Mud, Bloody Mud

Mud, Bloody Mud
Directed by	Lindesay Dresdon
Produced by	Oscar Whitbread
Written by	Cliff Green
Based on	comic strip Bluey and Curley by Alex Gurney
Starring	Simon Thorope Tony Rickards
Production company	ABC
Release dates	1985
Country	Australia
Language	English

Mud, Bloody Mud is a 1985 Australian television film based on a popular comic strip, Bluey and Curley. These comic book characters link documentary footage with puppets playing political figures.^[1]

The script was written by Cliff Green for the ABC. Green:

We had a very tight budget, very few actors, and no outside filming - so the whole thing was shot in-studio. The only real people in it - there is a narrator who is an army Medical Officer - he is the battalion M.O.; and there are two soldiers who are actually Bluey and Curly, the cartoon characters. And everybody else is puppets. So the politicians are puppets. And they are full-size - they are actually people but they are like those Sesame Street puppets... It was about the way the Australians were just sidelined by MacArthur, and left to rot in the jungles. And the dialogue was mostly Bluey and Curly jokes. And we got permission to use them from Sun News Pictorial and also from the cartoonist’s widow. And it had a tragic element because it is a story of a war, so to me it had to have a tragic ending. I would never try to do it again - it was a one-off in terms of its concept. I think nowadays, with animation and all that stuff, and computerisation, it wouldn’t be seen to be so unique. And it won an Award. They repeated it; they got a terrific response. They ran it on Anzac Day evening I think - and they got a fantastic response from RSL clubs and Old Diggers. And they ran it again on Armistice, the eleventh of the eleventh. So it was a real sort of “out of the box” piece of work - but great fun.^[2]

References

1. Ed. Scott Murray, Australia on the Small Screen 1970-1995, Oxford Uni Press, 1996 p108
2. Oral History with Cliff Green, Australian Writers Guild accessed 13 July 2013