"His word against mine' and 'today ends at dawn'

'His word against mine' is an interesting penultimate episode for D4 because it seems like it's really keen to not say what it wants to say, which is, this is the final episode with Gerard Kennedy as Frank Banner. The storyline aside from Banner's resignation (to get married) is a bit slender from a 2025 POV but perhaps it had more impact when it was first broadcast - it's a slightly non-sequiturish story of a local councillor who's accused of being gay and ultimately, well, is. Or is bisexual, rather. He concedes/confesses this to the Ds but he doesn't outright confess to his wife - which isn't the usual D4 way, there's no real closure there, not that we necessarily needed it.

And nor is there any real closure on Frank Banner. We simply end on the three originals in the car driving to do some job or other, I'm not entirely sure what. 

The following episode starring John Stanton still has Kennedy in the opening credits, i.e., they didn't bother making a special opener for what they already knew was a dead show. Stanton's character Tom Morgan is completely brilliant, very non-sexy (but how sexy was Frank Banner?) and more like Columbo than anything else. The character has taken a transfer from Bairnsdale, where he's been a long time, and he has attitude plus. 

The moustache isn't a bad look for Stanton but presumably also he had to distinguish himself from the character of Pat Kelly in Homicide. Those Homicide eps were still screening while this was being filmed. 

I'm 99% certain these images above are from a car park close to the Crawfords Abbotsford premises, somewhere near Duke St. 

Mick Peters here is reading the Age from 16 April 1975 p. 2, probably the article by John Pinkney, below. If the third paragraph in the second column isn't an easter egg, what is?! Add to the mix the fact that John Pinkney (who was married to my aunt) also wrote scripts for Crawfords shows, and you get... um... something added to the mix. I don't know what pen name John used, he didn't use his real name, I suppose it would have been a conflict of interest considering he was also a TV critic.*

Admittedly the episode does end on a rather crappy note with a madwoman wandering alongside the Yarra saying 'boy, where are you boy?' - fairly silly really. But D4 could have gone so much further into the late 70s with Stanton as Morgan, in many ways (from what little we saw) a lot more complex than Banner whose character roots were in tawdry soap opera. 

* Though IMDB says he wrote thousands of episodes of Bellbird so, I don't know. 

'billy's choice'

D4 7 October 1974, 'Billy's Choice'. It's a half decent storyline but what means the most to me is the marvellous three guest stars of Hilda Scurr, Keith Eden and John Stanton. YESSSS. And one other wonder (see below). 

Stanton is a mad bastard. 

Scurrfection! 

One scene with the amazeballs Denise. 

Scurr and Eden are terrific in this, a really sympathetic criminal couple (well he's a crim, she just deals with it). Great work everyone. 

more louise homfrey

This episode of Division 4 is a bit fragmented but I just wanted to mention it has Louise Homfrey in it again. Once again she is playing a self-possessed, self-reliant woman with even a touch of the feminist about her (Marg Stewart persuades Mrs Innes to consider going into a home because she says she needs to persuade her superiors of the value of policewomen). 

Oh and the amazing Pamela Stephenson, playing a woman with two boyfriends. 

...and the ever-incredible John Stanton. 

The episode is The Empty Hand, first shown 13 February 1973. 

It also, by the way, has a slight subtext about demolition (presumably by the HCV, though not stated) as Mrs Innes wants to stay in her house which is going to be bulldozed, and doesn't want to go into public housing because she can't keep her dog (Bob) there. 

division 4: 'man's only a battler'

Obscure name for a very excellent episode of D4 from 22 March 1972. My worlds collided in this one where the crooks are chased onto the 'Westgate Bridge Freeway' which at that point is incomplete. 

In a way the actual pictures of the empty freeway aren't all that amazingly exciting. You heard it from me (if you hadn't already realised). 

But it gets a bit thrilling when John Stanton (who plays a criminal) breaks away and is chased by Gerard Kennedy to what might well be the Aerodrome and therefore the future Westgate Park. 

Yeah it is just one more case of I wish I could reach into the screen and turn the camera around a bit but you can't have everything, or really anything. 

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. 

the end of inspector fox

Sorry to break it to you but Inspector Fox died, on 17 July 1973 in episode S10E22. There is a slightly bizarre account of the episode on IMDB where the writer uses the actors' names instead of the characters ('It is the last couple of days on the Homicide squad for Detective Leonard Teale. He has been promoted to Inspector and transferred to lead a new unit...'). Anyway there's a weirdo around modelling himself on Lee Harvey Oswald who wants to kill David Mackay but instead he shoots Colin Fox and there you have it.* Alwyn Kurts went on to host Beauty and the Beast and his departure was the end of that particular show, until it was rebooted umpteen times. 

Melbourne Age 12 July 1973 p. 35

Inspector Fox's replacement is Reg Lawson, played by Bud Tingwell. 

Sydney Sun-Herald 8 July 1973 p. 81

Whole new set of opening credits - whereas the first colour shows with Kurts/Teale had an opener that was modelled very closely on the original (Ds in a car, all get out together) now the opener is very tech-heavy with a lot of communications imagery featuring people who I'm pretty sure are not and never will be in the show itself, mainly D24 -  the communications hub of the force. This episode also features the debut of John Stanton.

Melbourne Age Green Guide Section 20 July 1973 p.3

* That Kurts and Teale left at the same time was used by Crawfords/Channel 7, I'm sure, to surprise viewers - the show is full of suggestions that Mackay was going to be killed, but of course at the last minute it's Fox. They used the same trick when they wrote Bronson out of the show - that time Mackay got shot early, and Bronson late in the episode.