Cirrus@Austlit

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.'

'Relegated to his grandparents' country home for the school vacation, Tony discovers his grandfather's secret laboratory and has a holiday he never expected'.

Source: Screen Australia.

'Two kids contrive to bring love to an unlikely older couple.'

Source: Screen Australia.

Like previous Grundy production Waterloo Station, Richmond Hill was an attempt to replicate Crawford Productions' success with the police-drama/soap-opera fusion that was Cop Shop. But like Waterloo Station, it was unsuccessful, limping through a year's worth of poor ratings before being cancelled.

Moran notes in his Guide to Australian TV Series that the program was

designed to fit on the other side of the main evening news, thus hopefully holding viewers already hooked by Neighbours. Although the program had its share of younger characters, it is chiefly remembered for its older players, including the monumental Maggie Kirkpatrick as the pretentious butt of much of the comedy, veteran Gwen Plumb as the caring owner of a boarding house, and Ross Higgins as the police sergeant trying to hold it all together.

Moran also notes that the serial cost $8 million to produce.

A serial set in the fictional Waterloo Police Station, Waterloo Station had strong soap-opera tendencies: Moran notes in his Guide to Australian TV Series that 'It was rightly seen at the time as trying to fuse The Restless Years with Cop Shop, but without much success'.

Despite focusing overtly on the police and trainees at the station, 'there was', Moran notes, 'little emphasis not only on crime but even on the station itself. Instead, the action moved between the station, a boarding house and the homes of a policeman and a detective who coincidentally are married to sisters. The latter locations, in particular, enabled the series to focus on young people as well as some of the older figures.'

The program was axed after three months on air.

Set in a small, fictional, New South Wales country town called Wandin Valley, A Country Practice focused on the staffs of the town's medical practice and local hospital and on the families of the doctors, nurses, and patients. Many of the episodes also featured guest characters (frequently patients served by the practice) through whom various social and medical problems were explored. Although often considered a soap opera, the series was not built around an open-ended narrative; instead, the two one-hour episodes screened per week formed a self-contained narrative block, though many of the storylines were developed as sub-plots for several episodes before becoming the focus of a particular week's storyline. While the focus was on topical issues such as youth unemployment, suicide, drug addiction, HIV/AIDS, and terminal illness, the program did sometimes explore culturally sensitive issues, including, for example, the Aboriginal community and their place in modern Australian society.

Among the show's principal characters were Dr Terence Elliott, local policeman Sergeant Frank Gilroy, Esme Watson, Shirley Dean Gilroy, Bob Hatfield, Vernon 'Cookie' Locke, and Matron Margaret 'Maggie' Sloan. In addition to its regularly rotating cast of characters, A Country Practice also had a cast of semi-regulars who would make appearances as the storylines permitted. Interestingly, while the series initially targeted the adult and older youth demographic, it became increasingly popular with children over the years.

Set in the fictional Riverside Police Station, Cop Shop combined self-contained stories focusing on specific police investigations with the type of open-ended serial storylines familiar from soap operas. This allowed Crawford Productions to make use of the expertise gained from their highly successful police procedurals (all recently cancelled) and serials such as The Sullivans (then still airing).

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

Although the format may sound predictable and routine, in fact it was pioneering. In putting women police on the screen, Crawford's were moving Australian crime drama away from being an all-male domain. In addition, by choosing a suburban police station populated both by uniformed police and plainclothes detectives, Cop Shop introduced an upstairs and a downstairs world. The latter, in particular, began to exert its own attractions with handsome young men and women in the roles of the new constables.

Our Man in the Company, a humorous expose of the world of big business, began life as a putative program called Our Man in Canberra. Like A Nice Day at the Office, Our Man in Canberra started as an episode of the ABC's comedy anthology program The Comedy Game. Three additional episodes covering the misadventures of backbencher Humphrey Sullivan had been filmed (at a cost of $30,000) before the ABC were notified by the Federal Attorney-General's Department that the program (for which advance publicity had been released) breached Section 116 (2) of the Broadcasting and Television Act: 'the Commission or a licensee shall not broadcast or televise a dramatisation of any political matter which is then current or was current at any time during the five preceding years.'

For a detailed account of the furore that followed, see Don Storey's Classic Australian Television.

The end result was that the three completed episodes of Our Man in Canberra (excluding the already-screened pilot) were never screened, and the program was re-structured as Our Man in the Company, focusing on an inside view of big business rather than politics. As Don Storey notes, however, the re-structure was fairly superficial. Storey quotes writer John O'Grady as saying,

Very odd company, this one. It has repatriation schemes for its old soldier employees, problems with censorship, an old-age pension scheme which nobody thinks is enough, and battles with women who believe the company constitution infringes their rights. What other strange things does this company have on its plate? Oh yes, it's been experiencing a rural crisis lately! We had difficulty adapting three of the original scripts on Aboriginal land rights, the Russian presence in the Indian Ocean and the U.S. takeover of our resources. But we have made the programme legal now.

Our Man in the Company ran for two series (a total of fifteen episodes). Storey summarises it as follows: 'Taken at face value, Our Man in the Company is an enjoyable series. Taken as a disguised Our Man in Canberra, it becomes a very funny and clever series.'

The Spoiler arose from the pilot for a proposed late 1960s' television program called Vendetta, in which a policeman left the force to pursue a private vendetta against a crime boss. Though Vendetta was not picked up as a series, the central idea was later re-visited by producer Robert Bruning. Bruning was approached by the marketing director of TCN-9; the network wanted a police program, but Bruning was keen to differentiate his program from the plethora of police procedurals then airing. Bruning settled on the notion of a vengeful former police officer.

According to Don Storey, in his Classic Australian Television, 'Bruce Barry plays Jim Carver, the 'spoiler' of the title. Carver is a Sydney detective who discovers that Sir Ian Mason, a leading respectable businessman, is head of a crime syndicate, and is kicked out of the police force because of his investigations that have so far turned up no evidence of complicity. His dimissal makes Carver all the more determined to find the evidence he needs to bring Mason to justice.'

Of the central character, Storey argues that 'Carver was a rough, tough character. When he needs information he often extracts it by force. He drinks hard. He's a womaniser, and he treats his women rough.' Storey also notes that the program became notorious for the quantity of nude and semi-nude scenes: 'A number of girls come into contact with Carver who end up in various states of undress, usually for no reasons of any pertinence to the plot.' Carver is supported by a sympathetic barmaid/sometime girlfriend, a friend in the police force, and an underworld informant.

The Spoiler was not successful: it rated poorly from its original airing in Sydney, so poorly that neither Melbourne nor Brisbane television stations even attempted to air it in a prime-time slot.

Summing up critics' responses to the program, Storey suggests,

The anti-hero was an aggressive, boozing chauvinist who belted the crooks and treated women like dirt, and was a sort of warring psychopath tolerated by the police and not understood by anyone. The show downgraded women, upgraded the law of the boot and took a dog-eat-dog view of society. There was very little for men to identify with, and certainly nothing to appeal to women.

While Storey acknowledges the legitimacy of these arguments against the program, he also suggests that the program might have been ahead of its time. The Spoiler cannot, however, be re-evaluated in terms of modern television, since the master tapes were wiped and no other copies of the episodes have surfaced.

A comedy drama set on Sydney's north shore, The Godfathers centres on nine-year-old Mike Varga and his widowed Hungarian mother. Crippled by the car accident that killed her husband, Maria Varga is confined to a wheelchair. To help financially, she takes in three boarders: Chris (a forty-something taxi driver), Pete (a thirty-year-old commercial photographer) and Gary (a twenty-one-year-old garage attendant who has just moved to Sydney from the country). Mike is an only child and a bit introspective, but the three boarders become fond of him and Mike adopts them as his 'godfathers.' Under their influence, he becomes a happy, outgoing kid, although they are often tested by his youthful ways.

Tensions are frequently raised through the on-going presence of Elizabeth Dent, a Child Welfare Officer who is constantly checking on Mike to see that he is being well cared for. After Pete leaves the Vargases' house to get married, he is replaced by another 'godfather,' Dave.