All Saints: articles


Jack Campbell

We need to see more of Jack in All Saints

I THINK All Saints would be a superior program if Jack Campbell didn't have a grey T-shirt on underneath that white uniform, and if the zip on his shirt was pulled down a bit further… bit further, a bit more, keep going, we'll tell you when to stop Jack…

Jack plays Dr Steve Taylor in All Saints, but I don't think that's important. What's important is why doesn't he have a nickname like McDreamy in Grey's Anatomy? He's a million times mcdreamier than Patrick Dempsey. OK, sure, he's not a brain surgeon, but he's obviously some sort of very talented medical personnel. They wouldn't give a hand-held radio to just anyone. He places himself in mortal peril tonight, it's very… what's the opposite of gripping? But he gets some hot lines: "I haven't managed to assess his injuries yet." "She needs to go to hospital." "Blood pressure's very low." That's it Jack, give it to us baby.

The medical stuff in this show doesn't interest me — tonight we have a hostage situation involving domestic violence and a boot to the ribs, and a woman whose swimsuit area clams up whenever her boyfriend's penis makes an approach… literally clams up. Like a steel trap, I think is how she describes it to the attending physician. Yes, it is a disturbing mental picture. I saw a rabbit trap in my head, not sure what you got in yours. The doctor on her case is that young guy Bart, he's working alongside the girl he's in denial love with, the one who's Dr John Howard's niece. So the hostile steel trap storyline becomes a handy analogy for their own ongoing fake problems. It's very… what's the opposite of effective? But that's what makes All Saints — the personal drama, the relationships, John Waters's drug problem and will he start using again and has the light really gone forever out of Gabrielle's eyes and so on and so forth. Do you ever watch the repeats in the afternoon? Erik Thomson has just died and Georgie Parker's fallen in a heap, and doesn't look like she'll ever work in television again. I wonder if they auditioned the pair of them when they were casting Packed to the Rafters? But back to Jack. Nothing to say really, apart from have you heard him speak? It's like Alec Baldwin, if Alec Baldwin was 20 years younger and had an Australian accent. There's a funny entry for Jack on IMDb, the big movie reference website, I don't know who wrote it, but I'd like to think it wasn't him. It's under personal information, where it says Trivia: "He has a special Interest in what lies beyond a man's vocabulary of thought. In other words — 'The Unknown'." Grew up on a wheat and cattle farm in Outback Australia." The Unknown. Wish I'd never read that. I'm off him a bit now. Luckily there's something good on SBS if you want to turn All Saints off halfway through. It's a film called Wings of Defeat and it's about Japan's WWII kamikaze pilots. Two women are behind it, one grew up in Japan with American parents, the other had Japanese parents and grew up in America. I don't think I've ever seen a story like this, where kamikaze pilots who survived the war are interviewed. None of them ever talked about it to their families or anything, the neighbours didn't know. As one of them points out, no one is going to boast about being a kamikaze pilot. It's pretty incredible. Pretty awful. "I love Japan," one old man says. "But the Emperor…" It'd be one thing if the strategy had been effective, another one says, but mostly they died in vain. "What the hell did they die for? Those people's lives were treated like wastepaper." Yep, say it again — war, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.

By Dianne Butler
March 23, 2009
The Courier-Mail