Cirrus@Austlit

A live-action puppet show, Li'l Horrors followed the misadventures of the students at a school run by Morbidda Bates, a retired horror-film actress. The students included examples of key monsters from horror films: vampires, Frankenstein's monster, gorgons, mummies, zombies, werewolves, and swamp creatures.

According to December Films' press release for the series:

Li'l Horrors is a children's puppet sitcom specifically produced for the 5-8 year old age group. This is an age group who are currently not well catered for. Much programming is made for pre-schoolers and for 9 year olds and above. Li'l Horrors is created for this in between age group. It does not talk down to its audience or aim over its head. It is, however, infused with enough wit and off-the-wall humour to engage an even wider audience. Aimed well at [its] target audience, it is modern, slick, sly, funny and irreverent.

The program also focuses strongly on difference, with each of the characters quite strongly physically different from one another, as well as widely different in behavious and characteristics.

Chuck Finn follows Charles 'Chuck' Finn, a Canadian boy whose parents move from Toronto to the Australian country town of Tingalla. At first, he longs desperately to return to Toronto, but he soon finds the decommissioned and derelict paddle steamer the Tingalla Rose. Soon, he and his friends--some of whom are ghostly, rather than mortal--are enchanted by the possibility of getting the Tingalla Rose running again and seduced by life on the Murray River.

Unfortunately for Chuck Finn, Barron Entertainment declared bankruptcy during the production of season two. A truncated season of six episodes was completed and released, but the production was abandoned at that point.

'A fast-paced television drama set within the fascinating environment of a State Coroner's office complex. Each day a team of highly trained professionals deal with the questions of deaths, murders, accidents, suicides, fires, drownings and even the odd natural cause. We see their battles with grieving families, slow or meddling authorities and organized crime, from the initial inquiry through to the courtroom appearances and the Coroner's final verdict and recommendations for trial or reform.'

Source: Australian Television Information Archive (http://www.australiantelevision.net/statecoroner/statecoroner.html). (Sighted: 8/3/2013)

An edgy and off-beat crime series that relies heavily on humour, contemporary music, and a touch of the bizarre, centring on the character of Elvis Maginnis. An ex-cop from the wrong side of the tracks, Maginnis now runs his own dry-cleaning business but still finds himself drawn into the shady side of life.

'The series is based on a national park ranger, her two children, their friends and how they form the Bush Patrol to help protect the park and its native inhabitants. There's plenty of adventure and fun featuring Australia's unique flora and fauna and modern family relationships.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 3/12/2013)

Science fiction in a stricter (and less speculative) sense, Sky Trackers followed the adventures of a group of scientists' children living in a remote space-tracking station in the Australian outback. The program had the romantic component common to young-adult programming (with blossoming romance between thirteen-year-old Nikki and fourteen-year-old Mike), but also focused on such topics as ambition, future careers, and scholastic achievement.

Ocean Girl follows the adventures of Jason and Brett Bates, who move with their mother (a reasearch scientist studying whale song) to an underwater research station near Port Douglas. There, they accidentally meet Neri, a young girl with super-human strength, the ability to breathe underwater, and an affinity for communicating with whales. As the series progresses through four seasons, the Bateses (and the audience) learn more about Neri's arrival on Earth, her home planet, and the ecosystem of their own home planet.

Ocean Girl, one of the earliest productions to come out of Jonathan M. Shiff Productions, is creator Jonathan Shiff's first science-fiction program; his name has subsequently become synonymous with children's science-fiction and fantasy television programs, through such shows as Cybergirl and H2O.

Ocean Girl is ecological science fiction, in that it uses the genre of science fiction to explore the consequences of exploiting Earth's resources. For example, as the program progresses, Dr Dianne Bates (mother of protagonists Jason and Brett) shifts from her early role as cetologist to a more active role as environmental protectionist, in response to the increasing threat of building large underwater constructions in the delicate ecosystem around ORCA. Similarly, season four shows the devastating effects of a 'Red Virus' on the oceans of Neri's home world.

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.'

In 1910, Alan Marshall is a thirteen-year-old boy is dealing with the after-effects of polio but still dreams of being a famous horseman like the town's hero, East Driscoll. That summer, however, he learns a lesson that will ultimately shape the rest of his life.

The first television program from prolific children's television producer Jonathan M. Shiff, Kelly follows the adventures of a police dog who, after being injured at work, is sent to recuperate in the country; here, Kelly becomes the constant companion of Jo Patterson and her friend Danny Foster, and manages to ferret out some criminals even in the country.

'An insight into the private and working lives of barristers.'

Source: Screen Australia.

'The story of a Melbourne house-wife who becomes a member of parliament.'

Source: Screen Australia.

Based on a novel by Norman Lindsay, Saturdee is a fictionalised account of Lindsay's childhood, set in the equally fictional Victorian town of Redheap. According to Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, Lindsay

invented the central character, twelve-year-old Peter Gimble, as a projection of everything he would have liked to have been and he also included a friend of Peter's, Conkey Menders, as a representation of his real boyhood. Saturday was the day the boys and their friends lived for, a time of escape and adventures, after the chores of the week and the coming sabbatical gloom of Sundays.

Moran notes that since the writers and the director/producer had previously been involved with the ABC, it is surprising that this was not an ABC production. Instead, it was commissioned by the Seven Network. Shot over eleven weeks on location in Creswick, Victoria, the program cost $1.3 million to produce, but rated well with its target audience.

A children's television series, Zoo Family followed the adventures of Dr David Mitchell, veterinary surgeon at Melbourne Zoo, and his children Susie and Nick (all of whom live within zoo grounds). Additional characters include the head groundsman, a young vet graduate, the zoo manager, and the zoo trustees. According to Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series,

The latter are perpetually scheming over trust money under their control and it is left to the others to ensure that animals and enclosures are maintained. Beyond this human family, the larger family of the series is animals in the zoo. Each episode features a particular animal or group of animals in the zoo. Successive episodes concern such events as the discovery and treatment of sore eyes on a seal, taking delivery of male and female cheetahs, and building a new enclosure for a bull elephant.

The series, Moran concludes, 'had the solid, even dull, worthiness that is so much a feature of Crawford's.'

The two series of The Henderson Kids (produced two years apart) explore the changing circumstances of Steve and Tamara Henderson, as they first go to live with their uncle in a small seaside community after the hit-and-run death of their mother (series one) and then return to the city to live with their father (series two).

Each series had an over-arching story arc: in the first series, the 'kids' and their friends attempt to stop a predatory property developer, and in the second series, the 'kids' and their new gang stop a group of thieves who are targeting the Hendersons' father.

According to Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, series one cost $3 million to produce over a six-month period, and series two cost $3.5 million to produce. Intended for a 7:30pm timeslot, series one was instead shown in the late afternoon. Series two reverted to a 7:30pm timeslot, as an attempt to capture some of the youth demographic of Hey Hey Its Saturday.

According to Moran's Guide to Australian TV Series, Holiday Island was something of an attempt to emulate the appeal of the American television series The Love Boat. Set on a tropical island holiday resort, the concept was, as Moran notes,

a good one with the potential for a continuous series of new characters in the guide of holiday guests, and the possibility of romance and other entanglements between them and the regular characters who worked at the resort. The opportunities for the intervention of nature in the shape of such happenings as cyclones and storms, and the appearance from time to time of more eccentric and enigmantic characters who had come to the island, offered promise.

But the program was broadcast without fanfare in the middle of the ratings season, to replace the poorly rating Bellamy, and only managed moderately good ratings. It was cancelled in 1982.

A serial drama set in an airport, which followed the familiar soap-opera structure of combining self-contained guest stories (usually involving stranded passengers, drug trafficking, and the like) with ongoing narratives affecting the regular cast.

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

Industry wags suggested at the time that Skyways was Crawford's version of the Ross Hunter feature film smash hit of the early 1970s, Airport. A soapie with an airport setting, Skyways was a chance to say hello again to many television drama faces, including Tony Bonner, Bruce Barry, Carmen Duncan, Ken James, Tina Bursill, Brian James and Gerard Kennedy.

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.

An hour-long sit-com set in a men's prison, The Bluestone Boys ran to twenty-six episodes, but was not one of Crawford Productions' more successful programs. According to Moran, in his Guide to Australian Television Series, 'The boys in question were male prisoners supervised by a mixture of idiot trustees headed by a Nazi-like Chuck Faulkner. The comedy of the male group outsmarting its supervisors should have been funnier, given the experience of Crawford writers such as Ian Jones and Terry Stapleton, but The Bluestone Boys fades into insignificance when compared with programs such as Bilko, McHale's Navy and Porridge.'