Jeff Peck began his involvement in film television as a critic rather than as a script-writer: in 1975, his PhD thesis, 'Structural Film Analysis and the Pro-Soviet Dramatic Films of Wartime America, 1942-1945', was submitted to the University of Wisconsin. This was followed fairly soon by his non-fiction book, Comparing Theatre and Film: A Contemporary View, published by La Trobe University (out of the Centre for the Study of Educational Communication and Media) in 1978. Peck continued to publish academic works until the early 1980s: his article 'Pro-social and Anti-social Behaviours in Children's Programming', for example, was published in issue 20 of Media International Australia (May 1981). By this point, however, he had begun to move into a practical engagement with children's film and television.
Peck's earliest known scripts were for Crawford Productions' Holiday Island, a Love Boat-style adult drama that centred on a luxury hotel on an island off the Queensland coast. Shortly after this, he produced the film script for Bushfire Moon, a Christmas drama set in the Australian outback in the nineteenth century.
But Peck is perhaps best known for his long association with the Australian Children's Television Foundation (ACTF). By 1984, some three years after he was writing for Crawfords, Peck was program manager for the ACTF where, among other projects, he worked closely on Jan Sardi's early projects with the ACTF, including Sardi's episode of Kaboodle, 'Snow White and the Dreadful Dwarves', which was selected for the program after Peck 'saw Sardi rehearsing Snow White at Eltham College [when Sardi was still teaching] when he was rehearsing methods of drama teaching and thought it would make a good subject for children's television' (Pamela Bone, p.45). He also worked closely on Paul Cox's script for The Gift, despite what Patricia Edgar notes as creative tensions between the two (see the work record for The Gift for details).
By 1987, Peck was co-producer, with relative newcomer to the ACTF Susie Campbell, on the ACTF's teenage drama discussion program, Seen But Not Heard, the dramatic aspects of which were written by Steve J. Spears.
Some time after this point, Peck stepped down as program manager to concentrate on writing and script-editing the new ACTF science / drama program, Sky Trackers. However, Patricia Edgar retained such faith in Peck (whom she describes in her memoir as 'an excellent analyst of scripts', p.317) that she called him in as a consultant on the ambitious new children's program Lift Off, when the program experienced conceptual problems in the early stages: according to Edgar, 'Jeff's proprosals became the blueprint' (p.260) and he was placed in charge of the scripting process.
Peck also wrote scripts for series two of the ACTF program Crash Zone in the late 1990s, but his work after this point has not been traced.
Further Reference:
Bone, Pamela. 'School Is In for the Budding Young Actors of Eltham.' The Age Thurs. 6 Nov. 1986, p.45.
Edgar, Patricia. Bloodbath: A Memoir of Australian Television. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2006.
