Punishment
 1 9 8 1 (Australia)
1 x 90 minute episode
26 x 60 minute episodes
Innocent TV viewers did not deserve Punishment. Low
ratings prompted justice to be done and they were soon released
from this hellish existence.
Punishment was the Australian soap opera meant to be the
male equivalent of the women-behind bars saga, Prisoner.
Like Prisoner it was screened in Australia on Channel
10. But everything, starting with the appallingly downbeat title,
was wrong.
There was an abundance of unsavoury, unsympathetic characters.
There were few, if any, likable or admirable figures of strength
and authority. The 'clean' prison doctor was around at the start
but then seemed to disappear.
There was no humour and no sex or romance - the vital
ingredients to soap opera. In the first episode a warder's wife
was briefly seen. After that she escaped.
Ascending star Mel Gibson appeared as a prisoner in the
movie-length opening episode. Brian Wenzel (later to play the
lovable copper in A Country Practice) played a warder. But
totally miscast as the prison governor was Barry Crocker, the
former variety artist, famous as Bazza Mackenzie, later to become
the singer of the Neighbours theme.
Much time was taken with unsavoury plots about drugs and
assaults and the squabbles of unpleasant warders. But worst of all
was the absence of women. It's effect on the men's lives was not
explored, perhaps on the grounds of taste.
Punishment was not Prisoner. Punishment
was a mistake. There was no mystique about men without women, and
viewers did not want to see a load of violence.
Where Prisoner had created a sympathy for society's
misfits, including some unhappy homosexuals, Punishment
created a horror of them.
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