Australia (Mark's Story)
- Episode aired Apr 7, 2008
IMDb RATING
7.4/10
27
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Mark Knowles is arrested in Sydney after attempting to smuggle cocaine from the U.S. to Australia.Mark Knowles is arrested in Sydney after attempting to smuggle cocaine from the U.S. to Australia.Mark Knowles is arrested in Sydney after attempting to smuggle cocaine from the U.S. to Australia.
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Featured review
Slippery Slope
A school-leaver looks around his home suburb of Watford, and doesn't like what he sees. He is expected to take a job in a bank, then get a mortgage and start a family, but he rebels against this - until falling in love and then finding himself willy-nilly starting to live just that sort of life after all, along with the ever-mounting debts that seem to go with it. It is his dissatisfaction with that humdrum existence that leads him by stages into one of Australia's Maximum Security prisons, where he has nearly five years to reflect on what exactly he was so dissatisfied about.
The trouble starts when his girlfriend's brother Keith blows in from Taiwan, awash with banknotes, and gives them £1000 out of pity for their humble lifestyle. To them, this is unheard-of wealth, and before long he offers them a quick way to pay-off their debts. Just carry a little package from Sydney to Hong-Kong. Not drugs, he assures them. In fact, nothing illegal at all. It turns out to be Australian currency - about twenty times more of it than you're allowed to export,. But they get away with it, and he gives them £8000 that makes them feel they're on permanent holiday, leading to more debt and domestic rows, and she goes back to England without him.
After his first appetising scent of smuggling, he is game for a serious cocaine run, and the stakes rise alarmingly. Only a few weeks earlier, he thought that breakfasting out in a restaurant was the lap of luxury. Now he declares that he wants "enough money to possibly not ever have to work again - an instant fix". What he calls "a decent amount" is the £100,000 he's been promised for taking one block of coke from San Francisco to Sydney. Once again, he sneers at the Watford life - grey people, living in grey houses in grey streets under grey skies - as he ties some of the packages round his waist and swallows the rest, sealed inside condoms. But an alert customs man detects that he's got something under his jacket, and game is up. Meanwhile the condoms inside his body have congealed into a logjam, and only the skill of the hospital medics saves his life - a debt he doesn't seem to acknowledge. It is only the long-distance phone-call to his mother that awakens any sort of social conscience about the burdens that criminals place on those little people called law-abiders, whom they despise so much.
The trouble starts when his girlfriend's brother Keith blows in from Taiwan, awash with banknotes, and gives them £1000 out of pity for their humble lifestyle. To them, this is unheard-of wealth, and before long he offers them a quick way to pay-off their debts. Just carry a little package from Sydney to Hong-Kong. Not drugs, he assures them. In fact, nothing illegal at all. It turns out to be Australian currency - about twenty times more of it than you're allowed to export,. But they get away with it, and he gives them £8000 that makes them feel they're on permanent holiday, leading to more debt and domestic rows, and she goes back to England without him.
After his first appetising scent of smuggling, he is game for a serious cocaine run, and the stakes rise alarmingly. Only a few weeks earlier, he thought that breakfasting out in a restaurant was the lap of luxury. Now he declares that he wants "enough money to possibly not ever have to work again - an instant fix". What he calls "a decent amount" is the £100,000 he's been promised for taking one block of coke from San Francisco to Sydney. Once again, he sneers at the Watford life - grey people, living in grey houses in grey streets under grey skies - as he ties some of the packages round his waist and swallows the rest, sealed inside condoms. But an alert customs man detects that he's got something under his jacket, and game is up. Meanwhile the condoms inside his body have congealed into a logjam, and only the skill of the hospital medics saves his life - a debt he doesn't seem to acknowledge. It is only the long-distance phone-call to his mother that awakens any sort of social conscience about the burdens that criminals place on those little people called law-abiders, whom they despise so much.
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