Cirrus@Austlit

When Rodney and Jessica witness two aliens crash landing on Earth, they undertake to protect them by roping them into joining the world's most unsuccessful children's television program, Kid's Breakfast (nicknamed Pig's Breakfast). Disguised as characters on the program, Grob and Meeba (and their pilot Queegle) are forbidden to reveal their real identities: the media believe them to be eccentric actors who prefer to stay in character (and costume). But the situation is complicated by the fact that the crashed spaceship was a school bus, and Grob and Meeba, although genuine aliens, are also genuine teenagers.

Alana lives in the year 3000AD, a utopian time in which the citizens' only concern is the ramifications of The Great Disaster that befell the world in 2500AD. While participating in a time travel experiment, Alana is kidnapped by Silverthorn, a criminal from the year 2500AD, whom her tutor has accidentally brought back with her. Escaping from Silverthorn in the year 1990AD, Alana elicits the assistance of local girl Jenny to help her both stop Silverthorn and get back to the time capsule before she is stranded permanently in the past.

The Girl from Tomorrow was an early collaboration between Mark Shirrefs and John Thomson, who had previously both written for the short-lived sit-com Let the Blood Run Free. The pair became significant figures in Australian children's science-fiction and fantasy television: together, they went on to write The Girl from Tomorrow Part II: Tomorrow's End, Spellbinder, and Spellbinder II: Land of the Dragon Lord.

'Two social workers reach breaking point with the heartless welfare system which treats destitute children as criminals. Reaching out to these children means entering into the world of drain kids, pinball parlour pimps, graffiti gangs, the 14-year-old dealers and their 12-year-old customers. It's an exhausting and sometimes dangerous occupation but they care about the kids with a passion and the successes make it all worthwhile.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 28/6/2013)

An Italian magistrate, Paolo Pizzi, pursues the Calabrian Mafia to Australia but finds that his son (who is married to an Australian woman) is involved.

A short-lived television program focusing on a group of journalists and the extent to which they were willing to go in pursuit of a story. The program was an independent production by John Edwards, but did employ some ABC staff members.

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

has a nice eye for compositions, clever and inventive touches of situation and camerawork, as well as good performances from the leads. The credit sequences and soundtrack, as well as the figure of world-weary loner Frank Buchanan, all gesture to the great cinema tradition of film noir. Frank's slouching trench coat and the many verbal references to stars and films of the 1940s and 1950s doubly secure this general framework.

Moran notes that Stringer could occasionally be 'routine and pedestrian', but concludes that, in general, it was 'one of those rare inventive series which, like, say, The Fast Lane, flowered briefly before disappearing'.

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.

Mini series tracing the devastation wreaked on Darwin by Cyclone Tracy during Christmas Eve and Christmas Day 1974.

According to Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, the mini-series fall roughly into three sections: the period immediately before the cyclone (in which the main characters are introduced), the night on which the cyclone hit, and the aftermath. As with so many disaster films and mini-series, Moran notes, Cyclone Tracy 'focuses on ordinary people caught up in an extraordinary event. The action is mostly documentary in tone and feeling, though one strand concerned with an American adventurer and a cargo of drugs is melodramatically quite out of keeping with the other stories.'

Moran notes that, American drug-runners aside, the mini-series works because of 'the low-key realism of the stories and the performances, the excellent special effects and sets, and the skilful integration of actual footage'. The program cost $4.5 million to produce.