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Clip description
This is the opening title sequence for season 1 of The Flying Doctors. The style and theme remained constant throughout its seven-year run with changes in content dictated largely by cast movements. Characters featured are Dr Tom Callaghan (Andrew MacFarlane) and Dr Chris Randall (Liz Burch). Seen but not credited here are Nurse Kate Wellings (Lenore Smith) and pilot David Gibson (Lewis Fitz-Gerald).
Curator’s notes
The first few minutes of a show matter far more on television than in features. Anyone who has gone to the effort and expense of buying a movie ticket is not likely to walk out because the opening titles are boring but that person, watching television, might well reach for the remote before the drama proper has even begun. The title sequence for The Flying Doctors is designed to make an audience sit up and take notice. The stirring theme and spectacular images promise colour, adventure, heroic deeds, attractive and intelligent characters and positive attitudes; altogether, an entertaining and even uplifting experience. As long as what followed was faithful to most of this promise most of the time, audiences were hooked.
Garry McDonald, who with Laurie Stone composed the theme and scored all 221 episodes, recalls with pleasure the 'very decent budget’ they were given, which enabled them to use the best musicians available, including the Queensland Symphony Orchestra. He acknowledges this was probably due to Hector Crawford’s personal passion for music and in particular for orchestral work. It is unusual even today for an open-ended television series to make original music a budget priority but in this case the investment proved its worth for both parties. The theme became a valuable promotional tool, instantly identifiable with The Flying Doctors and, for many overseas audiences, with Australia itself.
The work of the composers McDonald and Stone penetrated international markets far more quickly than might otherwise have been expected and opportunities flowed their way as a result. The duo won the combined APRA-AGSC award for Most Performed Work Overseas two years in a row, in 2005 and 2006, an indication of their standing in the music industry today. In 2008, 15 years after the show’s demise, they were approached by VARA, public broadcaster for the Netherlands, seeking their consent to the use of The Flying Doctors theme in a dramatised documentary, Fan (2009), about a young Dutch woman who is obsessed with the television series and star Liz Burch.
