Legendary Australian show.
Exhaustive article at Classic Australian TV. Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.
The NFSA did a piece here and here. ASO did a piece here.
The show did not make money until 106 episodes!
Ian Jones told Susan Lever:
Homicide was already created when I arrived. Homicide, the pilot script was written by Phil Freedman and Enid Johns, who was really quite a high ranking policeman called Eric Miller and he and Phil had written a script which was called originally The Clumsy Thief and went to air as One Man Crime Wave. So my only contribution to Homicide at the outset was to rename a couple of detectives. I think the Detective Fraser character was originally Detective Stone I think or Steel, a very wrong name to me for that character. Even before Jack Fegan was cast, I thought, because of the nature of the Victorian police I thought it would be good to have an Irish name in there. I think I suggested the name Connolly, Inspector Connolly and of course Jack Fegan fitted it like a glove. We did the pilot. I directed the film for the pilot which was great fun to work on. Almost a year ticked by and I sort of felt it probably won’t happen. It would be wonderful if it did and then suddenly it was sold. I was directing Homicide for the most of the first year and, when I could, I’d contribute a script. The first one I contributed was a thing based on a stunt I was in at the University, a mock bank hold up. I wrote the script, sketched it out, called The Stunt, polished up by Phil Freedman and that was the one Channel 7 selected to go to air first. It looked as though I was the co-creator of Homicide, but I wasn’t...
Homicide was a good solid formula. Hector Crawford always used to say, “In the year 2000, there will be two things on television: cop shows and westerns.” Now he was wrong about the westerns, sort of. He sure as hell is right about cop shows.
The most significant thing was that it was Australian and I keep saying it but you can’t avoid it, people would say, “Why are the actors using exaggerated Australian accents?” and you’d say, “They’re not. They’re using their own voices.” Some of them, most of them were radio actors and they would say, “This is the first time I’ve ever used my voice. I’ve always been doing English voices, American voices, Swiss voices, Mexican voices. Suddenly, I can just use my own voice.”
It was like an aunt of mine who was tape recorded for the first time and she said, “Oh, I sound so common.” We had this sort of national sense of embarrassment at hearing ourselves. That quickly wore off and then people got a bit strange and said, “Yes. It’s very good but why do your detectives walk everywhere and why aren’t they carrying guns. Why aren’t they more like Naked City? And we said, “This is what crime is like in Victoria or in Melbourne. Detectives do a lot of walking. They do a lot of knocking on doors, building up a picture, following trails.”
Eventually we had a guy getting his pistol from the master room and actually killing someone. Leonard Teale as a murder being the first person shot in Homicide, subsequently of course to become one of the D’s which was terribly hard for Hector when we suggested Len for the role because Hector said but he was a murderer. He’s been a murderer several times. We said, “Hector, it doesn’t matter. Trust us. It will work” and, of course, it did.
Q You were the director, of course, of a lot of those Homicide episodes. Is it true that the outside broadcasts couldn’t have dialogue in them?
A Well, you see, the early Homicides first of all, for the first episodes, half the show, the first half hour was the crime, the investigation of the crime. The second half hour was the trial. It was a development which everyone forgets, of Consider Your Verdict.
In that first half hour all the exterior scenes were shot on 16 mm film matched moderately successfully with sets with a quote, “degraded television picture” to try and match the texture of film which didn’t always work.
I would say, “You’re not degrading the picture, you’re giving it a dramatic texture” because I don’t think you’ll ever match film for drama. It’s a physical thing. I mean film is made up from a series of little physical articles put together, recreating a physical world. I mean that’s my view but I love the texture of film and the 16 mm stuff we were shooting had a sort of gritty reality about it which we lost when we went to colour.
If ever there was a show to me that should have stayed black and white, it was Homicide. I mean you see some cracking films today done really but occasionally done in black and white and, boy, it still works.
Hector Crawfords said the show was a little bit based on his radio show D24 but was "developed" from that. See here.
Brian Wright spoke to Susan Lever:
I was working at Channel O as an executive when Homicide went to air. Now when Homicide came to air and Hector Crawford started with Homicide everybody thought this is going to be a disaster. This is going to die. Hector had done a couple of television shows which hadn’t worked terribly well and then he came up with this concept of Homicide and Channel 7 in Melbourne, our opposition, put it on not expecting it to be very much of a success. Believe me, Len Major and I, we didn’t ever tell our bosses, Mr Ansett, Sir Reg, but we deliberately put the weakest show we possibly could against Homicide. We tried to let it get our rating for the first few months. It was almost dead in the first year. I’m talking of Homicide. It was pretty bad. Hector mortgaged his house, and pulled all his money out of the bank. Hector had practically no money by the end of the first year. It was all going into Homicide and it wasn’t rating at all. The management Keith Cairns was the General Manager of Channel 7 in Melbourne. Keith bullied his management to give it another year.
During the second year, it suddenly started to gain an audience, and the production started to gain skills. Ian Jones could probably tell you a lot about this. He was involved in it. They-- that audience started to build, and I can remember at Channel O suddenly I discovered looking at the ratings, which we were doing every week, Homicide became the number one show, for the first time in Australian drama had been the number one show in the ratings. I’m talking regularly: week after week after week. This I think was one of the great achievements of those early days.
The public preferred an Australian show to any of the imported shows. Skippy was coming in Sydney about the same time. I wrote for that too. And Skippy was also beginning to get a rating. This was the period when Australian programs were just starting to beat the overseas shows in the ratings. This to us was dreadfully important in those days.
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| The Age 15 Oct 1964 |
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| The Age 4 Feb 1965 |
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| Age 14 July 1981 |
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