division 4: 'man's only a battler'

Obtuse name for a very excellent episode of D4 from 22 March 1972. My worlds collided in this one where the crooks are chased onto the 'Westgate Bridge Freeway' which at that point is incomplete. 

In a way the actual pictures of the empty freeway aren't all that amazingly exciting. You heard it from me (if you hadn't already realised). 

But it gets a bit thrilling when John Stanton (who plays a criminal) breaks away and is chased by Gerard Kennedy to what might well be the Aerodrome and therefore the future Westgate Park. 

Yeah it is just one more case of I wish I could reach into the screen and turn the camera around a bit but you can't have everything, or really anything. 

why do i do this to myself

The intricacies of PMcC in the 70s continue to fascinate me but the hours I've spent listening to the back and forth over the making of Venus and Fucking Mars (that's what it's called right?) including the completely unfair sacking of Geoff Britton and the surprising recruitment of the excellent Joe English as his replacement and Jimmy McCulloch just being an absolute prize prick at all times and Denny being a sad loser (and of course, people hating Linda but that's par for the course) would have been hours wasted if it wasn't just a matter of keeping my mind distracted while performing menial tasks. That said, it might ultimately be bad for me to listen to this tosh.

'You Gave Me the Answer' is the hot topic where I'm up to at the moment, and it has given me to think a lot about McCartney's sinister attraction to composing music in the vein of 1930s-40s show tunes. I gather 'When I'm 64' was one of the first songs he wrote, so it obviously goes a long way back, and of course as he only got into writing and performing music after his mother's death, it has a certain poignance to it, being about living a long life with your partner, etc. 

I suppose the recording of that song comes next in the history. The next one is 'Your Mother Should Know', then 'Honey Pie', then... um I'm not sure what's next, he kind of got himself together for a while. Those are horrifying though. There are probably some other crimes in there which I've blocked out. It's a horrible tendency, I gather the reputedly grotesque 'Kisses on the Bottom' album is the culmination of all of it, but I haven't heard that record and I also, I can't stand people who judge things without seeing, hearing, knowing them etc. 

I note from the internet that a lot of people think there's a connection between this and Lennon's critique of McCartney's 'granny music' because that's the kind of music 1960s grannies would remember from their youth but I don't think this is 'granny music' exactly, surely that's more just 'easy listening' music, maybe 'My Love' or something like that? Actually I don't know. It was another catchy putdown along the line of 'your granny on bongos'. Just put 'granny' in a critique, everyone hates grannies. 

state coroner places

State Coroner is definitively a Melbourne (well, Victorian I guess) show but the names have been changed. They're mildly interesting, only mildly, I'm not going to write to the newspapers about it. 

There's no Grey Hills in Victoria. THERE'S NO GREY HILLS* OK (later in the show someone is told 'A motorist was killed yesterday morning at Spring Hill', presumably a continuity error no-one gave a loose root about).

This show was made a few years after the Royal Southern Memorial Hospital was amalgamated with various Alfred Hospital-related institutions. If that means anything. 

There is a Bass Valley, kind of, near Corinella but certainly no Airfield. 

'Glenview' is an odd choice for a name because Glenview High was the name of a Grundys soap of the seventies. Presumably the absolute genericness of the name made everyone forget that. 

How this was anyone's idea of a High Street, I do not know, but a lot of streets have weird names for historical or other reasons. 

There's no Mount Pyramid in Victoria, so probably not an access road either. In reality it goes to Grey Spring Hill Glen Valley. 

*There's a place in New Mexico called Two Grey Hills. Don't write in. 

state coroner

Having run out of Division 4s for the moment, I was naturally attracted to the volume of State Coroner I had on the shelf beckoning to me for some time now. I have always thought, like everyone with sense, that Wendy Hughes was one of the absolute greats so I knew I would enjoy it, on some level, though perhaps not the early-70s-Crawfords level to which I had become used. But I also knew it would be interesting in contrast with that material and that there would then be other things that would fascinate. 

I've only watched two eps so far. The first (a feature-length pilot) was a bit clumsy, but set everything up well enough, then this second one, which dealt largely with the death of a 4-year-old boy, had David Reyne in it which is only interesting I guess because Laura and I were for no strongly identifiable reason talking about him yesterday.* 

One early observation: the Crawfords attitude to death in (loosely-defined) police procedurals. Generally, they have to walk a fine line and this was as true in 1996 as 1966, of death being significant, the most significant thing you can imagine (so the law can't be flippant), but also everyone has to get levelheaded really fast** so you can find out your child has died and you are having tea with the detective (or whoever) in the next scene and you're solemn, but you're not acting like your world has changed immeasurably, aside from one less setting for dinner. 

No doubt I'll have some more fascinating insights or if I don't, you can deduce that I lost interest. 

*Probably related to the fact that I just finished reading Bill McDonough's memoir of Australian Crawl. ** Exceptions - when a death sends someone crazily bent on revenge. Doesn't happen often. 

division 4 february 1972 - 'the man who dug his own grave'

Truly late 1971-early 1972 was a golden era for Division 4 (maybe it went longer than early 1972, I'll let you know). This episode, 'The Man Who Dug His Own Grave', is - like many Crawford police procedurals - virtually a movie in its own right and like many of the best such shows, the police really play an incidental part in the overall story, which is essentially played out as the story of Sammy Goodall, played by Ken Goodlet. Goodlet is remarkably good, as is Charmian Jacka, who plays a woman he is living with, Maisie.* There's a brilliant piece of dialogue wherein Maisie puts the wind up Sammy by giving him a description of the people in Hell: 'they're too busy burnin - all shrivelled up, all their skin, their nose, their eyes and their hair, all burnin, cryin' out for water, no-body'll give 'em any'. The only thing that this scene lacks is any reason why Sammy might be interested in Hell in the first place; he just asks her if she's religious. But anyway. It's still an amazingly great scene. 

So, spoiler: I can't help but spoil and tell you Sammy dies in the end. But the thing that intrigues me is this: apparently on the way home before he is shot, Sammy has stopped off to buy a copy of Wochen End, a German magazine (title translates as 'Weekend'). It's apparently - from what little I've been able to glean from the internet - a simplistic magazine probably in the vein of That's Life. But there has been absolutely no suggestion in the rest of the episode that Sammy is German, speaks German, or is interested in anything German, and in fact I don't even think we get to see him go to the newsagent and there is no reason on earth he should have a magazine with him, let alone this one. He just dies with a German magazine. Because this episode is almost 52 years old and surely anyone involved with it is no longer with us (or even if they are, surely they would not recall) here we are with a mystery. 

This episode also has another wonderful solitary scene featuring Joan Letch, this time as a character so minor she's only called 'Maisie's Friend'. JL might have lived round the corner from Crawford's which is why they could get her in for things like this but actually I think she worked on the premises a lot of the time in some other capacity - casting director. So why not get her in for a couple of hours of acting. This is a brilliant scene with JL and Charmain Jacka.

At this time JL was 47. Notwithstanding 47 was regarded as a lot older then than we might consider it to be now, if you know what I mean, she could play this kind of character - obviously not a young hottie, but also obviously not an old lady, and she could also play an old lady, as per this episode.

Late in life JL wrote to the newspapers but I don't want to take away from the weirdness of the Wochen End situation by muddying the waters any further, I'll come back to those letters. 

* nb IMDB gives them both the last name Goodall, but the actual credits of the show only gives first names and there's dialogue suggesting they haven't been living together very long.
 

division 4 - the clean skins

This is a good episode (early January 1972), but I don't have a huge amount to say about it (the one following it, 'No Hard Feelings', is a bit of a masterpiece if only for the safebreakers' argy bargy at the beginning... anyway, that's not this). The thing I really wanted to say was yet again, amazing situation of Ian Smith and Anne Charleston cast once again in one episode of a Crawfords' show (IYKYK - they were married for a lifetime in Neighbours). Smith plays a character called 'Smith'.

Also, fabulous single scene from Joan Letch, who never letchs us down. 

 

sometimes your prayers are answered

All you have to do is believe and hope and, yes, pray.

For years I've wanted to know more about Margaret Dumont and I have always been distinctively unsatisfied with what I've been able to find, even in a fairly comprehensive wikipedia page. Only a few hours ago I was thinking maybe a retirement project might be deep archival work on her to get the full story, though I also wondered how much of a full story there might really be (after all, she seemed to play her cards pretty close to her chest and also, she had no children which does not mean anything in itself but it does mean there was unlikely to be anyone around after her death in 1965 to maintain her things and speak about her to others). 

All that is how come I was thrilled to discover that this book was published over a year ago:

Yes, of course I instantly ordered a copy. Can't wait to read it. I hope it is satisfying. Kind of annoying that even in this day and age (of course people were saying things of that nature in 1422) there was no way that I could have been told this book was coming out, so I could have read it in 2023, but that's OK really, I'm just pleased it exists. Unless it's terrible, in which case... but I won't waste time worrying about its potential terribleness. It will probably satisfy me.