October 16 2000

If there’s one Aussie film of the last five years that has achieved mass cult status it must be Working Dog’s The Castle. "How much does he want for it?" and "Tell him he’s joking" literally have ripped through most work places and homes throughout Aussie land.

The Working Dog team, as well as the Castle, have produced The Late Show, Funky Squad, Frontline and The Panel. Now Rob Sitch, Jane Kennedy, Santo Cilauro and Tom Gleisner have now presented their second feature film The Dish.

It’s centered around the big radio telescope which still graces the wheat fields around Parkes in NSW. In 1969 when Neil Armstrong did his "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind'' trick on the moon Parkes was the "dish" that served the TV pictures to the world.

It was a significant technical achievement and we were pretty chuffed to have managed to do our bit for the space race.

Anyway, apparently contact was lost with the spacecraft for two hours. Working Dog howled loudly during script development that the time would have to extended to make some sort of a picture, and off they went. The result is a nice piece of gentle nostalgia.

I’m old enough to remember 1969 and yes we did take an hour or two off school to sit up in the assembly hall and watch the pictures beamed down through Parkes to us.

The Dish has Sam Neill heading the Aussie scientific team aided by Tom Long and Kevin Harrington. American Tim Warburton plays the NASA expert and Roy Billing a rather loveable mayor who gets in trouble with his wife for leaving his elbows on the table.

There are some rather silly romantic subplots, a bereavement, the wind rises alarmingly and threatens to down the dish and when it’s not too gusty they play cricket and have rides up top. That’s pretty surreal.

But unlike The Castle, The Dish isn’t the laugh a minute. And there’s as much depth in the characters as there’s water in a working dog’s bowl. As we’d perhaps expect from this mob, the strongest characters are politicians.

I’ve already mentioned Roy Billings as the Mayor, but Bille Brown as the rough, gruff, larrikin Prime Minister was spot on. I remember blokes like that.

3 Nostagic Flys Steve Baker