Cirrus@Austlit

As with its predecessors, The Interpretaris and Vega 4, Phoenix Five took its name from the spaceship that was the show's focus: the flagship of Earth Space Control, with a two-man, one-woman team, assisted by their computeroid, Karl. The show had two primary villains. For the first thirteen episodes, the villain was Zodian (the evil scientist of Vega 4, now re-cast and with a newly blue skintone), who sought galactic domination from his base on Zebula 9, with the support of his twin computers, Alpha and Zeta. When Zodian was captured, he was replaced as villain by Platonus, assisted by a computer called Tommy.

Rather than following a single story arc as its predecessors had, Phoenix Five was a series of self-contained stories, allowing the script writers to move freely around the galaxies, and explore whichever crisis the crew happened to come across.

Soourece: Moran's Guide to Australian TV Series and Don Storey's Classic Australian Television (Sighted: 6/10/2011)

After a bridge collapse in Bali kills four adults and twenty-two children, the British and Australian construction and transport companies involved struggle to avoid the blame for the accident.

New Zealand-born producer Roger Mirams followed his earlier children's television programs The Terrific Adventures of the Terrible Ten and The Magic Boomerang with this ship-based adventure series, which, as Don Storey points out in his Classic Australian Television, was one of 'three Australian half-hour adventure series [that] were set on boats' during the first twenty years of Australian television.

Adventures of the Seaspray followed the adventurers of a widowed journalist who is raising his three children on a schooner in the South Pacific (aided by a Fijian crew member, Willyum).

According to Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, 'The 26 half-hour stories have all the adventure material that children love - haunted islands, rescues, shipwrecked sailors, hidden treasure, smugglers and primitive tribes all filmed in exotic Pacific locations.'

Storey concurs with this analysis, and adds

Seaspray was notable for several achievements, apart from a high standard of production. It was filmed on location in an international setting; it was the first Australian television show to be filmed in colour since the 1955 series The Adventures of Long John Silver (made before Australia had television); it was the first co-production with an overseas company; and it had a Fijian native in a lead role, the first Australian series to give such prominence to a non-white person.

Set in the fictional Waratah National Park (NSW), the Skippy series focuses largely on the adventures of a young boy, Sonny Hammond, and his intelligent pet kangaroo, Skippy. Sonny is the youngest child of Head Ranger Matt Hammond. Matt was left a widower in his early forties when his wife Mary died not long after Sonny was born. Other principal characters are Sonny's older brother Mark, Flight Ranger Jerry King (the park's helicopter pilot), and Ranger Clancy Merrick, the teenage daughter of another park ranger.

'When public opinion collides with private beliefs in a small town, the result is a tragedy of intolerance that destroys.'

Source:

[Television guide], The Canberra Times, 19 September 1966, p.16.

'Many lives are at stake while giants of the engineering world struggle for supremacy.'

Source:

[Television guide], The Canberra Times, 25 July 1966, p.14.

A modern version of the Apollo and Daphne story, adapted by Australian script-writer John Warwick from the play by Scottish dramatist James Bridie.

'THIS is a dramatisation of an event in Australian history. In 1797 the "Sydney Cove" was wrecked in Bass Strait. A party under the leadership of Mr. Hugh Thompson set off for help, but the nearest colony was Port Jackson, some 400 miles away through rough scrub country that had never before been traversed by white man. John Warwick opens his play when the party is only 90 miles from their destination. After two months of grinding marching, the party has shrunk from 18 to seven. Capturing the atmosphere of tension and almost hopelessness, John Warwick has constructed a gripping play that holds unwavering interest to the end.'

Source: 'For Next Week', ABC Weekly, 14 April 1951, p.13.