Reprint of an
article from the Australian TV Times 26 November
1977 about the forthcoming broadcast of episode
one of Cop Shop.
With Cop Shop, which starts screening on the Seven
network In most states In the next few weeks, Melbourne's Crawford Productions moves Into a new
comer of the well-known TV police show field. In Cop
Shop, the accent Is on the policemen as people first
and crime-busters second. Co-producer lan Crawford
says of the serial — which has one of the strongest
casts assembled for an Australian show In several years
— "It's going In the opposite direction to our earlier
police shows . . . It's not just guns and car chases."
Fred Roberlson reports.
Cop Shop brings back to TV one of the most popular actors
Crawford Productions has produced — George
Mallaby.
Mallaby was the heart-throb of Homicide for several years
and one of the key early characters of The Box, also made by
Crawfords.
Now Cop Shop moves him into another area of acting. Gone
is glamour boy Peter Barnes of Homicide. This time Mallaby is 38-year-old Senior Detective Sergeant Glenn Taylor, father of
a teenage girl.
Sergeant
Taylor's daughter is played by Joanna Moore, one
of the young stars of the movie Getting of Wisdom.
Mallaby is enthusiastic about Cop Shop. He said: "I suppose
they'll say it's just another police show, but it's not it's a human drama
which happens to take place in a police station.
In Cop Shop, Sgt Taylor's wife, Pamela, will be played by Rowena Wallace,
a performer he has had limited professional association with before,
despite being in the same series on some occasions.
Other key policemen in the Cop Shop team are played by
former Bellbird regulars Terry Norris and Gregory Ross, with
Paula Duncan, formerly of Number 96, playing the
glamorous Danni Francis, one of the new breed of involved,
efficient, modern policewomen.
Norris plays Snr. Sgt Eric O'Reilly, an old guard police
officer to whom the sexy policewoman is just one of the
signs that things aren't what they used to be. Ross plays
Constable Tony Benjamin,
tough and ambitious; and Peter Adams is Detective Jeff
Johnson, a rough diamond.
Mallaby thinks the program has plenty of potential,
particularly because such a strong cast has a chance to
build a variety of characters. He has returned from
England confident of the quality of Australian production.
He said: "While some of our product might suffer from the
speed with which we make it and the number of hours we
make of a series each year, the comforting thing is that we
do do it. "Given the dollars and cents that the overseas TV industry gets, our industry could match the best in the
world. I'm sure of it. "To achieve this, however, we need to develop shorter
series. To improve the quality we should be looking to
cutting down to 26 episodes a year, not boosting the output
to two hours a week the way things are going at the
moment."
One aspect of being back on screen that doesn't make
Mallaby quite so happy is that it's goodbye to the months of
being just plain "George." He said: "In England it was
wonderful being unrecognised, although it was
tremendous to run into Australians'
who knew me from the screen.' Generally, over there I could
enjoy the freedom, go down into bargain basements and
haggle and do a lot of things I just wouldn't bother trying
here."
Mallaby is taking his return to Australian TV very
seriously. The morning TV Times spoke to him, he had been up
at 4.30am, done some writing, and then cycled 12 miles to
get himself fit.
Because he has been through the Crawford cop show routine before, Mallaby
knows that not only must he be able to run a couple of
miles through narrow streets to catch his criminal, but he
has to have enough breath left to ask him to come down to
the station.
Cop Shop premieres on ATN-7 at 8.30pm on Monday,
November 28.
