the pip proud-homicide connection - 54 years ago today

It's all very well to say 'what I wouldn't do to see this episode of In Melbourne Tonight (7 April 1969) because, you know, I just love Lucky Grills lol. Well I don't hate him but of course what fascinates me is that this is the episode that my long gone and much missed friend, Pip, was on. I vaguely remember him telling me about this - that Preston tried to put him down and Pip turned the tables on him on live TV - don't know how. I was only dimly aware of who Mike Preston was when Pip mentioned this story - I think I was mixing him up with someone else. 

But I don't think I quite appreciated until a few minutes ago that MP was an actual celebrity, who'd had his own IMT for a long time, and that like Lionel Long, his tenure in Homicide was probably more of a 'get new audiences in with a famous face' thing than it was a 'here's a new guy for the long haul'. 

Anyway the NFSA, which as far as I know is the only real place for this kind of thing, has some Mike Preston's IMT from 1968, and a fragment from 1969, but I have to assume that the Pip episode is gone, gone, gone. Sad but real. 

*BTW (10 April) I thought to check up who else was on that show. Lucky Grills, already mentioned, was of course the comedian who later played Bluey in the cop show Bluey. Nelson (not Neilson) Sardelli was/is a Brazillian-born US-based singer of Italian descent, famous for having had a relationship with Jayne Mansfield (who had died two years before this show was aired). Elaine McKenna is/was a singer famously associated with Channel 9 in the 60s. Laurie Wilson was a TV personality. Ted Hamilton was in an episode of Homicide (Break Out, 1968) and also 227 episodes of Division 4. Overall, very, very conventional showbiz - Pip really needed gumption to be amongst those people. 

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.