Cirrus@Austlit

Reuniting script-writer Gordon Chater and Ralph Peterson (who had previously successfully worked together on the highly successful sit-com My Name's McGooley - What's Yours?), Snake Gully with Dad and Dave was a modernised and updated version of Steele Rudd's popular characters--albeit a version that, as Don Storey notes in his Classic Australian Television, was based more on the 1930s' radio version than on the original novels.

Just as the radio version had updated the setting to a contemporary 1930s, Peterson's television scripts updated the setting again to the early 1970s, moving Dad and Dave further away from the late nineteenth-century selector culture of Rudd's original narratives. In this version, then, Dad and Dave are farmers on a small, struggling farm.

Despite these alterations, Storey notes that 'ATN-7 held high hopes for the series. The same combination of Ralph Peterson and Gordon Chater that worked on the McGooley series, couple with well-known and liked traditional Australian characters should have guaranteed success.'

It did not. The series was poorly received by both critics and viewers. Storey concludes that 'Budget limitations notwithstanding, the fact remains that a major shortcoming of the series was that the characters did not work well in a modern setting. It can be argued that if the traditional setting could not have been maintained, then the series should not have been made at all.'

A thirteen-episode sit-com from the production company that was shortly to launch soap-opera Number 96.

The premise involves three men and two women who, for purely economic reasons, share a basement flat: Jeremy (who works in television), Mark (a medical student), Bob (an accountant), Jennifer (a university student), and Laura (a model and receptionist).

The program's tension comes from their landlord Tinto, whose prurient distress at the mixed-gender tenancy leads him to attempt various methods of evicting them.

According to Don Storey, on his website Classic Australian Television:

'The Group relies, in classic sit-com tradition, on misunderstandings and misinterpretations of events to generate comedy, which are usually the result of the scatter-brained antics of Laura. There is no underlying social comment, other than the overall theme of not judging by appearances as Tinto does. The sole purpose of The Group is to entertain, and this it does.'

Though The Group was popular with audiences, it was not picked up for a second season for various reasons, including (according to Don Storey) the lack of overseas sales, Bruce Gyngell's departure from the Seven Network, and Cash Harmon Television's planned production of Number 96 for the Ten Network.

The first satirical/comedy television series produced in Australia, The Mavis Bramston Show was effectively an adaptation of the stage revue format, the genre out of which many of its stars emerged as professional actors. The writers took aim at any number of contemporary issues, people, and social institutions, often garnering a good deal of controversy in the process.

The show's title derived from a long-held Australian theatrical in-joke concerning unimpressive overseas 'stars' brought out to headline local productions but who were in fact either second-rate performers or whose careers were in decline in their own countries. Such people became known as 'Mavis Bramstons.' In the TV series, the joke was played out by having the Mavis character (played by Maggie Dence) appear only at the beginning of each episode, as she arrives at Sydney airport and is greeted by the waiting press.