Television

Rain Shadow

This tale of two vets in dry-land farming territory grappling with a terrible secret was originally pitched to the ABC, by myself and my mentor and co-writer, the late Tony Morphett, as “All Creatures Great and Small … with kangaroos”.

However producer Gus Howard had different ideas and instead we created something akin to Outback Noir with Rachel Ward and Gary Sweet giving some of the best performances of their careers (IMHO).

There’s more about this on IMDB. The series did really well and the ABC were interested in a second but Gus told them they’d have to sign Ms Ward up quickly as she was about to go off and direct a movie and if they delayed, by the time we shot, edited and released the next series, people would have forgotten the first one. They said, somewhat snootily, that they would decide when they signed up for a second series.  By the time they said okay, Rachel had indeed gone off to direct Beautiful Kate and then the ABC bods said “ah, well, everyone will have forgotten the first series by the time it comes out.”

My one very showbiz story from this occurred on the day we went in and signed the contracts. The ABC’s Head of Drama, the illustrious Scott Meek, asked us to wait downstairs at the ABC studios while he went to get his jacket from his office – he was going to take us for a celebratory lunch.  So Tony and I waited and waited and eventually we were told that “something had come up.” It turned out that when Scott got to his office there was a letter from management waiting for him, telling him his services were no longer required, as of now.  He should have gone with the kangaroos. Rain Shadow is available on DVD and streams on Prime Video.

Crash Palace

This tale of bonking and boozing British backpackers in Sydney, was a low-budget, late-night frolic (as it must be).

It was filmed at Fox Studios under David Martin, with David Maher and David Taylor of multi-success productions (like The Artful Dodger) from Beach Road Productions learning their chops.

Sadly, Fox did not anticipate the Internet or the growth of streaming so the cast and crew were never signed up for repeat broadcast in other media.

On the other hand, I think I just found the old VHS tapes. 😉 You can find out more about the series HERE.

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Breakers

This long-running teen drama set in Bondi Beach was controversial in its time.  It was the first teen soap to have a permanent First Nations character and the first to deal with a young character “coming out” to his unsympathetic friends.

That led to my former colleagues on the Sunday Mail in Scotland branding me as “The man who wants to bring gay underage sex to afternoon TV.” Not true, of course, but talentless numpties have to express their bitter disappointments in their failures any way they can. It’s the “tall thistle” syndrome.

Breakers ran for 430 episodes (according to Wikipedia) here and on the BBC in the UK.  We didn’t realise that the Britain had different content rules from here, meaning that shows okay to be broadcast in the afternoons here (when kids were at school) couldn’t be screened until after 9pm in the UK. Oooops!

It did however provide the cashflow that allowed the newly fledged production house Screentime to become a major player.