A children's series from the 1990s that I wish people talked about more is Halfway Across The Galaxy and Turn Left. A gem of a series based on a 1985 novel by Australian author Robin Klein, regarding a family of fugitive extra terrestrials who flee their home planet of Zyrgon and get to Earth by following the directions supplied in the title, where they attempt to start anew in a suburb down under. I remember this one being a pretty big deal back in 1994. People on my playground spoke about it, and were genuinely interested in where the story was going. I'm not sure how we let this one fall into the cracks of obscurity, but I suggest that we all rectify that post haste.
The big intriguing hook of Klein's original premise was that, in Zyrgon society, the family dynamics are reversed, so that children have authority over their parents, or at least have an official route to gaining that authority. Her book centres on the middle child, X, who is the equivalent of 12 years old on Earth, and who tirelessly studied for the position of Family Organiser, winning a scholarship at the Zyrgon Community Centre and becoming the formal head of her household. In spite of her authority, X feels a degree of inferiority compared to her two siblings. Her teenage sister Dovis is a skilled pilot on track to becoming a Cosmic Flier, while the youngest child Qwrk is a mathematical genius awaiting a professorship with the Knowledge Bank. By contrast, X's role is considered dull and not very glamorous, a path she pursued because she couldn't excel at anything more exciting. Nevertheless, her hard-nosed leadership proves indispensable when the children's Father, a compulsive gambler, is exposed as a serial lottery cheater and is wanted by the Zyrgon Law Enforcement, forcing the family to flee the planet. They anticipate that this will be only a temporary measure, with the current regime expected to topple at any moment, and regularly check in with Lox, a dashing young Space Shuttle captain with whom X is infatuated, for updates on the situation. In the meantime, they attempt to hide on Earth by posing as an ordinary family who've recently moved from abroad, adopting Earth names (X becomes Charlotte, Dovis becomes Astrella, Qwrk becomes George, Father becomes Mortimer, Mother becomes Renee and as a family they become the Jacksons) and attempting to assimilate themselves into the local culture. Not wanting to attract attention, X orders them to be as unassuming as possible, but this presents a problem when the children attend school and Qwrk is required to present as a child of average intelligence, something he can't even fake. X has him take up the violin, hoping that his lack of musical aptitude will convince the school that there is nothing remarkable about him. But, as Boards of Canada told us, music is math, and Qwrk has little trouble applying his mathematical prowess to mastering the instrument, causing him to be hailed a prodigy and for the school to restructure his lessons around his musical education. Meanwhile, the charismatic Dovis takes to life on Earth like a duck to water, becoming one of the most popular girls in her peer group, and Mother and Father find jobs pertaining to their respective talents for fashion and cooking. X is the only one who still struggles to adjust, bogged down by the weight of her responsibilities.
Eventually, X decides that it would be easier for the family to return to Zyrgon, if they used the money saved from her scholarship to bribe the officials to drop the charges against Father, by which point everyone else has grown accustomed to their Earth routines and meets her proposal with resistance. X then discovers, through communication with Lox, that they actually can't go back, since it's come to light that the test papers that earned her that scholarship were falsified, and she's now the one the Zyrgon authorities are interested in apprehending. Father admits to tinkering with the results on X's behalf, knowing how much she'd wanted to succeed as an Organiser. Realising that she's been living a sham and was never suited to the position, X feels relief rather than disappointment. The book ends with her dispelling the raft the family travelled in, so that the Zyrgon law enforcers will be unable to trace it to their current location. With no choice but to remain on Earth, she opens up to embracing her new life as a child, announcing that the family will have to learn to start organising themselves. In the meantime, she's going ice-skating with her schoolfriend Jenny Roland.
At just 144 pages, the book is a slim read. The television adaptation, meanwhile, consisted of 28 half-hour episodes, so you know that they added in a ton of extra material. The show's Wikipedia entry states that the series was split into two arcs, with the first staying close to the events of the book. Eh, sort of. For the first 10 episodes or so, it's a reasonably faithful adaptation. We again follow the adventures of X (Lauren Hewitt), Qwrk (Jeffrey Walker), Dovis (played by German actress Silvia Seidel with dialogue dubbed by Amanda Douge), Father (Bruce Myles) and Mother (Jan Friedl), who in this version come to the fictional Melburnian suburb of Bellwood (filmed in the actual Melburnian suburbs of Williamstown and Surrey Hills), claiming to be returning to Australia after a period of living in Peru. They face many of the same challenges as in the book (Qwrk's violin story, for example, is transplanted pretty much wholesale), although the tone of the narrative is noticeably altered, not least because we get considerably more insight into life on Zyrgon, something that was largely related second-hand in the novel, from X's perspective. Zyrgon culture had also gotten even more draconian - in the original novel, the penalty awaiting X and Father, should they be apprehended, was a term in the Detention Centre, which was not suggested to be any worse than an Earth prison, whereas in the series they were threatened with execution by being thrown into a pit of lava. After 10 episodes, the series started following its own storyline, based on the new world-building it had introduced. It should be noted that Klein later penned her own sequel to her novel, Turn Right For Zyrgon, which I understand was written after the TV series and incorporated a few of the plot points from the latter half. I should confess that I've never read the sequel, copies of which seem to be quite hard to come by (I'm not even sure if it was ever published in the UK, despite the series being quite popular over here, and the original novel being readily available during its run), so I am unable to comment on how it compares to the events of the series.
Produced by Crawfords Australia, the series aired in 1994 on the Seven Network in Australia, and in the UK as part of the now-defunct CITV programming block. At the time, I got really invested in the story and characters, although for such a long-running series it was basically inevitable that I was going to miss an episode here and there, and for some reason my viewing during the second half got particularly spotty. I am happy to say that I caught the finale, "We Live On The Best One", so I at least got to see how everything concluded. I had missed the penultimate episode, "Trial By Lava", and remember how shocked I was when I learned from the recap what the final cliffhanger had been. But I was utterly delighted with how the story ultimately resolved, and the final line, spoken by X, is one that's really stuck with me through the years. I recently revisited the series in full, which it had long been on my mind to do, and was chuffed at how much I got from it the second time around. This is a show that has it all - a memorable cast of characters, a gripping sense of adventure, a stirring theme tune (courtesy of Peter Sullivan), visual designs that are really quite lovely (inevitably, some of the effects look kind of dated now, but for a television show of its day it seriously doesn't look so shabby, with those shots of the Zyrgon civilisation in particular still feeling so chilly, haunting and alien), and while it makes for darker, more dramatic viewing than some of the other Australian children's shows I remember from that era (most notably Round The Twist and Genie From Down Under), there's still a healthy undercurrent of antipodean quirkiness. My only real quibble is that there are times when the structure gets a little flabby. There comes a point (around episode 13) where it tips over from being a serialised science-fiction adventure into more of an episodic fish out of water dramedy, and from there you get your share of episodes that could be described as "filler", in that they don't do a massive amount to further the overarching plot. Such fillers aren't necessarily a bad thing (episode 14, "Qwrk Lands On His Feet", where Qwrk befriends an aspiring skateboarder, offers a neat little character study for the youngest Jackson). But there is a particularly laggy stretch (namely, episodes 20 to 22) that leaves you wondering when the adventure is going to pick up again - which it thankfully does in style for the remaining six installments. It's an excellent series, though one that might have benefited from being a smidge shorter.
(Top: The villainous Chief, as portrayed by Bruce Spence. Bottom: Chief in his more harmless rubot form.)
One of the most significant changes in the television adaptation was the addition of The Chief, a sinister and relentless law enforcer who'd tracked the family all the way from Zyrgon and was intent on bringing X and Father to his twisted vision of justice. In his anisocoric eyes (yes, Chief has the same eye condition as David Bowie), X had abused her position as Family Organiser by refusing to turn in her father, which already made her a high-level traitor to Zyrgon society, never mind any matter of falsified test papers. In the finale, it's revealed that he'd also harboured some personal jealousy of X, recognising how favoured she was by Zyrgon ruler Prinicipa (Diane Cliento) and her potential to rise up the ranks faster than him. (Chief had no real interest in Mother, Dovis or Qwrk, and in episode 11, "Home Is Where The Heart Is", when he temporarily apprehended X and Father, was happy to leave them behind on Earth.) In the book, the Zyrgon law enforcement were never more than a distant, vaguely-defined threat, with much of the conflict arising from the family's efforts to adjust to life on Earth, while in the television series the jeopardy naturally became a lot more immediate and intense, with an enforcer so actively and aggressively on their trail. Chief also got confused by the ways of Earth, and had contempt for what he saw as the planet's chaos and disorder (there's a hilarious moment in the penultimate episode where he tries to explain to Principa the concept of shopping malls). As a child, he was by and far my favourite character, and I recall that very specific disappointment, on reading the book, when it became apparent that he wasn't going to be in this version of the story; without him, it became a very different, somewhat slighter experience (although there was a reference to a "Law-Enforcer-In-Chief" who according to Lox loves the sound of his own voice, which I suspect was the basis of his character).
One of the joys of rediscovering the television series as an adult has been in seeing how fantastically well Chief holds up as an antagonist. A huge part of that has to do with his being played by the legendary Bruce Spence - not only does Spence's lofty, gangling frame give him an imposing and convincingly alien presence, he could imbue Chief with a sublime creepiness and sublime campiness all in one package, simply through what he does with his mouth (a talent put to subsequent use in his cameo as the Mouth of Sauron in The Lord of The Rings: Return of The King, which was egregiously excised from the theatrical cut). The guy is skin-crawling, but so, so fun. He also has an unexpected and frankly weird character arc, which involves him spending the middle portion of the series in the form of a harmless "rubot" (robotic beings used on Zyrgon in the roles of dogs and cocktail waiters), having accidentally transformed himself in a botched attempt to capture X, and being adopted by Father as a sort of pet he keeps around without X's knowledge. For a few episodes, he and Father appear to forge quite a loving bond, with Father regularly going out of his way to protect Chief, after taking pity on him in his disarmed state. From Chief's perspective the truce was almost certainly one of convenience - having finally returned to his true form (in episode 19, "Welcome To The Human Race"), he goes right back to hunting Father and X. Mercy and emotion are just not things that he comprehends, and while X is able to teach him something of their value in the series finale, his time under Father's care is oddly never cited as a factor in his eventual redemption.
The other major change made by the television series was to expand extensively on the role of Jenny Roland (Kellie Smythe), the lonely Earth girl befriended by X who ultimately gives her a reason to feel that she belongs on the Blue Planet. In fact, the very first scene of the opening episode centres on Jenny's perspective, indicating that the series will be her story as much as X's. It is established that Jenny is struggling with the absence of her father, who distanced himself from the family following the breakdown of her parents' marriage. Jenny spots a falling star in the night sky and wishes for her father's return. She then makes an additional wish that is not said out loud, but later shared with X - she wants things to be different for her at school this year, and to find a friend. (Were you watching, Chris Sanders?) The narrative thread regarding Jenny's father is not explicitly resolved, but he implication is that X has arrived to fill a dual role, both as Jenny's friend and as a surrogate parent, in helping her to come to terms with her father's abandonment. When X attempts to have the family return to Zyrgon (claiming that they are going back to their old home in Peru), Jenny is forced to relive the pain of that abandonment and expresses her anger toward her father by taking it out on the fishing boat he left behind, a symbol of their vacated connection. Unlike in the book, where Jenny remains oblivious to X's origins, in the television series X chooses to confide the truth in Jenny and her brother Colin (Che Broadbent), who become actively involved in the family's efforts to remain undetected on Earth and to evade the clutches of The Chief. In turn, their alliance provides Jenny with a means of healing from her own upheaval. The fishing boat, which has stood unused since her father's desertion, is granted a newfound mobility thanks to the Jacksons' telekinetic abilities (abilities that can apparently be unlocked in Earthlings too, if they concentrate hard enough). It plays an essential part in rescuing X and Father when they are apprehended by Chief in episode 11, and at the end of of episode 12 ("X: The Unknown Factor") when the girls have come through the first phase of their ordeal, they go out for a carefree joyride in the flying boat, mutual survivors of adult insensitivity. Just as X learns to enjoy life by becoming more of a child, Jenny learns to take control of hers by becoming more confident and independent. In the final arc, when Chief succeeds in capturing X and bringing her to trial on Zyrgon, Jenny and Colin make the gutsy decision to accompany Dovis halfway across the galaxy (and right) to save her.
Not all Earthlings are so hospitable, of course, and X must also contend with alpha schoolgirl Michelle Froggat (Tenley Gillmore) and her lackey Dallas (Katrina Lambert), who've long looked down on Jenny and take a similar disliking to X for not fitting in (in the absence of Chief, they were essentially the closest thing the book had to corporeal villains). By the end of the book it's hinted that Michelle might be forming a grudging respect for X, after she wins a school race; in the series, their enmity merely intensifies in the second half, when Michelle's family move into the house next to the Jacksons and her father (Denis Moore) becomes equally fixated on their weirdness (her mother (Ellen Cressey) is more inclined to let them be, in a dynamic that reminds me a little of Patrick and Pippa from One Foot In the Grave). In all fairness to Michelle, she undergoes a pretty traumatic experience in episode 12, when Chief captures her and assumes her form in order to lure X into a trap; I'm not sure I'd be so inclined to roll with all of these strange going-ons around me either. (It does mean that, for one episode, Gillmore gets to have an absolute ball playing Chief in Michelle's form, imitating Spence's quivering lip movements.)
The character who feels the most altered from his literary counterpart is Lox (Paul Kelman), the family's contact on Zyrgon. In the book he was a vain, unsympathetic character who cared only about his own reputation and status, and when the scandal about X's forged test papers came to light refused to help the family any further. He was also X's primary tie to her home planet, an attachment that revealed a more fanciful side to her hyper-serious character. She had aspirations of one day marrying him, in the same way that a schoolgirl might fantasise about marrying a favourite pop star, and was disappointed to learn that he'd become engaged to a kiosk attendant named Jady following her family's departure. Finally seeing through Lox, and her own foolishness in being so enamored of him, antecedes her willingness to let Zyrgon and the position of Family Organiser go. Her devotion to Lox represents her sense of affinity with the adult world (in her view, that she was "born in the wrong chronology), which she comes to realise was deeply misplaced; in her final line in the book, it is implied that she might have transferred those affections to the more age-appropriate Colin. In the series, while still the object of X's naive pre-adolescent attachments, Lox isn't quite so self-serving and becomes much more of a comic relief figure. In this version, Jady (Kerry Armstrong) is no mere kiosk attendant, but the fiercely loyal assistant of Chief (she's also the source of the series' funniest running gag, in the conspicuous amatory tension between herself and Chief that their own tyrannical protocol prevents them from acknowledging), looking to honey trap Lox into revealing information about X's whereabouts. Eventually Lox is forced into hiding himself and joins the family on Earth, where he becomes fascinated with cowboys and westerns and attempts to emulate their culture, not realising how hopelessly out of place it is in 1990s Melbourne. He nevertheless proves himself useful in episode 19 by saving the family from Chief, then fresh out of his rubot era, and is inspired to return to Zyrgon as a dissident (albeit a mostly incompetent one).
Zeppy and Jenny
Also dropping by to offer support are Aunt Hecla (Sandy Gore) and her pet Zeppy, a zepelope, or "hybrid antelope" as per the book (specifically, he looks like a hybrid of a pronghorn and Dougal from The Magic Roundabout, although the Jacksons are able to convince all house guests that he is a rare breed of Earth goat). Despite her eccentric appearance, Hecla is the voice of reason, a former Family Organiser who alone recognises how absurd it is to place that kind of responsibility on a child. She takes it on herself to shoulder X's burden, assuming X's form and giving herself up to Chief, although the ruse is uncovered when she is returned to Zyrgon (Zeppy, meanwhile, remains on Earth with the Jacksons, although he becomes less prominent as the series goes on and by the end has completely faded into the backdrop). Hecla gives voices to one of the story's key concerns, which is that of parentification and the effects of forcing children to grow up too soon. During her stay on Earth, she tries to dissuade X from feeling so responsible for her family, with the reminder that she is only a child. This is echoed more harrowingly in the penultimate episode, when Chief is preparing to execute X by throwing her into the much-feared lava pit, and Hecla tries to reason with him to let her go on those exact same grounds. There is an implicit suggestion that there is not so great a difference between the pressures put on X through her parentification and Chief's efforts to literally destroy her. In the book, there was a sense that Zyrgon represented the demands and anxieties that hung over X and bound her to her premature accountability. This is even more pronounced in the series, where Zyrgon becomes a caricature of adulthood at its most joyless, a cold blue realm of endless discipline and uniformity, where fun is literally forbidden and sweet treats are unheard of (crucially, it is the residents' demands for ice cream - a classically childish request - that causes Chief to lose his control over them). Earth, by contrast, represents the freshness and boundless opportunities of childhood, a green and vibrant world in which the family are reborn and given the chance to reinvent themselves from scratch, and to discover the potential that they never knew they had.
Another major theme of the television series is immigration and diversity, with X and her family being foreigners attempting to start over in a world that is new to them, and which does not always understand them in turn. I feel this was the significance of making the Froggats direct neighbours to the Jacksons in the latter half, since it makes the issue of coexistence more explicit - we share a common world and need to live alongside one another, even if our customs and outlooks don't always accord. Mr Froggat despises the Jacksons for being different, and there's an obvious message about how such bigotry may be passed down through the generations, with Mr Froggat's bitter intolerance clearly rubbing off on his daughter. Which is not to say that there's no hope for Michelle. In episode 26 ("Dark Night, Star Bright") she finds herself caught between her parents' opposing views on the matter. Mrs Froggat encourages Michelle to accept the Jacksons and advocates multiculturalism, while Mr Froggat lays out his vision of a "perfect" society in which everyone is the same and non-conformity is brutally punished, a vision that is chillingly reminiscent of the dystopian system on Zyrgon. Even Michelle, who looks up to her father and usually goes along with him, is disturbed by the notion. Elsewhere, in episode 15 ("Hearing A Different Drummer"), Dovis enters into a relationship with a young poet named David (David Walters), and admits to him that her family are originally from Zyrgon. While David likely doesn't appreciate that "Zyrgon" is a whole other planet, as opposed to another country, he is unfazed, sharing that his family is of Ukrainian descent and assuring Dovis that Australia is, historically speaking, a new country for a lot of its populace.
By the end of the series, while the narrative on Zyrgon is neatly tied up, the situation with the Froggats is a left little more open-ended. The Froggatts must resign themselves to the fact that the Jacksons are here to stay (following a brief interval in which they'd announced their intention to leave, much to the delight of Mr Froggat and Michelle), but will relations between the two families be in any way improved going forward? Will Michelle continue to make X's life difficult in school, or will she finally come around to her, as she did the book? Sure, if X can depart Zyrgon on peaceful terms with Chief, then Michelle should be a doddle, right? The answer might lie in that powerful closing line, when the Froggats go outside to see the Jacksons returning to their property with a splashy new car, and receive the unwelcome news that they are not only staying put, but are now lottery winners. It seems that Father has been up to his old tricks again, although one would hope that this is just a one-off to give his family enough money to live comfortably in their new lives. "What luck", says Mr Froggat, barely concealing his deflation. X responds: "That's not luck, Mr Froggat. THIS is luck. There's a million billion of these planets, and we live on the best one." The final sequence shows the Jacksons, along with Jenny and Colin, running playfully together around their garden, a collection of children and children at heart, while the Froggats observe them from the other side of the fence. The shot then pulls back to reveal Australia as viewed from outer space, part of a bigger world and indeed a bigger universe. Although the Froggats appear to be excluded from that final celebration, we might detect an implicit invitation in X's words, one that is being extended to the viewer as much as to her reluctant neighbours. After all, her closing statement is "We live on the best one", denoting the Earth's entire populace. The invitation is to see ourselves as part of a global community that is enriched by our individual differences, and in which we become stronger when we embrace and lean on one another (a theme likewise underscored in the conclusion to Chief's arc, when he and X both become stranded in the lava pit, and are required to cooperate in order to get out alive). To simply be on this wonderful planet, and to have so much splendour and diversity around us is, in X's terms, is to have done better than to have won the lottery. The opportunity to make the most of that is there, and the Froggats' final position in that equation is undefined in the same way that our own position is undefined - whether we choose cross the fence and partake in the Jacksons' celebration, or else stay leerily upon the sidelines, is ultimately in our hands.
The "Jacksons" - don't forget to turn left!