AustLit

When the sailing ship United World is almost sunk by a hurricane, the forty teenagers who are sailing in her scramble for the lifeboats, but five are overlooked in the general panic. Along with the ship, they are driven into the lagoon of a mysterious island, Tambu. Here, they find a lost civilisation: the descendants of settlers originally headed for New Holland, who still live an eighteenth-century lifestyle. But they are under the domination of the mysterious Q, a seemingly immortal being who allegedly prolongs his life with the aid of a blue weed obtained from a nearby island, Malo. The five children, with the assistance of the Quinns, a local family, seek to avoid the malevolence of Q, who fears they are a threat to his domination of the island.

The Lost Islands was another production from New Zealand-born Roger Mirams, who was also responsible for such Australian television programs as The Terrific Adventures of the Terrible Ten, The Magic Boomerang, The Adventures of the Seaspray, and Spyforce.

Aimed largely at young (specifically male) viewers, Alpha Scorpio followed the sudden realisation of two university students, enjoying a quiet coastal holiday, that their friend Mirny is one of a group of aliens from the fifth planet of Antares who have recently landed on Earth.

Alpha Scorpio has never been released on either video or DVD, and it is possible that nothing but the first episode remains in the ABC archives. However, the first episode is available to view on YouTube, beginning with part one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq7QOln0fro (Sighted 16/2/2011)

The program is a sole-author work: James Davern scripted all six episodes.

Further Reference

'"Alpha Scorpio": Based on Fact', Australian Women's Weekly, Wed.. 17 Oct. 1973, p.27.

Grigor Taylor's first role after leaving the highly rated Matlock Police, Silent Number focuses on Dr Steve Hamilton, a doctor working for the New South Wales Health Department. Hamilton has chosen this path because he couldn't afford to start his own practice, and thought, even before he is seconded to the NSW Police as a police doctor, that this would be more rewarding than work as a GP. This situation causes some tension with his wife, who would rather he worked shorter hours for higher pay in private practice.

According to Don Storey in his Classic Australian Television, Silent Number suffered somewhat from the close attention of censors after early episodes were deemed too violent, which led to the Australian Broadcasting Control Board decreeing that all episodes must be submitted to them for assessment prior to screening. Storey also notes that Silent Number was screened in Melbourne opposite Matlock Police, which seriously damaged its ratings.

Nevertheless, Storey concludes that 'Silent Number was quite a good series. If you allow a certain suspension of disbelief for the premise - real police doctors rarely, if ever, get involved with criminal detection the way Steve Hamilton does - the only valid criticism that could be levelled against it is the "cheap" look that using videotape gives to the interior scenes.'

Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, concurs with this assessment, noting that 'producer Roger Mirams and writer Ron McLean put their heads together to come up with a successful formula for the crime variation. They reasoned that because both medical and police series were popular, a series about a police doctor had to very popular. It wasn't. Again, though, the series is very watchable. Never profound, it does succeed as entertainment.'

Like Our Man in Canberra, Scattergood: Friend of All, and Aunty Jack, A Nice Day at the Office began as an episode of the ABC's anthology program The Comedy Game. According to Don Storey, in his Classic Australian Television, the ABC had hoped that some episodes of their anthology show 'could act as pilots and spin-off into a series on a regular basis, allowing the ABC to screen at least one Australian-made comedy a week'.

Storey summarises the program as follows:

A Nice Day At The Office is a situation comedy satirising the public service. The two central characters, Ted Harvey and Sean Crisp, work in the Central Files office of a government department. Harvey is solidly entrenched in the career system of the public service and follows every rules in the book, an outlook completely foreign to the impetuous, irreverent Crisp. Their differing personalities often lead to clashes and petty ways of annoying each other.

Limited to seven episodes (excluding the episode of The Comedy Game that served as the pilot) by the availability of actor Neil Fitzpatrick, the program rated moderately well (no better or worse than other program's in the same time slot, perhaps, as Storey notes, 'indicating that most people who watched the series were loyal ABC viewers anyway') and received mixed reviews from critics.