Young Bill looks at old Bill1st February 2007Organisations that throw their doors open to a fly-on-the-wall documentary team take a big risk. When the organisations are the Victorian police force and the Magistrate’s Court, the risks are magnified.
They agreed to give unprecedented access to the makers of the new Channel 9 series, The Code: Crime & Justice.
It was a brave move and good public relations for Victoria Police, which is still recovering from years of gangland slaughter and the decamping overseas of drug baron Tony Mokbel as he was about to be sentenced for cocaine smuggling. More embarrassing still, allegations have been made that Mokbel had close links with police officers.
One of the deciding factors in agreeing to the making of The Code was no doubt the track record of the makers, who were also responsible for RPA, and the producer Craig Graham, who threaded his way through the sensitive world of customs to make Border Security.
The end result, says a somewhat lyrical William McInnes, is amazing.
McInnes narrates the series, a first for the actor, but he’s quick to assure that there is none of that “host in a bad outfit drifting in and out”. His work is done in a studio after the cameras and crew have caught what happens in the street when an offender is caught by the police and then in the courts with the magistrates and lawyers.
“It is terrific stuff,” he enthuses. “You are there and it is even-handed and open-handed. It makes no judgments on what you see. “RPA was and is a terrific show because it cuts the viewer a bit of intelligence and doesn’t sweeten it. That is why it is popular, the audience can smell a bit of BS and nonsense. They know when something has been tarted up and when they are being sold a pup.”
He cheerfully admits that if he had known what he now knew after watching The Code, there would have been some changes in how he played Nick Schultz in Blue Heelers.
Or maybe not. There is not enough drama in the truth.
The big question with all these reality series is why anyone would agree to be in one, for no pay, particularly when they have been captured breaking the law.
McInnes does not profess to know the answer to that but he does say that The Code is not all serious, some is hysterically funny.
“You can never underestimate the ability of a human being to do or say something incredibly ridiculous. And, at the same time, you cannot underestimate the ability of a human being to do something incredibly brave and wonderful.”
He can take some of that better understanding of the police force and human frailty with him to his next job, playing a member of the major crime squad in Sydney in an SBS mini-series, Major Crime.
In November, McInnes finished work on a new Australian movie, Unfinished Sky. He is typically self-deprecating about it.
“It is a bit like searching for Lasseter’s Reef when you are doing Australian films,” he said. “They either take off like a Saturn rocket or they disappear into the ether. Certainly, there were lots of nice people associated with it and it was a terrific story so it might be all right.”
And then there is his career as a writer. His second book, Cricket Kings, was published last year.
He is writing another book . . . I think. McInnes has a dry sense of humour and the business part of the interview over, he didn’t mind a bit of fun.
Asked what the new book was about, he said: “It is about a hard-working journalist in Perth who is intelligent and a fantastic person who writes for The West Australian . . . ”
Yeah, right. Then he relents. He is really writing one about a supermarket and another on sport.
“I like supermarkets. I don’t know why. I always associate them with being pushed around in a trolley and when I go visit my mother, we still do that — I sit in a trolley and she pushes me around. I still want a little Freddo frog.”
PAM BROWN
The Code: Crime & Justice, Nine/WIN, Mondays, 7.30pm
