all i want is some vintage philip brown knitwear as worn on the box

...and then I go searching on facebook marketplace* and things like this come up. What is the world coming to? 

 * to be precise, searching on the phrase 'Philip Brown knitwear'. 

the aftermath of judy's death

So as I have no doubt mentioned, we watch a lot of The Box round here, and we're presently sometime in1975 (episode 259-60 territory). (It's hard to be sure when episodes were actually broadcast because IMDB doesn't say, and the newspapers of the day didn't either). This is the exciting/depressing ep where Judy has been blown up by Frank Roberts' bomb, but she's not precisely dead yet. Here are Paul and Lee in the street outside, seconds before the bomb goes off. 

This is where The Box starts to contort itself a bit to try and figure how to both deal with the demise of a major character at the same time as two other characters (Jean and Kay) leave (Jean's gone, to London to be with her husband Brad, and Kay is just about to be press-ganged into doing essentially the same thing by Michael Brooks (John Waters). Here are Sir Henry and Max dealing with the shocking situation while Jack O'Brian, um, is on the phone. 

Here's Kay dealing with that ridiculous situation where Michael is saying he has bought her a ticket to London that afternoon and she's, I suppose, required to not only pack in her job but leave her entire flat for ever, while her ex-lover Paul is grieving the likely death of his estranged wife. 

Here's Lee on Paul and Judy's couch, where so much has happened:

Michael and Kay blah blah. Laura said something funny, 'what's she going to do with her record?' (it's on the counter next to the flowers). 

I can't remember why Fanny was here but she is. She (and others like Syd Heylen as Vern, Ken James as Tony Wild, Tracy Mann see below, and I can't remember who else) have to serve the role of being light and shallow in the face of this tragedy, to propel the narrative to the future.

Tracy Mann must have simultaneously been really pleased to get the role of Tina the cleaner and really unhappy about how goofy the character is, at least at the beginning, will be interested to see where it goes. 

This is a golden moment, Paul's dream where he and Judy are having a baby. 

He is woken from this dream by a telephone call from a very unprofessional doctor who apparently thinks it's OK to tell a man his wife is dead over the phone. 

Unusually for The Box, the episode ends with a freeze frame on Paul's face and audio of a (simulated?) heartbeat while the credits go over them.

I just want to say that I am very much in the market for Philip Brown knitwear. 

Briony Behets went on to play someone called Jorja Jones in Class of '75 (I have watched practically every episode of that show, admittedly over a decade ago, and I don't remember her at all!) then she was in Bellbird and by the end of the year she was a weather presenter (in November John Pinkney wrote in the Age that she peformed this duty 'with the intensity of a Pinter heroine, but gets away with it'.) * 

The mainstream news, to the degree it paid any attention to shows like The Box, accused it of being unrealistic lol:

Sydney Sun-Herald 21 Dec 1975 p. 70

*26 November 1975 p. 2

five out of the box

Laura and I enjoy watching The Box, it is a very good show, much better than most people would think. It is in many ways quite modern and quite 'meta'. The Box is as you know a show about a television station, and it circulates a lot of the stories and rumours about various tv stars of the period (up to the mid-1970s) with a generous dose of romantic/sexual drama. Some of the characters are clearly, winking-at-the-camera, modelled on actual people. Sir Henry is an amalgam of Reg Ansett and Frank Packer, two television magnates of the period (probably more Ansett as Sir Henry is an industrialist with a rather blunt appreciation of television, rather than a mogul with media consciousness). Gary Bourke is, yes, Irish (like Dave Allen, I suppose, whose tv career started in Australia) but he's more like Graham Kennedy (certainly when it comes to payola scandals etc and over-riffing on products to the delight of particular sponsors, not when it comes to being secretly gay which so far he doesn't appear to be). There are probably others lost in the mists of time, I am sure Vicki Stafford is modelled on someone.  

I have to say that the article below is super confusing (possibly a relic of a time when press announcements weren't very coordinated) because from our perspective as viewers there are weeks and weeks, more than a month I'm sure, between the departure of Graeme Blundell and Lynda Keane, for instance, and any of the others mentioned. Where we are up to in the program, none of the other three have left yet. But I'm not even sure that Susie and Don were in the program at the same time.*

The first half of 1974 was a mindfuck for Blundell I'm sure as he was a megastar with Alvin Purple then appearing most nights of the week on The Box as Don Cook. I think the Don Cook character is incredible, very nuanced, he's a complete charlatan, messing two women around and becoming engaged to both and it's only happenstance that they don't come into contact with each other, the anxiety is palpable. In his memoir Blundell has apparently forgotten entirely the kind of character DC was, as he just says he was a womaniser, which is barely true or at least, he probably was a young man about town (that's how he got Barbie knocked up) but we don't then see him bedding any babes thereafter aside from Cathy who he is pretty reluctant to sleep with but does because he's so weak. 

So for us, 51 years later, Don and Barbie have gone (to Sydney) but Judy, Kaye and Susie are all still in the show. Susie is not such a prominent character that she can't leave without too much fanfare, but Judy and Kaye are pretty important and will make a splash when they go. Interested to see what happens next. 

* I don't know how this pans out but according to IMDB I'm right that Don leaves the show a couple of episodes before Susie shows up, but he does come back later, like, 36 episodes later. Since Susie is in 63  episodes they must overlap at some point. Also, perhaps I'm wrong about Blundell's typification of the character, since he has another 161-220 to be even more of an Alvin Purplesque cad in. UPDATE: He wasn't though

 

vanessa leigh loses her diamonds rushing to catch a taxi

 

I have barely mentioned that Laura and I are regularly viewing episodes of The Box from 1973 and while I wouldn't normally talk for her I am going to say we are enjoying it immensely. 

Vanessa Leigh played the part of Fanny Adams (how imaginative is that character name) in The Box apparently until 1975 after which she did surprisingly little - her last credit on IMDB is for one episode of Cop Shop in 1982. I wonder what became of her? Also, I wonder if she got her diamond bracelet back. 

Let me know what you think. 

homicide episodes 13, 14, then i lost count

The most interesting locale in episode 13, 'Aftermath', is the airport we then called Melbourne Airport and now call Essendon Airport. In episode 14, we are introduced to the most classic ad man ever, Mad Men to the max, Kevin Sinclair as played by Denis Doonan. 

You may be surprised to hear that this was pretty much Doonan's last big acting job aside from the film The Set (1970) and it's possible he worked through most of the 60s and into the early 70s as a real estate agent, but he found his proper role in life as Mr. Margaret Fulton. Fulton is the first woman I have encountered on wikipedia whose daughter is named, but whose husband isn't. But below there they are in the Sydney Morning Herald for 12 January 1978 (p. 3). 

The following episode is pretty standard stuff: a crooked babysitting group, murder of a waterskiing teenager with a stolen motorboat, and a bunch of bikers terrorising Elwood. (By the way I've been meaning to mention that my tv stretches out all my episodes of Homicide; either there's no way of changing the aspect ratio or I just can't work out how to do it; just relax). In this episode, not that the pictures really demonstrate this, I couldn't get it out of my mind that this woman might be, or might be related to, Colette Mann:

It's really not her because Colette Mann was born in 1951 and this was made in 1965, and the actor is Judith Arthy - who was already having a not inconsiderable career. But the weird thing is that the character's name is Peggy Mann. 

Not wishing to take away from Judith Arthy's great performance here, I did go down a little rabbit hole trying to establish whether there was a Colette Mann - Judith Arthy connection. What I did find was this gorgeous snippet, from the Ballarat South Street competition 1957 (Age 10 September 1957 p. 5, to be exact):

She got an honourable mention in 'song and dance solo' the next day. The South Street competition was some kind of annual talent show. I know this because over fifty years before many of the DeGaris siblings were competing in it, mainly in recitation. As I relate in my CJ DeGaris book, which for all I know may come out this year, CJ used the South Street competition at least once to hook up with the girl he had a 'friends with benefits' (yes I use that phrase in the book, soz) relationship with late in his teens. I was then super disappointed that this following was not the next time Colette Mann was mentioned in the papers (an item from the Sydney Sun-Herald 25 February 1968, p. 13), because it was actually about Colette Estermann:

Tbh I was only excited by the idea of Colette Mann being in the same room as Pussy Von de Var, easily the best name I have heard for a man, woman or cat (or dog) in a long time. CM next appears in the paper as a bridesmaid and then singing on a Digby Richards album and then in the cast of Godspell alongside Marty Rhone and THE REST IS HISTORY. 

Judith Arthy, in any case, was already up and running as an actor in 1961 when she appeared in the first (?) performances of The One Day of the Year (this from the SMH 15 April 1961 p. 20)

'A.W.', reviewing the show in the SMH on 27 April 1961 p. 9 said that Arthy's performance as 'the girlfriend' was 'a little too mannered to be true', but what was the last play you saw A. W. in? Reviewing her in Period of Adjustment in September the same year, 'R. C.' said that she mixed her accents unmercifully and tried 'far too hard in her distressed early scenes' but then 'found a much more satisfactory equivalent for newly awakened tenderness in the last act.' (SMH 7 September 1961 p. 9). She was then in Puss in Boots and got panned for that too, basically (SMH 26 December 1961 p. 5). So 1961 was a big year for her reading shitty reviews of herself in the Herald. 

Anyway Peggy Mann is not even the most important character in this episode, lots of calling the police on telephones and hanging up before she gets to say what she wants to say, but this does look like it would have been an amazing teleplay doesn't it:

(From the Melbourne Age 20 March 1963 p. 25) (below: SMH 3 June 1963 p. 11)

'R. C.' described Arthy's performance in this 'pointless sensation-seeking' production as 'reasonably competent', so she must have felt she was going up in the world (SMH 13 June 1963 p. 12). A-a-anyway, after I scrolled through many more mentions of Judith Arthy no doubt being raked over hot coals justifiably or otherwise I don't know, I found the actual thing I was really looking for i.e. mention of this episode of Homicide which was screened the week after I was born and which I would have found very interesting because, as mentioned, it was shot in Elwood and that was really only a crawl from where I was living at the time. This from the Age TV Radio Guide 22 April 1965 p. 1:

The same week (but in Sydney so I don't know if I would have been able to see it) the following line-up appeared on channel 2: 

SMH 26 April 1965 p. 17. I mean Ann(e) Charl(e)ston and Judith Arthy what a line-up and in a Hal Porter story no less, plus Eric Sykes who's always funny and Country and Liberal Party spruiks, I would have been in clover. Of course, you don't remember what you watched on tv in the first week of your existence but I just know I would have loved this line-up. Anyway, back to Homicide. 

This is a scene where the bikes threaten the dead girl's Aunt Olive. One of the odd things about Homicide is that everyone gets over other people's deaths very quickly, I suppose because it's a short program and there's not much time for tears/troubles if a murder is going to be solved and then the killer prosecuted and then they need to have time to banter at the end about dry cleaning. In this episode though the only real banter is between the police: youngster Rex and his older colleagues Frank and Jack about whether motorcycles lead to lawlessness, to which Rex opines that it's not a motorcycle's fault if a 'crumb' is riding it. Which is actually true. Anyway here are Paul Karo (as Tony Merrick) and Ken Sterling (as Alec Price) menacing, as I said, Aunt Olive (Neva Carr-Glynn who I just want to remind you is Nick Tate's mother). Check out the incredibly unconvincing outdoor scenes outside the windows. Deal with it. 

So is this Ken Sterling really the Ken Sterling? By which I mean the co-writer of Love Thy Neighbour in Australia with Vince Powell, the writer/performer of much of Doug Mulray's shizzle in the 70s-80s and then a painter of landscapes, now long dead? Well, could be, how often is IMDB wrong? Paul Karo, 'of Moroccan Jewish descent' says wikipedia, was later a regular cast member on The Box and apparently won the logie for best Australian actor in 1975. Who knew! Well, most people, then, I suppose. 

I just love Paul Karo's Ash Wednesday look in this show, eg:

Anyway that was a pretty good ep. But this one is ace too. It's called Motive for Two and is about a married couple, Brian (Leonard Teale) and Catherine (Benita Harvey) Leonardson, who live in Toorak and are rich because she owns a string of salons. She also has a string of lovers (we only see two of them, Eric and Ash) and he just observes and makes meek comments and mixes drinks and smokes cigarettes and calls her Kitty Cat. 

Kudos to Leonard Teale that (1) I know very well what Leonard Teale looks like (2) he had been a crim on Homicide only a few episodes previously and yet I didn't recognise him as the effete Brian. 

This is Brian wiping himself after Catherine throws a drink in his face because he has made it too weak. Now, she is a piece of work, but also, Eric has just come into the back yard and shot her in the swimming pool (ouch) so I guess she has reason to be a bit upset. 

This is just after Brian has gone to answer the front door to be told that Eric has given himself up to the police thinking he has killed Catherine and then he's come back to find Catherine smooching Ash, who is a racing car driver (natch) and the least developed character in this episode, frankly. Brian tolerates Catherine's affairs by the way or perhaps even actively encourages them, it's not clear. 

Now this is one of Catherine's salons. It's obviously a real business...

...as I am sure the admittedly excellent (not being sarcastic) Crawfords production team would not have had the resources to put together this as a window sign. I'd find out more about Coppelia Coiffure but for some reason the Sands and McDougalls directories which were so accessible online via the state library until a few weeks ago have now become extremely user-unfriendly. In the show they say this business is in Malvern Road Malvern (Terry McDermott pronounces 'Malvern' to rhyme with 'Alvin', for some reason). There was a Coppelia Coiffure in Box Hill according to the Age 6 June 1970 p. 56, so maybe it was a chain, and so all I wonder is did it tolerate being associated with this scandalous storyline or did it encourage it, was this even product placement? 

Anyway Catherine is finally murdered, electrocuted in her own salon. Here is Brian not caring that much with the salon's manager Margot who he briefly and off-the-cuffly brings in to be his alibi for the time that Catherine was probably dead, as long as the police believe the testimony of her two lovers, both of whom have reason to lie let's face it. (They think Eric's story that he found the salon in darkness stacks up because when he thought he had shot her he confessed straight away. However, let's be fair, he also did shoot at her, only a few days earlier, and in between that time and this it had become clear to him that if she wanted to steal all the money he had lent her, he didn't have a leg to stand on as there was no evidence she had taken it. But whatever, I'm a bit late to the party picking holes in this story I know). 

Forget about the ending to that one, it's not that important, starts well but ends boringly. This next one is a goodie though as it stars out in a farm in Bulla with one man nailing another inside a crate. Here's the crate being taken down Mount Alexander Road and almost falling out onto the road. This has to be just near Essendon station:

Don't quite know where this is, but I guess close to Moonee Ponds:

The crate being sent to a secure transfer station where a big fat crime is to be committed:

The man who was nailed inside the crate gets out, steals jewellery, knifes a nightwatchman, can't get out of the facility so gets back into the crate.

This nervous type is the dispatch clerk (played by John Godfrey) whose wife is about to have a baby and who has had a gambling problem in the past (but doesn't seem to have one anymore - who knows - but still needs or at least wants money). His name is Brian, because I guess as per the last episode, all weak men are called Brian. Her name is Nancy (a good, strong honest name) and she is played by Marie Redshaw.

The DVD really started glitching in the last ten minutes or so which doesn't bode well for the last one on this disc or perhaps it does as the whole thing is pretty interesting to watch, possibly more interesting than it might be otherwise, I can't know. 

Anyway I've spent way too long on all of this, especially as I said I wasn't going to keep tallying these up, I just find them so freakin' fascinating in so many ways. I mean what else is there to blog about? The Omicron variant? Scott Morrison? Nancy and Helmi? The weather? Idk