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Clip description
Maurice Morpeth (Lewis Fitz-Gerald), an accident-prone stranger, hits town – literally. He’s the unwitting cause of injuries to Ray Turner (Serge Lazareff), his dog (Matilda) and damage to Lucky’s (Luigi Villani) car, his eggs and his hens. Peter Ramsay (John Hargreaves) and Cassie McCallum (Louise Howitt) show some sympathy for Maurice.
Curator’s notes
This is the culmination of quite a long comic sequence that charts Maurice’s arrival in town and the havoc he creates. It’s a lesson in how careful preparation combined with a shot list of well-timed close-ups can make the comedy look effortless. It’s a fact that a joke is twice as funny if you can catch a reaction either prior to the moment, like when Lucky says ‘No, not the boot!’ or after it, as in the two-shot of Ray and Cassie watching in disbelief. Ray’s dog, the kelpie Matilda from Elfinvale Kelpie Stud, contributes a lot to this sequence in this respect. She is simply one of the most expressive doggy actors I’ve seen, particularly in the surgery when she is being patched up after extenuated contact with the (to her) terrifying Maurice.
One of this series’s great strengths is the array of animals that inhabit every episode. In this one alone there are dogs, hens, horses, cows and bulls. During the course of the series animal supervisor Christine Powell had to deal variously with very large shaggy sheepdogs, cranky koalas, bilious pythons and ducks with a tendency to fall asleep at inappropriate times. There’s no sign of anything resembling the mummified kangaroo paw that was responsible for so many of Skippy’s gate-opening tricks (see Skippy, 1966–69).
The human actors come over pretty well too. We get a glimpse here of the rapport between the three central characters. Luigi Villani, who plays Lucky, was a Crawford’s favourite, appearing over the years in many of their productions, usually as much the same character. Lewis Fitz-Gerald handles the bungling Maurice with a light touch and a touching innocence. In the end though, it is Matilda who upstages them all.
