Today was Canberra Cup Day for harness racing, and in between races they had a variety of fun events, one of which was dachshund races.
Naturally, for little dogs with little legs, the races were very short. In the first heat though, one of the dogs was not satisfied with this very short race and wanted to continue on, having seen the horses go right around the track, and managed to take people on quite a merry little chase.
Alas I didn’t see who won the final as the weather turned and I went home before the Canberra Cup and the final of the dachshund races. Still, it was good to see quite a decent crowd for the race meeting. Afternoon meetings are unusual for Canberra harness racing as they’re usually evening meetings, but if today is anything to go by, Sunday afternoons might be a good way to attract more crowds in future.
One of the longest-serving actors on The Bill was Trudie Goodwin who played WPC (and later Sergeant) June Ackland. In the show right from the start and until only a few years before the end, Trudie was rightly seen as one of the main faces of The Bill and, unlike many other characters over the years who left quite suddenly, Trudie and her character June were honoured with a long parting storyline which culminated in the brief return of Mark Wingett as Jim Carver, alongside whom June had spent many of her years on The Bill.
To go off on a tangent from there, Trudie Goodwin had a daughter, Elly Jackson. Around the time Trudie was finishing up on The Bill, Elly was starting a band called La Roux of which she was the lead vocalist. Later on, as a solo act, Elly used La Roux as a stage name.
Elly’s main vocal range is that of a soprano and most of her music takes that form. It’s also notable that unlike a lot of music in the synth-pop genre where lyrics are often very few and highly repeated, La Roux’s songs tend to follow a more traditional lyrical structure of having a bit of a story through the main verses and a repeated chorus. The first #1 hit for the band was Bulletproof and is a good example of Elly’s soprano vocals.
Personally though, while Elly’s soprano is quite powerful, I think Elly’s voice is just a bit better when she dials down the volume a notch and sings in a slightly lower register. My favourite song of La Roux’s is the somewhat creepy stalker song Fascination, which very much seems to describe a character that June Ackland would have taken great pleasure in arresting!
My 2nd favourite, and definitely in a lower register, is Tigerlily, which to my mind demonstrates Elly’s quite wide vocal range much more than any of her other songs.
I sometimes wonder if Elly had any interest in acting, because Trudie was no stranger to the stage and I think there could have been potential (and maybe still is) for them to team up as mother and daughter duo in a musical.
As many of you would know, I am a fan of The Bill, although I suppose seeing as it has been fifteen years since it finished production in 2010, some people reading this might not know what I’m talking about so a brief explanation is in order.
The Bill was a long-running British police procedural drama which started out as a one-off program called Woodentop in 1983, and became an ongoing series in 1984 which then aired continuously until 2010. Originally airing as an hour-long program post-watershed (the time in the evening on British television where more adult-themed programs are permitted) it switched to being a half-hour program pre-watershed which is a format it held for most of the 1990s, often airing three times per week and producing in excess of 150 episodes per year. Later on it went back to being a one hour program but remained pre-watershed. At the height of production, over 100 hour-long episodes were being produced each year. Towards the end of its run the number of episodes was reduced significantly as was the size of the regular cast and the show moved back to a post-watershed timeslot in an effort to reinvigorate the ratings with grittier storylines, but the audience reaction to the changes was poor and the show was eventually ended.
2,425 episodes were produced in total and the show went through many changes over the years, both in line with changes to policing methods in Britain, and production style. Originally very little was ever seen of the private lives of the officers, but these became more frequent over the years. Poor ratings in the early 2000s led to ITV bringing in a new executive producer Paul Marquess to dramatically overhaul the show, making the lives of the officers a more central focus, introducing much more sensationalised storylines, bringing in a larger supporting cast of people related to police work in some way and recurring criminals, and serialising the format which meant that often many storylines were ongoing for many episodes, rather than the old format where most storylines were wrapped up within a single episode. Ratings surged and a whole new audience came in, although reaction to the changes among the existing audience could be described as mixed at best. After Paul Marquess left, new executive producer Jonathan Young slowly returned the format to something resembling the period immediately before Marquess, and the results of slowly declining audience were predictable. Young’s final change to make a gritter version of The Bill, while probably an improvement on the product he had been producing, felt too much like a spin-off show and lost a lot of audience early on. While that version improved as it went on, the audience didn’t recover.
I happen to be quite a fan of the Paul Marquess era. Among fans of The Bill this is probably not the most favoured era, and I admit at times the show did become quite silly in just how many police officers turned into psychotic serial killers, but if I put those excesses to one side, there was a certain realism to the fact that crimes were often not solved in a single day and seemingly innocuous minor events from one episode could turn out to be key information in a case a few episodes down the line. Having recurring characters from other parts of the police force and among the criminal fraternity also lent credibility to the events as, in reality, police often use resources outside their station and deal with a lot of the same criminals over and over and over. I’m a fan of the intricate writing and the effort which went into tying storylines together and slowly weaving a storyline through months worth of episodes. The attention to detail in this was remarkable and it’s something I appreciate greatly.
The first half of the 90s in the half hour format is also a time I am a particular fan of. From Burnside and the move to the new station set through the wholesale changes to the senior ranks and station budgets of the Metropolitan Police being reflected on screen, and the way The Bill seemed to really capture the tough economic times which Britain went through. You can almost feel a nation in recession when you watch The Bill from that time.
The Bill has a strange history with YouTube. While the show was still on the air prior to 2010, people were uploading their VHS recordings of The Bill from around the turn of the century and just beyond. The picture quality was awful, but watchable. These videos would eventually get taken down and then reuploaded by someone else. This game of whack-a-mole continued intermittently until eventually the rights holders decided to start releasing The Bill on DVD and swiftly had pretty much all of The Bill removed from YouTube.
Some years later episodes started to appear on YouTube again. Some were VHS recordings, and some were copies off the DVDs. These would often disappear fairly quickly. They all disappeared when a new round of DVD releases of The Bill occurred.
In the last few years a website turned up which had copies of just about every episode ever released on DVD. These copies had interlacing issues but were otherwise decent. Around the time this website disappeared, pretty much every episode of The Bill was uploaded on a couple YouTube channels, again being copies off the DVDs. Recently these started to disappear, not entirely but many of them which made following a storyline through a season quite difficult as random important episodes just wouldn’t be there. The reason for this most recent disappearance has recently become clear.
An official channel for The Bill has turned up, with a couple episodes being uploaded each day starting from the beginning. They’re currently part way through season six and could be there a for a few years uploading episodes if they keep going at this rate.
I have most of the seasons of The Bill on DVD (just a few gaps to fill) but it’s still nice to have them on YouTube. My only gripe with these episodes on YouTube is that they have cut off almost all of the iconic opening titles, and also cut off the end credits. I do wonder how they’re going to handle this in later years when the opening titles were not at the start of the show but after the first scene.
At the time of writing this, the latest episode to be uploaded is Season 6 episode 30 “Big Fish, Little Fish”. By this stage plans to move to the new station set, which remained the station set until the end of the series, were well underway and were being explained on-screen by “renovations” of the old station set. It’s almost amusing that they expected anyone to think it was possible to renovate the old station to make it look anything like the new station. Part of this transition was the first and often-forgetten station fire in episode 41, with the new station debuting in episode 44. People often think the fire in 2002, which Paul Marquess used to make drastic cast changes and brighten up the set, was the first, but it wasn’t. Two more fires followed after that with another explosion a few years later (again under Paul Marquess, for another renovation) and a small fire during a hostage situation in Jonathan Young’s reign.
So, here is the most recent episode to appear on The Bill’s official YouTube channel, Season 6 episode 30 “Big Fish, Little Fish” which just happens to be a great example of The Bill at this period in time, featuring D.I. Burnside running around doing Burnside things, and plenty of June, Tony, Tosh and Jim doing much of the legwork, while the management ranks put their two cents worth in at the edges.
Apparently we’re coming into the year of the snake. Well, I don’t know about that, but whenever people start talking about the year of (insert animal here) my mind tends to go to Al Stewart and The Year Of The Cat.
Although I’m not entirely sure that my dogs are fond of the year of the cat. They probably like the year of the rabbit as they’re much more fun to chase!
Clive Robertson didn’t play a lot of music on his overnight show on 2UE, but there were a few songs which he would play more often than others. Many of these were quite sad and poignant songs, but one in particular was a very upbeat tune which seemed to have a message about the news and world events which mirrored Clive’s own observations. Something particularly notable about this song is it was released many years after one would have expected Clive to pay all that much attention to new music, and yet it clearly was a song of which he was quite fond.
The 1997 hit for Propellerheads, featuring vocals by Shirley Bassey, History Repeating
Clive took quite an interest in how things work, and I recall him once noting a couple videos available on YouTube about the workings of The Talking Clock. Hence, I’m sure he would have found this video about the making of the video clip of History Repeating to be quite interesting.
Given Nice Mr. Donald’s victory this week (I’ll analyse my prediction tomorrow now that it looks like the final states have been decided at last) I thought I’d go back to 2016 and something quite perplexing at the time.
Hugh Hewitt for those of you who don’t know (and I wouldn’t blame you at all for not knowing) is possibly the most boring presenter in all of talk radio…actually no I take that back, there’s a bloke who used to fill in for someone who was much more boring but I can’t remember his name. Hugh is actually quite a nice person, it’s just that he puts together a complete snorefest of a show across the Salem Radio Network.
Hugh worked in the Reagan administration and found his way into talk radio at some stage after that. He is a perplexing character in some ways as he seems to personally be a quite conservative person but suffers from the same affliction as many traditional Republican politicians in that he advocates for conservative ideals until he hits any resistance from the other side and then wants to compromise. This is largely what led to Republican voters embracing Trump in 2016 as he advocated for a lot of their positions and didn’t seem to care about backlash.
Anyway, like most traditional Republicans in 2016, Hugh wasn’t much of a fan of Donald Trump. Every day after Trump secured the nomination it seemed that Hugh changed his mind on whether to support him or not. I considered him to be a good barometer on the support Trump could expect from rusted-on Republican voters as they always had the option to just not vote. Eventually Hugh got behind Trump finally and permanently based on Trump’s list of people he would consider appointing to the Supreme Court as Hugh recognised the Supreme Court and the many Federal Court positions Trump would fill would be of great benefit for conservative politicians for decades to come even if the achieved absolutely nothing else in office.
After Trump won the election and prior to him taking office, Hugh started playing a song every single day as a message to Trump. For a very very boring show, it was extremely surprising, not only because Hugh’s enthusiasm for the song was out of step with the general tenor of his show, but because the song isn’t one you’d expect to find anywhere on the AM dial under any circumstances.
Hugh’s advice to Trump from the song was the “drive it [the presidency] like you stole it”. In other words, just go at getting as much done as possible because you only have a very limited amount of time to do it. While, in 2024, given what happened in 2020, we probably don’t want to offer a president-elect advice about treating the presidency as if it was stolen, I expect Hugh’s sentiment is the same today as it was back then, and Trump’s sentiment certainly appears to be that way. It should be noted Hugh was very pleased by Trump’s efforts to get things done in his first terms and how he seemed to get a lot more done than most Republicans do, so Hugh is firmly behind Trump this time around without any hesitation.
Back to the song. It’s a catchy tune and one worth sharing. I was certainly reminded of it this week.
The ACT had an election yesterday. My thoughts on it actually date back to the 2020 election which saw some very strange swings towards the incumbent Labor government and their friends the Greens, especially in electorates where such a thing probably shouldn’t have happened (Brindabella in southern Canberra which is the only part of town which consistently leans towards the Liberal Party, and Murrumbidgee in the west which picked up a couple Liberal-friendly suburbs in a redistribution and yet had quite a swing against the Liberals). These swings could only really be attributed to the incumbency bounce which occurred in many elections in 2020 due to COVID.
This election has mostly seen those swings reverse. Labor and the Greens have fallen back a touch which due to the peculiarities of the Hare-Clark system means the Greens have lost about half their seats. The Liberals recovered largely in Brindabella and Murrumbidgee but fell overall due to various independents doing quite well and probably picking up two seats. The Liberal vote also suffered overall as leader Elizabeth Lee, battling with three other party leaders in Kurrajong, didn’t pick up a quota on her own which is unusual for a leader in an ACT election.
The upshot of it all though is that, for all of the excitement about some independents getting in, Labor and Greens combined still have a majority so it’s likely that their governing coalition will continue unabated. As usual, as I have observed in every ACT election since 2012, people have expressed a desire for change but not actually voted in a way which delivered any change. Even if there had been a real change from this election, I doubt it would be smooth sailing. So much change is required that I’m sure many things would slip through the cracks, create controversy and derail the new government eventually.
Ultimately, being a voter with a conservative viewpoint in the ACT is a wasted effort. Not just in territory elections but in federal ones too. My electorate in the middle of Canberra is such a safe Labor seat that it barely even attracts candidates outside the major parties, and when it does it’s usually someone further left than the Greens. Even the Senate seems to be a lost cause now.
I could worry about it, but I realised a while ago that even when I do get some politicians elected whom I happen to support, they usually do something to disappoint me or fail to live up to the ideals I thought they would represent. One, who is no longer in parliament, even cemented my decision to get out of party membership entirely by boldly lying to me about a very shabby internal party matter (which I happened to know quite a lot about, maybe more than this person thought I knew) while trying to get me to vote a certain way in an internal party election.
So ultimately I now just accept that government and party politics is broken, especially while we have electoral systems which claim to be democratic but put people in parliament that in almost every case were not the preferred candidate of the majority of their electorate. It’s a farce, and it’s fair to say I am thoroughly disillusioned with the whole thing. For the record I did cast a formal vote, but it’s beyond me why I bothered. If only ballot papers had a “none of the above” option and people who received fewer votes than it were ineligible for election.
Which leads me to the song. The line from the song which comes to mind is “I used to care but things have changed”. Ironically, this song was used for a Canberra tourism commercial at one stage.
Good song. As cynical as I have become.
By the way, I misspelled “independents” and “indepents” earlier today. Autocorrect wanted to change it to “ineptness”. Changing the party name Independents For Canberra to Ineptness For Canberra sounds like a perfect description of the ACT Government. Another four years of ineptness, hooray! I think I’ll just look away…
The last time I shared something with you on a Sunday it was a closing theme for Art Bell on his various shows. Well, this week I am continuing that theme with the opening theme from Art Bell’s various shows, most notably Coast To Coast AM which has continued to use the theme despite Art leaving the show many years ago and running various competing shows (which mostly used the same opening theme) after that time.
The piece of music is by Giorgio Moroder and is simply called “Chase” and sometimes mistitled as “The Chase”, while also being the theme to the movie Midnight Express.
Not a night has gone by in US radio for decades where this piece of music hasn’t been broadcast on hundreds of radio stations. One can only imagine the royalty payments which have stemmed from that.
Art Bell was something of a pioneer of overnight talk radio in the US, with a format which has been emulated ever since. A lot of talk radio is political, but Art Bell found that the middle of the night was a good time to discuss more unusual things, and that the night-time audience was much more interested in such discussions than in a continuation of political talk. Art was a storyteller and was captivating when he could find a narrative to wrap around a discussion of the paranormal, the unexplained, or ideas which were outside the mainstream. Art didn’t stay permanently in the paranormal realm, often interviewing various musicians and actors, which probably explains why his show was such a hit as the subject matter, while often familiar, was never repetitive.
Art was also a very good listener, which made him a good interviewer. He could have guests on to discuss all manner of strange and unusual topics, and it really didn’t matter what Art believed on the subject, he was able to have an interesting and intelligent discussion with the guest, no matter how outlandish the guest’s subject or their claims, and get listeners involved as well. He was a true master of the theatre of the mind, and through the height of his popularity through the late 1990s and early 2000s, his show Coast To Coast AM was heard live in just about every market in the US and Canada, attracting millions of listeners in the wee small hours of the night.
After Coast To Coast AM was bought out by Premiere Radio, Art’s career was somewhat more checkered. Art semi-retired a few times citing various reasons for departing and coming back, and hosted weekend shows and served as a guest host on Coast To Coast intermittently for a few years, moving to the Philippines after he remarried and his new wife was not permitted entry to the US. Eventually after an on-again off-again relationship with Coast To Coast AM, he finally left the show permanently in 2011, and in 2013 started a competing show on Sirius XM satellite radio which lasted all of six weeks.
In 2015 he started an online show, again in basically the same format as his Coast To Coast show, this time called Midnight In The Desert. This show was picked up by a handful of terrestrial radio stations and seemed to attract a decent chunk of Art’s old audience who had come to the conclusion that Coast To Coast AM had grown stale without his presence. Indeed, the host since Art’s departure from Coast To Coast AM, George Noory, retained many of Art’s guests but tends to let them just talk for entire segments rather than engaging them in discussion. Art’s Midnight In The Desert show lasted about six months, with multiple technical issues along the way causing various shows to not air or be cut short. Eventually Art left this show after, it was claimed, people opened fire into his studio from the street, although the local police department never confirmed any of this.
Art suffered various health issues after this and died in 2018.
Midnight In The Desert and Coast To Coast AM continue to this day, and myriad of other paranormal-themed overnight shows have also appeared. It is now a thriving genre and a mainstay of US talk radio. Naturally some shows are better than others, and the ones where the host is a good storyteller and can engage in interesting conversation with the guests are probably the closest thing there is to a natural successor to Art’s legacy.
While Art was hosting Coast To Coast AM, Crystal Gayle performed a song called Midnight In The Desert which Art often used as his closing theme.
When Art launched the Midnight In The Desert show in 2015, he continued to use The Chase theme from Midnight Express as his opening theme, just as Coast To Coast AM continues to do to this day, but also continued to use Midnight In The Desert as his closing theme. Upon launching this show in 2015, he interviewed Crystal Gayle about the song.
As anyone who has read this blog for any length of time would know, I have some very peculiar dreams, and various characters from The Bill have been known to appear in them. Well, imagine my surprise when I came across this music video the other day and found actor Jeff Stewart (PC Reg Hollis from The Bill) in it. I don’t think I can make any sense of what’s happening in this video, but it really could be a scene from one of my dreams. It makes about as much sense as my dreams.
This is Sam Brown’s 1988 cover of Marvin Gaye’s “Can I Get A Witness”.
Courtrooms have appeared in my dreams before too. I had a dream where I was a prosecutor and mid-sentence forget absolutely everything about the defendant I was questioning and the case I was prosecuting. I asked the magistrate for a moment and referred to him as “your judginess” which prompted him to declare the defendant not guilty and find me guilty instead! Yep, makes as much sense as the courtroom in this video.
For most of the week, the majority of attention from the world’s news media was on a political conference in Milwaukee which showcased the likely next leaders of the American government. Of course, this all got wiped off the news agenda shortly after it finished when a very dodgy software update became the news, except that most news outlets were severely hampered by it and could barely report on it.
Anyway, the focus on Milwaukee reminded me of one my favourite performances by Jerry Lee Lewis, singing What’s Made Milwaukee Famous.
Apologies for not getting around to a Sunday Share post over the last few weeks.
This week we resume the series with one of my favourites. Longtime top-rating Sydney breakfast radio host Alan Jones had the very distinctive opening instrumental portion of this song as his theme music. Although only played briefly a couple times per day, there was no doubting what show you were listening to when this came on.
Although actually I did get confused one morning when I was listening to Rush Limbaugh as he was on around the same time as Alan and sometimes used this as bumper music. In my half-awake mode at the time I was slightly confused as to which station I had tuned into and why Rush was filling in for Alan!
As for why it’s one of my favourite songs. I am in awe at the effortless power and range of Laura Branigan’s voice. A marvel of musical talent.
For eleven years, John Kerr hosted New Day Australia on weeknights on a number of stations across Australia, headquartered at Sydney’s 2UE. For much of that time he used a very fitting song to end his broadcasts, with lyrics noting that “we’ve talked the whole night through”. It was the song Good Mornin’ from Singin’ In The Rain.
Later, when John hosted the weekend version of New Day Australia, he occasionally used the song to end the show, however for a lot of his weekend reign his show ended on 2UE earlier than it ended on the network so there wasn’t really an appropriate time to play the song. John moved to the Gold Coast while still hosting the weekend edition of New Day Australia and 2UE graciously paid for flights and accommodation in Sydney so he could continue to host the show, however eventually John retired from commercial radio. Thankfully John didn’t give up radio altogether and these days hosts an excellent country music show on Friday nights on Gold Coast community radio station 94.1FM.
Sean Hannity tends to have very very long openers for his show, combining clips of multiple songs with clips of various politicians and newsmakers. Unfortunately with the lengthy commercials breaks it does eat into the useful program time in each hour, but I digress.
For a few years around 2009, Sean used the chorus of Martina McBride’s Independence Day as one of the bits of music in his opener. It is a very powerful piece of music. I wish he still used it to this day, but alas.
Back when Jim Ball was the overnight host on Sydney’s 2GB, he used Paul Kelly’s “Sydney From A 747” as his theme song, at least until circumstances changed.
When Macquarie Radio made an arrangement with Pacific Star to turn Melbourne’s 3MP 1377 in to Melbourne Talk Radio MTR 1377, Jim’s show was networked into Melbourne and it became inappropriate for Sydney From A 747 to continue to be used for the show. Instead, he opted to use Peggy Lee’s “It’s A Good Day” which had previously been used as his closing theme.
There was a period of time where Jim moved to 2UE (where he was again syndicated) and then moved back to 2GB. My recollection of this is hazy but I think the Peggy Lee song continued to be his theme music during this time.