50 Years of Television in Australia Page 32

  > Countdown Revolution – music show

  > Pugwall – children’s series

  > That’s Dancin’ – showcases the cream of Australian dancers

  > Body and Soul – examines people’s lifestyles

  > Superquiz – a remake of Pick-a-Box > The Great TV Game Show – quiz show

  > The Heroes – mini-series about one of the greatest naval exploits of WW2

  > Naked Under Capricorn – mini-series based on a novel by Olaf Ruhen

  > The Money or the Gun – hosted by Andrew Denton

  > Our Place – entertainment show mixing music, chat and guest stars

  > The Magistrate – a hard-hitting political thriller mini-series

  > Inside Running – series about money-hungry lawyers

  > Mission Impossible – a revival of the American classic series in Australia

  > Tanamera: Lion of Singapore – drama

  > Dusty – a man transforms his part dingo dog into a class sheepdog

  > Hill’s End – children’s drama

  > Dearest Enemy – sitcom

  > This Man, This Woman – drama

  > Bodysurfer – drama about a man’s midlife crisis

  > Darlings of the Gods – drama based on the affair actress Vivien Leigh had with young Aussie actor Peter Finch

  > Cassidy – a woman discovers her dearly departed father has left a trail of corruption

  > Grim Pickings – family secrets come out after a body is discovered during harvest

  > E Street – drama about the residents of suburban Wildside

  > Tuesday Night Live: The Big Gig – ABC comedy show hosted by Wendy Harmer

  > The Family Business – sitcom

  The Greeks serve up the goods

  September: Seven has a hit on its hands with the new woggy sitcom Acropolis Now. The first ethnic comedy series on Australian TV, it went to air in August and hilariously sends up the European–Australian culture clash.

  Based on the successful stage show Wogs Out of Work, the series was written by and stars George Kapiniaris (Memo, the excitable waiter), Simon Polomares (Ricky, the smart one) and Nick Giannopoulous (Jim, the petrol-head womaniser).

  When Jim’s father, Kostas Stephanidis (Warren Mitchell, best known as Alf Garnet from the British comedy series Till Death Us Do Part) decides to return to his homeland, he entrusts his beloved Acropolis café to his son. But instead of keeping the place true to its ethnic roots, Jim attempts to turn it into ‘the’ place to be seen.

  Dropping in on a regular basis are Liz (Tracey Callendar), Skip (Simon Thorpe) and Effie (Mary Coustas), who is winning many fans with her uniquely tentative grasp of the English language and huge ‘hairs’.

  Exploring issues including arranged marriage, male domination and the generation gap between long-settled migrants and their ‘modernised’ children, the first series is rating consistently, and a second is almost certain to be green-lighted, creating an embarrassment of riches for Kapiniaris. Having played Dimitrios ‘DJ’ Lonniadis in The Flying Doctors for nearly three years, Kapiniaris may be faced with having to choose between the two shows.

  A great Gig to land

  November: Continuing the strong recent trend of Australian comedy shows like The Comedy Company and Fast Forward, the ABC’s The Big Gig has been steadily climbing in the ratings since its February debut. Hosted by Wendy Harmer, the show features Glynn Nicholas, Jean Kittson, duo Empty Pockets and musical trio the Doug Anthony All Stars.

  The All Stars have elicited some of the most extreme responses. Having been propelled into mainstream popularity by the show, their performance in a recent episode of The Big Gig drew a flood of complaints, predominately from Queensland. They were dubbed ‘blasphemous’ and ‘disgraceful’ for their bizarre brand of humour, while one caller even said, ‘I object strongly to the overt gayness of the Doug Anthony All Stars.’ But Ferguson says that’s the kind of reaction the trio is seeking: ‘It’s a matter of turning an audience, no matter where they are, into a mob.’

  Harsh nights in Bangkok

  November:With accolades mounting up around her, Nicole Kidman is now able to add to the pile having had a mini-series written specifically for her. After having been once more impressed by Kidman’s work on the feature film Dead Calm, Kennedy Miller and writer/producer Terry Hayes penned Bangkok Hilton with her in mind for the lead role.

  The six-hour mini-series will screen on Ten this week, with Kidman as Katrina Stanton, an Aussie girl who heads overseas in search of her father, who she has never known. She falls in love with Arkie Regan (Jerome Ehlers), who cruelly tricks her into carrying some of his luggage containing drugs, and she winds up in a horrendous Thai prison – the ‘Bangkok Hilton’.

  The mini-series was a physically gruelling experience for its bright star, who was badly bruised from having to wear heavy manacles in the jail scenes.

  Wandering in to Wandin Valley

  October: The folk of A Country Practice have welcomed some bright newcomers into their midst this year. In March, 23-year-old Sydney actress Georgie Parker joined the cast as nurse Lucy Gardiner, replacing nurse Michael Langley (Brett Climo, who left ACP to go to The Flying Doctors). Parker has appeared once before in Wandin Valley. Last year she played Barbara Gottlieb, veterinarian Ben Green’s (Nick Buffalo’s) ex-fiancée, in three episodes of the series.

  Then making his debut in the show in July was 18-year-old Mel Gibson look-alike, Matt Day. Playing the streetwise Luke Ross, Day has been winning a legion of fans and admirers. But, despite his pierced ear and dyed black hair, he’s struggling to come to terms with the label ‘heart-throb’. ‘It sounds like a disease,’ he told TV Week. ‘You can hear the doctor say, “I’m sorry. Your husband’s got heart-throb.”’

  MEMORIES

  > Logie award winner Nicole Kidman, 21, wows Hollywood with her role in the thriller movie Dead Calm.

  > Bert Newton hosts the Logies and Raquel Welch is special guest.

  > Jackie McDonald quits Hey Hey, It’s Saturday.

  > Neighbours clocks up 1000 episodes.

  > Mr Squiggle celebrates 30 years.

  > Dannii Minogue joins the cast of Home and Away. She is also invited to be a guest presenter at the 1990 British Television Soapie Awards.

  > 1000th episode of Wheel of Fortune goes to air.

  > Neighbours hippy Kerry Bishop (played by Linda Hartley) marries ‘ocker’ Joe Mangel (Mark Little) at Melbourne Zoo’s butterfly enclosure.

  > Sue McIntosh, mother of Jason Donovan, makes a return to TV in Melbourne as fill-in newsreader on the ABC.

  > Ten goes through its programs with a chainsaw, axing Perfect Match and Superquiz in one week.

  > Neighbours experiences a mass exodus with stars including Guy Pearce, Jason Donovan, Fiona Corke, Annie Jones, Craig McLachlan and Rachel Friend departing within the year.

  > Channel 7 goes into receivership.

  > TV heart-throb Julian McMahon signs on to Home and Away.

  > Identical twins Gayle and Gillian Blakeney quit their co-host roles on Wombat to join the cast of Neighbours.

  > Gold Logie: Daryl Somers

  > Silver Logie: Craig McLachlan and Annie Jones

  > Hall of Fame: Bryan Brown

  MEDICAL SHOWS

  The emergency wards and operating theatres of Australian television have provided a steady flow of drama, high ratings and more than the occasional Logie winner.

  The best of care

  Hysterical families, serious cases of medical negligence, hot workplace romances and nurses in tight, tight uniforms. Hospitals and medical surgeries aren’t just places for sick people, they’re hotbeds for intrigue and scandal, and the high-pressure settings for many heart-pumping medical dramas.

  ‘The doors never close in Casualty; the lights never go out’, bellowed the voice-over for Emergency (1959, GTV-9), the very first all-Australian drama set in an accident and emergency ward. The show took a hard line on realism, calling in medical experts and eq
uipment from the Royal Melbourne Hospital to ensure the gripping tales of complicated operations, amnesia patients, the threats posed by fraudulent quacks and medical drugs in the wrong hands were authentic. Hospitals were infinitely more glamorous – and dangerous – places 20 years later, when images of young stethoscope-waving interns and drop-dead-gorgeous nurses tearing through operating theatre doors burst on to our TV screens in The Young Doctors (1976–81, Nine). Shootings, explosions and blackmail were everyday occurrences in this bargain-basement medical drama, which after almost 1400 episodes became Australia’s longest running TV series at the time. Its cast still reads like a rollcall of TV sirens, including Karen Pini, Paula Duncan, Lynda Stoner and Delvene Delaney, who all played nurses at various stages. But the inimitable Cornelia Frances became the series’ major star – and nothing like its ‘weakest link’ – striking fear and terror through the corridors of the Albert Memorial Hospital as the interfering Sister Scott.

  The Young Doctors is where we were titillated, but A Country Practice (1981–93, Seven) is where we got educated. The straight Dr Terence Elliott (Shane Porteous) and goofy Dr Simon Bowen (Grant Dodwell), and in later years Dr Ben Green (Nicholas Bufalo) and Dr Alex Elliott (Diane Smith), demystified common medical conditions like cancer, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease and epilepsy for Australian audiences, so much so that the Australian Medical Association often suggested new storylines.

  Medical taboos were finally cracked on the set of the ABC medical drama GP (1989–96), with eyebrow-raising scripts tackling anorexia, obesity and even hermaphrodites. No medical subject was off limits to this group of inner-city general practitioners. Despite most of the original doctors packing up their medical bags after four years, the show soon ushered in some new blood, including Australian TV’s first gay doctor.

  Australian TV doctors already had it tough, but The Flying Doctors (1986–91, Nine) redefined the job description. Flying hundreds of kilometres through the Australian outback in 40-plus temperatures, to treat farm accident patients whose lives hung precariously in the balance, certainly had its hygiene challenges. This was in addition to the fact that most of the show was actually shot in a quarry out the back of the Melbourne suburb of Werribee. It took on an Aussie icon – the Royal Flying Doctor Service – and featured one of TV’s most drawn-out romances between nurse Kate Wellings (Lenore Smith) and Dr Geoff Standish (Robert Grubb). They finally married by radio, in true soapie style, after Geoff was called out to a medical emergency and missed the ceremony.

  The medical show genre has shown no signs of terminal illness in recent years. Seven’s All Saints (1988–) has been a huge hit and provided the platform for its biggest star, Georgie Parker, to win two gold Logies. RPA delivered a new perspective by taking us inside real hospital wards for a bedside view of actual blood-and-guts operations. And with MDA (ABC, 2002–) we even got to see lawyers and medicos trading blows in the ugly world of medical litigation.

  Medical shows’ combination of intense storylines, frantic emergency situations, hideous pain and patients clinging desperately to life have made for some seriously addictive viewing in the last 50 years. Whether they slashed their scalpels through society’s medical secrets or set us on unbearably intense emotional rollercoaster rides, medical shows have always been high in adrenaline, providing a shot in the arm for Australian drama.

  Prescriptions for success

  Is there a sure-fire prescription for a medical show hit?

  > Keep death rates low – A study in the New England Journal of Medicine found the chance of being resuscitated after a TV heart attack is 77 per cent. In reality, if you have a heart attack on the street, it’s five per cent.

  > Tyrant or martyr – Make your lead nurse a fighter. The Young Doctors’ Sister Scott endured an attempted rape and fell down a lift shaft (though not on the same day). Similarly, All Saints’ Terri Sullivan survived a heart tumour, a serial killer on a shooting spree, a siege and several bomb blasts.

  > Freak out your audience – Medical shows are no longer designed to gently reassure audiences (A Country Practice, GP). We want blood, beating hearts, close-ups of the hospital machinery, and a complicated mess of blurred ethical issues, toxic hospital management and poisonous patients (All Saints, MDA).

  > Turn up the shock value – Rule number one: test the audience’s gag reflex as often as possible, just like graphic US series Trauma: Life in the ER (1997–). Picture this: a surgeon perched on the chest of a teenage drive-by shooting victim, trying to crack open his ribcage with a chisel and massage his heart back to life. Would you keep watching?

  1990

  While Steve Vizard is flying high on his tonight show, Gina Riley is being recognised for her comedic talents, and a young Peter Andre is discovered on Daryl Somers’ New Faces, but all is not well in TV land. Financial pressures have forced many shows to be cancelled and rumours are rife that one or more networks might be about to fall over.

  Vizard goes live and revives Tonight

  Steve Vizard, the solicitor-turned-comedian from shows such as The Eleventh Hour and Fast Forward, has single-handedly reinvented the tonight show, with Seven’s Tonight Live the major hit of 1990. If you’ve watched American television lately, you might notice some similarities with The David Letterman Show – down to the coffee cup, a comedic nightly list of Top Tens (in Vizard’s case, sevens), the set and even the band leader called Paul (Grabowski for Vizard, Shaffer for Letterman). But for the majority of Australians, Tonight Live is fresh and new, with big name guests, stunts, live crosses to viewer’s homes and other such gimmicks.

  Vizard, who will continue on Fast Forward this year, is a confident, gregarious host who seems to enjoy the show as much as the live audience. ‘It’s actually like having a big toy,’ he told TV Week. ‘Someone lets you into a studio and says, “Well, here it is. Here’s all the cameramen and all the facilities, now you make a show.”’ A national live show, five nights a week, is a tough ask for anybody, but Vizard said his theory was simply to have fun. ‘You’ve got to enjoy just mucking around with it – and I love that. I love mucking around.’

  A surprising playmate on the show is the striking young newsreader Jennifer Keyte, who delivers a news update that often struggles to retain its dignity among the nightly mayhem. Not that Keyte minds, having been plucked from Victorian newsreading to a prime national role. Vizard calls her ‘the newsreader with the mostest’, and Keyte is often greeted on the set with wolf whistles and cheering – which never happened to Brian Henderson.

  Vizard has been praised by critics for his performance in the first year of the show. Only a few weeks into Tonight Live, TV Week’s Lawrie Masterson enthused: ‘When you’re live to air, there’s nothing between the high wire and potentially fatal impact with terra firma. The difference between doing the two shows [Tonight Live and Fast Forward] is vast, but so far Vizard has maintained a quite spectacular balancing act.’

  Now you see her, now you don’t

  May: Seven comedy show Fast Forward has uncovered a gem with Gina Riley, the Melbourne comedienne and singer who has an uncanny knack for imitating people. Riley’s merciless satire has seen her portray everybody from Madonna and Sinead O’Connor to Kylie and Dannii Minogue, Paula Abdul and Stevie Nicks.

  One of her most popular characters is Kerri-Anne Kennel, an outrageous ribbing of Good Morning Australia’s Kerri-Anne Kennerley. But remarkably, one of Riley’s biggest fans turns out to be Kerri-Anne Kennerley herself, who thinks Gina is hilarious and her impressions ‘terrific’.

  Phelps on the dock of the bay no more

  February: Aussie actor Peter Phelps has walked out on one of the hottest jobs in US television after his role in the beach drama, Baywatch, appeared to unravel behind the scenes. Phelps left Baywatch at the end of the first season. His exit means the end of cavorting in the surf with bikini-clad former Playmates of the Year, and no more parading in front of massive US audiences.

  ‘Before Christmas a few of the cast, incl
uding me, weren’t happy about the way the scripts were going. I expressed my dismay about everything – which I guess is not what you’re supposed to do in Hollywood when you’ve got a job everybody else wants,’ he told TV Week. Phelps said the writers ignored his suggestions, instead leaning the series towards action–adventure and introducing a new character who suddenly ate up Phelps’s screen time.

  Phelps said other Australians hoping to crack Hollywood should learn from his experience. ‘To them [TV executives], you’re just a product and they treat you like crap!’ he said.

  Molly gets excited by a new face

  July: He may have been beaten in the first series final of Daryl Somers’s New Faces this year, but young singer Peter Andre has turned out to be a winner. The 17-year-old Queenslander has been taken under the wing of New Faces’ judge Molly Meldrum, with the veteran Australian music personality signing Andre to his label, Melodian Records. Established to promote young talent, Melodian Records also has Indecent Obsession and Roxus on its books and Meldrum is confident Peter Andre will be a star to at least match them.

  ‘Peter impressed us all and he has a unique voice that can be developed,’ Molly told TV Week. ‘We want to get him to Los Angeles where the Janet Jackson style of dance comes from. It will help give him a feel for the style he wants.’

  Andre had won his New Faces heat before being narrowly beaten in the final.

  ON DEBUT

  > Family and Friends – soapie series

  > All the Rivers Run II – a sequel to the first mini-series

  > A Waltz through the Hills – children’s series about two English-born, children orphaned in Western Australia

  > The Paper Man – drama series

  > Ring of Scorpio – mini-series about three Australian women who wind up in a Spanish jail

  > The Girl from Tomorrow – children’s series