The Doctor Blake Mysteries

The Doctor Blake Mysteries
Genre	Mystery Crime Period drama
Created by	George Adams Tony Wright
Starring	Craig McLachlan Nadine Garner Rick Donald Cate Wolfe Joel Tobeck Charlie Cousins
Composer(s)	Dale Cornelius
Country of origin	Australia
Original language(s)	English
No. of series	4
No. of episodes	36 (list of episodes)
Production
Executive producer(s)	Tony Wright Carole Sklan Christopher Gist
Producer(s)	George Adams
Location(s)	Australia
Running time	1 hour (56–59 mins)
Production company(s)	December Media
Distributor	ABC Television
Release
Original network	ABC
Picture format	720p (HDTV)
Original release	1 February 2013 (2013-02-01) – present (present)
External links
Website

The Doctor Blake Mysteries is an Australian television series that premiered on ABC TV on 1 February 2013 at 8:30 pm.^[1] The series stars Craig McLachlan in the lead role of Doctor Lucien Blake, who returns home to Ballarat in the late 1950s to take over his late father's general medical practice after an absence of 30 years. Doctor Blake is a keeper of secrets and a solver of mysteries.^[2] The series is produced by Tony Wright and George Adams.^[3] The fourth series began airing on 5 February 2016.

Background

Doctor Lucien Blake left Australia in his 20s to study medicine in Scotland. Following a posting at a London hospital, he joined the British Army as a medical officer. During World War II, Blake's service included the Far East, where he fell in love and married a Chinese woman, with whom he had a child. However, at the fall of Singapore, he lost them both. Dr Blake also spent time in Thailand's Ban Pong POW camp. After a 33-year absence, Blake returned home to take over his late father's practice as a medical general practitioner and also becomes the Ballarat area police surgeon.

Jean Beazley is Blake's receptionist and housekeeper. Having previously served in the same capacity for his father, Jean has difficulty adjusting to Lucien's eccentric and sometimes oblivious behaviour; although considered old-fashioned in her ideas about womanhood, she occasionally challenges Blake's expectation that she wait on him hand and foot. Her husband died in the war and she is aware that her living with the unattached Blake is a source of gossip. Shrewd and observant, she guards her territory zealously, missing nothing and expertly sifting gossip for kernels of fact, which she dispenses when necessary. Her maternal tendencies are often a source of annoyance to her nephew Danny Parks, whom she treats like a son, and lodger Mattie O'Brien, whose outgoing attitude she does not understand at all.

Cast

• Craig McLachlan as Doctor Lucien Blake
• Nadine Garner as Jean Beazley
• Cate Wolfe as Matilda "Mattie" O'Brien (Series 1–4)
• Joel Tobeck as Chief Superintendent (later Chief Inspector) Matthew Lawson (Series 1–4)
• Rick Donald as Constable Daniel Parks (Series 1)
• Charlie Cousins as Constable (later Sergeant) Charlie Davis (Series 2-)
• Belinda McClory as Alice Harvey (Series 2-)
• John Wood as Patrick Tyneman
• Craig Hall as Chief Supt William Munro (Series 3)
• John Stanton as Douglas Ashby (Series 1–3)
• David Whiteley as Sergeant Bill Hobart
• Ian Rooney as Cec Drury
• Rodger Corser as Chief Supt Frank Carlyle (Series 4-)
• Anna McGahan as Rose Anderson (Series 4-)
• Ling-Hsueh Tang as Mei Lin Blake (Series 4)

Production

The series is set and mostly filmed in the gold rush city of Ballarat, in Victoria.^[3] It features Lydiard Street and many of the heritage buildings, including the Colonists Club, of which Lucien Blake is a member. External shots of the house and studio formerly owned by the muralist Napier Waller, in Melbourne, are used as a backdrop to represent Dr Blake's house.^[4][5]

The Doctor Blake Mysteries is produced by Melbourne-based December Media in association with Film Victoria and ABC Television, which also broadcasts it in Australia on ABC. The international sales are handled by British ITV Studios Global Entertainment.

It premiered in the United Kingdom on 25 November 2013 on BBC One.^[6] It is also shown by a number of other European TV channels and in New Zealand.^[7] The series airs on selected Public Broacasting Service (PBS) stations in the United States.^[8]

The series 4 ratings in the original broadcasts on ABCtv (Australia) were very respectable, ranging from 988,000 viewers to 825,000^[9] and rated weekly in the top five shows on free-to-air television in Australia. A fifth series has been commissioned for broadcast in 2017.^[10] The series began official production on 28 August 2016.

Episodes

Awards and nominations

References

External links

• The Doctor Blake Mysteries at the Internet Movie Database