I listen to podcasts like Blank Check and The Filmcast and I wonder 'where the hell do these people get the time to be so on top of all these fucking horrendous (sounding) films?' and then it occurs to me that I have watched about forty episodes of Special Squad in the last few weeks. 'Watched' is a slightly problematic term as I have really often just had it on in the background. I have antenna primed for when they go to interesting places, which is what intrigues me most. but also, the bonhomie of the Special Squad trio is, I have to say, pretty infectious.
In many ways, it's just updated Homicide, ten years later, and not that updated. The difference is that Special Squad don't always have to be investigating murder (a few times on Homicide they weren't investigating murder either - but they almost always were). They just get assigned the troublesome cases that need more in-depth investigation. They work long hours and they sacrifice their personal lives to the job. We don't know too much about them - Joel Davis (John Diedrich, who is probably super-annoyed that his fame is everlasting from being retooled thirty years ago to be 'Glen Twenty' on Bargearse) is a young, swingin' guy who'll go far; Greg Smith (Anthony Hawkins) is a man with a family and a moustache; Don Anderson (Alan Cassell) is their boss whose wife we met once only to see her shot about twenty minutes later by a man whose toyboy Anderson did away with; Anderson is apparently comforted by the news that his late wife was looking forward to a holiday with him (Crawfords don't understand grieving very well, in my experience, except when it's motivation for revenge).
In an article for the Age published on 31 January 1985, Barry Dickins writes about his experience as a bit part actor on Special Squad. He talks briefly with Diedrich and Hawkins:
‘”They spent five million bucks on this series, mate”’ says John Diedrich, the star of the show. “And now they’re winding it up.”
‘The other older Special Squad copper is called Tony, a real nice guy who tells me he wishes he was doing comedy. “Oh, they don’t like funny stuff,” he whispers to me in the Crawford caravan, putting on his Special Squad sox. “You can pull a funny face if you like, but you can’t overdo it. I think what Crawford wants to do is capture contemporary violence.”
What I note is that line about 'now they're winding it up'. I'm not entirely sure I know which episode he's talking about, and in fact he might not even have made it in, but the point is that the show gets axed, they have to keep churning it out and I can well imagine that once a Crawfords show got the chop - notwithstanding it had a life of being repeated a few more times thereafter - they might well have done a sweep of the archives for the sillier scripts that no-one would ever have pitched in a fresh new hot show. This episode, 'Mad Mountain Mumma' (IMDB wants you to think it's 'Mad Mountain Momma' and in its defence, autocorrect does too) is not really properly documented in IMDB which had obviously given up by this point.
This is just a silly episode, and indicates to me that everyone is going through the motions. A wealthy man, I'm not sure why he's wealthy but guess what he used to be a circus performer, whatever, he dies in the first few minutes, is picked up by his boyfriend (played by Daniel Abinieri) and chauffeur (Roger Ward) and summarily dispensed with (poisoned?). That's all par for the course I guess. But then the murdered man's wife turns up from the country (a town called Mad Mountain) and she's a witch called Bridey, played by Mary Canny in what might actually be the biggest role Canny ever played (Crawfords got her in again eight years later to be in The Flying Doctors). Bridey somehow convinces Abenieri's character ('Dillon') that she's put a curse on him and he has to go to the State Library, which is to Special Squad what the Sunnyvale High library was to Buffy) to find out how to lift the curse.
Apparently he has to make an axe and cut off her head, and we do spend quite a bit of time with him making an axe and chopping a watermelon in half, but this element of the story goes precisely nowhere thereafter so let's forget about it.
I'm nearly through these episodes and then I'll have to figure out what precisely I have learnt. The next episode has a small role for Alwyn Kurts (yes his eyes are open! Wide open) as a crook who dies in the first five minutes. Crawfords always had a place for their own.
No comments:
Post a Comment