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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mel O&#039;Drama" data-source="post: 444764" data-attributes="member: 23">Shootin’ Through / Pig In A Poke / Did She Fall? / Love’s Labour LostThere are some very familiar faces in three of these stories. First up is Judy Nunn. Although she’d done a short stint in Prisoner in the intervening years, at the time she’d probably still have been best known to Aussie audiences as bisexual bitch Vicki in The Box. Today, she is universally remembered to the most casual of TV viewers for her thirteen years as Home and Away’s Ailsa (over a decade and a half if we count brief returns including the infamous head-in-the-fridge scene). In between ACP and H&A, she would appear on my radar - and that of many European viewers - with a couple of years in Sons and Daughters. Her ACP character here is quite different from any of the roles for which she’s known.Despite being brought into the hospital with severe burns after a nasty camping fire accident (her screams during the horrific scene in question ensuring it’s not easy to shake from the mind), Nancy Brewer is quite brittle and mostly unsympathetic, favouring one of her sons while the other is her scapegoat for everything, with her husband caught in the middle. I anticipated the “he’s my stepson” revelation, but no, it was just that she’d convinced herself her son didn’t like her since he was a baby (and on that level, it kind of pre-empts Judy’s best screen work during Ailsa’s post-natal depression story where she snapped and almost smothered her newborn son). I adore her going ugly here, testing the patience of staff and her family with her complaints and unreasonableness. It’s her sons who get the cliffhanger, when they end up staying with Brendan and Molly (as you do) and one ends up shooting the other (as you do). Into the next two-parter comes another H&A original cast member who at the time would probably have been best-remembered for a racy Seventies soap. Sheila Kennelly would have been very busy around the time of this ACP episode, with ongoing roles in two series I’d never heard of: a sitcom called Kingswood Country and kids’ drama series Secret Valley. She was probably also shooting the Return To Eden mini series shortly after this as well.Here she’s playing her usual warm, bubbly, chatty type. Somewhat appropriately, she’s playing Hazel, a soap fan, devoted to radio serial Green Pastures, ACP’s serial-within-a-series which has been mentioned a number of times and heard on more than one occasion. With the cast coming to town for a visit, Hazel is more excited than anyone, but is devastated to potentially miss their visit when she ends up in hospital with stomach pains - initially thought to be appendicitis until they open her up and see she is riddled with cancer. If Judy Nunn’s complaining character was a pain for the staff, Hazel makes the staff feel guilty because she is - as Marta wearily tells Terence - “the perfect patient”, making it more difficult for them to shoulder the burden of her condition before she is told. Indeed, this episode introduces a moral dilemma that really got me thinking about what I would do in Terence’s position regarding the timing of breaking the news. Each time he almost tells her, she smiles and tells him it’s the happiest day of her life because she’s meeting her Green Pastures favourites… and then he can’t bring himself to spoil her day. Then the Green Pastures actors are admitted with symptoms of food poisoning - putting Cookie’s cooking under scrutiny (it turns out to be from homemade advocaat they’ve been quaffing liberally), and one of the actresses ends up sharing a room with Hazel who annoys her with her constant cheery chatting. It’s a nice touch that Hazel has deduced she is dying by episode’s end, but is cheered up with a photo op with the Green Pastures actors - who are friendlier once they know the circumstances. She refuses treatment and goes home to spend time with her loved ones, still smiling. The other well-known face was Lisa Crittenden, best-known to many as Sons and Daughters’ nasty Leigh Palmer, but it looks like this episode was filmed while she was still filming Prisoner. Here she’s sweeter than I’d thought possible, playing a new mum. As we followed her and her husband home with the baby, one could feel that something was going to go wrong, but what. I feared we were heading for a SIDS storyline, but it wasn’t quite that bad, with the baby instead suffering from tetanus - caused by their free range chickens treading poop onto the clothes pegs, which then found its way onto the freshly-laundered nappy and ultimately to the baby’s umbilical cord. This is the first of two storylines in this two parter in which it’s all hands on deck for the hospital team, observed by a suit doing a time and motion study. The man is well and truly on Marta’s bad side, getting a few snappy comments from her. But more than this, she is shown to be fed up with the frustrations of the hospital’s lack of resources, and her requests going unheeded while patients suffer. She even goes as far as looking for another position elsewhere, which I think is still up in the air as I write. continued</blockquote>

Verification: Who played JR Ewing?

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