homicide: 'grains of sand'/'the girl who wanted to go home' (may 1972)

After watching (almost completely, I've missed a few) close to 330 episodes of Homicide it occurred to me to wonder what attracts me so compulsively about this show. It is not nostalgia per se for me, I never watched police dramas of course when I was a child and I actually still don't really like them in themselves (I couldn't even watch most of the 2 May 1972 episode 'Grains of Sand' because it was so depressing - murder of a kidnapped child ffs). Aside from Ernie Bourne who I obviously have a soft spot for (but perhaps more for his depiction of Rob Lewis in Neighbours than for his Adventure Island stuff) I was not greatly familiar with any of the actors in Homicide (well, I suppose I did watch quite a bit of Class of '74/'75 ten or so years ago for a journal article I wrote, and Leonard Teale was ostensibly the star of that, but christ knows what he thought he was doing there - I suppose he thought he was maintaining an acting career!). 

It really does feel like time travel though, I know how stupid that reads, but I so thoroughly enjoy not just Melbourne of 50-60 years ago, but getting the sense of why Australians enjoyed the show so much - the familiarity of it all. Streetscapes, absolutely, and familiar place names. But also venturing into backyards, petrol stations, waste spaces, laneways and bedrooms (home interiors are a little less thrilling because they are almost always sets, constructed the same way and in the same depth through the close to eight years of episodes I have now watched). Not just what you see on the screen, either, but social mores too - things that people throw into the mix, the way we're supposed to empathise with George Mallaby's character Peter, a handsome young man who likes to play the field, or for that matter, Leonard Teale's character Mack, a handsome older man who likes to play the field (although he has a girlfriend, Joy, who suggested to him that she might be about to move to Brisbane for work and who was then shot in the neck by an escaped prisoner trying to kill Mack - she lived, but wasn't mentioned again lol). 

Anyway that said, I try not to get involved but 'Grains of Sand' is Norman Yemm's last episode and I will miss him. I couldn't really watch the actual episode as I said but I did watch the end of it which was not entirely dissimilar to Inspector Connolly's departure - in that he didn't definitively say he was going, just applied for leave, at Col Fox's urging. 

Homicide's producers etc clearly knew that Patterson was a popular character because they made it clear to us for some time before this episode that he wasn't happy in his job and finding it a strain, particularly because his wife was finding it a strain. 

Here he is on the steps, having said goodbye to Fox but no-one else, and about to stride down the street alone like Connolly did. 

The next episode, from 9 May, wastes no time: new opener (well, new-ish, they didn't waste time filming Kurts, Teale or Mallaby getting out of the car again, just inserted Mike Preston): 

Very little background on Preston's character Bob (who incidentally is only in it for 40+ episodes, so I won't get too attached). They do say Bob's wife left him, which I assume is flagging something into the future. Bob is the second of the Homicide team, after Lionel Long, to be played by a pop star - and like Alwyn Kurts, Preston had also been a TV show host. 

He is installed in Jim's old desk and that's the only time Jim is mentioned - Peter says something about how Jim's cleaned his desk out (but I thought he was only going on leave?!). 

Not much more to say about this episode. Here are Teale and Preston with Penny Ramsey who plays Sally Reid. 

Mildly interesting, to me, brief shots of the suspects (one of whom turns out to be the culprit for this particular episode's murder) visiting what was then known as the George, which would become about five years later the Crystal Ballroom, known as the Seaview Ballroom by the time I was going there in my late teens. Here as you can see it's basically a strip joint. I actually didn't know that about it. 

I will say that this is one of those instances watching Homicide when I get a weird little feeling - you don't see a huge amount of the frontage of this building, but even this was highly familiar to me. 

I say this a lot, but the 70s were a horrible time to grow up, so I guess in a way I'm processing something really. As I say it is compelling.