TV on the streets of your town

"Damn this war, Grace"

Check out The Sullivans - On the Brink of War (1976)

Be thankful for The Sullivans, the drama/soap about a Melbourne family battling its way through World War II.; in the final acts of its seven year run it unleashed a young Gary Sweet onto our TV screens playing larrikin Magpie Maddern. Earlier on, behind enemy lines in Holland, Tom Sullivan and Captain Norm Baker were sheltered from the Nazis by a sweet little Resistance girl called Carla (played by Kylie Minogue!) – and Sam Neill copped a belt to the snout from series patriarch Dave Sullivan (Paul Cronin), after Dave’s daughter Kitty had run off to Sydney in romantic pursuit of Neill’s caddish character Ben Dawson. Check out this compilation to see a 1970s pre-Mad Max Mel Gibson playing a naval lawyer fighting a court martial charge hanging over the head of Eddie Patterson, Lil Duggan’s (Noni Hazlehurst) little brother.

Det Sgt Jack Christey: I mean, you know, it's a simple request. I ask them to find a yacht in Sydney Harbour and they can't do it. I mean, how hard is that? A yacht is a very, very large object.

Check out the two parter Blood Trail (Part One) and Dead Or Alive (Part Two) on Water Rats - Series 2 - Disc 3 (1997)

Surely Sydney Harbour should have had its own credit in the Water Rats opening titles. In the 70s and 80s, many an Australian show was axed primarily because it wasn’t rating well in the Holy Grail that is the Sydney market. Melbourne based productions often headed north to use the Emerald City’s landmarks as a backdrop for special episodes, attempting to capture that city’s viewing heart; Prisoner’s Bea Smith sought refuge in a harbour side villa while on the run from Wentworth authorities, and Riverside’s finest, JJ and Mike Georgiou, pursued Sydney leads in Cop Shop. Check out this episode of Water Rats. There is irony in the late 90s Sydney Harbour based drama about the city’s water police having to throw in a Melbourne plot line to spice up the ratings. After finding a dismembered body floating somewhere near Goat Island, Detectives Frank Holloway (Colin Friels) and Rachel Goldstein (Catherine McClements) swap shades for scarves as they board the Southern Aurora and head for the seedy King Street nightclub district.

Wildside

Check out the opening episode on Wildside - Disc 1 (1997)

The ABC had shown it could produce social realist police drama with mini-series like Scales of Justice, Phoenix, Janus and Blue Murder. Set in a police station and a crisis centre, Wildside, all King Cross red light district mixed with the bottom of the harbour underbelly of Sydney, was the antithesis of hokey police dramas like Blue Heelers. With its Steven Bochco (Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue) influenced hand held camera style, and jazz inspired soundtrack, it irked local critics who went apoplectic over whether the dialogue was adlibbed or scripted. What did they expect? Tony Martin playing Detective Bill McCoy in the style of Reverend Bob from E Street? If it was American or English it would have been lauded.

Laura Gibson: Oh, every family's got a few skeletons in the closet. Miranda Gibson: So you don't mind me telling everyone that your sister's about to have my father's baby, and that my brother and I will have a cousin that will also be our half-brother or sister?

Check out the episode "Sex, Death and Bridges" on SeaChange - Series 1 - Episodes 10-13 (1998)

The trend in the 90s was for quaint dramadies set in isolated backwaters brimming with eccentric characters. The Americans started it with Twin Peaks and Northern Exposure; the Brits jumped aboard with Hamish Macbeth and Ballykissangel. Australia’s foray into twee drama came with SeaChange. Its success was all fairly simple really - set it in a dreamy seaside town like Pearl Bay and write it around 80s costume star Sigrid Thornton. Throw in two brooding heroes in David Wenham then William McInnes, and you have that smouldering URST (unresolved sexual tension). Check out the final episode of series one to see a baby born, a long lost love child sought, and discover if Laura (Thornton) and Diver Dan (Wenham) can drag that ‘will they or won’t they’ moment out that little bit longer.

The return of Jason Donovan … and Shane Bourne as ‘serious actor’

Check out the episode "Overexposure" on MDA: Second Chance - Season 1 - Disc 1 (2002)

Why set a show in a hospital or a legal firm when you can grab that extra slice of the genre quotient by having a drama about lawyers defending doctors facing malpractice suits. MDA is all horribly earnest and adult, yet smacks cynically of the ABC deciding it needed a vehicle for Kerry Armstrong post-Heather Jelly in SeaChange. If it’s titillation you’re after, try this episode; it has a woman claiming a doctor gave her unwanted tattoos, cosmetic surgery gone wrong, and a GP caught having sex with a patient. Guest cast includes Steve Kearney (one half of 80s comedy duo Los Trios Ringbarkus, hoping we forget his feature film Garbo), John Orcsik (Cop Shop’s Mike Georgiou) and grandson of our longest serving PM, Robert Menzies.

Elvis Maginnis meets Slippery Min the greyhound- the best dog story on TV since Le Hoodoo Gurus (Later The Hoodoo Gurus) backed a man and his singing dog on the Don Lane Show

Check out the episode "Gone To The Dogs" on Good Guys Bad Guys - Season 1 - Disc 1 (1997)

Marcus Graham dragged himself out of those E Street rose petal baths and hit the Melbourne streets as private eye Elvis Maginnis. And those streets hadn’t looked so good since the halcyon days of those 60s and 70s Crawford Productions’ police dramas Homicide, Division 4 and Bluey. Elvis even drove a Valiant Charger like Detectives Bluey Hills and Gary Dawson! Elvis worked and drank north of the Yarra in Fitzroy, and lived in a classic art-deco apartment overlooking the south’s Luna Park in St Kilda. It was contemporary (the soundtrack included Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Regurgitator and Spiderbait), but without the affectation of the later Secret Life Of Us. Oh, and Elvis had 70s vixen Belinda Giblin as his TV mum.

Stingers

Check out the episode “Jelly Babies” on Stingers - Series 1 - Disc 3 (1998)

Who was the real star of this drama about undercover cops and their ever changing identities as they delved behind the lines of the criminal underworld? Was it Phelpsy, (Peter Phelps) fresh off the plane back from his LA Baywatch sojourn? Gary Sweet as the bi-polar Detective Inspector Luke Harris of the later episodes? Or was it the city of Melbourne itself? With all the Melways style street maps overlayed on the screen as the cops sped to their destinations, even overseas viewers would know the place like the back of their hand. The time I watched a Stingers ep in a bar in Marseille, and then in Budapest, I should have set the locals a Melbourne geographical pop quiz. In this episode, Peter Church (Phelps) and a drug dealer inadvertently get caught in a siege in a petrol station convenience store. Watch out for a pre-Secret Life Of Us Samuel Johnson as one of the teen hostage takers, and Marieke Hardy as another. Maybe Marieke used the downtime in shooting to workshop those Last Man Standing scripts she’d churn out almost a decade later.

They paved paradise And put up a parking lot With a pink hotel, a boutique and a swinging hot spot (Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell)

Check out the episode episode 14 “Better the Devil You Know” on The Secret Life of Us - Series 1 Episodes 13-15 (2001)

Rooftop parties by night, impromptu games of park soccer by day. Sorry, but the total gentrification of St Kilda as a suburb was complete when this stylised version of life as a twenty-something in the new millennium hit our TV screens. The characters were all beautiful, and for the most part Anglo-Saxon; not a homeless person in sight. Even the unemployed hipsters amongst the in-crowd remained fashionably dressed and able to drink boutique beer in bars - and not pots or midis in grotty public bars. Fourteen episodes in, Will (Joel Edgerton) and Sam’s (Jessica Gower) relationship is showing the strain – as are the producers. They’ve gone and committed what is surely the Antipodean version of ‘jumping the shark’; they’ve hired Bud Tingwell to espouse wisdom and throw some senior citizen poignancy towards the younger generation. Evan (Samuel Johnson) bumps into Bud via his work as a glass jockey at a pokies venue. Pretty soon after Evan chucks in the job and lands on the dole. WARNING: the excruciating episode when Evan rises up against the fascist Centrelink employee - and garners the best ‘spontaneous’ applause from a bunch of similarly welfare dependent extras since one of those cheesy American movies when a man yells a marriage proposal to his girlfriend down the other end of a crowded subway station - is not too far away.

Last Man Standing

Check out the final episode 22 of Last Man Standing - Season 1 - Disc 6 (2005)

At least the Seven Network screened the series in its entirety back in 2005; but then having ludicrously sold the show as ‘Australia’s Sex and the City for blokes’, what chance did a local drama have when it’s dragged into a near midnight slot after only a few weeks. Why commission twenty two episodes of a series if you’re going to drop it as soon as it falls below the magical one million nationally audience figure? There was something slightly honourable about Last Man Standing – none of the characters were lawyers, cops or doctors (although one was a nurse), and its attempts to pick up a city’s feel were not (like is so often the case with so-called ‘hip’ urban dramas) half a decade behind the times. Written by Marieke Hardy (granddaughter of Power Without Glory author Frank Hardy), it has one of the greatest open-ended finales TV anywhere has ever produced. I’m not giving the plot away, but tune in and decide whether or not Cameron does remember what Adam told him on the previous night’s buck’s party.

The Alice

Check out the episode nineteen on The Alice – Series 1 - Disc 5 (2005)

When it screened on TV a few years ago, The Alice may have shared the Monday night close-to-midnight timeslot the Nine Network loves dumping their American HBO dramas in, but that was about all it had in common with the likes of The Sopranos, The Wire and Six Feet Under. It seemed nonetheless that Alice Springs had become our very own Bermuda Triangle, such was the power of this series to draw freakish characters with its sultry fly blown charm. If cast members weren’t discovering plants with miraculous powers in the desert, they had ghostly walking-dead ex-best friends advising them on life’s decisions. Real life partners Erik Thomson (All Saints) and Caitlin McDougall (Always Greener) were carrying the show towards the end. In this episode, Erik, as Jack the ex-rock star, has his ego jolted when it’s time to get the band back together - but is overlooked for a younger singer; and Caitlin, as Helen, starts work as a real estate agent but gets busted taking a bath during one of her client’s open for inspections.