The galah of television

Press, 10 March 1987, Page 11

The galah of television

Ken Strongman

ON TELEVISION

Bludger, zack, old tart, Pat Malone, pearler, carking it, old dill. Where are we? Well, Cooper’s Creek among other places. There is something strangely fitting about the cultural extravaganza of Ustinov’s Russia on One while “The Flying Doctors” are on Two, from the extravagant clutter across the Tasman. Dr Tom and Dr Chris fight out the sex war against a backgound of mock Big Country music. This, from Billabong Enterprises, is a series of human drama, or what passes for drama and what passes for human in this context. Talk is frequently of Surfers, that paradise of Job’s state, and the genders can be distinguished by printed frocks and silly hats. Everyone mucks in together in the heat and dust, but there is not much flying, or doctoring. Voices, perhaps ravaged by the heat, sound like finger nails being scraped down rusty iron. The people of Cooper’s Creek are good-humoured enough, in spite of sporting 25-year-old clothes and haircuts. Physically, though, they have the not altogether prepossessing charm of failed Sumo wrestlers. That is not quite fair, since the younger ones look vaguely desicated by the heat. By the time they have reached more mature years they have turned into heaps. Their physical presence is not improved by the setting apparently being an old tip on the edge of a ghost town probably once called Yorumba-Yorumba, or somesuch.

As is frequently the case with Australian dramas, the actors are given words that do not stretch their Thespian skills very far. Most sentences end in “Eh?”, eh? and contain what is technically termed a fair amout of redundancy. “If

yew can’t blew with yer best mate, oo can yer blew with? Eh?” The particular human ■ dramas in last week’s episode, while Ustinov was doing his sardonic best with Napoleon, were threefold. The garage owner returned from a trip t 0... wait for it, Surfers, where he had met a widow, the first love of his life, albeit a bit late. Would he sell up and join her, would she join him, or would they compromise and settle for a dirty week-end in Alice Springs? Then were was the old miner called Rabbit, searching for opals, but a danger to himself. “Take

more than a few sticks of geli to finish me off.” He was nearly wrong, though. The intrepid doctors found him down the shaft and accomplished instant outback diagnosis. “Fractured humerus by the looks of it,” although they resisted saying, “and that’s not funny.”

Then, as a final by-play in this momentous world, the two blewing garage blokes broke down out in the bush. One was bitten by a snake and the other

carried him out to be seen by the ever-ready docs. Mateship thus triumphed over other, more heterosexual, alternatives, and the writers were given the chance to produce one of those . once-in-a-lifetime television lines: “Sim stroke bull dust, snake bite you mad coot” Apart from these tribulations, much of the life at Cooper’s Crossing is about puzzling out the roles of men and women in the modern world.