homicide 4 feb 1975, 'mr spence'

This episode is more interesting for the way the story is told, than for the story itself, which is pretty pedestrian (ok so the man didn't kill his wife so he could have a relationship with a co-worker precisely - it seems he killed her kind of in self-defence - but he still killed her and it's credit to the talents of Homicide cast and crew that they were able to spin this out to an hour). 

So here's Keith Eden, in the 13th of his 14th roles in Homicide, as Mr Spence, waiting outside Flinders St station for Helen Taylor - played by Patsy King who oddly enough was also appearing in the 13th of her 14 Homicide roles. 

Surprisingly this episode - well, this scene at least - was shot almost a year before it was shown, on 27 February 1974. Here's the front page of the Age for that day:

Btw Whitlam was using 'fantastic' in the old sense, of pertaining to fantasy. 

I suppose it was semi-nice to see the old Princes Bridge Station roof (?) area looking out towards Flinders St, I went up there a few times, it was always stupid. 

homicide, 'my brother must rest'

Just when I was thinking I was getting less interested in Homicide, this fabulous episode from October 1966 comes along and I get the bug again. This one has a lot of great guests, a lot of weird twists and quirks, and good locations too. Love it. Colin is trying to get sweet with his secretary (? office manager?) Leslie, to the degree that he goes to her house to listen to her records (when he compliments her on her taste in classical music, she doesn't straight up say well you don't have to pay copyright on those kinds of records, although let's be fair that's what everyone's thinking). (He doesn't compliment on her taste in art). Anyway, this is a fun / creepy element of the whole. Yes, Leslie is played by Elizabeth Harris. 

Helmi was freaked out by Colin's behaviour and I told her as far as I was concerned there was a lot more to this than meets the eye. In fact, the show kicks off with Colin's stepson Timothy being reckless on the balcony of their high-ish apartment building, and Colin apparently kind of hoping that if he did nothing Timothy would fall to his death. Colin!!!

I said to Helmi really I think Homicide is really hitting its stride here, it was already a massive TV hit. We went and looked at what it was up against when it first screened, I mean looking at this stuff I think the other stations are really getting out of its way. There was nothing like it. You can almost imagine IMT not wanting to go up against it on a Thursday night but just hoping that people will be glued enough to their TVs they'll switch over to another golden local program. And 7 and 2 both have cop shows after it, as well. This is the schedule for 11 October 1966, by the way, from the Age TV and Radio Guide for 6 October 1966, p. 10.

Leonard Teale is really getting on top of his role in the show too, making a lot of fun in ways that look improvised, a little geeky/awkward but I bet would have a lot of value to viewers in 1966. Not that either of these pictures really convey the fun of it. 

Elizabeth Harris doesn't get enough screen time. But there are a number of secret magic ingredients in this ep. One is the marvellous Patsy King as Joan Preston, suspected of killing her husband ten years previously in the UK. Timothy is her first husband's son, not hers (biologically) , and Colin is her second husband. I am pretty sure Timothy says nothing at all during his time on screen. 

Here are the police going to visit Joan to tell her that her first husband's body has been found. By the way - spoiler - I am not going to tell you the story in full, you should check it out, it's cool. 

The flats where Joan, Colin and Timothy live. 

So the other magic element of this is... yes... Hilda Scurr! Hilda is Sarah, Joan's first husband's sister, who has come from the UK to see justice done now his body has been found. 

I didn't want to have to tell you this but Timothy fell off the roof. This is one of the weirdest bits, where Colin - who's already informed the police that he's put grease on the ledge after Timothy fell from it, to make Joan feel better about his death (yeah, I know) - now tries ardently to get her to go up on the roof and look at the grease. She really doesn't want to go. 

The police have found out that Colin is actually someone else, I won't bore or excite you with the details. Colin is played by Rhoderick Walker, and he (Colin) is quite the bounder, a really great nasty piece of work. Here are the police driving in St Kilda, and coming to the block of flats again. 

So um Colin tries to push Joan off the roof and instead he gets kind of thrown off himself somehow, and he is not in great shape...

But he's not quite unalived enough that he can't be taken to hospital where the detectives can visit him and clear up all the details of what he did, killed Joan's first husband, then came to Australia and married her, etc. He also tried to get Leslie to love him but that clearly wasn't going to pan out.  

Looks like despite the near-death he still had time to eat some hospital jam but life (his) was too short to wipe his face afterwards. Anyway, presumably he dies. 

Joan is visited by Sarah who says she is sorry for everything. 

I don't want to detract from Patsy King, Hilda Scurr and Elizabeth Harris but Rhoderick Walker deserves a special mention for having such an extraordinary life someone should write a book about him. Or two books?! He was a British actor (1920-2010) who was a Broadway star in the 1940s, then drove - drove - across Eurasia 'to' Australia (I'm not sure how he did the Indian Ocean bit) in the late 1950s to visit his mother and sister in Perth (!!!) then ended up staying in Australia the rest of his life (till 2010) because he fell in love with Max Meldrum the actor. I mean, they were a couple. Although I'm fairly willing to bet that they were not, as IMDB would have it, married. Talk about rewriting history, ffs.

homicide episodes 9-11 or thereabouts

I am n.o.t. not going to turn my blog into a rundown of various episodes of Homicide from the mid-1960s. I just want to marvel for a second at various elements of these early shows - firstly, the great locations and secondly the great actors that were on the show. Episode 9 is called 'Silent Witness' and Ron Tunstall puts in a terrific Norman Bates-esque performance in what seems to have been his one and only tv spot. 

There's an article on Tunstall in the Sydney Sun-Herald 14 July 1968 p. 70 in which he says he really wants to be a theatre designer, not an actor but he can only get acting jobs. A lot of those jobs are in community theatre too, judging by the various mentions he gets in the papers in the 60s and quite a few of them are reviews that really pan his acting pretty viciously. Interesting.

This is him laying it on thick as Adrian Fox, a spoilt evil rich boy who kills the cleaner and somehow persuades his mother to be his alibi. He does everything he can to not be caught and then when the time is up he just sort of says yes he did it. It's kind of weird. This episode has some good shots of St Kilda in 1964, just as I was preparing to move there. 

The episode after this one is even better. It's set in the shipyards - Footscray/Yarraville I guess - has some really fine buildings and places in it. It's dank. 

Also one of those ubiquitous scrapyards that were apparently everywhere in Melbourne in the 1960s. This one was supposedly in Yarraville. 

That episode incidentally also has two great things about it: 1. Norman Yemm, doing great work as an unidentified 'ethnic' accused of murdering his lover's husband (at the end the detectives figure that he will probably be deported, and that the woman would be upset about it, but that she probably wouldn't be alone for too long) 2. a really bizarre extra few minutes at the end about picking up some dry cleaning that just seems completely improvised when they realised they didn't have quite enough minutes to make up the episode. At first I thought 'hey, they're trying to humanise the policemen by bringing in talk of wives and children etc' and then I decided, no, they're just putting on a weird little show for us so the program doesn't come up short. It was one step away from getting Jade Hurley on to sing 'How I Lied'. 

Episode 11 uses up its whole budget in the first five minutes by blowing up a Vauxhall in a 'car bomb' sequence. Hats off to Leonard Teale (who would of course end up a regular on Homicide as David Mackay, down the track) as the appalling carbombing, kidnapping, just all round bad crook Bill Nelson, and Patsy King, later best known probably as Erica Davidson on Prisoner, as his wife. Nelson's escape from custody has to be one of the most genuinely unconvincing bits of television I've seen all day, but I don't watch much television, and when I do I make sure it's from the year I was born. 

In this episode they pay a visit to Johnson St Fitzroy - I don't recognise it though. 

Age TV Radio Guide 21 Jan 1965 p. 2