I was just swimming through the torrential flood of mediocrity which is most YouTube content, when I stumbled on this little gem! Who would have thought David Bowie used to hang out around Broadway as well? This video for his 1983 single, “Let’s Dance”, was shot around Sydney, with a large part down Broadway. According to wikipedia:
This loneliness and desperation seeps into the music video, made with David Mallet on location in Australia including Sydney Harbour, which features Bowie watching an Aboriginal couple’s struggles against metaphors of Western cultural imperialism impassively while playing with his band.
MMmmm! I bet you Communication Students are getting off over that! Although I have to admit I must have missed all the references too Western Cultural Imperialism nestled within the lyrics when I’ve only just listened to the song. With lyrics like “Let’s sway you could look into my eyes / Let’s sway under the moonlight, this serious moonlight… LETS DANCE!”, it becomes obvious Bowie must have been Keating’s script writer for the Redfern address. No doubt about it.
(Its funny because that crappy rental store halfway down to the Broadway shopping centre is still there, 30 years later.)
Ahhhhhhh, Farthing Wood, it is perhaps hard to find a portrayal of British wildlife so utterly different from the woodland idyll that Toad of Toad Hall seemed to inhabit, yet the Animals of Farthing Wood managed to do it in spades.
Wind… was winsome, a spry tale of the misadventures of a corpulent amphibian, whilst Animals… was an epic adventure, spanning three cartoon series and focusing on the plight of a mismatched band of animals in flight from their destroyed homes at Farthing Wood, to the supposed idyll of the nature reserve “White Dear Park”.
How could Wind compete? it featured but four main characters; Farthing on the other hand juggled more than twenty. Who could forget the likes of Fox, Badger, Weasel, Mole, Adder, Toad, Owl, Whistler and various other nondescript characters (I’m looking at you Rabbits, Squirrels, Mice, Voles etc)?
Wind concerned itself only on such shallow pursuits as boating, speeding in a car and occasional cross-dressing. Farthing Wood featured birth, marriage, sex, murder, revenge, conspiracy, violence, interracial marriage (remember when the red fox cub and the blue fox cub got together? Though for some reason they never produced purple offspring…) And finally DEATH! If ever there was a show that thrived on serving up mortality to its target audience of five to ten year olds at 4:30 in the afternoon, then The Animals of Farthing Wood was it.
Who could forget such tragic denouements like the shooting of Mr and Mrs Pheasant? Or perhaps Mr Hedgehog having a nervous breakdown on the highway and being squished, along with his wife, by a lorry? Or even dear Moley’s tragic battle with pneumonia?
Such realism has not been seen since; children of today are too soft. Spongebob (like The Wind in the Willows) just doesn’t have such a grasp on reality.
by Jack Ivens
Wind in the Willows
The Animals of Farthing Wood were all communists. That’s right. Every last one of them. You know why? Because every damn animal in that forest was allowed to join the group. I mean, where were the bad animals? Where were the comically naughty ferrets and the evil though strangely likeable rats? I’ll tell you where they were – marching along side the moles and the foxes to the tune of “The Red Flag”. Damn pinkos.
The Wind in the Willows knew how it was done. There were four main characters and plenty of interchangeable bad guys, made up of the scum of the woodlands. And this character structure taught children a very valuable lesson about exclusion which could be applied to the playground, thus teaching them about life as they watched. Brilliant! And even more brilliant was the fact that the characters represented English society in the Victorian era, with the upper class being played by Toad, Badger, Ratty and Mole (the good guys) and the lower class characterized by the ferrets, stoats and weasels (the bad guys.) Social commentary ahoy!
Then there were all the deaths in Farthing Wood. I’m surprised there were any animals left the way the writers started killing them off. It’s supposed to be a children’s show about woodland creatures, not a fuzzy episode of NYPD Blue. And to show all the deaths on screen! It’s a wonder a whole generation of children weren’t traumatised.
Of course, we all know the real reason why Wind in the Willows was the best show ever. Toad. Toad was without a doubt one of the funniest and most ridiculous characters ever. His lovable antics made him a favourite for children of all ages. No doubt there was a corresponding character in Farthing Wood, but he was probably killed off after ten minutes by the psycho writing team. If only said writing team had killed themselves off, then we would have never had to experience the boring and offensive program that was The Animals of Farthing Wood.
