Cirrus@Austlit

The Nostradamus Kid is a semi-autobiographical account of the early life of Bob Ellis. Protagonist Ken Elkin is a young, over-sexed, and hyperactive youth with a taste for personal melodrama. While attending an annual Seventh Day Adventist camp in 1956, he is led to believe that the end of the world is imminent and fears that his true love for the pastor's daughter will never be consummated. But the world doesn't end. Some six years later, he arrives in Sydney to attend university. While his religion has receded, Elkin's waywardly obsessive sexuality and belief in the apocalypse come to a head with the advent of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The much-anticipated apocalypse is once again postponed, however.

'The Logan family run a small hotel in the remote township of Cooma, a dusty yet peaceful place to call home. But the building of an enormous dam is about to turn Cooma into a wild new frontier. With the surge of hopeful immigrants, shady hustlers and colourful characters - life will never be quite the same for the Logan family - a dramatic existence seasoned with passion and danger, cultural intrigue and the inescapable bustle of change.'

Source: Publisher's blurb for the DVD release.

'They're women of action, they're women of the '90s, they're intelligent, highly trained and resourceful. But in the police force they call them "skirts".'

Source: Screen Australia

A mini-series tracing the wartime exploits of Nancy Wake, one of the most decorated Allied operatives of World War II.

The mini-series traces Nancy's marriage to French industrialist Henri Fiocca, their opposition to the Vichy government and involvement in the French Resistance, Henri's capture and death, and Nancy's activities behind enemy lines. Though Moran notes, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, that Wake's autobiography was the 'foundation around which the mini-series was based', he also notes that 'the real Nancy Wake was not entirely happy with the series and she made this known to all at the premiere.'

Moran is ultimately rather dismissive of the split focus of the mini-series, arguing that 'Part 1 has followed Henri into prison and torture, but the narrative effectively forgets this figure to concentrate on the super exploits of Nancy, the commando. This is a pity given the superb and moving performance of John Waters in the role of Henri as against the less interesting work of Noni Hazlehurst in the role of Nancy.'

The first of two 1980s' mini-series on Australian involvement in the Vietnam War, both of which, as Moran notes in his Guide to Australian TV Series, follow very similar plotlines, in terms of tracing the tension between the war and the peace movement. Whereas Vietnam explored this tension through sibiling relationships, the ideologically opposed protagonists in Sword of Honour are lovers.

Though Sword of Honour aired the year before Vietnam, Moran considers it inferior to its (independently developed) successor:

Andrew Clarke is particularly wooden in the central role, a mixture of poor casting, writing and acting, and although Tracy Mann is rather better, characters seem stiff compared with the characters in Vietnam. However, in justification of this series, it is worth noting that it is eight not ten hours in length, and therefore there is less narrative space available here to develop the dense historical and referential textures of the other series.

The series cost $5 million to produce over twenty weeks, and received good ratings when it aired on Australian television.

A fictionalised account of the life of real-life Melbourne-based gangster Joseph Leslie Theodore 'Squizzy' Taylor, who enjoyed a fearsome reputation in Melbourne before dying in 1927 in a mutually fatal gunfight with Sydney-based rival gangster John Daniel 'Snowy' Cutmore.