the aftermath of judy's death

So as I have no doubt mentioned, we watch a lot of The Box round here, and we're presently sometime in1975 (episode 259-60 territory). (It's hard to be sure when episodes were actually broadcast because IMDB doesn't say, and the newspapers of the day didn't either). This is the exciting/depressing ep where Judy has been blown up by Frank Roberts' bomb, but she's not precisely dead yet. Here are Paul and Lee in the street outside, seconds before the bomb goes off. 

This is where The Box starts to contort itself a bit to try and figure how to both deal with the demise of a major character at the same time as two other characters (Jean and Kay) leave (Jean's gone, to London to be with her husband Brad, and Kay is just about to be press-ganged into doing essentially the same thing by Michael Brooks (John Waters). Here are Sir Henry and Max dealing with the shocking situation while Jack O'Brian, um, is on the phone. 

Here's Kay dealing with that ridiculous situation where Michael is saying he has bought her a ticket to London that afternoon and she's, I suppose, required to not only pack in her job but leave her entire flat for ever, while her ex-lover Paul is grieving the likely death of his estranged wife. 

Here's Lee on Paul and Judy's couch, where so much has happened:

Michael and Kay blah blah. Laura said something funny, 'what's she going to do with her record?' (it's on the counter next to the flowers). 

I can't remember why Fanny was here but she is. She (and others like Syd Heylen as Vern, Ken James as Tony Wild, Tracy Mann see below, and I can't remember who else) have to serve the role of being light and shallow in the face of this tragedy, to propel the narrative to the future.

Tracy Mann must have simultaneously been really pleased to get the role of Tina the cleaner and really unhappy about how goofy the character is, at least at the beginning, will be interested to see where it goes. 

This is a golden moment, Paul's dream where he and Judy are having a baby. 

He is woken from this dream by a telephone call from a very unprofessional doctor who apparently thinks it's OK to tell a man his wife is dead over the phone. 

Unusually for The Box, the episode ends with a freeze frame on Paul's face and audio of a (simulated?) heartbeat while the credits go over them.

I just want to say that I am very much in the market for Philip Brown knitwear. 

Briony Behets went on to play someone called Jorja Jones in Class of '75 (I have watched practically every episode of that show, admittedly over a decade ago, and I don't remember her at all!) then she was in Bellbird and by the end of the year she was a weather presenter (in November John Pinkney wrote in the Age that she peformed this duty 'with the intensity of a Pinter heroine, but gets away with it'.) * 

The mainstream news, to the degree it paid any attention to shows like The Box, accused it of being unrealistic lol:

Sydney Sun-Herald 21 Dec 1975 p. 70

*26 November 1975 p. 2

cop shop, first four episodes

So I ripped off the bandaid of mourning for D4 by jumping straight into Cop Shop.

Here, we're heading into terrain I actually personally remember. I was 12 when CS started in 1977 and we watched it in our household, though whether we started from the first episode I don't recall (in fact, I don't recall much). Now, I'm looking at it from the POV of Crawfords having all their police shows cancelled on them in rapid succession (for no particular good reason) and then three years later they start another one up, now with everything they've learned about soap opera laid upon everything they already knew about police/crime shows. It's a good blend of cast members with the old (George Mallaby as a very key figure) and the new (OK, not much of the new, really, so far). The actor who might feel the most jangled by the new show is Rowena Wallace who was the rookie WPC in the final year of D4, all youth and inexperience and idealism, and who is now three years later in CS the bored housewife mother of a 14-year-old (and married to George M's character). 

Peter Adams is the firstnamed actor in the credits, perhaps because his last name starts with 'A', but his JJ is a major character from the outset. Adams had quite a bit of tv presence in the 70s including a lot of petty crim characters in Crawfords shows. One thing I found intriguing was that JJ was generally called 'Double J' in the early episodes, presumably at some point (once the show went to air perhaps?) someone told them about 2JJ in Sydney. 

Double J is an interesting character because he brings elements of the wisecracking vaudeville star and he's also on the make like a British tv comedy character with the bizarre added extra that he does actually succeed, well, he has sex at least once in the first couple of weeks of the show. That's a fine balance - he's a comedy figure, you're not meant to envy him (I don't think so, anyway), it's not women want him men want to be him exactly... hmmm... I'll think about it further. 

Meanwhile, just want to note a marginally interesting element of the first show. The poster for the Saints' I'm Stranded on the wall. 

I continue to be intrigued by the dichotomy between Ed Kuepper's testimony that the Saints never had any profile in Australia and the fact that this kind of thing happened. I admit in and of itself this kind of thing (blink and you miss it promo albeit on a major mainstream show) is probably pretty minor. The fact that they were on big K-Tel style hits compilations in the mid-to-late 70s is more of a challenge to that narrative. But it makes me think. 

Oh also, that picture above with Adams, Mallaby and Tommy Dysart. Dysart is playing an evil gangster and guess what his name is? Dimonicus. Brilliant.

Oh and also also, the storyline in the first couple of episodes features a policeman named Tom Foster (the eminent Peter Sumner) who is bashing gay men trying to find the teacher who seduced his son Gary  (played by Andrew McKaige). It's just sign-of-the-times stuff - Mallaby's character Glenn Taylor tells Tom at the end of the storyline that ultimately he's unlikely to be charged with bashing all those men, and Gary is of the opinion that his teacher shouldn't be blamed for anything because he (Gary) started it. All pretty gross really.

Also #3: This show debuted in November 1977. November?! 

where leonard teale used to live

This, according to a few letters sent by Crawfords in the early 1970s (and the Sands and McDougall for 1974) is where Leonard Teale lived in the early 1970s. 

But that's basically all I have to say about it, except that there is mention of the home in the Age in October 1994 as having been sold (LT died in May of that year). I admit when I parked outside it this morning I half imagined Liz Harris still lived there but obviously she does not. 

I suppose it is odd/interesting that Alwyn Kurts and George Mallaby lived in comparatively humble circumstances. I don't know if Kurts was married* but Mallaby was, to Ruth Bass (he used to write scripts for Homicide under her name, I gather). 

Laura asked me the empathetic question which Homicide actor would I most like to visit at home, in the time he was alive, and I replied Norman Yemm. The addresses I gleaned of the other actors were from letters asking them to come to a launch for Yemm's replacement, so I suppose he wasn't invited, or at least, there's no letter to him. But the only N Yemm in the Sands and McDougall is at 401 Chesterfield Road East Bentleigh. I suppose I should pay it a visit sometime. 
 

*Update 27/12 I did some research. He was married twice. The first time was to a woman called Jean Pember (although one article refers to him in the same sentence as Jean Jember, so...?) but they divorced in 1939 after she supposedly found him sleeping with a vaudeville artist called Dulcie Kelly but the whole thing seems to have been something of a charade. He then married Eileen O'Hehir who was an athlete who worked in a shoe store. So it seems. Eileen outlived him. He appears to have had one child from his first marriage and two from the second, though his obit in 2000 only mentions two children. 

Perth Daily News 8 November 1939 p. 12

visiting alwyn and george

Today Perry and I went to Caulfield to visit the addresses Alwyn Kurts and George Mallaby lived in in 1971. This is the Mallaby apartment - it's a ground floor flat in a quiet cul-de-sac in South Caulfield.

I assume this is the same building, though it's hard to be entirely sure. It's obviously been renovated up the wazoo if the building existed in 1970. 

This is where Alwyn Kurts lived, a rather odd looking bunch of flats in North Caulfield. His place was way up the back. 

This is one of its windows, upstairs from the laneway alongside. 

This is its door.

These are the stairs to its doors. 

This is the front of the same building. 

I don't know what to do with this so-called information but it's real. Next destination, Leonard Teale's house. 

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. 

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... 

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.