Cirrus@Austlit

According to Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, City West was 'the first multilingual drama series produced in Australia. With some dialogue in English, the series variously had different dramatic characters speaking Greek, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, Polish and Russian subtitled in English.'

The program was set in a legal aid office (part of a migrant community centre) in the western suburbs of Sydney, and focused strongly on the real difficulties facing migrants living in the outer suburbs, including, according to Moran, 'unscrupulous car dealers, illegal social security operations, industrial disputes among migrant workers and the problems facing newly arrived migrants in adjusting to their new homeland.'

The desire for a multi-ethnic cast caused some problems for the producers. Moran says, 'Faced with the relative lack of ethnic actors and actresses in the mainstream film and television industry, the producers went to different ethnic theatre groups to find migrants to populate different episodes.'

According to Don Storey, in his Classic Australian Television, The Young Doctors was the result of Grundy's association with Ron McLean, who devised a pilot for a program called City Hospital at the same time as he was developing the ultimately unsuccessful King's Men.

Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, notes that

The domain of the serial was young viewers, and accordingly the emphasis was on romance and relationships at the Albert Memorial Hospital. Divorce, sex, social and medical problems were all off-limits for this deliberately lightweight serial concerning the various doctors, nurses and patients at the hospital.... However, shootings, bombings and invasions by dangerous psychotics were all permissable ways of removing regular characters and rearranging relationships.

Though less critically and commerically successful than its rival The Sullivans, The Young Doctors ran for five years, ultimately amassing more screen time than either The Sullivans or Number 96.

A spy series set, according to Moran in his Guide to Australian TV Series, 'very much in the same locale and situation' as Contrabandits. The two spies work for FIASCO (Federal Intelligence and Security Control Organisation), run out of Canberra by the never-seen and rarely heard Dave Shannon.

Moran notes that Shannon's Mob was glossier than Contrabandits, but also mundane:

In its own eyes the company had made a fundamental mistake in not coming up with a formula that used some real point of Australian difference. Many other countries had harbours, boats, and water. For that matter the special investigation team headed by Shannon was very ordinary indeed.

In his Classic Australian Television, however, Don Storey suggests that 'The spectuacular scenery, particularly of the Harbour, is fully exploited.'

Shannon's Mob received poor treatment from the network (which persistently delayed its televisation) and was widely panned by critics when it did air, perhaps in part because the popularity of spy stories had peaked some decade earlier. Storey concludes:

It would be easy to suspect that the treatment of Shannons Mob, coinciding as it did with the cancellation of the three Crawford cop shows (Homicide, Division 4 and Matlock Police), was part of the plot to sabotage Australian production. However, there is no evidence or even speculation to suggest that anything was deliberately done against the series - although it would be safe to assume that in the prevailing climate nothing positive would have been done to help the series either.

In an early report on the series, The Australian Women's Weekly noted, 'All writers for the series will be Australian, and among them will be some of those who produced the most successful of the "Boney" scripts' (Wed. 10 October 1973, p.10).

'A claim by a bankrupt Wagga Wagga butcher that he was Sir Roger Charles Tichborne, heir to the Tichborne title and estates as twelfth Baronet, resulted ultimately in one of the most famous British criminal trials of all time.'

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

Set on far north Queensland's Great Barrier Reef, this adventure series revolves around a scientific search and recovery team working for General Trust Corporation (GTC), a large Australian industrial and pastoral group. Led by Captain Ted King and his first mate and diving expert Jack Meuraki (a Thursday Islander), the team of scientists and divers are also often required to carry out missions for the government. The team is highly proactive with regard to conservation and vehemently opposed to any type of exploitation of the Reef.

The centre of operations for the team is a 135-foot windjammer named the New Endeavour. The ship also houses a sophisticated piece of electronic equipment called Minus Five (Mineral Identification Nuclear Undersea Seismography Mark V), which the Endeavour team affectionately call 'Grandma,' after the line in 'Little Red Riding Hood': 'What big eyes you have!' Specifically developed for General Trust projects, Grandma serves a number of functions, including providing accurate geological analyses of the seabed and the earth below it. Though Grandma plays a vital role in the various missions and adventures that ensue, the machine's presence must be kept secret, since GTC and the Federal Government are concerned that foreign political and commercial interests might attempt to get hold of the technology (which includes, for example, the ability to locate mineral deposits or sunken wrecks with valuable cargo).

Contrabandits was a fifty-minute procedural series following the Customs Special Branch, an elite group of law-enforcers intercepting contraband in Sydney.

Colin Free was script editor for the series (as well as scripting several episodes).

Source:

Moran's Guide to Australian TV Series

Storey, Don. Classic Australian Television http://www.classicaustraliantv.com/contrab.htm (Sighted 13/9/11)

See also:

Musgrove, Nan. 'Contrabandits'. Australian Women's Weekly 4 October 1967, p.17.

'Smuggling Theme of New Series'. Canberra Times 18 September 1967, p.15.

'Mr Caradoc finds that the eternal triangle contains problems of unexpected dimensions.'

Source:

[Television guide], The Canberra Times, 16 October 1967, p.17.