My marvelous indulgence in Dr Blake.

ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) TV occasionally comes up with some absolute rippers when it comes to crime shows. They have history of making some of the best, and often most unwatched crime dramas on Australian television.

I guess that's the nature of being a government broadcaster; you get to make the kind of television that commercial networks would find too risky. If you're over the tripe of forensic investigators with magical pieces of equipment, gangsters that spend half the time posing in fashion, and episodes that are too short to really draw you in, I suggest you grab hold of a series called 'Phoenix' on DVD. If you want real a Melbourne crime drama, skip 'Underbelly' and head to this series first.

Phoenix, now, is almost a couple of decades old now, but as it was a re-telling of a story that happened a decade prior to when it was filmed, it will always be watchable. It's a semi fictional re-telling of the events surrounding the Russell Street bombing.

Phoenix cast - in all their 90's fashion glory.

Keep looking serious boys....

Once you're done with that, I suggest you grab the two episodes of Jack Irish which have been filmed so far, and then get hold of a more Sydney centric series called 'Blue murder'. But don't mistake the latter with the British or Canadian series by the same name.

With the exception of Underbelly, all of the series above a so gritty, that you'll almost feel the dirt growing under your fingernails. In the case of Underbelly, the dirt is oddly sugar-coated.

There's something about Melbourne and the state of Victoria that seems to lend it self to crime shows such as these. The real-life organized crime in Victoria is a sloppy and ineffective mess. I used to work at the Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne, and there was a substantial amount of Russian mafia in the place. But ask any trader if it was dangerous working there with the Russian mafia, and they'd laugh at you.

Melbourne's gangland war, so awfully depicted in the first Underbelly series cost the lives of three people that worked in the market - including a kid that I knew by the name of Benji, which used to have pizza with us every so often for Sunday lunch, while we worked our stalls. But that's how the Vic market was - it had more community than mobsters.

But there's so much dark brutality in Melbourne's history, that it always makes compelling television.

But putting that aside, the ABC in the last 12 months aired a couple of great crime series of a very different nature. While the ABC are no strangers to costume drama, they don't often indulge in mixing it with the crime genre. However they did, and the results have been... interesting.

Firstly, they produced a series called 'Miss Fisher's Mysteries', which is based on the Kerry Greenwood Phryne Fisher books. By the standards of the ABC, this series is utter fluff. And largely fun fluff at that. Ms Jane was a huge fan of the books, and naturally it became compulsory viewing in our house.

Set in the 1920's, again, the series is all about Melbourne. And like so much of Melbourne, it is rather all about fashion, dark alleys and dodgy operators. The series was fun, and nicely skims a few facts of Melbourne's history. This series was largely targeted at a women.

It had nothing of the grit and complexity of previous efforts by the ABC, and I'm guessing that's exactly what they were aiming for.

Enter Dr Blake.

Now... Dr Blake isn't exactly gritty television, but he does have a couple of great things going for him. Firstly, he has a damn beautiful Rheinmetall typewriter. In fact, the whole show is a typewriter spotter's delight.

And yes, he does often use this Rheinmetall during the series.

It is embarrassing to admit this, but I've found Craig McLachlan's acting to be excellent in this series. Craig has in the past been a beacon for everything rubbish. He's been a soap star who has transitioned across several teenage soaps, and a god-awful musician. This time around he seems to have eschewed his boyishness and grown a beard. Previously Craig's efforts have been something of a focal point of derision - often quite unwarranted. 

Then again, he's being supported by a very talented actor by the name of Nadine Garner.

Looking at Dr Blake's desk, I can see the Art Deco desk set that I was out-bid on last year. BASTARDS!

Anyway..... It's 1959. Dr Blake is a private GP that often advises the police surgeon on cases.

While Dr Blake has made me want to have a Rheinmetall of my own on my desk, there's other parts of this series that makes it fit nicely into the ABC's crime drama lot: Here's the rules, and how Dr Blake stacks up to them.

Melbourne Location: Okay, it's not set in Melbourne, but about an hour and bit outside of it in the former gold-rush town of Ballarat.

Alcohol: Yep, Blake drinks like a fish. He drinks to cope, think, forget and remember. He even gets himself so sh*tfaced, that he turns up at major high end social events and abuses visiting British officials, before punching his cop mate in the face.

Odd relationship with cop mates:  You're never sure if Blake is a friend or an annoyance to the local constabulary that he advises, until the head cop rocks up to his house with a bottle of something, and they proceed to get sh*tfaced. Something that was a bit of a theme in the 'Phoenix' series.

Hangs out at the pub: Jack Irish, Phoenix, Blue murder, Janus, all these series managed a bit of pub love, and Dr Blake is no exception. He's either at the pub, or the gentleman's club. The very first episode even references the controversy surrounding 'Chloe', a painting that now hangs on the wall in the Young and Jacksons pub in Melbourne.

Swearing: This is the 50's ol' son. There's no swearing here! 

Central character with a tormented past: Jack Irish saw his girlfriend gunned down by one of his clients in his series, while Dr Blake has a family missing in Singapore - where he was located when the Japanese invaded during WW2. He spends parts of the series going through private artifacts of his life with his family that he fears are lost. His anguish provides much of his motivation through the series, as he occasionally lashes out at people in frustration.

Police brutality: It wouldn't be proper to have a series set in Victoria that doesn't have the cops thumping the crap out of the crims. Although this series tends to see the cops being regretful afterwards. 

*   *   *

As far as costume dramas are concerned, the ABC have gone a long, long way towards accuracy with this one. The phones, the cars, the badges on the taxis. The upholstery on the furniture. And even the typewriters, have been meticulously researched and picked - and have all been the sort of things you'd expect to find in the sets that depict the era.

And that's what I really love about this series. The hospital looks like a hospital in the 50's. The Doctor's surgery is a very typical home adapted into a surgery of the era. Ballarat looks 50's. The cops look 50's. The nurses look 50's. The factories look 50's. The research and setting has been extraordinary.

So anyway.. Here's a couple more screen grabs for you typewriter perverts out there. Have a good perve, chaps.

 

I'll eventually grab a snap of Nadine using the Olivetti Studio 44, that is on her desk. But it is often very fleeting. Other machines to pop up here and there, is an old Remington and a couple of Royal desktops and portables.

Now, I feel motivated to write some nasty Melbourne crime.... Or find myself a Rheinmetall on ebay. 

Or maybe both.

A little spot of spotting!

 

The sun arose into a clear sky over Brisbane Saturday, and I awoke rather excited about taking a little trip out to Ipswich. 

I'm still adjusting to my new job and new hours, but I grabbed an extra shift at work on Friday night that saw me working till about 10pm just to keep my funds respectable. Hospitals are weird places after 7pm and it has been a very long time since I have done the after hours shift at work. At 9 o'clock when there's pretty much nobody in the corridors, all the doors on the campus automatically shut and lock-down. If you're in the hallways at the time, it is as though a fleet of ghosts have slammed all the doors shut and locked you out.

Despite working late, I still sprung out of bed ready for the drive - albeit with a slight headache. It is a fair way from my home to the town of Ipswich, but conditions were brilliant, and it looked like a lovely day to be out on the road. The objective for the day was to attend the Ipswich Antiques and collectables fair and have a browse - and hopefully spot some typers out in the wild. 

It took an hour to get to 'Ippy', which is a city just a little to the west from Brisbane. It's an odd little town that originally grew as a trade hub for the rural community, but became something of a miner's town in the late 19th to early 20th centuries, where the outskirts of Ippy were mined for coal to feed Brisbane's power needs as it mechanized with steam then electricity. 

When the mines closed - largely due to a string of underground disasters in the 1960's, the town relied on its rail-yards and train workshops to continue its economy. Now, the city is an odd mix of rural industry and tourism. A lot of people think about Ipswich by its 'blue collar' and somewhat impoverished outer suburbs, while others think of it by its proud heritage. Unlike Brisbane much of Ipswich has been able to keep a lot of its characteristic old buildings and homesteads.

It is a city that shows how much of the charm has been stripped away from Brisbane and its rush to ditch the past and replace it with the new and shiny and somewhat temporary.

So I was very curious about what might turn up at the fair. Naturally, I was inclined to do a bit of typewriter spotting - and perhaps buying if the price was right and the machine interesting enough.

 Upon arrival we were greeted at the door by this magnificent Ariel motorcycle which looks as though it has been someone's loving project. The day was beautiful, and why wouldn't you take your pride and joy out for a ride!

 I've likened restoring typewriters to working on Motorcycles before, and I'm sure many of the typosphere can appreciate what I'm talking about when you see a chrome, metal and rubber beast like this. My grandfather, a typewriter mechanic, lost the ends of two of his fingers while working on his motorcycle when he was younger. Oddly, it never seemed to stop him from being able to fix typewriters - or ride motorcycles. However, I have no intention of repeating family history.

 

Ms Jane was with me, and after we'd ohhh'd and ahhhh'd over the motorcycle for a bit we made our way inside.

The day was beginning to get quite hot, and the shed that the fair was being held in was really starting to cook up with the heat and the dense crowd inside. Once we'd gotten through the door, we had to push our way through clogged aisles of people inspecting wares and haggling over the price of a dainty little tea set or a Princess Dianna plate.

I never understood the charm of collecting plates. But there were plenty of collectable plates here. The Dianna ones always seemed especially gaudy. There were some spectacular jewelery pieces, but Ms Jane didn't have the budget to buy what she liked the most.

  

 Towards the back of the shed the crowds dropped off a little. But the temperature was several degrees hotter. I was starting to feel the sweat run down my back, and almost every trader exclaimed a complaint about the heat the moment you attempted to engage with them. 

As Paul McDermott (of DAAS) once said: "Of course we sweat in Queensland. It's all we do. If we didn't like sweating, we wouldn't live here".  But as I'm a Victorian at heart - my point of view is "F**k this heat. Let's find some air-conditioning before my shirt shows a sweat patch. You know how much this black shirt cost"?

I"d sussed out a Kerosene lamp that seemed to be a good price, but I didn't buy. I thumbed through a few books and rumbled through bits of junk under tables. Antique tools always seem to be a big hit, and oddly enough the old bottle openers that I saw selling at the Antiques auction a couple of months ago, seemed to be liberally scattered around the table with these antique tools. How very Australian - you need some beers open in order to be able to use these old world tools. 

The first typewriter I stumbled across wasn't really a typewriter at all, but rather a toy typer.

At $45, I felt compelled to leave it exactly where it was. I clanked the keys for a little bit, and well and truly affirmed that this machine had no place in my collection. It looked in great condition, but being in great condition doesn't simply equate to being a great machine. And besides.... it has a creepy as all get-up Dali-lama doll next to it, which I'm sure would posses its soul and have it quoting evil platitudes. 

As to be expected, and no doubt to the joy of our friends in Geneva, there were a lot.... and I mean a lot... of sewing machines. Singer seemed to be the brand of choice, and there were a lot of the old-style cast metal machines about. As it happens, I already gotten a sewing machine myself recently, so it was time to move on...

Not far from the Petite toy typewriter I discovered a nice and curvy Alder Tippa.

 

The photo doesn't really show it, but this machine had a few nasty looking blemishes in the plastic. I've wanted one of this model Tippa for a while, but at $55.... I wasn't too sure if I wanted to grab this one. I asked if they had the case, and they did.... but I passed it up anyway. 

Outside of that, the collection was a bit thin with typewriters. There was only one more to be had.... and it was this Imperial desktop machine:

$200? No thanks. The Imperial was not coming home with me today. Too heavy, too ugly. Too expensive. I bet it is a great machine... but... 

So that was that. I didn't co home empty handed though. I ended up getting this amazing 1950"s fan.

The powder blue was quite striking, but it needs a bit of a clean up. It works far better than most of my modern fans, and we've already made good use of this over hot weekend. As I walked out the door one of the traders yelled at me "Hey! Could you turn that thing on"? As he slowly melted into his seat.


The Maryborough fair is on next fortnight, but I doubt I'll be driving up there. However, in about a month, it's the Toowomba fair. And Toowomba beautifully interesting town.