1964
A detective’s hat
How television took off
This pork-pie hat worn by actor Leonard Teale on the TV drama Homicide became a national icon. Made by Crawford Productions, Homicide was the first successful Australian TV drama and a major hit, beating its international rivals in the ratings and creating an iconography of Australian police detectives in ill-fitting hats.
Television arrived in Australia on 16 September 1956, more than a decade after its American debut and just in time for the 1956 Olympic Games. The Labor Party intended to introduce a government-run monopoly following the example of the British Broadcasting Corporation, but they lost power. The Menzies government went with a mixture of commercial and government options, handing the licences to the country’s two main media players: the Fairfax family (Channel Seven) and the Packers (Channel Nine).
There was no local content quota and the two commercial stations were delighted to reuse American material that then, as now, could be purchased at a fraction of the price. The early local productions tended to be quiz and panel shows and news and current affairs programs. Some 97 per cent of all drama shows broadcast in Australia between 1956 and 1963 were American.
Hector Crawford was an orchestral conductor who, with his sister Dorothy, produced and packaged radio shows. They were quick to move into TV with the marriage game show Wedding Day on air in 1956 and the sitcom Take That! the following year. The courtroom drama Consider Your Verdict (1961–64) was a step up in terms of local drama. Then, in 1964, Hector finally found a taker for his police procedural.
At 7.30 p.m. on Tuesday, 20 October 1964 on Channel Seven in Sydney and Melbourne, Inspector Jack Connolly (John Fegan), Detective Sergeant Frank Bronson (Terry McDermott) and Detective Rex Fraser (Lex Mitchell) dragged the first crims back to Russell Street in the first episode of Homicide. The production values were a significant notch higher than other Australian productions. With external scenes shot on film and a very tight budget, Homicide had a gritty realism that immediately appealed to Australian audiences. It was a ratings smash – the first Australian drama to compete with and beat the imported shows. Some episodes rated more than 50, which would be an unheard-of number these days. The series ran for 510 episodes and aired from October 1964 to January 1977.
Making a virtue of necessity, Homicide stories were taken directly from the police blotter. The show didn’t flinch from difficult topics such as gang rape, poverty, drugs, sex work, child abuse and ‘poofter bashing’. The more controversial or salacious episodes were preceded by Fegan, the actor who played the senior detective, prologuing the episode with a community announcement. Hector Crawford himself introduced ‘The Rape of Lennie Walker’, which was about child murder.
Homicide pioneered and guaranteed the viability of Australian television drama and the Australian feature-film industry. ‘I think it was the Melbourne people that decided it,’ said Teale when asked about the success of Homicide. ‘And the fact that it was the first outside action series and the people spoke the Australian language . . . all those things were part of it.’