d4 the battle of waterloo st

It becomes particularly obvious what a high quality series D4 is when you hit the rare dud. This one, from 11 March 1974, has all the ingredients - great cast (Keith Eden, Sheila Florance, Norman Kaye, Jon Finlayson, David Jon, and others) possibly even on paper a decent storyline, almost. But the way the whole is played for comedy (why? why?!) and the type of hamfisted comedy... jeepers. When you consider how many incredibly good, tightly scripted, brilliantly acted episodes they made in '73-'74, well, obviously, there have to be winners and losers. But a flour fight under a hose? Thanks but no thanks.

Possibly the D4 world just wasn't sure how it felt about hot shot property developers and/or the inner city, still in this episode the habitat of old battlers and eccentrics. In this episode some heavies are employed at arm's length by an effete developer who won't actually have the money he needs to buy all the land he's bought for his new high-rise towers until he scores one holdout house, The Briars, owned (sort of) by an elderly lady called Miss Bobby. (I say elderly and perhaps the character is but Sheila Florance was... gulp... younger than I am now, when this show was made). 

The final moment of the show depicts a model of the Briars next to the extensive property development* and we are told that 'Miss Bobby is still living in her house which is now in the centre of a shopping complex,' no doubt a reference to the poor lady in real life who held out against the sale of her home in Camberwell Junction and had people looking into her backyard for years as they went into Target. The model we are shown while hearing these words does not match the description of a house in a shopping centre but oh well. That's the least of anyone's worries with this silly farce. Such a waste.  

* Which btw implies that the developer actually got his way, which is odd, as he went to prison in the story.

egan st richmond etc

It being horsemurder day today* Perry and I thought we'd head down to Richmond to check out some of the locations previously mentioned. 

Here's a useless one:

Useless mainly because the morning sun was too big and bright, but also some fool has grown trees in the way. Also, I wanted to get a picture of Perry in front of the sign that said Perry Palms but the Y has fallen off. 

So this place:

I didn't even show it to you before because I didn't know where it was but we happened upon it. It's a bridge across the Yarra in Abbotsford and the building behind is now the big Salvos op shop. Apparently at one stage it had an incinerator (or at least a chimney) on it which it no longer has. 

I think this is Sheila Florance outside this place in Egan st and...

Here it is today. Literally today. 

The other side of the road, at 2 and 4 Egan which as you can see has now been blown out of all proportion by I'm sure entirely appropriate renovations. 

& generally speaking, the street. 

We also walked around to the parallel st, Peers st, where I used to live in 1996, so I could show Perry that house, but I couldn't find it. It might even have been pulled down. There's nothing that corresponded to my memory of the house. 

* and also destined to get reasonably hot

homicide ep 12 s 5, 'surprising what people can do' (and a bit of 'a nameless grave')

This is a very fine, tight, well-scripted, documentarily fascinating episode of Homicide first screened on 8 April 1975. Thrillingly it stars Hilda Scurr who I've discussed here before, as well as Peter Corbett. You don't need to know the various bits and pieces of the story, but here are some of the locations. 

Corbett's character is called Kenneth Cook. This is him (yes, he's just been shot in the arm, don't worry he's ok) in the car park of Coles New World. I am assuming this is the Coles in Swanston St (I may be wrong).  

Age 29 December 1972 p. 8. Presumably this is Coles' nice new (or at least nice newish and recalibrated for Coles) supermarket car park. It has other shops in it, which I can't quite imagine. 

I'm not sure where this is, I think I might be able to find it out. I also don't know who owned the car with the registration number KSN 968, sorry. 

This is Kenneth Cook standing in the car park of his block of flats, which today is known as Perry Palms (124 Perry St). He's looking towards 200 Hoddle St, which was at that time the HQ of Patterson Press. To the right of the picture is the huge Hoddle St Housing Commission complex, but the choice was made to omit this. 

2 and 4 Egan St Richmond, the Hilda Scurr character Frances Brown lives here. 

Egan st looking east. 

Hilda Scurr was brilliant. 

Bizarrely in the episode 'A Nameless Grave' (which aired two weeks later on 22 April) the Ds are in Egan St again - this time trying to visit Sheila Florence's character. 

Just above Dennis Grosvenor's head you can see 2 Egan St. I suppose they were all set up in Egan St so why not fit in a bit of extra filming. 

fcuwm6: homicide 'end of class'

This is a mildly interesting episode of Homicide apparently first broadcast 16 August 1966. The pictures I took have uploaded in reverse order but that doesn't really matter to me. First, a picture of Leslie Dayman who just seems every bit as perfect in a Homicide regular detective role as Leonard Teale - he has the appropriate cragginess but also a guppy spark.

Brian Hannan and Chris Christensen received a Logie that year in the category of 'men closest in age to be cast in father and son role'. 

Here's Leslie Dayman as Bill Hudson rescuing the schoolboy Gary (Hannan) from the fey but malevolent killer schoolboy Alan (Roland Heimans). Good water work guys. 

I couldn't find much about Heimans although he is in another Homicide episode, from the following year, I'm guessing playing another troubled youth:

Possibly the most interesting thing about this clipping is that it's treating Homicide episodes as 'plays'. Anyway, looking forward to 'The Destroyer', but back to 'End of Class'. The sea arrest/rescue above takes place after an exchange in a beach box at which Alan reveals he killed Lorraine by pushing her off the roof because she made him angry. The conversation in the beach box is funny because it has to be contrived to be in a beach box because outside scenes in Homicide couldn't be filmed with sound (the sound is overdubbed often very unconvincingly). So Alan has to say to Cheryl, 'let's go to the beach box, I have something to tell you' or similar. But there was no reason I could see that he couldn't tell her on the beach itself, no-one else was around. 

This was an odd scene, with Lorraine's father calling the police to tell them he wasn't going to pay for her funeral because he'd disowned her at the age of 12 and that was that. William J. Adams plays 'Mr. Purvis'. I hope for his sake this was not a good angle. Imagine if this was his best. The inclusion of this little scene is presumably intended to remind us that girls like Lorraine, who tell multiple men/boys that they have made her pregnant and have to marry her, are not born bad but made bad by shitty fathers like Mr. Purvis. I just liked the notion that Purvis assumed the police took care of people's funerals, though now I come to think of it, for all I know back then they did everything. 

These are probably the best things in this episode. Alan made a bunch of drawings which he gave to Lorraine. We see quite a few of them, the only one that the detectives are interested in is the first in the series which we see twice in the show, but this is the last in the series and oddly we don't really see it at all - the camera catches it but the edit is so fast it's only because I photographed it using the 'live' function of my phone that we can now see it in all its glory. 

This one does not fit in with any cats and dogs metaphor I've ever heard, but carry on Alan. 

So this is the drawing that makes Lorraine go up to the roof. I just want to say that the only reason that she is enabled to go up to the roof during class time, and her killer to follow her there, is that the teacher unexpectedly leaves the room. This is a serious plot fault. 

The drawings being handed over to the detectives by the teacher Howard Brennan. 

The detectives interviewing Cheryl Reade, a fairly uninteresting schoolgirl character played by Joy Mitchell an actress with a very impressive body of work up till more or less the present day. Mitchell and Roland Heimans had both been members of the University of Melbourne's Union Theatre in the early 60s (as had Sheila Florance, just by the by). 

Exciting

Lorraine and Cheryl in class. 

Sometimes, when Homicide eps are particularly deep social issue ones, they'll get John Fegan to introduce with a kind of pipe-in-the-hand chat. In this case it's all about how today's teenagers face problems never before known and need some understanding and empathy from parents. What I don't get is whether this is meant to be John Fegan, or Inspector Jack Connolly? He never says 'in tonight's episode', or 'here our assembled players present a tableaux within which...' 

Note the phone handset which all the detectives get a go on in Homicide. I can just imagine some bright spark in the postmaster general's office figuring out how to make a new type of phone exciting - give a couple to Homicide. 'Everyone will want one!' (I think they did). Update: I was completely wrong about this and I really should pay attention to the end of the end credits:

It's an Ericofon. I was so beholden to my memory of the amazing time (mid-80s?) when Telecom (?) allowed us to buy our own phones rather than rent them from Telecom that the intricacies of the Ericsson Ericofon escaped me (and still do). I mean I definitely remember the phones - my grandparents had one, it rocked and rooled. Also, in case you're obsessed, the Moreland Plant Farm was at 45 Sydney Road Coburg. They also had a branch at 7a Military Road Avondale Heights.