian restaurant called Sisters of Soul. Anyway, that's not important here. This was a controversial episode that needed sensitivity from Channel 7: 

Age TV-Radio Guide 31 January 1974 p. 3, 

Note however Channel 7 in Sydney had absolutely no such qualms:

SMH 21 January 1974 p. 27

This episode is about the murder of a man apparently on a beat somewhere though it's super confusing where as it's clearly St Kilda (see above) but a lot of the action takes place in a housing estate which looks to me like Broadmeadows but could as easily be anywhere where LJ Hooker had his fingers in the pie. Possibly the billboard below would give some detail though it's not very clear at all. 

So the murder's solved reasonably easily - the murderers were a big bunch of teenagers, and the weak link in the chain (I don't think we see any more than one of the teenagers actually) was inculcated into hating gay men by his father, who is a weaselly English migrant. 

What's more interesting IMO is the various opinions put forward about gays in the episode. Lawson (Bud Tingwell) at one point tells Paul Karo's character (Ernst Brenner) that he enforces the law as it stands and he doesn't need to know if any law was broken, which comes fairly close to saying that he doesn't think the law is right, or perhaps I'm being too kind. There's not a lot of in-depth discussion of homosexuals or what they do, beyond when Lawson confronts Brenner with some love letters he had written to the victim.*

Maybe I wasn't paying enough attention but there is a weird sub plot (?) where some young kids on the estate, one of whom is the younger brother of the boy who is ultimately found guilty of the murder, are bullying another kid. That seems to go nowhere except when the bullied boy vandalises a police car and Lawson loses his temper and tells other Ds to find the child who did it. I don't know if they do. I got lost. 

*That Brenner had written, obviously, not Lawson.  Keep up. 

homicide: 'grains of sand'/'the girl who wanted to go home' (may 1972)

After watching (almost completely, I've missed a few) close to 330 episodes of Homicide it occurred to me to wonder what attracts me so compulsively about this show. It is not nostalgia per se for me, I never watched police dramas of course when I was a child and I actually still don't really like them in themselves (I couldn't even watch most of the 2 May 1972 episode 'Grains of Sand' because it was so depressing - murder of a kidnapped child ffs). Aside from Ernie Bourne who I obviously have a soft spot for (but perhaps more for his depiction of Rob Lewis in Neighbours than for his Adventure Island stuff) I was not greatly familiar with any of the actors in Homicide (well, I suppose I did watch quite a bit of Class of '74/'75 ten or so years ago for a journal article I wrote, and Leonard Teale was ostensibly the star of that, but christ knows what he thought he was doing there - I suppose he thought he was maintaining an acting career!). 

It really does feel like time travel though, I know how stupid that reads, but I so thoroughly enjoy not just Melbourne of 50-60 years ago, but getting the sense of why Australians enjoyed the show so much - the familiarity of it all. Streetscapes, absolutely, and familiar place names. But also venturing into backyards, petrol stations, waste spaces, laneways and bedrooms (home interiors are a little less thrilling because they are almost always sets, constructed the same way and in the same depth through the close to eight years of episodes I have now watched). Not just what you see on the screen, either, but social mores too - things that people throw into the mix, the way we're supposed to empathise with George Mallaby's character Peter, a handsome young man who likes to play the field, or for that matter, Leonard Teale's character Mack, a handsome older man who likes to play the field (although he has a girlfriend, Joy, who suggested to him that she might be about to move to Brisbane for work and who was then shot in the neck by an escaped prisoner trying to kill Mack - she lived, but wasn't mentioned again lol). 

Anyway that said, I try not to get involved but 'Grains of Sand' is Norman Yemm's last episode and I will miss him. I couldn't really watch the actual episode as I said but I did watch the end of it which was not entirely dissimilar to Inspector Connolly's departure - in that he didn't definitively say he was going, just applied for leave, at Col Fox's urging. 

Homicide's producers etc clearly knew that Patterson was a popular character because they made it clear to us for some time before this episode that he wasn't happy in his job and finding it a strain, particularly because his wife was finding it a strain. 

Here he is on the steps, having said goodbye to Fox but no-one else, and about to stride down the street alone like Connolly did. 

The next episode, from 9 May, wastes no time: new opener (well, new-ish, they didn't waste time filming Kurts, Teale or Mallaby getting out of the car again, just inserted Mike Preston): 

Very little background on Preston's character Bob (who incidentally is only in it for 40+ episodes, so I won't get too attached). They do say Bob's wife left him, which I assume is flagging something into the future. Bob is the second of the Homicide team, after Lionel Long, to be played by a pop star - and like Alwyn Kurts, Preston had also been a TV show host. 

He is installed in Jim's old desk and that's the only time Jim is mentioned - Peter says something about how Jim's cleaned his desk out (but I thought he was only going on leave?!). 

Not much more to say about this episode. Here are Teale and Preston with Penny Ramsey who plays Sally Reid. 

Mildly interesting, to me, brief shots of the suspects (one of whom turns out to be the culprit for this particular episode's murder) visiting what was then known as the George, which would become about five years later the Crystal Ballroom, known as the Seaview Ballroom by the time I was going there in my late teens. Here as you can see it's basically a strip joint. I actually didn't know that about it. 

I will say that this is one of those instances watching Homicide when I get a weird little feeling - you don't see a huge amount of the frontage of this building, but even this was highly familiar to me. 

I say this a lot, but the 70s were a horrible time to grow up, so I guess in a way I'm processing something really. As I say it is compelling. 

homicide - the corrupter

This episode of Homicide screened on 23 March 1971 and it's sort of interesting not just because of the only time I've ever seen Vivean Gray playing a character with a modicum of sex appeal (although I suppose the characters she was famous for, Mrs Jessup and Mrs Mangel, did have romance storylines). 

In this case however the romance that her character, Hilda Mercer, is having is confusing, if it's meant to provide some kind of contrast with the main thrust of the story which is the first I've come across on Homicide that deals reasonably sympathetically with homosexuality. 

In the 6 October 1970 episode of Homicide, 'Once a Killer', a fruiterer called Conti eludes the police (specifically, Peter Barnes who's staking out a St Kilda flat) by wearing a flamboyant disguise and walking a big poodle. Barnes says something along the lines of, 'I thought he was just a queer!' So that makes this episode doubly unusual.

Ok, so what happens? A young man called David Whittaker is found dead in his bed. His landlady, Miss Mercer, was out the night before looking after a 'sick friend', but it transpires that in fact she is having an affair with a man whose wife was out of town - put a pin in that, it's not crucial to the story, except that we see a flashback where she confides in Whittaker about the situation and he tells her to seize the day and she asks him something like whether he's ever been in love and he just gives her a meaningful look. 

So to cut a long story short it turns out Whittaker had until recently lived in a country town somewhere and his teacher had in some way seduced him (?) (it's never really spelled out, or it's left to the imagination, but the episode is called 'The Corrupter', right).* Rather confusingly the teacher appears to still work at the school, although his wife has left him and the education department has terminated his employment, so whatever. The teacher has driven to Melbourne, tried to get back with Whittaker (he says they could move to Sydney - which is everyone's default on Homicide for getting away from trouble, except very occasionally it's Queensland) and Whittaker has laughed in his face and gotten killed for it. 

As is so often the case I'm left wondering. Is the Hilda Mercer storyline thrown in to suggest that love comes in many forms, or that we are not to judge (eg Hilda Mercer, who is a real Jessupmangel in most other respects, would be likely to judge gay people normally but here she is caught in a situation she would not approve of for anyone else), or...? Atypically for Homicide - I suppose they were just dipping their toe in the water - there is no moralising elsewhere; Peter Barnes doesn't say anything about anyone being 'just a queer', neither Whittaker (in flashback obvs) or his killer (Kevin Lang) gives a soliloquy about the love that dare not speak its name; the only character who comes close to editorialising is the character of Whittaker's brother, Don, who expresses his hatred for his brother without really saying why, and since the whole thing is so subtle (to me, anyway, lol) it doesn't have a huge amount of impact.  

To further muddy the waters we are really left in the dark about what we are supposed to think about the relationship between David Whittaker and Kevin Lang, and of course in 2022 we would naturally be very down on a teacher-student love affair but in this episode that power imbalance is really not at all discussed. I suppose since homosexuality was illegal anyway in 1971 not to mention highly condemned by most, no-one was really going to split any hairs on pedophilia/age of consent stuff. The Homicide team had enough to contend with, putting together a more or less nonjudgemental storyline about gayness. 

I would be interested to see whether this episode got much attention at the time. Certainly there was no particular press preview stuff about it. The above was about all there was in the Age Green Guide on it.

One more interesting thing: Lex Mitchell plays Don Whittaker. Mitchell was of course one of the original detectives in Homicide when it started seven years before, and he was only in it for the first 24 episodes I believe. I gather he is still alive (he is probably in his early 80s) and oddly, considering he was a founder member, one of the few members of the main cast remaining. 

*Look it's possible that David Whittaker is meant to be 'The Corrupter', after all, the teacher was a married man. But it's just not made clear, at all. To my mind there's no sense in which the show suggests that David brought his appalling fate on himself.

homicide, 'my brother must rest'

Just when I was thinking I was getting less interested in Homicide, this fabulous episode from October 1966 comes along and I get the bug again. This one has a lot of great guests, a lot of weird twists and quirks, and good locations too. Love it. Colin is trying to get sweet with his secretary (? office manager?) Leslie, to the degree that he goes to her house to listen to her records (when he compliments her on her taste in classical music, she doesn't straight up say well you don't have to pay copyright on those kinds of records, although let's be fair that's what everyone's thinking). (He doesn't compliment on her taste in art). Anyway, this is a fun / creepy element of the whole. Yes, Leslie is played by Elizabeth Harris. 

Helmi was freaked out by Colin's behaviour and I told her as far as I was concerned there was a lot more to this than meets the eye. In fact, the show kicks off with Colin's stepson Timothy being reckless on the balcony of their high-ish apartment building, and Colin apparently kind of hoping that if he did nothing Timothy would fall to his death. Colin!!!

I said to Helmi really I think Homicide is really hitting its stride here, it was already a massive TV hit. We went and looked at what it was up against when it first screened, I mean looking at this stuff I think the other stations are really getting out of its way. There was nothing like it. You can almost imagine IMT not wanting to go up against it on a Thursday night but just hoping that people will be glued enough to their TVs they'll switch over to another golden local program. And 7 and 2 both have cop shows after it, as well. This is the schedule for 11 October 1966, by the way, from the Age TV and Radio Guide for 6 October 1966, p. 10.

Leonard Teale is really getting on top of his role in the show too, making a lot of fun in ways that look improvised, a little geeky/awkward but I bet would have a lot of value to viewers in 1966. Not that either of these pictures really convey the fun of it. 

Elizabeth Harris doesn't get enough screen time. But there are a number of secret magic ingredients in this ep. One is the marvellous Patsy King as Joan Preston, suspected of killing her husband ten years previously in the UK. Timothy is her first husband's son, not hers (biologically) , and Colin is her second husband. I am pretty sure Timothy says nothing at all during his time on screen. 

Here are the police going to visit Joan to tell her that her first husband's body has been found. By the way - spoiler - I am not going to tell you the story in full, you should check it out, it's cool. 

The flats where Joan, Colin and Timothy live. 

So the other magic element of this is... yes... Hilda Scurr! Hilda is Sarah, Joan's first husband's sister, who has come from the UK to see justice done now his body has been found. 

I didn't want to have to tell you this but Timothy fell off the roof. This is one of the weirdest bits, where Colin - who's already informed the police that he's put grease on the ledge after Timothy fell from it, to make Joan feel better about his death (yeah, I know) - now tries ardently to get her to go up on the roof and look at the grease. She really doesn't want to go. 

The police have found out that Colin is actually someone else, I won't bore or excite you with the details. Colin is played by Rhoderick Walker, and he (Colin) is quite the bounder, a really great nasty piece of work. Here are the police driving in St Kilda, and coming to the block of flats again. 

So um Colin tries to push Joan off the roof and instead he gets kind of thrown off himself somehow, and he is not in great shape...

But he's not quite unalived enough that he can't be taken to hospital where the detectives can visit him and clear up all the details of what he did, killed Joan's first husband, then came to Australia and married her, etc. He also tried to get Leslie to love him but that clearly wasn't going to pan out.  

Looks like despite the near-death he still had time to eat some hospital jam but life (his) was too short to wipe his face afterwards. Anyway, presumably he dies. 

Joan is visited by Sarah who says she is sorry for everything. 

I don't want to detract from Patsy King, Hilda Scurr and Elizabeth Harris but Rhoderick Walker deserves a special mention for having such an extraordinary life someone should write a book about him. Or two books?! He was a British actor (1920-2010) who was a Broadway star in the 1940s, then drove - drove - across Eurasia 'to' Australia (I'm not sure how he did the Indian Ocean bit) in the late 1950s to visit his mother and sister in Perth (!!!) then ended up staying in Australia the rest of his life (till 2010) because he fell in love with Max Meldrum the actor. I mean, they were a couple. Although I'm fairly willing to bet that they were not, as IMDB would have it, married. Talk about rewriting history, ffs.

neighbours 2012

Monday: Karl and Rhys meet Rhys’ mother (well, Rhys has met her before) a thirty five year old paraplegic who presumably had Rhys when she was about eight. Mia just pointed out that every time they have an outdoor scene there’s bellbirds on the soundtrack. Rhys’ mother has spinal degeneration, which is why she says the words ‘spinal degeneration’ carefully and cautiously as though she was talking a foreign language. Here’s Audrey, the dog whose name I was uncertain about, who seems unable to get out of her basket. Rhys has a popeye chin. Dig that tattooed guy with the mobile phone at Harold’s table when Karl and Susan had their Audrey chat. Callum has a picture of Sonya on her t-shirt. Does he know she’s his real mother? I was always a bit confused about that. Hey, Kyle and Callum, great chemistry. Karl has towels in his office, Room 23. Hey, Rhys just quoted Corey Worthington, kind of, when Kate told him to take a good long look at himself and he said ‘I do, every day’ then something else I can’t remember but quite a bit like what whatsername said to Corey Worthington. I wish I wrote for Neighbours.

Tuesday: Labby and Stav are – get this – to me, kind of annoying. Did you watch The Loop last weekend? I really enjoyed it, it reminded me of a lot of things, it didn’t go on long enough for me though, admittedly I started watching it about an hour in. Now Neighbours has started. Sophie in the opening credits should reflect Sophie in the show – the mature young lady. I wonder what’s going on with miserable Kate. Also, I wonder why Kyle’s got all this weird white shit all over his flanny. Also, why is Paul so into Kate doing office management. Does Andrew ever think about his dead brother? That kind of thing ruins some people’s lives. He has about fifty other siblings anyway. Summer was reading Truman Capote, but I’m not sure what. Corey is a crazy liar. Green girl brought a coke to Sophie and Corey’s table but did not do or say anything to expand her storyline. Oh, I saw her again and it wasn’t green girl at all, I guess they all wear green t-shirts in that establishment.

Here are Erin and Kate drinking amongst the reeds. Erin is a really annoying person, I've figured that much. She and Kate are going on the road, with 'a hot guy to do the driving'. Jade just asked Kate to a dance party in St Kilda and I thought she said Dad's party in St Kilda and I thought well, who's Jade's dad? That got me nowhere and then I thought maybe Dad's Party is a club in St Kilda, great name for a club. But actually she said dance party, one more example of how what you misunderstand in Neighbours is actually much more interesting than what is actually there. I mean Dad's Party isn't great, as a club name, but it is 20 times greater than what was actually said, right?