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
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