A wonderful nostalgic time warp and a very addictive show

Melbourne, Australia, has been voted the best city in the world in which to live for the fourth year, so watching a show filmed there with ocassional glimpses of the city and places I remember is a nostalgic trip for me.

I live in Florida and caught two or three episodes in the 1980's in which Sigrid Thornton appeared. The show was either dropped or moved to another time slot without warning, and not having VCR's in those days, I was not able to record it. Whenever I subsequently saw Sigrid Thornton in a film I wondered what had become of Ros, so when I discovered the episodes on YouTube I decided to watch just one show to see if it was the original I remembered. I am now up to episode 95.

I lived in Australia for several years and just love being requainted with the colorful language and colloquial expressions. "In a pigs eye!" "Bugger off!" "Poofter basher" "Fair Dinkum". No political correctness about ethnic and gender slurs. There are so many different words used, such as 'a Unit' meaning an apartment, that I don't know how most Americans can follow it, but I do know it was very popular here. I also love the sometimes hilarious humour, especially Lizzie the unrepentant alcoholic who lives for that first drink when she gets out. The inmates are all too human and the show depicts them as a cross section of flawed humanity who made mistakes. At least two of them, possibly more, have been incarcerated for killing abusive husbands. Two are innocent and one has served a long term for a crime she didn't commit, although she was too drunk to know that. Some are clever and manipulative, others are thick witted, some are bullies, and there is always the struggle for dominance.

To me the show is like a time warp and a vision of western life 30+ years ago through a slightly warped glass. They speak English, sort of, they are much more smartly dressed for everyday. They have slightly different manners, customs and procedures from the US, in many ways 'more proper'. There is a picture of the Queen on the office walls and people do not refer to the staff by their first names. Portable phones and transistor radios are the size of a biscuit tin, and there are no cell phones or computers - they use typewriters and when out of the office - call boxes. Another strange quirk as seen from a 21st century viewpoint, is the amount of smoking which goes on everywhere, and the side table in every home set up as a home bar and practically collapsing under the weight of bottles of whisky, gin, rum and whatever you like to drink.