division 4 dates

My favourite thing when watching Crawfords shows is identifying places (unless it's enjoying the actors) but I also like figuring out dates. Unfortunately, the above Age point-of-sale poster from the Division 4 episode 'For Better, for Worse' (first screened 13 October 1970) gives me no information. Ysmael was somehow involved in racing but I don't get any of it. 

This one's easy though, mainly because it's an actual headline on the front page, not a point-of-sale poster. This scene from the 20 October 1970 episode 'The Recruit', featuring Vivean Gray and Gordon Glenwright, was shot on 17 July 1970. 

division 4 - a key to paradise

This episode of Division 4 was first screened on 11 August 1970. It's very, very loosely based on the Ronnie Biggs story (British train robber hotfoots it to Australia) but that's really only the jumping off point. One of the interesting things about it is that part of the episode takes place in the Ranelagh Estate in Mount Eliza. 

Ostensibly this house is in Mornington, and the street is Ozone street or something like that. But it's very clear where they are. 

The house number is 115, probably 115 Rutland Ave I suppose, although I checked google earth and that house isn't there. 

I have nothing else to say. 

division 4 - my mate death

This post is more like a note to self than anything. Interesting-ish in the Division 4 world. Although it is quite an intriguing episode in itself. It's about a smallpox scare with a criminal played by Peter Adams carrying smallpox around town with him as he plans a lucrative theft. It also has a weird gay subtext which may only seem like a gay subtext in the 2020s (the extreme hero worship that John Derum's character has for Adams') and a weird relationship between the character played by 'Judith' Morris and Adams' character which she facilitates on the advice of Derum's character's mother for reasons that just aren't clear to me. 

Here's the corner shop with the only newspaper on sale being Newsday. Poor old Newsday, by the time this episode came out on 9 June 1970 the newspaper had already gone under. It didn't die for want of Division 4 promotion. 

Ok but the real thrill here is that Hilda Scurr is the mother. Hilda Scurr!!!

Also, Peter Cummins, who sources tell me died earlier this year, also gets a very short and inexplicable look in for one brief scene. 

The other thing that is worth mentioning about this episode is that it's the first to feature a new, far more pumping, opening credit sequence.

As you know, I watched Homicide to the end earlier this year, so I perhaps became too used to more sophisticated, mid-70s Homicide, and that's why late 60s/early 70s Division 4 seems a bit amateurish, at best patchy. But also perhaps Crawford's were spreading themselves a bit thin, pushing the same writers (and actors) to do more work. That said, everyone has off days and this episode was a very fine one. It was shown in the UK the following year as well, at least on Yorkshire TV, as this from the Hull Daily Mail 11 September 1971 p. 6.

I don't know what Big Jack's Other World is but I have to say it seems likely to me that D4 was the best thing on that station that day. 

...and one more bit

This picture is from April this year, a bit of old 50s campus left lying around presumably with some ultimate destination in someone's mind. This is the western edge of the new student precinct which was the site of the Alice Hoy building - various decorative elements of that building got incorporated into the new one. 

Update: I note that a row of these have been installed outside the walkway around the building. I appreciate they are probably new but surely modelled on something much older. 

 

more campus art

Yep so Farrago in the late 1950s was thrilled by the new art being commissioned by university administration and never missed an opportunity to show its excitement. Here's an example. 

Farrago 24 March 1959 p.4. There were probably other responses. But how ho-hum is this now. And then there's...

Annoyingly, I failed to record the date/page on the above. I'm pretty sure it's 17 Mar 1959 p. 1. Sorry. Anyway, this statue was clearly a major thrill to everyone on campus in '59. 

This is Farrago 17 March 1959 p. 2. Below cartoon is from 12 May 1959 p. 6. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. 

Don't even start me on Tom Bass' mural for Wilson Hall. They really laid into that. 

what a relief

 From Farrago 21 March 1958 p. 3. A few weeks later (11 April) Farrago reported that the bas-relief was removed ('and smashed in the process'!) and a version of the drawing above, sans caption, substituted in its place. People were so weird back then. 

way to drops!

I do believe I have bored you stupid (are you stupid yet?) with details on my attempts to at very least get my foot in the door with the Finnish language via apps, duolingo until a few months ago and now Drops. I am now on the very babyishly simple topic of Finnish words for other countries and for the people who live in those countries (something I covered very extensively in duolingo so it's even less of a stretch). Right now I am on a couple of gripes. One is the use of what I always (following the lead of Spike Milligan I think, putting me in a minority) call 'talks balloons' but most people call speech bubbles. 

So Drops is all about little pictograms which I suspect is the reason it can go in far greater depth with a super-minority language like Finnish - the pictograms are the same for every language course, but the answers are different depending on what language you're studying. Here, the answer is 'portugalilainen' i.e. a person from Portugal. In most instances, the pictogram for 'a person from...' is just a standard white (I guess) man wearing a t-shirt with that country's flag on it. But in this case, this is a cliche/icon of Portugal, with a talks balloon coming out of it with the flag in it. Why? 

Here are more examples. The pictograms for Italy; Spain (this time, a talks balloon coming out of Spain!); Brazil and Belgium.  

But the pictogram for Belgian person is a talking glass of beer, presumably saying 'I am Belgian'. 

Whereas the pictogram for Italian person is below - and most of the others are the same. Well, it's confusing! 

This is the first glitch of this nature I've encountered, by the way. The answer is 'italialainen'. I started to trace the word out and realised it was going to get me in a corner I couldn't get out of, but persisted because I thought well maybe - for the first time - it would let me reuse the 'i' on the second row. But it didn't, and I couldn't go forward (or back, but what would be the point). The lessons are typically 5 minutes long, and as you can see I was on 4:19 at this point. All I could do was wait it out. 

 Ridiculous! Hope this doesn't happen again or, you know, I'll never get to speak fluent Finnish :-P