happy 100th birthday leonard teale

Leonard Teale (seen here with his wife Liz Harris a year or so before they were married) was born a hundred years ago today. I must say I have greatly enjoyed the many hours I have spent with him in the last year or so as I witnessed the many travails of David 'Mack' Mackay in Homicide. I am sorry he is no longer around. 

 

probably not THE samuel hatty

Our Samuel Hatty was 31 when this happened on 24 September 1921, so this is probably someone just trying to crash the Samuel Hatty party, but thought it was slightly worth mentioning. You're welcome. 

george

Episode 222 of Homicide, 'George' is a partially successful (bit messy plotwise) exploration of mental illness, and one of the episodes which is preceded by the information that it is based on an actual case. (It actually feels like a play someone has retrofitted to put the Homicide team into). 

It's also the first time that Alwyn Kurts starts the program by addressing the viewer in the way that John Fegan used to when someone deemed the subject matter a bit close to the bone. It's a program, he says, about mental illness and it's not suitable viewing for children (like any episode of Homicide ever was!). 

It was also first screened 23 September 1969, so, exactly 53 years ago. 

a law unto thems-health sock

Age 4 April 1985 p. 26

I have a complete thing going on with Humphrey Law socks. Yes they are the very expensive socks you can seemingly only get from David Jones these days (or a place at the Victoria Market which is rapidly running out of them because I keep going there). No doubt this is one of the reasons why middle aged men are so smug, not Humphrey Law socks per se but because they have been round the block a bit and think their niche preferences indicate that they know everything. But it is a stunningly good sock. I have a lot of the thick alpaca ones, lovely, and a number of other varieties the exact specs of I couldn't summon to mind only that I know what I like. Right now I am wearing a fresh pair in a strange salmon colour which I have had sitting around all week I just hadn't put them on because I was so much enjoying the other HL socks I bought I kept washing and rewearing them. 

I'd like to also tell you something informative about Humphrey Law but I can't really, well, a little bit. The company is first mentioned in the papers on 13 September 1950 (p. 17), this ad: 

But they first make their real strides three years later when it's revealed in the press (the Age again) that CSIRO has developed a way to stop woollen socks from shrinking and thus brought them back to a better competitive position with synthetic fibres. Humphrey Law (it was a Harvey Norman-type situation: their website says 'In 1947 Sidney Humphrey and Albert Law formed a partnership to make socks in Australia') announced they would be using this process in their socks: Albert Law is quoted discussing the process which applies resin in umpteen 'spot-welds' to the fibres stopped their usual response to moisture. This treatment was called the Belmont process. 

The company appeared to trundle on through the 50s, 60s and 70s without any actual advertising of their own, just mentioned in department stores' ads (so they presumably had some kind of reputation of their own as a quality brand) then in the 80s they began to promote themselves. Which is interesting in itself. This ad is from the Sydney Morning Herald 23 September 1989 p. 268. 

In the early 1990s the company is ardently promoting its grass seed sock ('How much time have you spent removing those torturous points of pain from socks', expressed as a statement not a question). I don't know if this is commonly available anymore but there are some on eBay. I am not usually one to suffer from grass seeds in my socks but you never know, maybe I should invest. 

eBay also has a bulk buy option for health socks, I'd be silly not to really wouldn't I. 

Although the cushion foot bit makes me feel a bit weird. Nevertheless. I am sorely tempted.

This is their premises on Google Earth, they've been here for seventy years or more ('They built a factory on land that had been a lemon orchard in the bush at Heathmont about 20 miles out of Melbourne,' says the website). They don't have any signage.

jenkinson

As we draw to the end of the 60s in Homicide the guest actors are no doubt going to veer away a little from people only really known as stars of the Melbourne stage and towards people who might have been that but who also went on to be nationally or globally famous. Well, we've already had Jackie Weaver. This is the first time Graeme Blundell has been in Homicide, in an episode called 'Never a Man', screened in July 1969. He has a small part (though important to the plot) as a criminal called Jenkinson. When he's holed up in a car yard shooting at cops Leonard Teale calls out 'Jenkinson' so many times it starts to get silly. 

IMDB tells us he was actually also in the pilot episode in 1964, uncredited. 

yep, you know, stuff...

So Bert Costello is dead. He died in an old mineshaft in episode 210. It was a weird death, because so unexpected. There was no meaningful shot of him and no otherwise inexplicable monologue about how he was looking forward to seeing his mother on the weekend or maybe he'd pop the question to his (admittedly he had no real backstory other than that he was Italian and born in Walgett or something like that) girlfriend or anything else to make his death poignant. It was like they decided during the episode that they'd found a good way to get Lionel Long out of the show, 'let's chuck him in the mineshaft and blow it up off-camera' And yes, it all takes place offscreen but we do get to see him dead:

I mean who knows what the circumstances were of LL leaving the show after a reasonably short tenure (fifty or so episodes) but I think he was in some ways an underutilised resource, and he did a pretty decent job all through his time on the program. He could even reel off some credible (to me) sounding Italian which is a talent for someone without an Italian background, he wasn't like Con the Fruiterer or anything. So it was sad. The other characters have not mentioned him since he left, at all, not once. The first episode after he went was based on the Robert Ryan case, so a Pentridge warden is shot, and they are all talking about 'going to the funeral' and I assumed they meant Costello's funeral but no it's the warden's. So, I guess Poochie died on the way back to his home planet. Long (who by the end of the year was hosting an hour-long country and western show on ABC radio, so win/win) is replaced by Norman Yemm, who I have to admit, is spectacular. 

Weirdly Long/Costello only lasted a few episodes after the departure of Inspector Connolly, the last original cast member to leave. Connolly got quite a send-off, with a whole lot of back-and-forth about how he didn't want a party with speeches. A lot was also made of the notion that Connolly wasn't retiring, but going on long service leave for six months. Even the other characters seem confused about whether this is a fake way of saying he's retiring. His replacement is Alwyn Kurts.

I just went looking through IMDB to get clear when Connolly left and Costello died, and it looks like there's a whole disc on my DVD box (8) which I actually haven't watched, lol, or the episodes were so unmemorable I might as well not have watched them. Anyway I think there are probably only about six episodes with this as the opener:

The four men are cleverly in shadow because you know what? I think this might still actually be John Fegan in there not Kurts. When Norman Yemm joins they stripped him into the guys-getting-out-of-the-car opener (perhaps they even shot it on the same day! Looks like the same light) and then did a less in-the-dark ending to the sequence. 

Norman Yemm is already incredible, what a guy. I mean it's chalk and cheese and each was talented but Lionel Long, right, can slip into big international films like The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders as 'singer in prison' (apparently, I haven't seen it) and be a functional presence. Norman Yemm couldn't have a bit part in a film, he's just not wallpaper, he's of it. Look at him drawing the charisma away from Leonard Teale here. That takes some doing. 

So that's where I'm at in Homicide. Mid-1969. 

Other things I'm loving right now include the debut album by Maustetytöt, which is called Kaikki Tiet Vievät Peltolaan. The title translates as All Roads Lead to Peltola; obviously this has a local meaning that only locals can understand (Peltola is a small industrial area outside Turku; means nothing to me obviously, I'm surprised it even has an english-language Wikipedia entry).  

According to Finnish wikipedia the duo (sisters guitarist Anna Karjalainen and keyboard player Kaisa Karjalainen) are from Vaala (an hour on the train from Oulu) and live in Kallio, a suburb of Helsinki. Wikipedia (via google translate) continues:

They listen to traditional Finnish iskelmä, and their role model is Leevi and the Leavings. Oskari Onninen says in Helsingin Sanomat that the band is "downright suspiciously 'authentic' and non-commercial". According to Sound's Antti Luukkanen, the songs contain "everyday realism and the glamor of downright misery".

I mean sure, but this is an album that is completely beholden to references to 80s pop and the joke I saw somewhere that they were Finland's Pet Shop Boys is not really a joke (Anna is a complete Chris Lowe in all performances, immobile and deadpan). There is also a song called 'Se Oli SOS' ('It was SOS') which kicks off with a musical reference to that ABBA song. The lyrics are seemingly sardonic depresso slacker stuff that is frankly hard to resist. 

There is another song - I'll find it somewhere - which is basically a translation into Finnish of the general concepts from the Smiths' 'There is a Light That Never Goes Out', which I mean is, no judgment, but lazy songwriting (there's a live clip on youtube where Kaisa says something like, she wasn't glamourising death, just translating Morrissey!). But like I said 'slacker'. Anyway, they're an excellent band and also, considering I am currently in the throes of trying to get some basic Finnish via duolingo, the fact that they almost always include the song title in the chorus is good practice for me. I can already pick out some words. By the way, the name 'Maustetytöt' means 'Spice Girls'. 

So yes I have spent a long time the last couple of weeks absorbing this kind of thing: 

It's actually pretty satisfying to turn your mind off a bit and feel it rather than try to figure it out. Often works, though clearly, duolingo has a hell of a process that reinforces you a lot for what is basically guesswork/deduction. 

So that's been my last couple of weeks. Going back to my earlier point, vale Lionel Long. He was only 59 when he died, that's a shame, he was good. 

another hatty

I wonder if he was related to Samuel. 

By the way I heard about this flood, 62 years ago today, which also apparently ripped through what is now the City Gardens estate where I presently live. People's furniture floated out the door. 

I am trying to place the location of this 'workshop' and can't, quite, though I think it must have been near what is now the on-ramp to the Tullamarine Freeway. 

a bunbury townhouse development that, for some weird reason, i sort of liked (a week ago)

Yeah I can't explain why I liked it only that it looks less impressive in these pictures than in real life. 

 This is its cousin over the road

greetings from albany (last week)

Hi I am in Albany (Sunday 4/9). I am staying at a strange enough motel in a snug beachy holiday suburb slightly east of main Albany. I am about to go to main Albany and have a look around (it's not daylight yet). The hotel had some weird liquid soap which just seems very oily, and I used it last night and I thought I had got it all off but then this morning it revealed it had been on me all along, and was still hard to get rid of. 

How fabulous is the town hall? It looks like some 15th century belgian shizzle. 

Just, you know, all blue books. 

It's one thing to see old signage advertising CDs and DVDs (they'll be back before too long, don't you worry) but this shop still had a lot of that stock up the back. The front was a lot of cheap junk. It was closed, this was Sunday. 

Also closed. 

I couldn't imagine a worse looking remodel on an old cinema although tbh this might not be that much of a remodel, just a building which was originally intended to have placards and postcards on it, etc, and now it  has these horrible logos on it instead. 

So it was a Sunday morning and I was gasping for a coffee of course apart from anything else and I used google maps naturally and found a bunch of cafes. Kate's Place was obviously going to be ideal for my purposes but fucking hell... 

And it looked so much like my kind of thing, what with the bunting and so on. 

However! I went back to the motel in a razz but then had another look at google maps and realised there was a place I hadn't investigated so I drove there and... 

Flippin' perfect! Albany you ultimately got it right so thank you.