AustLit

'Funny, fast and furry - the WOODLIES are kobolds (small troll-like creatures) that are nuttier than a squirrel's lunch, on a mission to protect their forest from Uglies (the Woodlies call all humans Uglies) and get their paws on the greatest stash of food they can find!

'Big job when you're not much bigger than a squirrel ...

'Fearless FIREHEAD, gentle SEVENPOINTS and Curious NINEEYES are a mischievous crew with two rules. Rule number one? Never be seen by Uglies. Rule number 2? Never be seen by Uglies while stealing their food or sabotaging their weird Ugly plans.

'But when streetwise MIA and her nature-loving dad WELLIE take over a run-down campsite nearby, they bring with them disasters in the form of clumsy campers, greedy developers and a mean cat with a real taste for Woodlies!

'Think that's bad? A gang of renegade Woodlies known as the SWAMP RATS, led by WHITETAIL and his obnoxious cronies - FOULTOE and GNARLYBUTT, are determined to take over the forest and all the food in it. And they're not about to let a bunch of do-gooder Tree Saps get in their way ...

'As if that's not enough, nature itself serves up a menu of freezing blizzards, searing droughts and loads of creatures ready to make the Woodlies their next main course!

'So when NineEyes breaks the number one rule and becomes friends with Mia, it seems like things couldn't get any worse. Is this the end for the Woodlies?

'One thing's for sure... life's about to get a whole lot more interesting!'

Source: Flying Bark Productions (http://www.flyingbark.com.au/?portfolio=the-woodlies). Sighted: 12/4/2012

'The day of Bianca's wedding has arrived, Vittorio waits nervously at the alter as his stunning bride walks down the aisle towards him. They say their vows but Bianca hesitates for a moment and then tells Vittorio that she can't marry him. In front of all her friends and family she rushes back down the aisle and into the arms of her true love, Liam Murphy. In shock, Vittorio tries to drag Bianca away from Liam, but Romeo steps in and lands a punch that knocks him out cold. Bianca and Liam ride off into the sunset on his Harley Davidson. In the meantime, John and Gina save the day. Not being one to waste a good opportunity, John is prompted by Gina into telling everyone that there will still be a wedding today between himself and the beautiful Gina Austin. Colleen is quick to offer her services as Matron of Honour and Xavier happily steps in as best man. All seems to be going well until Xavier sees April's tear streaked face. She is being taken back to Europe by Joanne and has no idea if she will ever return to Summer Bay. There are more tears from Nicole when she confesses to Marilyn that she is pregnant to Penn Graham! Detective Robertson really spoils the party when he arrives with Graves to arrest Alf for Penn's murder. The residents of Summer Bay watch as Alf is taken away in handcuffs!'

Source: Home and Away homepage, www.au.tv.yahoo.com/home-and-away/ (sighted 08/11/2011)

A mini-series based on Mary Durack's biography of the same name.

'When Constable Tom Daly (Aaron Pedersen) of the Territory Police is thrown into the position of local man-in-charge, he fears the worst when he learns he is to be teamed up with Detective Sergeant Robert McCabe (Steven Vidler), a no-nonsense city cop with fixed ideas on how proceedings should be conducted. While Tom is a laid back Aboriginal Australian who relies on intuition when assessing situations, Robert is hard-nosed, meticulous and a man who goes strictly by the book. The spate of unexplained murders finds the two men sharing the dangers of the vast open desert space and rugged escarpments as they race against time in a painstaking hunt for a psychotic killer. Their forced time together also finds them combining their individual talents to become a formidable, investigative team.'

Source: Australian Television Information Archive. (Sighted: 28/6/2013)

'Prosecutor Flicker and Rafferty differ over a debacle in police processing that keeps a Polish-Australian in the local police station holding cell.

Rafferty's clerk, Fulvio, is chosen to sit on a panel interviewing job applicants but doesn't impress the other panelists including the one who chose him.

Rafferty has terrible trouble chasing up errors made by his credit card provider and at the end of the episode Rafferty presides over a case on civil rights where a woman is charged for not filling out a survey partially due to a discrepancy in its instructions.

Penne Hackforth-Jones guest stars as the prosecutor of this case. Georgie Parker appears as one of the job applicants.'

Source: Internet Movie Database

The central character of the series is Michael Rafferty, a stipendiary magistrate in the small suburban court of the Sydney seaside suburb of Manly. The main business of the court is minor offences. Rafferty's personal life is also a feature.

Source: Moran's Guide to Australian TV Series

The comedy series Bobby Dazzler was created as a vehicle for pop-star John Farnham. Crawford Productions had been seeking a suitable vehicle for Farnham for some time, including writing an episode of Ryan with him in mind (a part that was re-cast due to Farnham's unbreakable concert commitments) and casting him in the failed pilot Me and Mr Thorne.

Bobby Dazzler played to both Farnham's strengths and his popular image. As Don Storey notes in his Classic Australian Television,

The pilot episode sets the scene - a young singer, Bobby Farrell, releases a record and seeks a manager to steer him on a successful career. Meanwhile, his father Fred, a former vaudeville performer, re-enters his life after an absence of many years, and proceeds to move into Bobby's flat, much to his (and his new manager's) dismay.

The program so appealed to Maurie Fields (as an opportunity to combine his television experience and vaudeville background) that, according to Storey, he quit a nine-year-long run on Bellbird to take the role of Bobby's father. It also won Terry Stapleton a Sammy Award. But as Storey notes,

HSV-7 in Melbourne, unfortunately, did not give Bobby Dazzler much of a chance - after sitting on the programme for the best part of a year, the first episode finally went to air on November 20, 1977. The bulk of the series was shown during the 1977-78 summer non-ratings 'silly season', and went through a timeslot change which did nothing to encourage regular viewers.

The series was not renewed for a second season, and Farnham returned to a full-time singing career.

The premise behind this short-lived comedy program was English water diviner Hugh's inheritance of an Australian property that, for some reason, is being run by eight woman who (as Moran notes in his Guide to Australian TV Series) 'were all varyingly beautiful but quite inexperienced in the ways of the world'.

The series was, says Moran, 'in effect a runaway production intended in the first place for a British rather than an Australian audience.' As such, British script-writer David Croft both wrote and directed the program, and the cast comprised both British and Australian actors.

The program was not a success on Australian television. Moran suggests that 'Perhaps this was because the Carry On concept and humour had no place in the Australian comedy tradition, particularly in the era of second-wave feminism.'

A short-lived sit-com based on the tribulations of working-class widow Jessie Finnegan and her lazy adult son Darby, Mrs Finnegan, as Don Storey notes in his Classic Australian Television, 'has long been forgotten by most of the viewing public. In fact, forgotten is not strictly accurate as most people were unaware of its existence in the first place'.

Like other early Australian sit-coms (such as Barley Charlie and Hey You!), Mrs Finnegan showcased Australian idiom while centering (in the character of Darby Finnegan) on an essentially lazy and immature male character who pursues get-rich-quick schemes rather than holding down a regular job. Darby is balanced by the figure of his mother, Jessie Finnegan, who, in Storey's words, 'grew up during the depression and has had to struggle to get by all her life.'

Mrs Finnegan was an in-house production by ATN-7 (Sydney), who hoped to replicate the success of earlier sit-coms such as My Name's McGooley - What's Yours?. However, somewhere during the production process, the network lost either its interest or its faith in the program, which was shelved for several months before being screened without fanfare in the non-ratings period.

Storey concludes:

Why the show was treated so badly by the Seven Network is something of a mystery. Granted, Mrs. Finnegan is not a pinnacle of artistic achievement, and was never going to be a runaway success, but it was of a high enough standard to warrant a fair go. Indeed, there have been many inferior programmes that have received much better treatment. Consequently, Mrs. Finnegan has been relegated to the limbo of obscurity.

As with its predecessors, The Interpretaris and Vega 4, Phoenix Five took its name from the spaceship that was the show's focus: the flagship of Earth Space Control, with a two-man, one-woman team, assisted by their computeroid, Karl. The show had two primary villains. For the first thirteen episodes, the villain was Zodian (the evil scientist of Vega 4, now re-cast and with a newly blue skintone), who sought galactic domination from his base on Zebula 9, with the support of his twin computers, Alpha and Zeta. When Zodian was captured, he was replaced as villain by Platonus, assisted by a computer called Tommy.

Rather than following a single story arc as its predecessors had, Phoenix Five was a series of self-contained stories, allowing the script writers to move freely around the galaxies, and explore whichever crisis the crew happened to come across.

Soourece: Moran's Guide to Australian TV Series and Don Storey's Classic Australian Television (Sighted: 6/10/2011)

A spin-off from the highly successful My Name's McGooley - What's Yours?, Rita and Wally represented a re-structuring of the original series after Gordon Chater (the titular McGooley) decided not to continue in the role. As Don Storey notes in his Classic Australian Television, McGooley had departed from the series three episodes before the actual final episode of My Name's McGooley (apparently visiting an old girlfriend in Queensland, from which location he sends word that they've decided to elope to the United States). Meanwhile:

Wally has received a promotion to an office job as a 'junior salesman' - in fact, he is the oldest 'junior' salesman in the firm - and he becomes desirous of moving to a more exclusive suburb befitting his new 'executive' status.

Selling the Balmain house, Rita and Wally move to the Sydney North Shore, where the plotlines are focused largely on 'keeping up with the Joneses' scenarios. It was never as popular a program as its predecessor. As Storey notes:

Although Wally had become the focus of the McGooley series, the character of McGooley was nonetheless an important ingredient. And Wally had changed - now he was in a white-collar job, and the emphasis had changed from 'battler' Wally in working-class Balmain to 'fish-out-of-water' Wally in his new 'executive' job and residence on the North Shore. Without McGooley, and with the other characters in a North Shore setting, Rita and Wally began to drift into middle-class dullness.

The program was wrapped up after twenty-three episodes, in a scenario that represented a return to the show's beginnings: to quote Storey, 'Wally had just given himself the sack from his job, and the outlook for the future was looking bleak for the Stiller household. Then McGooley and his mates turn up on their doorstep', facilitating a move back to Balmain (albeit outside the actual program).

Australia's first successful sit-com, My Name's McGooley's - What's Yours? blended domestic and social realism in an exploration of working-class Australian life.

According to Don Storey's summation of the program in his Classic Australian Television, My Name's McGooley - What's Yours? focused on

working class battler Wally Stiller and his wife Rita, who live with Rita's father Dominic McGooley, a crusty old pensioner. Their house is in Balmain, an inner suburb of Sydney that was then still largely working class. In classic sit-com tradition, early episodes centred on the farcical situations that McGooley blundered into, which were exploited for their comedy potential. As the series progressed, Wally Stiller became the protagonist, and the emphasis shifted to social issues within the family structure, with McGooley reacting to Wally's middle-aged ocker outlook on life.

Created by Ralph Peterson, who originally intended the program for British commerical network ITV, My Name's McGooley made use of actors who were already under contract to ATN-7 (both Gordon Chater and Noeline Brown, for example, had been working on The Mavis Bramston Show), as well as attracting John Meillon back from England to take the role of Wally.

Highly successful with audiences from the outset, My Name's McGooley ran for nearly ninety episodes before Gordon Chater left the program (and moved to a new vehicle, The Gordon Chater Show, still on ATN-7). With McGooley absent, the program was heavily re-tooled and re-invented as Rita and Wally.

'Set in an Australian outpost in the Antarctic, the play opens when the seven members of the expedition, who have served 12 months at the base, learn that they are to be marooned for another 12 months because the relief ship is unable to get through. Tension mounts and one of the men is murdered.'

Source: [Television guide], The Age, 6 September 1962, p.7.

An anthology series of eleven one-hour television dramas, based on the earlier radio series General Motors Hour.

A television adaptation of Hugh Hastings's stage play.

A murder mystery set in Cobar, New South Wales, in the mid-nineteenth century.

It aired first in the UK as part of anthology series ITV Play of the Week, then in the US as part of anthology series The United States Steel Hour, then in Australia as part of anthology series General Motors Hour.

A contemporary review offers the following detailed synopsis:

'The story starts when one of the young men of the town of Cobar, western New South Wales, is found battered to death. A man called Jem was lying in a drunken stupor beside the body and the murder weapon, an iron bar, is found near the scene of the crime.

'Jem is immediately accused of the crime, but floods prevent his being sent to an established court for trial.

'Coldringer, an old German opal prospector, suggests to the townsfolk that they set up their own court and have the trial in the town.

'The locals agree that the best way of ensuring that Jem is given a fair trial is to make Rigger, the father of the murdered man, defend Jem, and let the prosecution be handed by Kirk, who was Jem's employer.

'Neither Rigger nor Kirk is happy with the townsfolks' decision, but they eventually agree to accept the court arrangements.'

Source: 'Murder Trial in a Bush Town', The Sydney Morning Herald, 12 September 1960, p.7

An Australian-made version of the Sumner Locke Elliott script initially produced as part of American anthology series Playhouse 90 the previous year. The Australian version had an entirely different cast and crew from the original American production.

The drama was intended as the flagship program for a planned anthology series called General Motors Hour, based on the radio series of the same name (see 'Harry Dearth Will Host G.M.H Drama Venture on TV'.)

Locke Elliott's script was based on the so-called 'Shark Arm Case' (1935), and Patrick Brady, the defendent in that trial, brought an application for an injunction to prevent ATN (Channel 7) from televising the court scene in The Grey Nurse Said Nothing, which his lawyer argued was defamatory. The application was denied (see 'Application to Stop T.V. Play Rejected').

According to the news article on Brady's planned injunction, lawyers for ATN/Channel 7 claimed that 'the production would have a cast of 72. It was the most ambitious T.V. play produced in Australia, and cost more than £4,000 to produce'.

Further Reading

• 'Application to Stop T.V. Play Rejected', Canberra Times, 28 May 1960, p.7.

• 'Harry Dearth Will Host G.M.H. Drama Venture on TV', The Age, 18 February 1960, p.12.