<< HEY YOU ~ MAIN ~ GENERAL IDIOCY >>
LATEST COLUMN
A powerful screenplay stolen by the ABC.
UPDATE. More on the Australian waterfront from Hal G.P. Colebatch.
Tim Blair -
RIGHT-WINGERS across the land are furious over the ABC’s Bastard Boys wharf-a-rama, which aired earlier this week. Certainly, questions of bias and imbalance must be addressed but the real issue here is that the ABC completely stole the idea for the program from me.
Yes. From me.
Oh come on, does this sound like something Tim would write? Now, if ABC produced a mini-series on the letter “j”, yes, I can see how Tim could say they ripped it off from him. But a whole script?
This is paco’s I bet. Or maybe Penguin did it.
And if either of them wrote it on Tim’s blog. It belongs ... to ... Tim? Oh this sounds exploitive and rightwingish. Karl Rove is involved somehow I’d bet.
Posted by wronwright on 2007 05 18 at 12:25 PM • permalink#2: N-o-o, not one of mine, although, now that you mention it, it does bear a vague resemblance to a screenplay I wrote a long time ago that was stolen by Hollywood. It was called “Pretty Near the Waterfront”. There are also shades of another little thing I wrote that was stolen by a guy named Constantine Fitzgibbon: “When the Kissing Had to Be Sharply Curtailed”.
Tim, I reckon you must have been influenced by my script which I sent to the ABC, called Menzies: Triumph of the Will. It’s a struggle between the free world and communism, between good and evil, as the young, virile Robert Menzies (played by Hugh Jackman) battles Doc Evatt (Jack Thompson, suitably dopey and Alzheimiac)for Australia’s soul. Cate Blanchett as the beautiful Russian spy, Evdokia Petrov, plays the love interest.
Unfortunately,the ABC rejected my script as being “too political”, unlike their Curtin and waterside docu-dramas.
Not bad, but could do with some orgy scenes, featuring union officials and crumpet provided by the ABC current affairs department.
Posted by Margos Maid on 2007 05 18 at 07:12 PM • permalinkI think the very concept of “docudrama” is dodgy.
The word itself is an oxymoron.
As observers have noted, Bastard Boys has been used as a vehicle to make statements and claims (only months before an election) that would run foul of the ABC’s guidelines regarding bias if presented as a documentary.
Also some of the people depicted say that they have been misrepresented.
Frank Hardy was prosecuted for criminal libel in 1951 for claims made about John Wren (thinly disguised as “John West") in his book Power Without Glory.
He was acquitted on the grounds that the book was judged to be a work of fiction.
It would be interesting to see Bastard Boys similarly tested.Unions killed Curtin. Now the unions want to kill free Australia to give their mates jobs.
Posted by stackja1945 on 2007 05 18 at 08:56 PM • permalinkColebatch MUST be onto something.
I haven’t witnessed any challenges to his examples of Union buffoonery in any medium since it went public in the past 3 days.
Why doesn’t a journo ask Gillard, Rudd or Combet what they think of Colebatch’s comments? They couldn’t say that was an action of the past...because we know that is what Corrigan was railing against in the past decade.
And then they can start on the building unions who still have undue influence on the costs of construction.
Posted by Macosghair on 2007 05 18 at 08:58 PM • permalinkMy hope is that the Bastard Boys was so bad it might have a negative effect. I never watched it but I saw a large photograph in one of the metro newspapers that looked awfully like a still from the sketch comedy program Full Frontal. It was a picture of people very obviously made up to look like other people, like you see in comedy caricatures.
The feel from the photograph was of a cheap and nasty show that would never have made it out the studio door in the US or UK. Purely on its quality, Bastard Boys must have set back Australian TV drama 30 or 40 years. Why even the title smacks of those corny, badly acted and appalling scripted Australian TV cop shows from the 1970s and 1980s.
Beautiful work Tim!
The conception and characterisation were immaculate, the dialogue so true to life I could hear the wheels of union corruption turning, the oil to silence their squeaks having ended up on a truck only to fall off at the door of a pub.Forget the ABC, make it for radio!
Posted by carpefraise on 2007 05 19 at 03:47 AM • permalinkLook what someone posted in another forum after reading Colebatch’s effort:
When I was a student I worked in the union dominated wharves in NZ as a
“seagull”, non-union labour filling in for the slack unionist shortages for
the stevedores company when they took their inevitable sickies. Most of them
were known as “Backache Blueys” at the time.The stevedores and ship-owners preferred the seagulls any day of the week as
we got the job done. I worked on one ship, the “Cap Egmont”, and during one
day, the wharfies went out on strike for: Freezer Money, Stoop Money, Vermin
Money, Dirt Money and Embarrassment Money (handling packs of toilet seat
covers). I kid you not.Inevitably, there was resentment between the wharfies and the seagulls and I
finished up being involved in a contrived “accident” which also involved
other seagulls. I was uninjured, though shaken, but my mate broke his back
and another student broke his ankle when the wharfies put the hooks of the
crane into the bottom bale of a pile of wool we were sending out to the
ship, causing the whole heap on which we were working to collapse. A bit
like the P-38 story.Another union leading hand who was sympathetic to the seagulls and got on
well with us was totally flattened by 20 tonnes of sheet steel when the
steam in a crane winch allegedly “failed” as he was walking underneath.
Later I helped to hose his remains off the wharf into the sea. Have you ever
seen a 2-D human? - he was just ironed-out overalls in a pool of blood and
compressed tisse and bone splinters.Those interested in more detail could look at David Carment, “Australian Communism and National Security September 1939- June 1941” vol 65 Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 246-256. This is the period when the Russian non-aggression pact with Germany was in force. Not surprisingly, as Carment argues, the CPA “not only at one stage opposed the war but campaigned against its effective prosecution”. He argues that “a key aspect of the C.P.A.’s role was its encouragement of industrial unrest. The war required, a party paper argued, the ‘militant trade unions should go into the offensive’ and ‘initiate a struggle in the industrial field’”. He notes that “a key industry in which C.P.A. directed disruption was evident in coal mining.” “Another feature of C.P.A. activities was an attempt to infiltrate the armed forces”.
Page 1 of 1 pages
Members:
Login | Register
| Member List
Bloody hilarious! Definitely looks like you’ve got an intellectual property-rights case, Tim.