Frontline (Australian TV series)
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Frontline is an Australian situation comedy TV show, which satirised Australian television current affairs. This show ran for three series of 13 half-hour episodes and was broadcast on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 1994, 1995 and 1997.
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Production
The series was written, directed, and produced by the tight-knit team of Jane Kennedy, Tom Gleisner, Rob Sitch, and Santo Cilauro. They had met at the University of Melbourne and after a stint on radio they created and performed in the popular ABC comedy series The D-Generation and The Late Show; after Frontline they moved into feature films, making several popular Australian movies including The Castle and The Dish, and for several years they have hosted the popular panel discussion show The Panel.
Kennedy, Sitch, Cilauro also acted on the show, as well as Tiriel Mora, Alison Whyte, and numerous other notable Australian actors appeared in guest roles. Gleisner also appeared in a regular cameo role as a photocopier repair man.
The series was partly inspired by a 60 minutes special 'Has the media gone too far', not Drop The Dead Donkey as some have suggested.
Setting
The series followed the fortunes of a fictional current affairs show, Frontline, and satirised the machinations of the ruthless producers, the self-obsessed airhead host, and the ambitious, cynical journalists, all of whom resort to any sort of underhanded trick to get ratings and maintain their status -- including the use of hidden cameras, foot-in-the-door, bullying interview techniques and cheque-book journalism -- not to mention ingratiating themselves with the all-powerful network bosses -- while all the real work is in fact done by their long-suffering production staff.
But what gave the show its special edge was that the stories and the actions of the characters were often thinly-disguised parodies of recent real events and real people. The dim witted, egotistical host of the fictional show, "Mike Moore" (played by Sitch) was widely considered to be a parody of Stan Grant, who at that time was host of the Seven Network current affairs program Today Tonight, one of the shows that Frontline satirised.
Sitch has claimed that none of the characters were directly based on a single person, but it is evident that some of Moore's characteristics, and the storylines of the third series, were clearly inspired by Today Tonight, by its rival, A Current Affair, and the travails of Ray Martin, the show's host at the time, and also by Martin's predecessor, Mike Willessee.
Parallels might also be drawn between Frontline and ABC's Media Watch. Much of the real life journalistic misconduct reported on Media Watch later appeared on Frontline in fictionalised form, and one episode of Frontline involves a Media Watch episode critical of the show.
Series
One memorable episode of Series 1 ("The Siege") featured an incident in which the hapless Moore causes havoc when he finds himself negotiating by telephone, live to air, with a gunman who is holding some children hostage – this was a thinly veiled parody of a very similar and highly controversial real-life incident involving Mike Willesee.
A scene in another episode, in which Moore performs an embarrasingly bad version of Eric Clapton's Tears In Heaven while accompanying himself on guitar, is considered a clear dig at Grant, who is an amateur musician. It was claimed in the media at the time that Grant hated the show, was convinced that Mike Moore was a caricature of him and supposedly forbade any mention the series in the Today Tonight offices.
The series also contained a number of running gags which continued from program to program, including the fact that young sound man Jason Cotter (Torquil Neilson) never spoke.
The first series of Frontline was, unfortunately, the final screen role for renowned musician and actor Bruno Lawrence, who played the fictional series' devious, golf-loving producer, Brian Thompson. Lawrence was diagnosed with inoperable cancer shortly after the end of the first series, while he was working on the Australian film Cosi and he died on 10 June 1995. For the second series he was replaced by Australian actor Kevin J. Wilson and in the third series the producer was played by Steve Bisley.
Other information
Frontline also broke new ground for Australian situation comedy, by adopting some innovative production strategies. Its rapid production schedule was inspired by Drop The Dead Donkey, where each episode was written and taped in a single week and scripts were closely based on the real news stories of the preceding seven days.
The Frontline scripts were likewise written and the series filmed with a short period, often within a single week. It was a fully collaborative effort, with Cilauro, Kennedy, Gleisner and Sitch all sharing writing and directing duties, and the cast all contributing ideas during all stages of production.
To create a heightened illusion of grainy documentary realism, footage was taped on hand-held digital video cameras (usually operated by Gleisner and Cilauro) then tranferred onto film and finally transferred back to videotape.
The series was extremely popular throughout its run, winning a Logie award for Most Oustanding Achievement in Comedy, and a Sydney Morning Herald industry poll rated it #2 in the 25 all-time greatest Australian TV shows.