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.