About the Production

In the words of creator/producer/director Brett Harston:

Conceived in the late 1980s and produced in the mid-1990s, Buck House emerged as a direct response to the pervasive fear-mongering and harmful stereotypes about HIV/AIDS and the LGBTQIA+ community dominating mainstream media. We felt an urgent need for an LGBTQIA+-friendly platform to counter this negativity, leading to the show's creation.

My team and I deliberately embraced and extended the era's LGBTQIA+ stereotypes to craft a sitcom. Our goal was to resonate positively and humorously within our own community while also reaching a broader audience, using a familiar format.

Sitcoms of that time (and often still today) relied on relatable, stereotypical characters caught in absurd, inescapable scenarios. Hits like The Golden Girls (immensely popular within Sydney's LGBTQIA+ scene) and Friends proved the winning formula of American-style comedic chaos. Buck House aimed to channel that same fervent energy.

Beyond representation, producing a home-grown LGBTQIA+ sitcom offered a vital opportunity: to employ local LGBTQIA+ talent – actors, writers, designers, and technical crew across camera, lighting, sound, and more. It also served as a dynamic training ground for emerging professionals.

Why the Long Wait to Go Online? The Story Gets Complicated...

Buck House began with pilots filmed before a live audience at AFTRS (Sydney) in 1995. This initial series, made on a shoestring budget by a volunteer cast and crew (with crucial support from the NSW AIDS Trust and AFTRS), starred Jude Kuring (Prisoner's Noeline Burke) as Phyllis Buck – a sexually frustrated, middle-aged lesbian landlady running a rundown Sydney boarding house.

After rewrites and securing proper funding, full production resumed under a new banner in 1997. Our pioneering vision? To deliver full-length episodes via streaming video, leveraging the exciting new invention: the Internet.

However, Australia's promised rollout of affordable broadband stalled. Instead, industry focused on high-priced business ADSL/ISDN, leaving households with painfully slow dial-up. Rather than compromise quality, we shelved the online launch until technology and accessibility caught up.

Then, Disaster Struck...

Just as production hit its stride (completing Episode 8 of a planned longer series), our government-owned investment partner was sold to private venture capitalists. Tragically, the new owners proved virulently homophobic and abruptly pulled our funding, forcing the entire operation to shut down.

Everything – including incomplete episodes – was packed and stored. I believed it was safe. Later, an accidental fire in the storage facility caused extensive smoke and water damage to many original masters, audio tapes, and camera tapes. (A testament to Panasonic Mini-DV: the surviving tapes retained quality remarkably well over the years.)

Living abroad in the UK at the time, I was unaware of this catastrophe. Upon returning to Australia, I painstakingly sorted through salvageable footage. This included the sole surviving master of a 1995 pilot and a Hi8 backup of a rough first cut for the new series' Episode 1.

The Painstaking Resurrection:

Remastering the series has been arduous, plagued by technical setbacks. Compounding the challenge, all logging sheets, scripts, and editing materials were lost. I've essentially worked blind, relying on slate numbers at the start of scenes to reconstruct the order of salvageable takes.

A breakthrough came with the discovery of an old Digital-S master containing the 1998 Sydney Mardi Gras Film Festival version of Episodes 1-4. Though the tape was degraded, careful splicing yielded enough footage to rebuild the episodes. Audio was thankfully salvaged from CD backups wisely made by our DOP, Dion – to whom I owe immense gratitude!

Episodes 5-8 were recreated using similarly laborious methods. Where original Hi8 audio was lost, sound had to be captured directly from camera tapes – not ideal, but the only option.

Finally...

After decades of setbacks, I am profoundly proud to present Buck House as originally envisioned, albeit with some unavoidable technical imperfections. Remember: these episodes represent a groundbreaking piece of history – the world's first LGBTQIA+ sitcom.

I hope you enjoy this long-awaited piece of our shared heritage.

Brett Harston 2023

NB  Below are screenshots from an online 'Director's Diary' I created some years ago as a precusor to this site.  I'm showing it here so you can see the sizes of the original video files we used for a test airing online.  We used a program called Vivo, which churned the full sized videos down into clips we could post on the internet.  Even then, we had to break each episode into scenes because we couldn't stream a full episode.  There were two files available:  one for regular dial-up users, and one for those lucky enough to be on ADSL/ISDN (old fashioned broadband).

PS  It needs to be noted that we shot the series knowing our limitations with inferior internet access, as it was at that time.  The upshot was we needed to limit camera movement and framing to try to accommodate faster internet download speeds wherever we could.  As a result, we had to lock off the camera for most of the shoot, meaning you won't see many fancy cinematography techniques and the like.  Along with that, our actors were limited to 'perform' within a restricted frame boundary. Such a bummer trying to produce a cyber sitcom at the advent of the internet arriving in Australia, especially with the promise of fast internet access never eventuating - an issue still faced in many regional and rural areas today!