The virtual city in 'The doctor Blake mysteries'
- Authors: Speed, Lesley
- Date: 2016
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Metro Vol. 187, no. (2016), p. 50-56
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- Description: Ballarat provides the stage upon which the ABC's riveting period crime drama 'The doctor Blake mysteries' unfolds. As such, writes lesley speed, the city - whose size is between that of a metropolitan centre and a rural town - exemplifies the regional gothic as well as the interaction between real and imagined places.
Renditions from the inside : Prison Songs, documusical and performative documentary
- Authors: Speed, Lesley
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Continuum-Journal of Media & Cultural Studies Vol. 33, no. 3 (2019), p. 324-336
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- Description: Produced for SBS Television, Kelrick Martin's Prison Songs is unusual as a documentary in which the participants convey their stories through songs that were written for the film. Centring on inmates of Darwin Correctional Centre, known as Berrimah Prison, and described in its press kit as 'Australia's first ever documentary musical', Prison Songs involved a collaborative production process in which inmates contributed to writing the musical numbers. As a documusical, the film belongs to a documentary subgenre that originated in the United Kingdom and forms part of a wider landscape of convergence between non-fiction and fictional television. Prison Songs expands Australian documentary, contemporary Indigenous film-making and stories about incarceration. The film's presentation of participants' experiences through music, story, dance and humour can be situated within the performative documentary mode, in which orthodox screen discourses of sobriety are supplanted by poetic expression. Its use of songs and musical performance as partial alternatives to interviews and narration traverses boundaries between avant-garde and television forms, expression and information, and prison and the wider society.
Comic investigation and genre-mixing : the television docucomedies of Lawrence Leung, Judith Lucy and Luke McGregor
- Authors: Speed, Lesley
- Date: 2020
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Continuum Vol. 34, no. 5 (2020), p. 690-702
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- Description: In an era in which comedians have been positioned as public commentators, a cycle of Australian television documentaries centres on the premise of a comedian’s investigation of a theme of existential significance. Produced for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, these series are Lawrence Leung’s Choose Your Own Adventure (2009), Judith Lucy’s Spiritual Journey (2011), Judith Lucy is All Woman (2015) and Luke Warm Sex (2016). This article examines the relationship between genre-mixing and cultural commentary in this cycle, which explores themes of life goals and identity, spirituality, gender and sex. Employing conventions of personalized documentary, these docucomedies use performance reflexively to highlight spectacle and explore the humour of awkward situations and contemporary and changing cultural values. Central to each series is the positioning of the comedian as commentator, central participant, therapeutic subject and performer. Using humour to address uncertainties about what is acceptable in today’s society, these docucomedies draw on traditions of Australian screen comedy and non-fiction representation to serve as public pedagogy about twenty-first-century concerns, from spirituality and mediated intimacy to pornography. © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.