Cirrus@Austlit

A live-action puppet show, Li'l Horrors followed the misadventures of the students at a school run by Morbidda Bates, a retired horror-film actress. The students included examples of key monsters from horror films: vampires, Frankenstein's monster, gorgons, mummies, zombies, werewolves, and swamp creatures.

According to December Films' press release for the series:

Li'l Horrors is a children's puppet sitcom specifically produced for the 5-8 year old age group. This is an age group who are currently not well catered for. Much programming is made for pre-schoolers and for 9 year olds and above. Li'l Horrors is created for this in between age group. It does not talk down to its audience or aim over its head. It is, however, infused with enough wit and off-the-wall humour to engage an even wider audience. Aimed well at [its] target audience, it is modern, slick, sly, funny and irreverent.

The program also focuses strongly on difference, with each of the characters quite strongly physically different from one another, as well as widely different in behavious and characteristics.

A web series that began as a short-run series on Melbourne community television, Damon Dark follows the titular character, an agent with secret government organisation Department 6, which tracks and defeats alien incursions on Earth.

An independent sicence-fiction production, Damon Dark first aired on Channel 31, a community television station in Melbourne (and also home to nightmare-themed television program Fever Dreams). Five episodes aired on Channel 31 in late 1999.

In 2000, with funding from Screen Australia, a thirty-minute 'pilot' episode was produced, with a view to professional television sales. Though the script was produced by Adrian Sherlock, he was replaced as Damon Dark by established television actor Bruce Hughes. The episode was directed by Chris Langman and James Kalisch.

When the series was not picked up by networks, Sherlock revived it in 2006 as a web series, which aired largely on one of two YouTube channels.

Damon Dark is part of a complicated network of science-fiction web-series. For example:

• Oliver McNeil (a British actor and script-writer behind the independent web series Barry the Demon Hunter) crossed over into Damon Dark as an antagonist (a 'time meddler') in the episodes 'The Cosmic Magician' and 'Revenge of the Magician'.

• Damon Dark's antoganist Vincent Kosmos was spun off into his own eponymous web series (produced by an Italian production company) after his appearances in Damon Dark.

• British script-writer Brett Gerry wrote several adventures involving Damon Dark (see list of episodes below).

• A spin-off series called The Young Adventures of Damon Dark also runs as a web series on YouTube.

Various episodes of Damon Dark can be seen on the dedicated YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/TheDamonDarkChannel (Sighted 20/4/2012).

The Young Adventures of Damon Dark (which is a separate production) can be seen on a separate YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/j3pfilms

Chuck Finn follows Charles 'Chuck' Finn, a Canadian boy whose parents move from Toronto to the Australian country town of Tingalla. At first, he longs desperately to return to Toronto, but he soon finds the decommissioned and derelict paddle steamer the Tingalla Rose. Soon, he and his friends--some of whom are ghostly, rather than mortal--are enchanted by the possibility of getting the Tingalla Rose running again and seduced by life on the Murray River.

Unfortunately for Chuck Finn, Barron Entertainment declared bankruptcy during the production of season two. A truncated season of six episodes was completed and released, but the production was abandoned at that point.

'Inspired by true events, Stingers reveals the shadowy and ambiguous world of undercover cops — people with covert lives and constantly changing identities. They are police who defeat crime from within the criminal world — always without a badge and frequently without protection. The series follows the lives of the operatives as they befriend and betray those on the other side of the law. For these select few, it is a deadly way of life.The undercover cops of Stingers are a unique breed. They must juggle their own lives — love, laughter, family and humanity — with the tension of the criminal personas they adopt in their passion for justice.'

Source: Australian Television Information Archive. (Sighted: 7/6/2013)

Water Rats is an Australian police television series which was broadcast on the Nine Network between 1996 and 2001. The series was based around the men and women of the Sydney Water Police who fight crime across Sydney Harbour and surrounding locales. The show was set on and around Goat Island in Sydney Harbour.

'Fast-paced series spin-off of the hit feature film. Filmed at an abandoned school in Sydney's Maroubra, this program was about an ethnically diverse group of students attending Hartley High School.'

Source: National Film and Sound Archive record.

A character-based television drama series about the lives of police officers in the fictitious Australian country town of Mt Thomas, this series began with the arrival of Constable Maggie Doyle (Lisa McCune) to the Mt Thomas station in the episode 'A Woman's Place'. Doyle and avuncular station boss Senior Sergeant Tom Croydon (John Wood) were the core characters of the series until the departure of Lisa McCune.

Immensely popular for a decade, Blue Heelers was cancelled in 2006 after thirteen seasons. The announcement was front-page news in Australia's major newspapers including The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney's Daily Telegraph, The Herald Sun and The Age in Melbourne, and Brisbane's Courier Mail.

On June 8, 2006 Ross Warneke wrote in The Age:

'It's over and, to be perfectly blunt, there's no use lamenting the demise of Blue Heelers any more. When the final movie-length episode aired on Channel Seven on Sunday night, 1.5 million Australians tuned in, a figure that was big enough to give the show a win in its timeslot but nowhere near big enough to pay the sort of tribute that this writer believes Heelers deserved after more than 500 episodes. It is unlikely there will be anything like it again. At almost $500,000 an hour, shows such as Blue Heelers are quickly becoming the dinosaurs of Australian TV.'

A television series ostensibly based on Arthur Upfield's series of detective novels, and stemming from a telemovie aired two years earlier.

After protests from Indigenous groups about the casting of a white actor as a descendant of Detective Napoleon Bonaparte, the production was altered to make the character a white man who had once lived with Indigenous Australians. As such, it bears little real connection to Upfield's novels.

The series was not a success, and was cancelled after the first thirteen episodes.

The first television program from prolific children's television producer Jonathan M. Shiff, Kelly follows the adventures of a police dog who, after being injured at work, is sent to recuperate in the country; here, Kelly becomes the constant companion of Jo Patterson and her friend Danny Foster, and manages to ferret out some criminals even in the country.

The Carmichaels, an old family of pioneering stock, clash with the 'back to basics' city-bred family who buy the neighbouring farm.

A children's television series, Zoo Family followed the adventures of Dr David Mitchell, veterinary surgeon at Melbourne Zoo, and his children Susie and Nick (all of whom live within zoo grounds). Additional characters include the head groundsman, a young vet graduate, the zoo manager, and the zoo trustees. According to Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series,

The latter are perpetually scheming over trust money under their control and it is left to the others to ensure that animals and enclosures are maintained. Beyond this human family, the larger family of the series is animals in the zoo. Each episode features a particular animal or group of animals in the zoo. Successive episodes concern such events as the discovery and treatment of sore eyes on a seal, taking delivery of male and female cheetahs, and building a new enclosure for a bull elephant.

The series, Moran concludes, 'had the solid, even dull, worthiness that is so much a feature of Crawford's.'

The two series of The Henderson Kids (produced two years apart) explore the changing circumstances of Steve and Tamara Henderson, as they first go to live with their uncle in a small seaside community after the hit-and-run death of their mother (series one) and then return to the city to live with their father (series two).

Each series had an over-arching story arc: in the first series, the 'kids' and their friends attempt to stop a predatory property developer, and in the second series, the 'kids' and their new gang stop a group of thieves who are targeting the Hendersons' father.

According to Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, series one cost $3 million to produce over a six-month period, and series two cost $3.5 million to produce. Intended for a 7:30pm timeslot, series one was instead shown in the late afternoon. Series two reverted to a 7:30pm timeslot, as an attempt to capture some of the youth demographic of Hey Hey Its Saturday.

An attempt to re-invoke the popularity that police procedurals had enjoyed a decade earlier, Special Squad was the most expensive program produced in Australia up to 1985 (at $150,000 per episode), yet received such lukewarm ratings that Channel Ten chose not to commission a second series.

According to Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series,

it was good to watch, with expert stunt work and special effects. With well-paced narratives, intelligently and nicely worked out situations and plenty of emphasis on the villains and victims, Special Squad was just as watchable and entertaining as Homicide had been in its last series.

According to Moran, the failure of Special Squad lay both in its difference from and its similarity to Homicide. The novelty (of Australian accents and Australian locations) that had helped make Homicide so successful was no longer in play, and 'the sight of tough men (on both sides of the law) made the program [Special Squad] seem very old-fashioned. In addition, the plethora of other Australian dramas on air at the time gave viewers more than enough alternatives.'

When someone from Eve's terrorist past traces her to Australia, she grabs her teenage daughter Chrissie and runs not only from him but also from the men chasing him.

'In the glittering world of high fashion, beauty is only skin deep! Barbara Kennedy is a successful business woman in the fashion and modelling industry. In the lead up to the Annual Fashion Designers Awards night, her boyfriend finally proposes to her. But everything else is not going well. On the evening of the awards, Barbara realises that one of her own models is her illegitimate daughter, given up for adoption years earlier. Worse than this she is about to walk into the hands of a murderer.'

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