five out of the box

Laura and I enjoy watching The Box, it is a very good show, much better than most people would think. It is in many ways quite modern and quite 'meta'. The Box is as you know a show about a television station, and it circulates a lot of the stories and rumours about various tv stars of the period (up to the mid-1970s) with a generous dose of romantic/sexual drama. Some of the characters are clearly, winking-at-the-camera, modelled on actual people. Sir Henry is an amalgam of Reg Ansett and Frank Packer, two television magnates of the period (probably more Ansett as Sir Henry is an industrialist with a rather blunt appreciation of television, rather than a mogul with media consciousness). Gary Bourke is, yes, Irish (like Dave Allen, I suppose, whose tv career started in Australia) but he's more like Graham Kennedy (certainly when it comes to payola scandals etc and over-riffing on products to the delight of particular sponsors, not when it comes to being secretly gay which so far he doesn't appear to be). There are probably others lost in the mists of time, I am sure Vicki Stafford is modelled on someone.  

I have to say that the article below is super confusing (possibly a relic of a time when press announcements weren't very coordinated) because from our perspective as viewers there are weeks and weeks, more than a month I'm sure, between the departure of Graeme Blundell and Lynda Keane, for instance, and any of the others mentioned. Where we are up to in the program, none of the other three have left yet. But I'm not even sure that Susie and Don were in the program at the same time.*

The first half of 1974 was a mindfuck for Blundell I'm sure as he was a megastar with Alvin Purple then appearing most nights of the week on The Box as Don Cook. I think the Don Cook character is incredible, very nuanced, he's a complete charlatan, messing two women around and becoming engaged to both and it's only happenstance that they don't come into contact with each other, the anxiety is palpable. In his memoir Blundell has apparently forgotten entirely the kind of character DC was, as he just says he was a womaniser, which is barely true or at least, he probably was a young man about town (that's how he got Barbie knocked up) but we don't then see him bedding any babes thereafter aside from Cathy who he is pretty reluctant to sleep with but does because he's so weak. 

So for us, 51 years later, Don and Barbie have gone (to Sydney) but Judy, Kaye and Susie are all still in the show. Susie is not such a prominent character that she can't leave without too much fanfare, but Judy and Kaye are pretty important and will make a splash when they go. Interested to see what happens next. 

* I don't know how this pans out but according to IMDB I'm right that Don leaves the show a couple of episodes before Susie shows up, but he does come back later, like, 36 episodes later. Since Susie is in 63  episodes they must overlap at some point. Also, perhaps I'm wrong about Blundell's typification of the character, since he has another 161-220 to be even more of an Alvin Purplesque cad in. 

slow reevaluation

This has been a constant source of fascination to me, not just the re-evaluation of disco, but the re-evaluation of all kinds of genres and oeuvres which are understood to peak and die but which can never really die as long as people (artists and/or consumers) continue to associate them with pleasurable times in a life course, either their own or others', vicariously. 

I can't imagine what a 1989 take on the disco era might have looked and sounded like, but it would have gone heavily for some tackiness (and probably despite itself some anti-gayness - though I can't say that for certain and maybe I'm doing the people involved here an injustice - but that was certainly an objection to disco music in the 70s, that it was gay and in Australia, that it was for mediterranean migrants). Anyway, I'm fascinated.

I found this because I was trying to piece together whatever I could about the career of Keren Minshull who, within a couple of years of this production, was singing in Euphoria, a band who took Australia by storm in the very early 90s. Wikipedia says that Minshull was 42 by the time of that success and that the record company wanted another member of Euphoria, Holly Garnett, to be the 'face' of the band, but that's a mysterious set of stories and perceptions that (like my implicit denigration of the show described above) I don't know enough about to really say anything about. Would like to know more though.  

jenkinson

As we draw to the end of the 60s in Homicide the guest actors are no doubt going to veer away a little from people only really known as stars of the Melbourne stage and towards people who might have been that but who also went on to be nationally or globally famous. Well, we've already had Jackie Weaver. This is the first time Graeme Blundell has been in Homicide, in an episode called 'Never a Man', screened in July 1969. He has a small part (though important to the plot) as a criminal called Jenkinson. When he's holed up in a car yard shooting at cops Leonard Teale calls out 'Jenkinson' so many times it starts to get silly. 

IMDB tells us he was actually also in the pilot episode in 1964, uncredited.