Cirrus@Austlit

The president of Catalyst software company hires five high-school whiz-kids to help save her failing business.

The program's interest in artifical intelligence, the Internet, and the video-game industry was comparatively unusual for the time. As with other Australian Children's Television Foundation programs, the focus was on the child protagonists, all Melbourne high-school students with a keen interest in video gaming, who are recruited as games testers by Alexandra Davis, president of Catalyst, in the hopes that they will be able to revitalise her failing business.

Produced in association with the Disney Channel, Crash Zone was successful in Canada and the United Kingdom, as well as Australia.

'Inspired by true events, Stingers reveals the shadowy and ambiguous world of undercover cops — people with covert lives and constantly changing identities. They are police who defeat crime from within the criminal world — always without a badge and frequently without protection. The series follows the lives of the operatives as they befriend and betray those on the other side of the law. For these select few, it is a deadly way of life.The undercover cops of Stingers are a unique breed. They must juggle their own lives — love, laughter, family and humanity — with the tension of the criminal personas they adopt in their passion for justice.'

Source: Australian Television Information Archive. (Sighted: 7/6/2013)

'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)

An American/Australian co-production, this series was a revival of the original 1964 - 1967 series Flipper.

The show's production is sharply divided between seasons one and two on one side and seasons three and four on the other.

Seasons one and two aired in first-run syndication in the US, as American television networks turned away from funding comparatively expensive one-hour dramas in the late 1980s and 1990s. These two seasons were made in Australia and took advantage of local directors and other crew, but, notably, the script-writers were exclusively American (as far as they have been traced).

For seasons three and four, Flipper left first-run syndication and aired in the US on the new network PAX TV (now Ion Television). These two seasons were also made in Australia and directed by Australians, but for the first time, they also used Australian script-writers: of the writers who have been traced for seasons three and four, all of the season three writers and the majority of the season four writers are Australian.

For full information on the script-writers, see the list of episodes on the film details page of this record.

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.'

Inspired by A. B. Paterson's classic poem and set in a fictional Snowy Mountains township called Paterson's Ridge, this turn-of-the-nineteenth-century adventure concerns wealthy cattle-station owner and widower Matt McGregor and his three children, Colin (the town preacher), Rob (played by Guy Pearce), and Danni (the tomboyish youngest daughter). Unresolved sexual tension comes in the shape of Matt's independent, free-spirited childhood friend, the recently widowed Kathleen O'Neil, who returns to Paterson's Ridge with her son after having spent many years in England.

Produced by the same television production company responsible for the successful medical drama G.P., Law of the Land moved away from the inner-city urbanity of G.P. Set in the fictional small town of Merringanee, series one involves the arrival in town of young magistrate Peter Lawrence, who (thanks to a stolen car and a long-buried body) learns that the locals have their own way of enforcing the law.

Series two involved a different character, Kate Chalmers, unravelling the truth behind Peter Lawrence's death.

The program ran to a total of four thirteen-episode series, yet it is obscure enough today that little information about it is readily available.

Cinematographer Brendan Lavelle did, however, contribute an article to Metro Magazine ('A Day in the Life: The Work of a Cinematographer', issue 99) while he was working on the series.

A mixture of live-action, puppetry, animation, and documentary, Lift Off centred on a group of children who lived in the same neighbourhood and whose imaginations made their environment a world of fun and excitement. However, the program also explored issues such as pain, loneliness, jealousy, and anger. The program was aimed at three-year-old to eight-year-old viewers (as defined by Harvard University developmental psychologist Howard Gardner), and was linked to school curricula through the Curriculum Corporation of Australia.

A television series ostensibly based on Arthur Upfield's series of detective novels, and stemming from a telemovie aired two years earlier.

After protests from Indigenous groups about the casting of a white actor as a descendant of Detective Napoleon Bonaparte, the production was altered to make the character a white man who had once lived with Indigenous Australians. As such, it bears little real connection to Upfield's novels.

The series was not a success, and was cancelled after the first thirteen episodes.

Two series tracing the ambitions of Sim, who longs to be a clown.

In series one:

'Fifteen-year-old Sim wants to be a clown. His third set of foster parents think he's as nutty as an Australian fruit cake. So he runs away, joins an outback rodeo, then a travelling circus. He is taught the art of clowning by a former clown, Anatole, an iron-willed Frenchman who is no longer able to perform. When Anatole returns to Paris, Sim follows, and is finally given the chance to perform at the famous Winter Circus'.

In series two:

'Sim is now a clown at the Winter Circus in Paris. Ambitious and determined to become a great clown, Sim becomes intrigued with the 'modern' circus routines pioneered by Circus Oz and Cirque du Soleil. When Sim suddenly inherits a share in the Rathnow Circus back in Australia, he has a chance to create his own 'suitcase' style of circus that is unique to his own character and experience.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 13/11/2012)

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.

A rocker whose glory days were twenty years earlier in the 1970s unexpectedly finds that he has twin children when their mother dies in a plane crash and they and their carer move in with him.

'Bobby must choose between family and music when he's offered a six-month tour. Anna continues playing the piano.'

Source: Australian Television Information Archive. (Sighted: 13/6/2013)

'Drama series set in and around an Australian embassy in the fictional Islamic country of Ragaan, where day to day diplomacy is the stuff of danger and news headlines rather than privilege and cocktails.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 10/4/2014)

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

Source: Screen Australia.

Like other Crawford's programs in the 1980s (such as The Flying Doctors), All The Way began as a six-part mini-series, and was spun off into an ongoing series (which began production before the mini-series was screened on Australian television).

Set in the 1960s, the program follows three families through key historical events both abroad (such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy) and in Australia (such as the Maralinga atomic tests and the Bogle-Chandler case).

According to Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, the program was 'a soap opera neither any worse nor any better than a host of others such as Cop Shop, The Box, The Restless Years or Neighbours', but it 'has an orientation towards the worlds of work and public affairs that, to the extent that one can generalise about the above-mentioned programs, tends to be present in Crawford soaps and missing from those produced at Grundy's.'

Moran is, however, critical of the program's setting, suggesting that the comparative lack of identifiable iconography in the early 1960s means the program 'looks and sounds little different from the present. Instead the viewer has the feeling that the costumes, props and sets were all found at the local Salvation Army depot.' The result, he argues, is that 'the serial just looks old-fashioned and therefore potentially of interest only to older viewers.'