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. 

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. 

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. 

it's garry shandling's show season 4

Fifteen and a half years ago I wrote about how much I enjoyed It's Garry Shandling's Show and, well, Shandling in particular. Since that time I have also droned on about how hard it was to watch it in Australia and how great it was to get all episodes on DVD ten or so years ago but how ironic it was that having them all didn't mean I watched them all. Well, lately I have dipped in to the box set and particularly the fourth and final season. It's an interesting season because it features a major change: Garry is joined by a girlfriend, Phoebe played by Jessica Harper, who becomes his wife during that season as well. Garry also dies - close to the final episode but then is resurrected somehow in an awkward last couple of episodes (according to the commentary there was also an actual final episode filmed which was never properly completed, and instead the final episode is a parody of Driving Miss Daisy which to be honest didn't do much for me because I haven't seen the original; it has a farewell awkwardly tacked on to the very end). 

It's interesting to hear the commentary on the 4th season episodes from various people who worked on the show (and GS himself) where it's revealed that they thought the 4th season was a dud and that the introduction of Phoebe was a mistake, etc. I think they're completely wrong - to me, Jessica Harper absolutely holds her own with Garry and some of their scenes together (and the few moments when she is on screen by herself or with people other than GS) show her to be a great comedy talent. Listening to those Hollywood guys diminish various elements of the shows and the actors (whose names they sometimes don't recall) makes me like them less and the shows more. 

It's also noted in the commentary, and this is self-evident when you watch the show, that a lot of the people who worked on IGSS went on to work on, or somehow have an impact on, The Simpsons and really changed the way that people saw comedy/parody in the late 20th century. You can see some of that stuff being worked out on IGSS. 

So then I started watching a few episodes of season 3 and I'm like - what is this!!! Although there is a great episode where Pete is in a bad mood with everyone and Garry sneaks into his house and puts a dream hat on his head and sees that he's dreaming he wishes he was a lawyer and not a shoe salesman. That's a cool. But then there's also a purported live episode covering the Bush-Dukakis election which is just depressing and weird... 

Very weird too that Barbara Cason, who plays Garry's mother, died a few months after the show ended. She died of a heart attack, but maybe the weird thing for me is I think she was in her sixties and really just didn't look that old. That happens to me a lot. Laura and I watched Maybe This Time, a film written by Anne Brooksbank and Bob Ellis and starring Judy Morris, Bill Hunter, Mike Preston and about forty other people who were once in Homicide (including Leonard Teale as some kind of Jim Cairns figure) the other night and Jill Perryman is in it, as Judy Morris' mother, bemoaning being 53 and I'm just somewhere in my mind really confused about whether that's old or not, though of course since the whole film revolves around Judy Morris being perplexed about turning 30, her mother is likely to be somewhere around that age and clearly since we're on some level meant to identify with Judy Morris' character and her thirtyness, we're meant to regard someone 23 years older than 30 as old. 

But I'm 57 and the older I get the less I am able to understand what particular ages are supposed to 'mean', whereas when I was 20 it was easy, if you were over 30 it was like why aren't you dead already. 

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. 

happy 100th birthday leonard teale

Leonard Teale (seen here with his wife Liz Harris a year or so before they were married) was born a hundred years ago today. I must say I have greatly enjoyed the many hours I have spent with him in the last year or so as I witnessed the many travails of David 'Mack' Mackay in Homicide. I am sorry he is no longer around. 

 

yep, you know, stuff...

So Bert Costello is dead. He died in an old mineshaft in episode 210. It was a weird death, because so unexpected. There was no meaningful shot of him and no otherwise inexplicable monologue about how he was looking forward to seeing his mother on the weekend or maybe he'd pop the question to his (admittedly he had no real backstory other than that he was Italian and born in Walgett or something like that) girlfriend or anything else to make his death poignant. It was like they decided during the episode that they'd found a good way to get Lionel Long out of the show, 'let's chuck him in the mineshaft and blow it up off-camera' And yes, it all takes place offscreen but we do get to see him dead:

I mean who knows what the circumstances were of LL leaving the show after a reasonably short tenure (fifty or so episodes) but I think he was in some ways an underutilised resource, and he did a pretty decent job all through his time on the program. He could even reel off some credible (to me) sounding Italian which is a talent for someone without an Italian background, he wasn't like Con the Fruiterer or anything. So it was sad. The other characters have not mentioned him since he left, at all, not once. The first episode after he went was based on the Robert Ryan case, so a Pentridge warden is shot, and they are all talking about 'going to the funeral' and I assumed they meant Costello's funeral but no it's the warden's. So, I guess Poochie died on the way back to his home planet. Long (who by the end of the year was hosting an hour-long country and western show on ABC radio, so win/win) is replaced by Norman Yemm, who I have to admit, is spectacular. 

Weirdly Long/Costello only lasted a few episodes after the departure of Inspector Connolly, the last original cast member to leave. Connolly got quite a send-off, with a whole lot of back-and-forth about how he didn't want a party with speeches. A lot was also made of the notion that Connolly wasn't retiring, but going on long service leave for six months. Even the other characters seem confused about whether this is a fake way of saying he's retiring. His replacement is Alwyn Kurts.

I just went looking through IMDB to get clear when Connolly left and Costello died, and it looks like there's a whole disc on my DVD box (8) which I actually haven't watched, lol, or the episodes were so unmemorable I might as well not have watched them. Anyway I think there are probably only about six episodes with this as the opener:

The four men are cleverly in shadow because you know what? I think this might still actually be John Fegan in there not Kurts. When Norman Yemm joins they stripped him into the guys-getting-out-of-the-car opener (perhaps they even shot it on the same day! Looks like the same light) and then did a less in-the-dark ending to the sequence. 

Norman Yemm is already incredible, what a guy. I mean it's chalk and cheese and each was talented but Lionel Long, right, can slip into big international films like The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders as 'singer in prison' (apparently, I haven't seen it) and be a functional presence. Norman Yemm couldn't have a bit part in a film, he's just not wallpaper, he's of it. Look at him drawing the charisma away from Leonard Teale here. That takes some doing. 

So that's where I'm at in Homicide. Mid-1969. 

Other things I'm loving right now include the debut album by Maustetytöt, which is called Kaikki Tiet Vievät Peltolaan. The title translates as All Roads Lead to Peltola; obviously this has a local meaning that only locals can understand (Peltola is a small industrial area outside Turku; means nothing to me obviously, I'm surprised it even has an english-language Wikipedia entry).  

According to Finnish wikipedia the duo (sisters guitarist Anna Karjalainen and keyboard player Kaisa Karjalainen) are from Vaala (an hour on the train from Oulu) and live in Kallio, a suburb of Helsinki. Wikipedia (via google translate) continues:

They listen to traditional Finnish iskelmä, and their role model is Leevi and the Leavings. Oskari Onninen says in Helsingin Sanomat that the band is "downright suspiciously 'authentic' and non-commercial". According to Sound's Antti Luukkanen, the songs contain "everyday realism and the glamor of downright misery".

I mean sure, but this is an album that is completely beholden to references to 80s pop and the joke I saw somewhere that they were Finland's Pet Shop Boys is not really a joke (Anna is a complete Chris Lowe in all performances, immobile and deadpan). There is also a song called 'Se Oli SOS' ('It was SOS') which kicks off with a musical reference to that ABBA song. The lyrics are seemingly sardonic depresso slacker stuff that is frankly hard to resist. 

There is another song - I'll find it somewhere - which is basically a translation into Finnish of the general concepts from the Smiths' 'There is a Light That Never Goes Out', which I mean is, no judgment, but lazy songwriting (there's a live clip on youtube where Kaisa says something like, she wasn't glamourising death, just translating Morrissey!). But like I said 'slacker'. Anyway, they're an excellent band and also, considering I am currently in the throes of trying to get some basic Finnish via duolingo, the fact that they almost always include the song title in the chorus is good practice for me. I can already pick out some words. By the way, the name 'Maustetytöt' means 'Spice Girls'. 

So yes I have spent a long time the last couple of weeks absorbing this kind of thing: 

It's actually pretty satisfying to turn your mind off a bit and feel it rather than try to figure it out. Often works, though clearly, duolingo has a hell of a process that reinforces you a lot for what is basically guesswork/deduction. 

So that's been my last couple of weeks. Going back to my earlier point, vale Lionel Long. He was only 59 when he died, that's a shame, he was good.