person or book cover
Script cover page (Crawford Collection at the AFI Research Collection)
form y separately published work icon A Political Animal single work   film/TV   crime  
Issue Details: First known date: 1976... 1976 A Political Animal
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All Publication Details

      1976 .
      person or book cover
      Script cover page (Crawford Collection at the AFI Research Collection)
      Extent: 62p.
      (Manuscript) assertion
      Note/s:
      • The script is labelled 'Code 11538' and 'Episode No. 34' on the cover page, although it aired as episode 30. Although this is a later copy of the script and not (as with most Bluey scripts) an original, there is still a discrepancy between the labelling of the script and the final production order.
      • The script contains extensive annotations in blue ink, in a single hand, changing, adding to, or deleting dialogue and, in some cases, whole scenes. While this is more extensively annotated than most Bluey scripts, it is more a matter of changing a few words or perhaps a single line, rather than adding whole swathes of dialogue.
      • The Crawford Collection contains three copies of this script, but only one is held in this file: the other two are filed separately.

      Holdings

      Held at: AFI Research Collection
      Local Id: SC BLU : 30
    • Melbourne, Victoria,: Crawford Productions , 1977 .
      Extent: 47 min. 7 secs (according to the script)p.
      Series: form y separately published work icon Bluey Robert Caswell , Vince Moran , Everett de Roche , James Wulf Simmonds , Tom Hegarty , Gwenda Marsh , Colin Eggleston , David Stevens , Peter A. Kinloch , Keith Thompson , Gregory Scott , Peter Schreck , Denise Morgan , Monte Miller , Ian Jones , John Drew , David William Boutland , Jock Blair , Melbourne : Crawford Productions Seven Network , 1976 Z1815063 1976 series - publisher film/TV crime detective

      According to Moran, in his Guide to Australian Television Series, Bluey (and its Sydney-based rival, King's Men) 'constituted an attempt to revive the police genre after the cancellations of Homicide, Division 4 and Matlock Police'.

      Don Storey, in his Classic Australian Television, summarises the program as follows:

      Bluey is a maverick cop who breaks every stereotype image. He drinks, smokes and eats to excess, and therefore is rather large, but it is his unusual investigative methods that set him apart. He has bent or broken every rule in the book at some stage, to the point where no-one else wants to work with him. But he gets results, and is therefore too valuable to lose, so the powers-that-be banish him to the basement of Russell Street Police Headquarters where he is set up in his own department, a strategem that keeps him out of the way of other cops.

      Moran adds that 'Grills, Diedrich and Nicholson turned in solid performances in the series and the different episodes were generally well paced, providing engaging and satisfying entertainment.'

      The program sold well overseas, especially in the United Kingdom. But though it rated well domestically, it was not the success that the Seven Network had hoped for, and was cancelled after 39 episodes.

      Bluey had an unexpected revival in the early 1990s when selections from the video footage (over-dubbed with a new vocal track) were presented during the second series of the ABC comedy The Late Show as the fictional police procedural Bargearse. (The Late Show had given ABC gold-rush drama Rush the same treatment in series one.)

      Number in series: 30
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