AustLit

Based on an incident in the western suburbs of Sydney in 1968, in which ex-criminal Wally Melish was mistakenly believed to be holding his girlfriend hostage: the siege ended with NSW Commissioner of Police Norm Allen acting as witness to the wedding of Melish and his 'hostage'.

G.P. is an Australian television series that ran for eight seasons. Set in and around a fictional general medical practice in an inner-city suburb, the storylines explore the professional and personal lives of the doctors and staff who worked there.

'Candy has been working in Bambi's health studio and massage parlour for six months to raise money to buy time or maybe freedom. She becomes involved in a triangular love affair. Gradually her sense of self assurance slips away and she becomes the prisoner of her obsession. A powerful often amusing story, at first deceptively naturalistic, it develops as a psychological suspense story with a classically tragic ending.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 23/1/2014)

As Moran notes in his Guide to Australian TV Series, this was (like other productions of the same period, including Are You Being Served? and Father, Dear Father) an importation of a British concept: unlike the other programs, however, this was based on a concept for which William Stewart had produced a pilot, but that had never been picked up for production.

The series revolved around tea ladies working in Parliament House, Canberra. Moran notes that 'The short series made at ATV Channel 0 in Melbourne cost $500 000. Each episode was aired almost immediately after studio shooting and was screened at 8:30pm to small audiences with almost no reviews.'

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.'