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Telly

It looks like we’ll be gone before it gets to the last couple of episodes, but I’m still delighted to see The Apprentice back on telly. I stayed up late last night when I got in to watch the first one, while a still sick Sal went straight to bed. Of course it’s the same old stuff as every other year–the same hapless, arrogant, twats giving it 110% all the way while they make catastrophically idiotic decisions and then get rightly ridiculed by siralan in the boardroom, but it’s entertaining stuff anyway.

I’d love to write something witty, but I’ll leave that to Andrew Collins and the Watch With Mothers lot, who’ve beaten me to it.

What I will write about, a bit, is the other TV that I’ve been enjoying recently. Since getting back from Oz earlier in the month, Sal and I have been watching the excellent Underbelly, a dramatisation of the retributional gangland killings that took place in Melbourne for about 10 years from the mid nineties onwards.

It’s cracking TV, but all the more remarkable for the fact that–so far as I can tell from reading old news reports off The Age website–much of what is depicted in the show actually happened, and did so pretty much the way it’s presented.

They’ve even chosen to use the real names of all the people involved, which is an interesting decision given that there are still ongoing legal proceedings involving some of these people (the ones who aren’t either dead or in prison, at least, although even some of the dead ones have a part to play in some of the ongoing cases…). Having said that, perhaps you don’t have to be totally cynical to wonder whether this might not have been a deliberate calculated move, given the publicity that was generated for the show once Channel 9 had been indefinitely banned from broadcasting it in the state of Victoria by the Australian Supreme Court. I also wonder if it is a complete coincidence that suitably technically savvy Victorians have conveniently been able to watch the show anyway, given that there were high-quality torrents of the first 10 episodes up on Mininova before even half of them had been shown on TV in the other Australian states (and the only versions of episodes 11 – 13 that I’ve seen out there so far must have been leaked by someone inside the production company, given that they are rough cuts with an incomplete soundtrack and a timer running on the bottom of the screen).

It’s also interesting to us because many of the events took place in Sal’s bits of Melbourne, and some of the show was filmed in Essendon itself. One of the characters, for example, is Jason Moran, who ends up getting shot dead in front of his children (who had just finished an aussie rules game) in his van in the car park of the Cross Keys Hotel on Pascoe Vale Road. Yeah, that’d be the same Cross Keys Hotel that we’d just been to a few weeks ago for Sal’s dad’s birthday drinks…

Now, having seen the first 10 episodes, we just have the tricky decision of whether to watch those unfinished final 3 now, or wait 4-6 weeks for Australian TV to catch up so we can watch the proper ones. Decisions, decisions…