Classic Aussie TV and Radio Drama for January

Via Vision Entertainment have released the second and final DVD box set of the notoriously naughty series Chances.

Number 96 star Abigail plays sex therapist Bambi Shute in Chances.

In these concluding episodes the Taylor family continue their lives of excess after winning $3 million on the lottery. If you were a fan of Number 96 and The Box during the 1970s then you’ll enjoy Chances which is a 1990s take on the close to the bone sex and sin ‘soap’ format.

Steve Harland (Peter Kowitz) risks his career in politics by confessing to turning off his wife’s life support machine, and when the hairdressing salon starts going down the tubes Sharon Taylor (Mercia Deane-Johns) decides to employ topless stylists. Angela Sullivan (Patsy Stephen) is heading towards a Teflon nose job after becoming a cocaine freak, and vampire Dr Vlad Caldura (Mark Neal) arrives in town trafficking human body parts for organ transplant surgery on wealthy patients.

Playboy advertising executive Alex Taylor (Jeremy Sims) is presumed dead following a plane crash but in truth, he’s been thrown off a cliff and has lost his memory. As Alex tries to piece together the fragments of his life, he finds himself in the middle of a deadly series of events involving a shonky sexual dysfunction clinic using an experimental drug, he becomes possessed by an evil spirit during an erotic devil worship session for a lingerie advertising campaign, and dying billionaire Crowley Lander (Barry Hill) decides to take over his body using DND transfer.

Left: The concluding DVD volume of Chances is out now. Right: Alex Taylor (Jeremy Sims) is in mortal danger in Chances.

A homosexual architect finds that the work begins to dry up when gossip mongers start claiming that he has Aids, and Chris Reynolds (Mark Kounnas) falls in love with his late father’s ‘wife’ even though she’s working as a hooker. A novel about a pervert who rapes and mutilates women turns out to be based on fact, and a pair of young swingers decide to seduce the middle-aged Dan and Barbara Taylor (John Sheerin and Brenda Addie) but Barbara is more interested in the charms of the mysterious jewel thief Cal Lawrence (Gerry Sont).

The insatiable good time girl Stephanie Ryan (Molly Brumm) claims that she was previously a man who has been undergoing sex-change surgery in order to seduce a homosexual, and sex therapist Bambi Shute (Abigail) launches a new TV show featuring the sexually confused, transvestites, flashers, and assorted deviants.

Michael Caton starred in The Sullivans and Packed to the Rafters. He plays Aussie battler Bill Anderson in Chances.

A group of Nazis will stop at nothing to recover an ancient necklace with mystical powers which once belonged to Adolf Hitler, and Aussie battler Bill Anderson (Michael Caton) is horrified to learn that his latest girlfriend is a transexual who had been born a man.

Familiar faces appearing in these episodes include Eric Oldfield and Christine Harris from The Young Doctors; Tommy Dysart from Prisoner: Cell Block H; Briony Behets from The Box; Justin Melvey from Home & Away and Days of our Lives; Liz Burch from The Flying Doctors; Richard Morgan from The Sullivans; Felicity Soper from Richmond Hill; Helen Scott from A Country Practice; Annie Jones and Fiona Corke from Neighbours; Kate Fitzpatrick from Boney; and John Orcsik from Cop Shop.

You can order Chances Collection Two from the Via Vision website.

Via Vision Entertainment will be re-releasing the first two seasons of Prisoner: Cell Block H on DVD on the 2nd of February.

The series followed the lives of the inmates and staff of the Wentworth Detention Centre and in these initial 165 episodes top dog Bea Smith (Val Lehman) is outraged when Lynn Warner (Kerry Armstrong) is brought into the prison. Lynn claims that she is innocent of abducting and attempting to murder a child but Bea decides to exact her own revenge using the laundry steam press.

Lesbian inmate Franky Doyle (Carol Burns) goes berserk after learning that Doreen Anderson (Colette Mann) is being moved out of her cell, and tragedy strikes during a shoot-out with the police when the pair go on the run. Prostitute Marilyn Mason (Margaret Laurence) gets up close and personal with electrician Eddie Cook (Richard Moir) right under the nose of the sadistic screw Vera ‘Vinegar Tits’ Bennett (Fiona Spence), and officer Meg Jackson (Elspeth Ballantyne) is left a widow when a prison riot gets out of control. Meanwhile, Karen Travers (Peita Toppano) finds herself behind bars after murdering her abusive and unfaithful husband who had forced her to have an abortion against her religious beliefs.

Catherine Roberts (Margo McLennan) ends up on remand after taking the law into her own hands by mowing down her daughter’s rapist with her car, and former bent screw Anne Yates (Kirsty Child) comes to a sticky end in one of the laundry dryers after ending up on the wrong side of the bars.

Trouble is on the cards for deputy governor Jim Fletcher (Gerard Maguire) when his old army mate Geoff Butler (Ray Meagher) blows into town to illegally recruit mercenaries. Geoff has a violent temper and when he’s propositioned by a homosexual, he gives the man a brutal bashing in a pub lavatory. Geoff is totally deranged and rigs up a parcel bomb which will wipe out Jim’s entire family.

Left: The first two seasons of Prisoner: Cell Block H are coming back to DVD. Right: Alcoholic Lizzie Birdsworth (Sheila Florance), top dog Bea Smith (Val Lehman) and good time girl Chrissie Latham (Amanda Muggleton) are among the inmates in Prisoner. Bottom middle: ‘Soap opera’ pioneer Alan Coleman directed two episodes of Prisoner.

The lives of the inmates and warders are on the line when heavily armed terrorists with explosives break into the Wentworth Detention Centre, and governor Erica Davidson (Patsy King) is gunned down during the commotion. Alcoholic inmate Lizzie Birdsworth (Sheila Florance) learns that she has spent the past 20 years behind bars for a crime that she did not commit, and lesbian taxi driver Judy Bryant (Betty Bobbitt) is determined to become an inmate to be reunited with her drug pushing lover Sharon Gilmour (Margot Knight). Unfortunately, the unhinged warder Jock Stewart (Tommy Dysart) breaks Sharon’s neck by throwing her down a flight of prison stairs. When the inmates decide to protest about bent screws things get out of hand with young Leanne Bourke (Tracey-Jo Riley) plunging to her death from the prison roof.

When Doreen Anderson falls pregnant after being raped by a factory foreman whilst on prison work release the women decide to take revenge on the man by giving him a nasty bashing, and a mass escape through an underground drainage system will end in tragedy when the tunnel roof caves in.

Familiar faces appearing in these episodes include Cornelia Frances, Lisa Aldenhoven and Brian Moll from The Young Doctors; Val Jellay and Terry Gill from The Flying Doctors; Anne Charleston, Ian Smith, Anne Haddy, Stefan Dennis, Tom Oliver and Myra de Groot from Neighbours; Judy Nunn and Debra Lawrance from Home & Away; Rowena Wallace from Sons & Daughters; George Mallaby from Cop Shop; Briony Behets and Lois Ramsay from The Box; Vic Gordon from Matlock Police; and Colleen Clifford who had been a star of the very first John Logie Baird television service also crops up in the action. Episodes 25 and 26 are directed by Alan Coleman who also produced The Young Doctors and directed Crossroads in the UK.

You can pre-order Prisoner Collection One now from the Via Vision website.

Grace Gibson Productions have released another batch of classic radio serials on CD, USB and as digital downloads.

The classic radio serial Just Off Fifth is now available.

Just Off Fifth, adapted for radio by Richard Lane from the novel by Edith P. Begner, introduces us to the neurotic middle-aged novelist Maud Harewood (Patricia Kennedy) who has developed writer’s block. In order to get her creative juices flowing again her husband Albert (Don Crosby) moves them into a fashionable apartment house just off New York’s Fifth Avenue. The house was built by Laurence Ryder (Syd Conabere) who is always very particular about the tenants that he will take in but will he live to regret renting an apartment to the Harewood’s?

As she settles into her new home Maud will become acquainted with the diverse group of tenants including an egocentric chemist whose family live in fear, two elderly sisters, and a woman who has been crippled by obesity. The trouble begins when Maud learns that a thirteen-year-old boy is living in the building, she had been assured that there were no children on the premises and we will discover that she has a kind of sickness which could poison the people around her. Maud’s troubled mind and gossip will cause countless problems for young Robin Faye (Peter Oliver), his family and for the other residents in the building. The cast includes Beverley Dunn and Marie Redshaw from The Flying Doctors, Wynn Roberts, Elizabeth Wing, and Douglas Kelly.

More mysteries need to be solved in Spiral Ten.

The latest release of the political satire How Green Was My Cactus starring Keith Scott and Robyn Moore features all of the episodes which were broadcast on radio during December, and in volume 3 of Spiral Ten private investigators Frank Connor and Joe Mintz tackle another crop of fascinating cases from their offices in Sydney’s colourful King’s Cross. A big-time import agent approaches Connor and Mintz for help when his neurotic wife becomes involved with gypsies, and the detectives learn that a client’s husband could be an enemy spy who is trying to infiltrate the top-secret military base at Woomera. Elsewhere an eccentric heiress is being done down by a beautiful embezzler, an offbeat couple are worried about the end of the world at the hands of giant insects, and a nephew who is due to inherit a fortune wants to know who his eccentric uncle is giving his money to but is the old man deliberately setting himself up to be murdered.

Just Off Fifth, How Green Was My Cactus and Spiral Ten can be ordered from the Grace Gibson website.

Photo’s copyright: Via Vision Entertainment/Beyond International. Via Vision Entertainment/Grundy Organization/Fremantle Australia. IRS Grace Gibson Productions.

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