Cirrus@Austlit

One of Australia's highest rating dramas, All Saints is a Logie Award-winning Australian medical drama set in the fictional All Saints Western General Hospital in suburban Sydney. The stories originally focused on the nursing staff of Ward 17 run by Nursing Unit Manager Terri Sullivan. It was sometimes referred to as the 'garbage ward' because it took the overflow of patients.

In 2004 Network Seven producers overhauled the series in an effort to increase the show's gradually dwindling audience. They achieved this by closing down Ward 17 and transferring some of the staff to the Emergency Department managed by Frank Campion. Several other new lead characters were also introduced. The changes also saw the storylines begin to focus more on the lives of the doctors and nurses.

Another significant change to the series came in early 2009 when the producers introduced the Medical Response Unit. Central to this development was the helicopter which took doctors to rescue situations outside the hopsital and which in turn brought patients to the All Saints Emergency Department. The show's name was also changed at this time to All Saints: Medical Response Unit. The increased production costs created by having scenes shot on location played a part, however, in the series being cancelled mid-year. The series ended with the Emergency Department and Medical Response Unit teams having a dinner to farewell the last remaining original character, Von Ryan on her final day at All Saints.

All Saints was popular in many countries including the United Kingdom, Ireland, Belgium and Iran.

A spin-off from the series The Ferals, Feral TV saw the Ferals, while wandering the sewers looking for a new home, stumble across the cables for a television network. Hacking into the cables, they begin their own pirate television program, but soon prove so popular with the network's core audience that the network dispatches one of their executives to oversee the program.

Set in a small coastal town against the turmoils of murder, mystery and romance, Heartland deals with the death of an Aboriginal girl and the doubts concerning the guilt of her boyfriend, who is arrested for her murder. Vincent Burunga, an Aboriginal police liaison officer working in the town, is an outsider to both the local Aboriginal people and the white justice system, and he finds himself constantly on the edge caught between two cultures trying to understand each other. It explores the developing relationship between Vincent and the newly arrived Elizabeth Ashton. Both are convinced of the young man's innocence but must endure hostility from both the white and black communities and get past the obstacles of their different backgrounds.

The narrative also follows the people from this seaside community and their battle to restructure their own way of life and their struggle to restore their belief in a positive future, despite the obstacles in their path.

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 one-hour soap opera focusing on life in a gritty inner-city suburb.

G.P. is an Australian television series that ran for eight seasons. Set in and around a fictional general medical practice in an inner-city suburb, the storylines explore the professional and personal lives of the doctors and staff who worked there.

Like previous Grundy production Waterloo Station, Richmond Hill was an attempt to replicate Crawford Productions' success with the police-drama/soap-opera fusion that was Cop Shop. But like Waterloo Station, it was unsuccessful, limping through a year's worth of poor ratings before being cancelled.

Moran notes in his Guide to Australian TV Series that the program was

designed to fit on the other side of the main evening news, thus hopefully holding viewers already hooked by Neighbours. Although the program had its share of younger characters, it is chiefly remembered for its older players, including the monumental Maggie Kirkpatrick as the pretentious butt of much of the comedy, veteran Gwen Plumb as the caring owner of a boarding house, and Ross Higgins as the police sergeant trying to hold it all together.

Moran also notes that the serial cost $8 million to produce.

'Two stories of a single marriage. Part one belongs to Anne. She is having an affair with Michael, Richard's best friend. Their friends are unaware of the liaison, but Richard knows. Part two belongs to Richard. Richard is in love with Eleanor, another woman he met in Paris. Anne and Richard are equally capable of disloyalty but the outcome of Ann's affair is very different from the outcome of Richard's.'

Source:

[Television guide], Canberra Times, 7 March 1988, p.8.

Television program focusing on a working-class family living in the western suburbs of Sydney, centred around Ed Devereaux (formerly of Skippy) as panel beater George King.

The program aimed for social realism in the presentation of working-class life, but Moran notes (in his Guide to Australian Television) that it did not attract a good initial audience, leading to, firstly, a halt to production and, secondly, an unannounced return to the screen, which also failed to attract good viewing figures.

The pilot episode for a crime drama series that was apparently never made: no trace of it exists outside a script held in the National Film and Sound Archive. The NFSA describes it as 'A police and courtroom drama.'

'Drama about a lengthy industrial dispute involving metal-trade workers in an engineering firm who lose their annual leave because of a one day strike.'

Source: Trove/ (Sighted: 21/9/2012)

Conceived as a male equivalent to the highly successful Prisoner, Punishment was deemed by Channel 10 to have failed after only three episodes had aired, according to Moran in his Guide to Australian TV Series.

Moran says of the series that

Based partly on true case histories, Punishment is a story of survival as prisoners and warders come to terms with being trapped within the prison system. ... But Punishment doesn't only focus on the troubles within the Longridge walls. Wives and girlfriends of both the officers and the prisoners are beseiged with problems that stem from the prison system. They learn there is no escape. Everyone from the superintendent down is serving a 'sentence'.

According to Moran, the failure of Punishment is that it was 'too hooked on realism', resulting in a program that 'was almost unremittingly heavy, with most of the prisoners and their guards being completely unsympathetic and unpleasant.'

Pulled from the air after the first three episodes had screened, Punishment was later re-introduced in the non-ratings period, where it quickly flopped.

Reports in the contemporary press, however, indicate that the series was cancelled much earlier, while it was still in production. According to a report in the Australian Women's Weekly in 1980, the series was dropped by the network before it went to air and after only fourteen episodes had been taped:

'It is believed the decision over the series was made because of internal rivalries between Sydney and Melbourne, particularly by pitting Punishment against the already successful Prisoner series.'

These claims were immediately counteracted by Network Ten executives, who reported that they had only ever commissioned twenty-six episodes of the series.

Further Reference:

Fiona Manning, 'Shock Move: TEN drops Punishment!', Australian Women's Weekly, Wednesday 8 October 1980, p.151S.

'New Prison Show Will Go to Air', Australian Women's Weekly, Wednesday 15 October 1980, p.201S.

Series following the role of a priest in an inner-city Sydney suburb.

The Spring and Fall television series comprised one-off dramas by different playwrights, focusing on life in Australia in the early 1980s.

Chopper Squad follows the adventures of a helicopter surf rescue team based on Sydney's northern beaches, as they deal with various difficult rescues and occasionally come into close contact with desperate criminals.

The program suffered from long hiatuses between the pilot and series one, and between series one and series two. Furthermore, Don Storey notes, in his Classic Australian Television, that

Unfortunately, the quality of the scripts varied immensely. Some episodes had excellent dramatic narratives, and the viewers would be on the edge of their seats watching the rescue process. Other plots were contrived merely to justify the use of a helicopter, or to show off some other facet of the surf rescue operation, or were just corny. This variation in quality occurred not only from episode to episode, but quite often within an episode.

However, Storey concludes that

If the scripts left a lot to be desired, the same could not be said for the other aspects of the programme. The actors all gave good performances, and the technical quality is excellent by any standards. Extensive external location work was used, with internal sets being kept to a minimum. The camerawork is second to none, highlighting the magnificent scenery of the Sydney coastline to great effect.

Albert Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, notes that 'World distribution rights to the series were bought by Paramount Pictures, which sold the production to Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines and Britain'.

'Lee and Martin, Vinnie and Tina are next-door neighbours and the best of friends until Lee decides she and Martin should tell their spouses about their affair. Lee believes it will bring them closer together — she is mistaken.'

Source:

[TV guide], Canberra Times, 17 March 1978, p.24. (Read via Trove.)

A private investigator is called over to Perth, Western Australia, by the widow of an old friend: her seemingly respectable bank-manager husband has committed suicide, and the trigger seems to be a network of pornography and blackmail.