The great Australian sledgehammer

Press, 18 March 1988, Page 19

The great Australian sledgehammer

It is obvious from the opening credits exactly what “The Flying Doctors” is going to be like. They seem to be an animated form of the front cover of a tenth-rate romance, one of those thin, paperback, half-book/half-magazines in which Godfrey yearns after Estelle. In this, though, the romance takes a back seat to outback drama with Dr Him and Dr Her above it all. This week, two sets of pressing problems interwove into a television cloth with the charm of a three-day-old polyester shirt. Would the pub have enough beer, so that the denizens of Cooper's Crossing could endure the annual rodeo? Would Carol Brett admit her dyslexia and take the township off the hook of thinking her standoffish, stuckupish and lookingdownhernoseish?

Clearly, modern medical thinking has penetrated along the long straight roads of the outback. "Umm. dyslexics are often above average 1.Q." This began the earnest interchange between the two flying d's, although they were grounded at the time. It

went on for what seemed like 10 minutes. ; Even the wooden actors could not keep their faces fixed enough to match the. words Which thudded on to the floor between them, like boots after a night out. The profundities of their analysis of the treatment of dyslexia culminated in “iff she accepts she needs nelp, she’ll have to take it one day at a time.” Meanwhile, Carol Brett was back on her horses, not worrying too much about it, or w’as she? Meanwhile, her husband was in hospital with his neck braced after a whiplash suffered in an entirely inexplicable road accident in the desert, inyolving barrels (beer perhaps?) Meanwhile, the pub was still dry and the town was drinking home brew in the garage. The action, as sub-plot trampled on sub-plot, plodded on from one "Good on yer" to the next. The characters clubbed one another into submission with cliches. “Strike me pink" ... “Strewth” ..). “Country’s going to the flamin' dogs" .... “When the chips are down you find out who yer mates are."

Whilst the working jokers surrounded one another with these linguistic nuances, iso the doctors and nurses played doctors and nurses just like they used to as children. “Ah. you ; know doctor; we sometimes forget how we rely on you." “She knows I’m a sister but she treats me just like a nurse’s aid."; Think about what this ; implies about the “she" referred to, the speaker'and the potential nurse’s aid, to say nothing of the whole of Cooper’s Crossing. No doubt, not having seen this television masterpiece, you are agog to know how it resolved itself. Well, on the one hand, the townies got completely plastered on home brew and became vaguely schizophrenic. They recovered, , sheepishly, in time for the rodeo, which still had to pass with no beer. On the other hand, Carol Brett's little lad, Jamie, swallowed something awful near the sink. She “phoned the flying d's but couldn't say much.

"It's not! the bottle, it's me, I can't read." Aha, leaping; from the [ bath with an Archimedian sense of discovery; one

through. The great Australian television sledgehammer had plummeted down with a clunk which left the lone viewer in no doubt that Carol Brett would henceforth graciously accept h e! P’ her husband and the [doctors crinkling their eyes in kindly fondness in,' the background. And thus it was.

At the end of “The Flying Doctors” there appear the following words: "The characters in [ this series are fictional ’ and any similarity to any person living or dead is coincidental." “Is coincidental" should be replaced with “would be little short of miraculous.”

Ken Strongman

on television