Episode Titles

[Si-Co]

Home and Away has certainly never had any episode titles onscreen, yet I have stumbled across something quite intriguing when viewing original newspaper listings from the 80s. 

In late 1988, the episodes were billed as having titles in some publications! In September 1988, the episodes surrounding Roo giving birth to Martha are listed as "When The Bough Breaks Parts 1-5", and subsequent weeks as "The Cradle Will Fall Parts 1-5" and "Down Will Come Baby Parts 1-5". The episodes on the week commencing November 14th 1988 are billed as "Dealing in Futures Parts 1-5". So, it appears that for a while each week had an episode title even though these didn't appear on screen. 

I have no idea how long this practice lasted, or why, as I've seen very few newspaper listings for the Early Years. Surely a newspaper wouldn't take it upon itself to invent episode titles, so I can only assume these were provided to the papers and listings magazines by Channel Seven.

Does anyone have any further information?

I am unsure how to add an attachment via mobile otherwise I would show you the evidence in print!

 

[Dan F]

29 minutes ago, Si-Co said:

Home and Away has certainly never had any episode titles onscreen, yet I have stumbled across something quite intriguing when viewing original newspaper listings from the 80s. 

In late 1988, the episodes were billed as having titles in some publications! In September 1988, the episodes surrounding Roo giving birth to Martha are listed as "When The Bough Breaks Parts 1-5", and subsequent weeks as "The Cradle Will Fall Parts 1-5" and "Down Will Come Baby Parts 1-5". The episodes on the week commencing November 14th 1988 are billed as "Dealing in Futures Parts 1-5". So, it appears that for a while each week had an episode title even though these didn't appear on screen. 

I have no idea how long this practice lasted, or why, as I've seen very few newspaper listings for the Early Years. Surely a newspaper wouldn't take it upon itself to invent episode titles, so I can only assume these were provided to the papers and listings magazines by Channel Seven.

Does anyone have any further information?

I am unsure how to add an attachment via mobile otherwise I would show you the evidence in print!

Interesting - I presume these were Aussie listings... was it just the one newspaper or a couple of different ones? I've been through a lot of Early Years listings for the UK and can't say I've ever seen titles crop up.

I'll make some enquiries

[Si-Co]

I should have clarified they were Aussie newspapers, Dan - one of the Brisbane newspapers. At first I thought the synopsis I was reading was wrong (it sounded more like ACP or similar, which always had episode titles), but someone checked the the listings for other dates and they contained episode titles too! 

[Dan F]

From Script Producer of the time, Bevan Lee:

I've certainly never heard of that, but they may possibly have done it for a while. I agree that it would seem odd for newspapers to attach titles made up by themselves.

It may have come from the desire to minimise the identity of serial. They may have thought "When The Bough Breaks: Part 3" sounded posher than Episode 200 ( or whatever it was). I think it's best viewed as an aberration of a writing department with an inferiority complex and its short-lived nature shows they woke up to themselves pretty quickly and went back to the episode numbering.

I guess it's also possible that the publicity department, or whoever was responsible for that sort of thing back then, could have done it as they sent the info out to the press.

Would certainly be interesting to try and track down some more of them at some point.

[Si-Co]

Dan, thanks for getting Bevan's feedback on this. It does seem odd that the episode titles only seemed to appear in certain listings. They certainly never appeared in the UK's TV Times, or any UK newspapers I saw back then. 

There is an online archive of Melbourne newspaper The Age (I don't have the link but will try to find it). Of course, it may not include the titles at all. 

By the way, I was wrong about those Brisbane listings being from a newspaper - it seems they were reproduced from TV Week.