AustLit

'Charles Tingwell is one of Australia's best loved actors with a career spanning over 50 years. From glamourous post-war Hollywood to London in the swinging sixties, to some of Australia's favourite film and stage productions he has a long list of acting credits. This is Bud's life as an actor, director, producer, writer and family man.' (Source: Online)

A children's television series, Zoo Family followed the adventures of Dr David Mitchell, veterinary surgeon at Melbourne Zoo, and his children Susie and Nick (all of whom live within zoo grounds). Additional characters include the head groundsman, a young vet graduate, the zoo manager, and the zoo trustees. According to Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series,

The latter are perpetually scheming over trust money under their control and it is left to the others to ensure that animals and enclosures are maintained. Beyond this human family, the larger family of the series is animals in the zoo. Each episode features a particular animal or group of animals in the zoo. Successive episodes concern such events as the discovery and treatment of sore eyes on a seal, taking delivery of male and female cheetahs, and building a new enclosure for a bull elephant.

The series, Moran concludes, 'had the solid, even dull, worthiness that is so much a feature of Crawford's.'

Set in the fictional Riverside Police Station, Cop Shop combined self-contained stories focusing on specific police investigations with the type of open-ended serial storylines familiar from soap operas. This allowed Crawford Productions to make use of the expertise gained from their highly successful police procedurals (all recently cancelled) and serials such as The Sullivans (then still airing).

According to Moran, in his Guide to Australian Television Series,

Although the format may sound predictable and routine, in fact it was pioneering. In putting women police on the screen, Crawford's were moving Australian crime drama away from being an all-male domain. In addition, by choosing a suburban police station populated both by uniformed police and plainclothes detectives, Cop Shop introduced an upstairs and a downstairs world. The latter, in particular, began to exert its own attractions with handsome young men and women in the roles of the new constables.

An hour-long sit-com set in a men's prison, The Bluestone Boys ran to twenty-six episodes, but was not one of Crawford Productions' more successful programs. According to Moran, in his Guide to Australian Television Series, 'The boys in question were male prisoners supervised by a mixture of idiot trustees headed by a Nazi-like Chuck Faulkner. The comedy of the male group outsmarting its supervisors should have been funnier, given the experience of Crawford writers such as Ian Jones and Terry Stapleton, but The Bluestone Boys fades into insignificance when compared with programs such as Bilko, McHale's Navy and Porridge.'

Another Crawford Productions soap opera, The Box was set in a Melbourne television-production studio. According to Moran, in his Guide to Australian Television Series:

The setting for the continuous drama was a television station populated by a series of familiar types. These included Sir Henry Usher, chairman of the company; Max Knight, the harrassed station manager; Tony Wild, the egotistical star of the station's on-air detective series; the inevitable tea lady; Paul Donovan, a harrassed station executive, and many others. Most memorable of all was a wonderful bitch-figure in the person of reporter Vicki Stafford.

Like Number 96, The Box was designed for a late-night timeslot, and so focused on 'adult themes', including adultery and bisexuality.

Moran also suggests that The Box was 'very important to Crawford's in generating a cash flow at a time when they were losing the contracts on their police dramas' and that writers used the character of television police officer Tony Wild as 'an opportunity to settle the books against the egotism of some of the actors in Crawford's police series'.