AustLit

When the owner of a surfing supply store, who has been receiving mysterious death threats, is brutally beaten outside his store, he takes an old friend up on his offer to 'go to ground' with his wife at the friend's beachside holiday house. But the two couples are followed to their sanctuary by a mysterious motorcyclist, and soon find themselves trapped inside the house by their would-be assassin.

'A reunion of longtime friends is just a facade for one to kill the other, take over her identity, and set into motion a scheme to destroy the Capitol.'

Source: Australian Television Information Archive. (Sighted: 25/6/2013)

A pair of prison escapees plan to abduct a rich couple's baby and hold it for ransom, but have not calculated on the presence of an obsessive babysitter.

John Pinkney's review of the film, published in the Age in 1977, was dismissive. He wrote:

'This handsome telefilm had almost everything on its side – from Russell Boyd's poetic photography and Peter Maxwell's direction to the assured acting of such principals as Gerard Kennedy and Carmen Duncan.

'Even the unhappy writer, Bruce Wishart, achieved verisimilitude most of the time. But the story, written in an off moment by Bruning himself, got Wishart in the end'.

Source: John Pinkney, 'Mr Bruning's Films Need Pruning'. Age 27 May 1977, p.3.

When husband and wife Gary and Pat Keating stumble across a murdered couple and a traumatised adolescent in a remote farmhouse, Pat remains behind with the boy while Gary, a former long-distance runner, sets out to the nearest town to find help–but on the way there, he crosses the path of two violent escaped prisoners.

Recently released from a sanatorium, Kate Hersey is seemingly unaware that her husband, John, has been pursuing an affair with her sister, Marianne. When a series of strange events begin to plague the block of flats in which (in John's absence) the sisters live together, Marianne assumes someone is confusing her with Kate. But Kate, aware of her sister's betrayal, has her own plan to gain both her husband's money and revenge, before fleeing with her own lover.

The People Next Door spins off from previous Gemini Productions' sit-com The Godfathers. The child welfare officer who prompted much of the tension in the original program, Elizabeth Dent, is now married with a child of her own. She and her husband Bill also board Dave Milson, one of the 'godfathers' from the original series. Elizabeth, Bill, and Dave take a house next to misanthropic writer Daniel Penrose and his three children. Following the pattern established by The Godfathers, the program was focalised through the viewpoint of the youngest Penrose child, B.J.

Don Storey, in his Classic Australian Television, notes that the Nine Network commissioned 48 episodes, with an option to review after 16 episodes:

Perhaps it was the timeslot. Perhaps it was the changing tastes of a fickle public. Perhaps the formula was not quite right. Whatever the reason, The People Next Door was nowhere near as successful as The Godfathers. Low ratings caused Nine to exercise their option to reduce the number of episodes, and production ceased after 20 episodes were made.

The Spoiler arose from the pilot for a proposed late 1960s' television program called Vendetta, in which a policeman left the force to pursue a private vendetta against a crime boss. Though Vendetta was not picked up as a series, the central idea was later re-visited by producer Robert Bruning. Bruning was approached by the marketing director of TCN-9; the network wanted a police program, but Bruning was keen to differentiate his program from the plethora of police procedurals then airing. Bruning settled on the notion of a vengeful former police officer.

According to Don Storey, in his Classic Australian Television, 'Bruce Barry plays Jim Carver, the 'spoiler' of the title. Carver is a Sydney detective who discovers that Sir Ian Mason, a leading respectable businessman, is head of a crime syndicate, and is kicked out of the police force because of his investigations that have so far turned up no evidence of complicity. His dimissal makes Carver all the more determined to find the evidence he needs to bring Mason to justice.'

Of the central character, Storey argues that 'Carver was a rough, tough character. When he needs information he often extracts it by force. He drinks hard. He's a womaniser, and he treats his women rough.' Storey also notes that the program became notorious for the quantity of nude and semi-nude scenes: 'A number of girls come into contact with Carver who end up in various states of undress, usually for no reasons of any pertinence to the plot.' Carver is supported by a sympathetic barmaid/sometime girlfriend, a friend in the police force, and an underworld informant.

The Spoiler was not successful: it rated poorly from its original airing in Sydney, so poorly that neither Melbourne nor Brisbane television stations even attempted to air it in a prime-time slot.

Summing up critics' responses to the program, Storey suggests,

The anti-hero was an aggressive, boozing chauvinist who belted the crooks and treated women like dirt, and was a sort of warring psychopath tolerated by the police and not understood by anyone. The show downgraded women, upgraded the law of the boot and took a dog-eat-dog view of society. There was very little for men to identify with, and certainly nothing to appeal to women.

While Storey acknowledges the legitimacy of these arguments against the program, he also suggests that the program might have been ahead of its time. The Spoiler cannot, however, be re-evaluated in terms of modern television, since the master tapes were wiped and no other copies of the episodes have surfaced.

In the course of the previous couple of episodes of The Godfathers, Pete commits himself to marrying Helen by getting engaged. However, will he go through with it? 'I Do... I Don't' begins on the day of the wedding, and Pete subsequently sends the house into chaos. The attempts by the other godfathers, Maria, and Mike to get him to the altar prove to be difficult, as he makes every effort to get out of the wedding right up to the last minute.

A comedy drama set on Sydney's north shore, The Godfathers centres on nine-year-old Mike Varga and his widowed Hungarian mother. Crippled by the car accident that killed her husband, Maria Varga is confined to a wheelchair. To help financially, she takes in three boarders: Chris (a forty-something taxi driver), Pete (a thirty-year-old commercial photographer) and Gary (a twenty-one-year-old garage attendant who has just moved to Sydney from the country). Mike is an only child and a bit introspective, but the three boarders become fond of him and Mike adopts them as his 'godfathers.' Under their influence, he becomes a happy, outgoing kid, although they are often tested by his youthful ways.

Tensions are frequently raised through the on-going presence of Elizabeth Dent, a Child Welfare Officer who is constantly checking on Mike to see that he is being well cared for. After Pete leaves the Vargases' house to get married, he is replaced by another 'godfather,' Dave.