I have written elsewhere about the difficulties Australian television drama had with character development – for instance, Class of ’74 is a real collage of non-starter, unresolved/unresolvable scenarios where (it seems) actors’ contracts ended before their storylines even got started.
But what I didn’t realise when I was watching Co74 was that repeats were a big deal for commercial TV in the 60s/70s (probably still are) and one of the ways TV justified the much greater expense for television made in Australia was the repeatability. This meant (I guess) every, or almost every, episode had to be self-contained. That must surely be one of the main reasons there’s so little character development in Homicide. That’s then the reason why when George Mallaby (for instance) was written out of the show, they had to kind of retroactively work a storyline of sorts – that he’d been under stress for some time – into his character’s departure (as well as telling the usual solvin’-a-crime story of the episode). So Peter is gloomy and moody for the whole ep, and when he finally breaks down and admits he has a problem,* he cites one previous case we’ve seen and another which (to my knowledge/memory) we didn’t see, as examples of the horrors he’s witnessed as a policeman.
It's a shame to see Mallaby go because he’s really the last of what I presently consider to be the classic line-up of Homiciders, although I suppose that’s a fluid cohort to some extent, certainly he was around so long that only Leonard Teale, I’m guessing, was there longer.
Peter Barnes didn’t really grow as a character (funnily, even he admits that in this episode, when he suggests to Pat Kelly that he became a policeman straight out of high school and feels a lack because he has never been anything else; he is going to resign from the force and perhaps become a schoolteacher) but he was always at odds somewhat with the conservative, old fashioned force, always hinting that he had a somewhat countercultural view – though never really demonstrating what that was. By 1973 it must have been years, four or five, since he picked up his guitar.
There aren’t too many more Homicide episodes to go. I haven’t actually watched them all, as I think I have mentioned – for a few the premises were just too grisly, or I was just sick of ‘a young girl is killed when…’ I don’t know what I’ll do when I run out though. I’m not saying it’s hopeless. I’m just saying… do I go straight on to Division 4? Probably!
* and accidentally solves the case by being so weird the murderer thinks he's been rumbled and Barnes is just playing with him
No comments:
Post a Comment