AustLit

A short-lived television series about idealistic young police officers in an inner-city Sydney area, Young Lions did not rate well, and was not renewed for a second season.

'The detectives of the Kingsway Major Crime Squad fight to preserve their Pacific Paradise. Crime knows no boundaries—from the Miami-like streets of Sylvania Waters, all dark glass and pontoons, to the towering cranes on the Container Wharves of Botany Bay, bordered by the white beaches and blue water between Monterey and Hungry Point. This is our world. It's tough. It's beautiful. Dangerous. A contradiction.'

Source: Australian Television Information Archive. (Sighted: 12/6/2013)

An adult drama set in an inner-city crisis centre and police station, Wildside focuses on a group of people who deal with the endless array of problems, crimes, and triumphs that tumble onto the streets of a city bursting with life. In addition to the police, other characters include those who work in a crisis centre in the tough red-light district of the city.

'A famous film director and his crew arrive in town for two weeks of location filming. Stamford is overjoyed to find the leading lady, Francis "Frankie" Lane, is an old flame of his from his stringer days in Cambodia. When the leading man is killed in an apparent stunt-gone-wrong, Stamford's suspicion is aroused. Unfortunately, no-one else suspects murder but him. As he quietly delves into the lives of the film unit, his investigation begins to point firmly in the direction of Frankie and Stamford finds that the 'good old days' are best left in the past.'

Source: Australian Television Information Archive. (Sighted: 27/6/2013)

'Fast-paced series spin-off of the hit feature film. Filmed at an abandoned school in Sydney's Maroubra, this program was about an ethnically diverse group of students attending Hartley High School.'

Source: National Film and Sound Archive record.

Inspired by A. B. Paterson's classic poem and set in a fictional Snowy Mountains township called Paterson's Ridge, this turn-of-the-nineteenth-century adventure concerns wealthy cattle-station owner and widower Matt McGregor and his three children, Colin (the town preacher), Rob (played by Guy Pearce), and Danni (the tomboyish youngest daughter). Unresolved sexual tension comes in the shape of Matt's independent, free-spirited childhood friend, the recently widowed Kathleen O'Neil, who returns to Paterson's Ridge with her son after having spent many years in England.

'A police psychiatrist rides with Mickey and Angel while Angel tries to cope with the return of his alcoholic and abusive father.'

Source: Australian Television Information Archive. (Sighted: 11.6.2013)

An Australian television series which deals with the New South Wales Police Rescue Squad and its work attending to various incidents from road accidents to train crashes.

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.

A comedic adventure series that follows two men (Abel Moore and Charles Willing) living and working on a houseboat on Sydney Harbour, particularly their attempts to keep up payments on the boat. Also living on the house boat are aspiring actress Angela and the young, streetwise Parramatta.

Moran notes, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, that while the series reprised the ABC's The Fast Lane, it was nowhere near as successful a production:

there was little difference between the principal characters, both looking for the main chance. In addition the playing-off of Shane Withington and Grant Dodwell against each other (mildly tolerable in A Country Practice where the two had become fictional bachelors and odd-couple house companions after the departure from the series of their fictional wives) was decidedly threadbare.

Moran notes that this was the first series that Lynn Bayonas produced after leaving A Country Practice, and she had brought with her to the production not only the two main actors but also a number of writers.

Described by Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, as 'a curious, even an eccentric mini-series in terms of the narrative threads it works in the course of its four hours', Whose Baby? recounts a real-life legal struggle in the 1940s, in which Gwen and Bill Morrison became convinced, largely at the urging of Gwen's mother, that their baby daughter had been accidentally swapped at birth with the daughter of Jess and Noel Jenkins. The case dragged on for several years through several appeals, but the appellate court ultimately upheld the Jenkins' insistence that the daughter they had brought home from the hospital was their biological child.

According to Moran,

the viewer still has the distinct impression that there is one narrative too many in Whose Baby?. The producer was aware of this problem of coherence and thus the mini-series has a flat, off-screen voiceover whose commentary guides much of the overall narrative. While this commentator knows more than any of the characters, my knowledge still does not extend to the heart of other events in the hospital when the two girls were born within minutes of each other. Were they switched? Whose Baby? parades its bafflement with this question from beginning to end.

Like the earlier Crawford's series The Box, Prime Time was concerned with television production. In this case, the programme focused on the fictional Lockhart Productions and its prime-time current-affairs program, Assignment: according to Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, 'although there was no physical resemblance between actor Chris Orchard and real-life current affairs host and company owner, Mike Willesee, nevertheless the reference was clear.' The show was produced in such a way that, according to Moran, its 'format was flexible enough to allow both the presence of ongoing narratives about the principal characters as well as featuring guest characters, narratives and situations arising out of the stories that Assignment was focusing on.'

Unlike The Box, Prime Time was not successful, though Moran emphasises that Channel 9, the network airing the program, 'did much to snatch disaster from the jaws of victory by scheduling Prime Time on Thursday and Friday nights'.

Television program focusing on a working-class family living in the western suburbs of Sydney, centred around Ed Devereaux (formerly of Skippy) as panel beater George King.

The program aimed for social realism in the presentation of working-class life, but Moran notes (in his Guide to Australian Television) that it did not attract a good initial audience, leading to, firstly, a halt to production and, secondly, an unannounced return to the screen, which also failed to attract good viewing figures.

Based on Jeannie Gunn's fictionalised autobiography of the same name, the story begins in 1902 with the arrival of Mrs Gunn and her new husband Aeneas in the Northern Territory. They have come to take over management of Elsey Station, a huge cattle and horse property. She is subsequently forced to battle isolation, disease, and the white stockmen who believe the station is no place for a woman. She befriends the local Aboriginal women, but is mystified by their culture. Her affection for the place and the people is tested by frequent tragedy.

(Source: Australian Screen.)

Series following the role of a priest in an inner-city Sydney suburb.

An adventure series following the experiences of a naval patrol boat, Patrol Boat rated reasonably well on Australian television and sold well overseas. Made in co-operation with the Royal Australian Navy (which, Moran points out in his Guide to Australian TV Series, 'had been trying to get something similar onto the screen for almost eight years'), the series made use of two naval patrol boats for open-sea shooting, including (for the second series) the Fremantle class patrol boat HMAS Defiance.

Moran notes that 'Guest stories included pursuing drug runners, helping a stranded refugee boat and destroying an old mine that had become dangerous to shipping. Each self-contained episode was constructed around two stories, one usually working around an individual sailor while the other concerned a larger group'.

Patrol Boat was the first program in which series creator James Davern's production company, JNP Film, had an active involvement, but Moran notes that JNP Film 'simply packaged scripts for the first series'. Their involvement was greater in the second series, which was made much later.

When an American naval officer moves his family to Australia in order to undergo training in submarine warfare, the upheaval causes particular challenges for his son, who has developmental delays.

According to Moran, in his Guide to Australian Television Series, Bluey (and its Sydney-based rival, King's Men) 'constituted an attempt to revive the police genre after the cancellations of Homicide, Division 4 and Matlock Police'.

Don Storey, in his Classic Australian Television, summarises the program as follows:

Bluey is a maverick cop who breaks every stereotype image. He drinks, smokes and eats to excess, and therefore is rather large, but it is his unusual investigative methods that set him apart. He has bent or broken every rule in the book at some stage, to the point where no-one else wants to work with him. But he gets results, and is therefore too valuable to lose, so the powers-that-be banish him to the basement of Russell Street Police Headquarters where he is set up in his own department, a strategem that keeps him out of the way of other cops.

Moran adds that 'Grills, Diedrich and Nicholson turned in solid performances in the series and the different episodes were generally well paced, providing engaging and satisfying entertainment.'

The program sold well overseas, especially in the United Kingdom. But though it rated well domestically, it was not the success that the Seven Network had hoped for, and was cancelled after 39 episodes.

Bluey had an unexpected revival in the early 1990s when selections from the video footage (over-dubbed with a new vocal track) were presented during the second series of the ABC comedy The Late Show as the fictional police procedural Bargearse. (The Late Show had given ABC gold-rush drama Rush the same treatment in series one.)