Can you believe there was a time when 'jumping the shark' was not a thing. I am not entirely sure if D4 was jumping it by 1974 but there are some signs towards this, particularly a prevalence of 'funny old life ain't it' music on key scenes, and the walking of the fine line between actual criminals and funny criminal families. I have to admit, for all the shakiness of the script here in 'Now Be A Good Boy' (24 June 1974), Margaret Christensen as Eleanor O'Donnell is Dickensian if not Shakespearian in her horrifying berating/manipulating. It also has the typically excellent Sally Conabere who is Barbara Fairweather (Crawfords shows got a bit Dickensian in their character names too by the mid-70s) who for reasons not entirely clear became mixed up with the less-horrendous but still criminal member of a crime family.
Anyway to my mind the shark jumping really started to get a run-up a few episodes earlier with the departure from the show of Policewoman Marg Stewart, left-to-get-married in the episode aired 28 May 1974 after announcing her resignation the previous episode. Very swift dispatch, is my point.
Patricia Smith was a real asset to the D4 universe (by the way Ted Hamilton, another core member of the cast, had left some months earlier in a situation that frankly just outright confused me, as he was there one minute and gone the next and no discussion of his departure at all unless it was so minor I was doing something else and missed it).* Marg Stewart was not in every story (apparently, she lived in Adelaide and would come to Melbourne periodically to film shows) but she was often used very cleverly to give a whole new dimension to the program, and not just a 'woman's perspective'. The character must have been ground breaking at the time. She wasn't hard, but nor was she a wuss, and she followed procedure to an internal compass we only occasionally glimpsed. On the whole, a very impressive character with gumption. To pack her off to be the wife of some loser moustachioed grazier was not a great idea, and the story told at her farewell that he had seen and liked her while she was working at an agricultural show and so sent his small boy to pretend to be lost so he could claim her and strike up a conversation with Marg, while possibly a sort of joke, who knows, was also creepy and stupid. Long story short, I didn't like it and the character deserved better though on the other hand, she didn't get shot and killed or invalided or any other options that might have occurred to the producers or Channel 9 at the time.
So for the last year of the show we have Banner, McLeod, Vickers and Peters, aided by two uniformed constables (Roger Wilson played by Andrew McFarland and Bob Parry played by Clive Davies) whose characters are not really allowed to develop much, at least not as far as I've got. I am not against them but with hindsight you can sort of see why there might be a case for not just crawling along and instead for doing a dramatic facelift. I should have more to say about this and in one sense I do but in another sense I'm too tired and too busy. Bye!
*His last episode was 25 March 1974.
