special squad gone for the doctor

This episode of Special Squad, called 'Gone for the Doctor', is I think the actual very last one, and it's a really shameful place to end a series. I think my theory about grabbing the crappy scripts out of the bottom drawer and retooling them to fit the current characters was correct. 

In this episode the team somehow end up camping (I shit you not) and on a whim decide to go for a drive in their jeep, with Smith driving and Anderson in the passenger seat and...

Davis on the bonnet of the vehicle. I'm serious. He's just travelling on the front of the van like that's a normal thing to do. 

Anyway for some reason not necessarily related to that activity, they crash into a tree and Smith is gravely injured. 

To be honest even at this early point you're thinking, why did we bother? Please just all die in the accident. But instead the other two are fine and simply need to get to a town, and they find a weird dystopian family in the bush with what is I guess a father, two more-or-less-adult children (Tina played by Julie Nihill and Yabbie played by David Slingsby) and another person with an eyepatch whose name I am sorry to say I've forgotten, or didn't catch in the first place, either that or it's Errol played by Richard Moir. I am not entirely sure where Errol fits into the story as apparently the father believed that Errol was having an affair with his wife so he killed her and poked Errol's eye out, this is all long ago by the way, but apparently Errol still hangs around talking in a raspy voice.  

I can't be bothered going on. Kudos to all involved that they took this idiotic script and made it into a whole program. I say 'kudos' but I wish they hadn't. But they knew by this stage that no-one would be watching. 

It was mostly nice knowing you Special Squad. 

special squad: mad mountain mumma

Mary Canny as Bridey and John Diedrich as Davis with Hawkins (Smith) in the background at Spencer St Station

Another uninteresting picture, of Alan Cassell (Anderson) and Hawkins' back. I only took this because there's the famous Spencer Street train mural in the background. I mean it is that. 

I listen to podcasts like Blank Check and The Filmcast and I wonder 'where the hell do these people get the time to be so on top of all these fucking horrendous (sounding) films?' and then it occurs to me that I have watched about forty episodes of Special Squad in the last few weeks. 'Watched' is a slightly problematic term as I have really often just had it on in the background. I have antenna primed for when they go to interesting places, which is what intrigues me most. but also, the bonhomie of the Special Squad trio is, I have to say, pretty infectious. 

In many ways, it's just updated Homicide, ten years later, and not that updated. The difference is that Special Squad don't always have to be investigating murder (a few times on Homicide they weren't investigating murder either - but they almost always were). They just get assigned the troublesome cases that need more in-depth investigation. They work long hours and they sacrifice their personal lives to the job. We don't know too much about them - Joel Davis (John Diedrich, who is probably super-annoyed that his fame is everlasting from being retooled thirty years ago to be 'Glen Twenty' on Bargearse) is a young, swingin' guy who'll go far; Greg Smith (Anthony Hawkins) is a man with a family and a moustache; Don Anderson (Alan Cassell) is their boss whose wife we met once only to see her shot about twenty minutes later by a man whose toyboy Anderson did away with; Anderson is apparently comforted by the news that his late wife was looking forward to a holiday with him (Crawfords don't understand grieving very well, in my experience, except when it's motivation for revenge). 

In an article for the Age published on 31 January 1985, Barry Dickins writes about his experience as a bit part actor on Special Squad. He talks briefly with Diedrich and Hawkins:

‘”They spent five million bucks on this series, mate”’ says John Diedrich, the star of the show. “And now they’re winding it up.”   

‘The other older Special Squad copper is called Tony, a real nice guy who tells me he wishes he was doing comedy. “Oh, they don’t like funny stuff,” he whispers to me in the Crawford caravan, putting on his Special Squad sox. “You can pull a funny face if you like, but you can’t overdo it. I think what Crawford wants to do is capture contemporary violence.”  

What I note is that line about 'now they're winding it up'. I'm not entirely sure I know which episode he's talking about, and in fact he might not even have made it in, but the point is that the show gets axed, they have to keep churning it out and I can well imagine that once a Crawfords show got the chop - notwithstanding it had a life of being repeated a few more times thereafter - they might well have done a sweep of the archives for the sillier scripts that no-one would ever have pitched in a fresh new hot show. This episode, 'Mad Mountain Mumma' (IMDB wants you to think it's 'Mad Mountain Momma' and in its defence, autocorrect does too) is not really properly documented in IMDB which had obviously given up by this point. 

This is just a silly episode, and indicates to me that everyone is going through the motions. A wealthy man, I'm not sure why he's wealthy but guess what he used to be a circus performer, whatever, he dies in the first few minutes, is picked up by his boyfriend (played by Daniel Abinieri) and chauffeur (Roger Ward) and summarily dispensed with (poisoned?). That's all par for the course I guess. But then the murdered man's wife turns up from the country (a town called Mad Mountain) and she's a witch called Bridey, played by Mary Canny in what might actually be the biggest role Canny ever played (Crawfords got her in again eight years later to be in The Flying Doctors). Bridey somehow convinces Abenieri's character ('Dillon') that she's put a curse on him and he has to go to the State Library, which is to Special Squad what the Sunnyvale High library was to Buffy) to find out how to lift the curse. 

Apparently he has to make an axe and cut off her head, and we do spend quite a bit of time with him making an axe and chopping a watermelon in half, but this element of the story goes precisely nowhere thereafter so let's forget about it. 

I'm nearly through these episodes and then I'll have to figure out what precisely I have learnt. The next episode has a small role for Alwyn Kurts (yes his eyes are open! Wide open) as a crook who dies in the first five minutes. Crawfords always had a place for their own. 

electronically yours, special squad, kuolleet lehdet

This week I listened to the audible version of Martyn Ware's Electronically Yours, Vol. 1. As you know, Ware was the prime mover in the Human League in its first incarnation and then went on to be a central force in Heaven 17. The second Human League album, in particular, is one of my favourite records ever, it's called Travelogue and I agree with Ware's own assessment of it - that it sounded like nothing else when it came out and it still doesn't sound dated. It's a remarkable record. 

I was most interested in the early stuff here - particularly the HL material - though I was also disappointed by a lot of the approach. I couldn't help feeling that Ware really needed an editor, which I'm pretty sure he didn't have (someone to elicit more detail on some things and less blah on others). Ware was there, so he doesn't seem to appreciate what we would want to know. For instance, he goes into great detail about 'Marianne' which is, you know, an ok song, but says completely nothing at all about 'The Black Hit of Space', which is, of course, an amazing work of genius. He barely touches on 'Empire State Human' which is extraordinary, remarkable, and immense (actually, he might not even mention it, I can't remember). The rise of the HL is unbelievably fast and things like the release of their first record is practically an afterthought. I'm pretty sure, too, that he gets important things wrong - like John Lydon's review of 'Being Boiled' in the NME which I'm 1000% sure was two words: 'trendy hippies' but Ware says it was 'fucking hippies', in fact, he says it twice. 

Update 10 July: It also occurred to me how extremely little Ware says about '(We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thang' which was a revelation and an amazing statement of intent for Heaven 17 - it was their first single. The bass playing of John Wilson (inc. a hell of a solo) was a remarkable feature of this single and how Ware, Marsh and Gregory came across Wilson is entirely avoided, I am not even sure he's discussed at all. That's all pretty weird, right? It took a lot of gumption to launch H17 the way they did, and a lot was made of Wilson, in particular, at that point. Wilson appears in group photos etc (I'd never seen him before but I gather he's here second from right) and yet, not a mention. 

Of course it could be that I stopped listening/paying attention for a while and/or that I accidentally skipped a bit (I definitely skipped one section about football, so maybe he segued into discussing John Wilson then as well) so who knows?

Ware is a very dedicated socialist, which I approve of, and a football fan, which is a bore. He really likes art and values creativity and adventurousness which I admire. His book is full of the usual crapola about hot women and drinking too much which is a drag but apparently necessary in books like this. Simultaneously to H17 he became an extraordinarily successful record producer though he gives us precisely no information about what a record producer does or is (I suppose I'm fine with that). OK I think I've about said all there is to say about this. By the way it's hard to be sure whether he's providing his own interjections reading this book for audible or whether the interjections are in the original book, I guess I'll never know. 

Meanwhile I've been watching a lot of another Crawfords show made in Melbourne in 1984-5, called Special Squad. It's a peculiar production which apparently sought a certain measure of gritty realism. In one sense it might as well be Homicide '84; it's three men in an elite section of the police force, always in car chases, each episode a neat solving of crime with a lot of the usual moralistic elements (no crim ever gets away). One odd aspect is that the first episode absolutely does not even slightly bother to introduce you to the police characters - you are just thrown in at the deep end. I'm still confused about who these three men are. 

What else does it have? A lot of interesting actors. Red Symons as a terrorist (I'm not even sure he has a speaking role, but it's him) and Frankie J. Holden as an undercover cop, for instance. Norman Coburn is a corrupt cop in another episode (see below). The storylines are, on the whole, not magnificent* and if it wasn't for the intriguing mid-80s technology (phones and computers in cars!) the above mentioned actors and the locations I wouldn't really be bothering, I suspect. Oh, but every episode does end with someone making a lame joke** and the frame freezing, which is pretty amazing to see in the wild. 

Last night my mother and I went to see Kuolleet Lehdet, a low-key Finnish film which surprised me no end by including Maustetytöt in one scene. 

Oddly enough I knew they were in a film because I saw this poster a few weeks ago on the Maustetytöt fan club facebook group but I didn't realise that this was the same film I had already bought tickets to. Just 'cause I'm dumb. 

They don't have lines or anything just a crucial moment in the action, where they convince one of the main characters to stop drinking by dint of their extremely depressing song. It's pretty cool. 

Overall the film is probably worth it. I am still thinking about it. 

* to be fair, I haven't been paying 100% attention

** or just a pointed comment.