Gallipoli is a seven-part Australian television drama miniseries being telecast on the Nine Network in 2015, the 100th anniversary of the Gallipoli Campaign. It is adapted from the best-selling book Gallipoli by Les Carlyon and has been directed by Glendyn Ivin, a onetime Tamworth kid. Gallipoli was shot over a three-month period a year ago in Melbourne and surrounding areas, including Bacchus Marsh and Werribee. The April 25, 1915 landing was recreated on the Mornington Peninsula and the series depicts the 10-month campaign in Turkey, highlighting the landing. One Melbourne radio reviewer said:?"I don't normally pump TV shows up just for the sake of it, but Channel Nine was good enough to send me the first four episodes and I think it's compelling," Tom Elliott said. "I've got to tell you, it's a fantastic piece of Australian television. "It tells a magnificent Australian story. It's no holds barred, it's even-handed on both sides and is definitely worth a watch." While it premiered last Monday, in what is a first for an Australian network drama, the episodes have been released online ahead of their free-to-air broadcast, and can be viewed through recently launched on-demand streaming service Stan, co-owned by Fairfax Media and Nine. But for regular viewers of weekly television, the series continues next Monday at 9pm on Nine. Glendyn Ivin's mum Verna and older brother Leigh, a muso, teacher and environmentalist, were among plenty of northern fans glued to their sets this week to see it all. The Leader asked his family to review it warts and all and from a personal and objective viewpoint. Here's what they had to report.
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"OF COURSE, I'm very proud of my little brother, and it goes without saying Mum is too, as we've seen him ascend from crafting gore-riddled post-modernist sculptures at Oxley High, to standing on the glittery stage at the Cannes Festival, accepting the Palme D'Or for his short film Cracker Bag.
The world of the arts is notoriously tough, as I can attest, but Glendyn has drawn some long straws, worked hard and the results have been great.
His TV directing excursions in Beaconsfield and Puberty Blues maintained the intimate subtlety meets close-to-the-bone realism for which he's become known, but a re-telling of Gallipoli was always going to be a challenge.
If Australia's national identity is so closely married to this awful chapter in the First World War, what sort of a gamble would Channel Nine be willing to take?
Once I knew something of the way this story was to be treated, with accurate reference to historical records it's basing on the writings of lauded author Les Carlyon and importantly, an avoidance of over-the-top heroics, focusing instead on the hard truth of the events I know I began to look forward to this telling of the Gallipoli story.
Watching episode 1, The First Day, the things I've always suspected were true are there the palpable fear of the rookie soldiers, some dropping dead with fright; the grief and reluctance of the mothers and wives on the home front; that there was no instant bloody battle on the beaches and that the enemy, the Turks, in many ways, were like the Anzacs just as young, scared, confused and human.
Sure enough, the Aussie larrikinism and notions of mateship, so central to the Anzac legend, are evident in this rendition teen soldier/brothers lean on each other as never before, their naivety and wonder dashed to shreds as they bayoneted their first Turk and realise what it means to kill.
Also central is the supreme folly the British commanders were willing to perpetrate for the sake of their own face, the Anzacs a mere expendable commodity. Colonials crude, yet useful.
Throughout this episode, Glendyn and director of photography, Germaine McMicking allow the daydreaming of central character, Tolly Johnson, to expose what must be the hyper-real and unreal experience of finding oneself in a full-blown unfolding tragedy.
The child-soldier's nascent thoughts of love and sensuality are brought jarringly back to reality as his captain calls a charge. Before the officer can complete the directive, he is dropped dead by a sole projectile. The bullets do not discriminate.
Gallipoli will likely educate many who take the time to watch it. We learn that by nightfall of The First Day, it was expressly requested by the commanders onshore to evacuate the troops, the task clearly an overwhelming impossibility.
Yet, mere months after the orders to "Dig, dig, dig!" came from British command 8500 Anzacs, many more French and English and an astounding 80,000 Turkish troops would lie dead across the peninsula.
And Gallipoli was just a forerunner of greater casualty in the Great War.
As a family, Glendyn, mum and I have never been all that involved with Anzac Day, other than the few times I played The Last Post badly on the cornet and the fact it also happens to be mum's birthday.
I know my brother and I don't feel that identity and spirit that is said to have shaped the nation. Yet the horror of war, its stupid waste and emotional destruction is not something we take for nothing.
This telling of Gallipoli may prove to be a risk for the commercially conscious likes of Channel Nine, though their cliched trailers and adverts paint a more familiar concept.
It is a victory for the art of TV drama and also victory over the narrowing of what is thought to be Australia's defining moment."
Reviewed by Leigh Ivin, February 10, 2015