New posts

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mel O&#039;Drama" data-source="post: 443262" data-attributes="member: 23">A Town TragedyAlready I’m intrigued about the background to these early episodes. As mentioned, I’m aware that James Davern had written In General Practice as a pilot a couple of years before it came to fruition. Since this second story introduces a few new characters not seen in that first story, I find myself asking whether it’s because the pilot was (a) shot earlier or (b) was filmed alongside the series, with Davern thinking of additional characters in the intervening years. Was it always the plan to introduce more regular characters gently as the episodes unfolded, or is the second story ensemble the “series” version compared with the first episode’s “pilot” cast?Not that the changes are major. There are no recasts, no changes to sets or settings, everyone looks the same and the title sequences remain the same (other than two additional characters in the second story’s opening credits). This suggests the two stories were produced very close together. My feeling - and this is just conjecture - is that the additional characters weren’t in the original pilot script but were written into the series in the pre-planning stage, with the decision taken to leave the pilot script more or less intact and add the others in the second story. My view on this may change if more regulars are introduced in the coming episodes, but for now that’s enough to help me sleep at night. The key new faces in this story are Brendan and Molly Jones. Brendan and Molly are a cute pair - together or individually - and they’ve very quickly been integrated into things. As I watched Brendan splitting his time between nursing and getting things straight on the farm, the familiarity came back to me. As a male nurse, he’s something of a pioneer - something that’s acknowledged in dialogue. There’s no real controversy over it, just mild surprise from a couple of characters, but I can’t think of a male nurse who appeared on-screen earlier. The Young Doctors’ focus seemed to be on photogenic young women, so if they had any male nurses I missed it. Certainly, Brendan was on screen over half a decade before Casualty’s Charlie Fairhead who came to symbolise - and arguably popularise - the role on British television. Just as with Simon in the first story, Brendan’s medical background allows him to quickly spot that Terence is a gifted surgeon leaving him with the same question of why this surgeon has ended up in a small rural hospital, only to receive the same answer from other characters: that it is nobody’s business but Terence’s. This serves a double purpose. Not only does it keep the intrigue bubbling away, Brendan’s curiosity integrates him fully into the character dynamics. And, they endear him to the audience who have similar questions. It’s a winning function for a character. And then there’s Molly. How interesting to have an eccentric, borderline comedic character played by - to repeat a phrase used earlier - a photogenic young woman. And without the usual props of her being “other” in some physical way. There are no goggle glasses. She’s not overweight. She’s not a bookworm. The “other” element mainly comes from her being too “city”. She hasn’t adapted her dress to her surroundings but there’s also a sense that she’s very out there by any standard. We see her glam up her wellingtons, which is perhaps more acceptable in 2026 than it would have been in 1981. In one scene with Brendan, she wears a large necklace on which are hung - front and back - about a dozen plastic spoons of different colours, set about two inches apart at regular intervals. It’s not even acknowledged in dialogue. It’s simply there, and because Brendan simply accepts it, we, too, accept that this is simply Molly. The little comedic touches work well for me. In one of Brendan and Molly’s first scenes, we deduce the apple didn’t fall far from the tree when their housewarming present from Molly’s mother is a chandelier. Later in the episode there’s a scene with Molly talking to someone at the pen of Doris the pig. The camera pans up to show Doris’s pen is now adorned with the chandelier (talk about keeping up with the literal Joneses). It’s just enough. Debuting is part two is Bob Hatfield, apparently a one-off fairly minor character who will come to be a more permanent part of the Wandin Valley scenery. Along the same lines, there’s ornery Miss Bird, who gives Brendan a baptism of fire as his first patient. It’s the first of three roles for Colleen Clifford, an actress born in the Nineteenth Century). Again, the character will appear on a more recurring basis come Season Two and - incredibly - the actress will still be seen on the series in other roles more than a decade after this. The meatier story this time out is of a respected married townswoman who is killed by a drunk driver, with much talk about the fact that she is in the car of a local businessman evidently heading out of town with a packed suitcase, a note addressed to her husband and no ring on her finger (even her friend Shirley has to admit “rings don’t fall off”).As well as tapping nicely into the Peyton Place element of the way information travels quickly round a small town, fuelling (sometimes cruel) gossip and speculation, it also presents a moral dilemma for various regulars uncovering pieces of information - the ring; the letter; the cases. Given the circumstances, the question is how much of this information they give the woman’s grieving husband. Do they have the right, with the best of intentions, to conceal something that would cause nothing but hurt. The path taken is relatively satisfying. It’s not so much about whether their choices end up being the “right” or “wrong” ones, but about the fact that, one way or the other, any choice made is going to have a consequence to someone, even if it’s the person who says nothing.</blockquote>

Verification: 6 + 4 =