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Clip description
The Vane family gathers at the Christmas dinner table with friends Tony Duff (Sam Neill) and Blake Minor (Rick Ireland). Seen here are Fred Vane (George Dixon), his wife Julie (Carol Burns), daughters Lucinda (Wendy Hughes) and Lydia (Lisa Rogers), and son Bill (David Page).
Curator’s notes
Fred makes his expectations of proper manly behaviour clear to the young men at the table.
This scene shows the restrictions of shooting on videotape, in a studio multicam setting. Two of the characters are seated in such a way that the viewer never gets to see their faces. The three cameras are static, only pulling focus to change their shots. It is the kind of camerawork you would expect to see in a two-hour weekly serial, not special event television. Some characters, like Lydia, we never get to see face on during the whole episode, although she tries hard to get her profile in shot.
Carol Burns, immortalised for a generation of viewers around the world by her portrayal of the young, illiterate lesbian Frankie Doyle in Prisoner (1979) is seen here in a starkly different role as Lucinda’s mother, Julie Vane.
