coburg lake reserve in d4 'standover'

David Clendinning, Amber Mae Cecil and of course Gerard Kennedy in a great end-of-episode chase sequence that takes us from Pentridge to the Coburg Lake Reserve. The episode is 'Standover', from 15 August 1973. This episode also has Norman Yemm in it but not enough Norman Yemm, as if there could ever be enough Norman Yemm!

 

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

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. 

homicide s5 e46 the hero

This episode was written by John Dingwall who I mentioned recently. 

Apparently there is some shitty program or other called, fuck, I can't even remember what it's called, Bag of Turds or something but it's a prequel to Game of Thrones, of which I would have to say, who fucking gives a toss. I bet most (OK, I'll just say many) people who really love this Game of Thrones show have never even seen every episode of Homicide well, I mean, neither have I ok. But I am getting there. 

So this one is the seventh to feature Norman Yemm but the last to feature him as a guest (which I think has always meant, playing a criminal) before he joined the regular cast as a detective. He is brilliant in this, absolutely brilliant and they make the most of him too in a way that (I'm not even exaggerating) significant parts of the show - particularly at the very end - are like some Hungarian art film from 1958. Incredible!

The following shots do not do this sequence justice, you have to see it, it's extraordinary. The only thing that would have improved it would be disjarring 'mind-madness' audio. That's what you'd do if this was a longer narrative with more background to Yemm's character Malcolm Timms other than 'he grew up in the Northern Territory'. 

This is Timms at the very end, not dead but just completely worn out:

So I'm explaining this all out of sequence OK. In this ep two criminals escape from Pentridge (shots of Pentridge, rather bizarre sequence in which the detectives show up at Pentridge after the escape and then we cut straight to the criminals running away which certainly gives the impression that they've got out two minutes before and are very nearby, though presumably this is not what is meant to be conveyed). They hole up in the showgrounds for a while - some nifty locational material there - and then one of them leaves and is caught at the North Melbourne post office. I mean that's more or less my local. You don't see any of the post office which is part of the Town Hall building on the corner of Errol and Queensberry, but they went to that corner to shoot these brief sequences. Here are a few shots from that brief moment:

The Rainbow Room was a nightspot at the Savoy Hotel which had a sponsorship deal with Homicide but surely it's a complete coincidence that there is an ad for it in this scene. As you can see the ad is on the side of the Courthouse Hotel which is opposite the town hall. Also, down the lane you can see a sign for the premises (probably just a branch) of E. A. Machin & Co, automotive spare parts merchant, which had a shopfront at 114-116 Errol. 

This is from the street outside the town hall looking across to the north side of Queensberry. That's G Sutherland Smith & Sons, Wine Merchants at 508-12 Queensberry and next to it on the left is Haddow's Hardware. 

Here's the street today. The main thing missing is the veranda. Oh and the parking spaces.

This laneway (really more of a driveway - it has no name and as you can see it once had a gate though that is now gone; back in '68 it was between the Ruskin Press' warehouse and 'T. R. Services Pty Ltd'). This shot includes some of the same buildings as the one above i.e. from l-r 502, 500, 498 (part-obscured) Queensberry. 

That's all we see of North Melbourne and in fact most of the North Melbourne action takes place in descriptions relayed from the postmaster to Inspector Connolly over the phone.

Can I have a moment to give a shout out to Vaughan Tracey, here on the right, who gives a tremendous performance as Mick Webb, a local fool who takes Timms in because Timms starts to gain a bit of celebrity as a 'Ned Kelly' figure. Here Webb is about to boast to his mates at the pub that he is harbouring a criminal and he does a terrific little turn in his glee where his fingers dance on the shoulders of the man in the middle as he can barely wait to tell them what he's done. This by the way doesn't end well (see below). 

Norman Yemm is a hero and it's extraordinary what he does in this episode. I mean seriously he could quite obviously have died crossing these rapids but he just does it. Just does it. He gets right in. 

Here's a little exchange at the end which is curious to me because clearly from the outset the makers of Homicide have relied on the good will of the Herald (which owned Channel 7, the broadcaster of the show) to make mock-up front covers, etc for use in the program. This is one of the journalists, he is not a developed character but the detectives use him to spread disinformation, apparently through the Herald because that's the only newspaper they talk about. At the end the journalist says to Mack that the pursuit and capture of Timms made a great story. 

Mack says something sardonic about the mayhem and waste of resources and death that Timms has caused and then says words to the effect of, 'yes, I suppose it is a great story' i.e. it's not about stories you petty fool. But you know. It's a police drama show, so um of course it's about a story and also, this is the newspaper you relied on to try and persuade these escapees that you thought they'd left the state. So huh? 

Now a final shout-out to the redoubtable Margaret Cruickshank! She is Mick Webb's sister Sheila and Timms stabs her with an unreasonably big carving knife she has supplied him with a few minutes earlier (she also looks remarkably grossed out when he eats butter). Great 'I've been stabbed' face from MC. 

Anyway everyone in this episode is great but just one more hurrah for Norman Yemm, runner, singer, actor. Here's an article about him from the Age TV-Radio Guide for 21 Jan 1965, p. 3. I love how he says he 'did not do much' before acting, before the journalist goes on to describe all the things he did do: