What could be more soothing than watching old episodes of A Country Practice? Nothing – except maybe listening to a podcast devoted to it.
A Country Podcast, which launched in September, explores the long-running Australian drama – inside and out, from all angles, in all its 1,058-episode glory.
The podcast has found a large and growing audience of loyal fans, and hosted some of the show’s creatives and stars – but it started small and with simple intentions: as a way to entertain its creators, Kim Lester and Melanie Tait, in Covid lockdown.
“When Covid hit, I was working in local radio in Brisbane,” says Lester. “I was going home and feeling like, ‘I don’t want to listen to anything newsworthy’. I just couldn’t deal with it. I realised all I wanted to listen to was podcasts recapping something I had already seen.”
Lester and Tait were children and teenagers during A Country Practice’s run from 1981 to 1993, and their memories of the show are interwoven with their memories of childhood. But very few people watch TV as a family any more – and very few shows unite a country, and drive the water cooler talk, as much as A Country Practice did in its heyday.
“Creating the podcast was also nostalgia going back to a simpler time and a caring place. Some of my favourite shows are so well made but so stressful, like The Wire and A Handmaid’s Tale. I wanted to go back and watch something really comforting and familiar,” Lester says.
But when she and Tait revisited some of the episodes, they found a show that not only explored sweet, rural life in Wandin Valley, but also told the story of the country in the Hawke-Keating years. The podcast lowers listeners into a warm bath of nostalgia, but it also re-examines episodes under the light of social mores and politics of the time, including attitudes to the environment, drug decriminalisation and HIV/Aids.
“It’s not a recap podcast of an old TV show,” Tait says. Instead, they want it to be “a real record of a time in our culture.
“I don’t know of a TV podcast where you’re going to hear about the background of adoption in Australia, for example.”
The podcast also explores the now-unusual relationship that the series’ producers had with government bodies and charities, which would often feed them storylines based on the health crises and social issues of the day.
“A Country Practice’s writers and producers were pitched by the government and NGOs for stories. They would go to CSIRO and learn about farming. The health department would pitch them stories about drug use or drug sniffing,” says Tait. “The illnesses are done with compassion and kindness, it’s not about scaring people. It’s got great humanity.”
Rewatching old episodes, it became clear that the show wouldn’t get made in the same way now.
For a start, the actors didn’t look like supermodels – and the sets were fairly drab.
“Everyone is so normal looking, everyone wears beige. That’s what makes it so wonderful; that’s what country towns looked like,” says Tait. “There’s a lack of sheen in that show; it’s daggy in the way that life is daggy. And maybe that’s part of its appeal.”
Then there’s the politics.
“A Country Practice is the ultimate comfort watching in 2020. It’s a real lefty, progressive paradise. There’s an episode about nuclear disarmament, and the real life Bob Hawke comes to this rock concert and gives an amazing speech, and watching it now, I started weeping,” says Tait. “I don’t know about how a show like A Country Practice could be made in the Howard and Morrison years.”
As well as excavating the social history of the show, the pair have tracked down key writers – such as Judith Colquhoun, who penned more than 100 episodes and is responsible for some of the series’ most harrowing deaths, including Molly’s – and actors such as Matt Day (Julian ‘Luke’ Ross), Di Smith (Dr Alex Fraser/Elliott, and later Sharon Lyons) and Shane Porteous (Dr Terence Elliott).
“There were all these people who had these incredible careers, and yet [when we found them] they were still working actors – and they weren’t necessarily taken care of, or remembered in the way that the big American stars were from say Dynasty or Dallas,” says Lester. This podcast goes some way to addressing that.
• A Country Podcast is available now on iTunes, and you can join its dedicated Facebook group. The early seasons of A Country Practice are currently streaming on 7Plus
