Underbelly

I CAUGHT the final installment of this award-winning mini-series last night and, generally, I liked the whole production. Nowadays I don't watch much television so it has to be pretty good for me to bother. It was well written, soundly paced and engaging - but not as engaging as it could have been. In other words, I wasn't fussed about missing a few of the 13 episodes when I was otherwise occupied. (I was fussed when I missed a single episode of the superb Sopranos). Perhaps the difficulty mustering any strong interest in a resolution being reached had to do with the fact that the Melbourne Gangland Killings were so strictly intra-criminal. This is how a lot of people felt about the actual events at the time, of course: so they're knocking each other off one by one - who cares? Even The Untouchables movie cleverly invented a child's inadvertent death up front - and featured the brutal murder in a lift of bumbling accountant, Oscar Wallace - to make sure cinema-goers didn't take the side of the raffish Capone gangsters disobeying the indictably stupid and immoral policy of Prohibition.

Not even close to Blue Murder, Underbelly had that tin-ear and cock-eye for cinéma-vérité that are traits of the network whose specialty is bombastic sports coverage and 60 Minutes. Again, the fact that the antics of Detective-Sergeant Roger Rogerson and his associates in the Sydney police were truly shocking to citizens - who naively thought their community was governed by the rule of law - gave Blue Murder a narrative edge absent from the account of Melbourne's war between Carl Williams and a bunch of dumb painters and dockers and Corleone wannabes. (The Dodger's dedicated Underbelly blog has to be read to be believed - contrite this disgraceful man isn't). The true victims of the Melbourne underworld were - are - the people killed or rendered ill, broke, deranged or criminalised themselves by drugs. But none of them got the slightest of thematic acknowledgements in Underbelly. With murderer Ned Kelly back in the news, Tony Mokbel soon to be back in Australia and the glamorisation of criminality a topic du jour, Underbelly is certainly au courant. Yet strangely clueless.