UNDERBELLY - A Tale of Two Cities: will it be the Australian television epic that might have been?

Having been the editor of Griffith’s local newspaper, The Area News, for 10 years from the mid-1970s, it is easy to be an armchair critic. But having viewed the two episodes of the new series that have screened so far, it is hard to get excited.

Much of the discussion of the series so far has concerned the explicit sex scenes between Terrence John Clark (played by Matthew Newton) in what was just a real life six-week fling with drug courier Allison Raewyn Dine (Anna Hutchison) back in 1978.

But even their displays of flesh are not enough of a distraction to miss so many obvious bloopers.

It is the fiction substituted for fact that threatens this second Underbelly. The writers have settled on a storyline that does not tell it exactly the way it was.

It represents a multi-million dollar travesty when it could have been the serialisation of sensations. A great opportunity has been missed by not telling it straight.

As a record-breaking 2.5 million people tuned in to the first episode, it was hard to believe Scrrentime producers Des Monaghan and Jo Horsburgh could not have tried harder to place a higher priority on accuracy than television ratings.

Instead, the 30,000 people who live in Griffith alone winced at the portrayal of Donald Mackay (Andrew MacFarlane) and Bruno "Aussie Bob" Trimbole (Roy Billing) in an episode that could have doomed a potential blockbuster to become a fanciful soap opera.

The writers claim their script has been “based on true events”. But, as the reporter who broke the news of the disappearance of Donald Mackay about 7am on Saturday, July 16, 1977, it is impossible to reconcile what we’re seeing with the volumes of well documented factual information available to them.

Griffith has been a town intensely scrutinised in two Commissions of Inquiry into Drugs, an Inquiry into the Mackay Investigation, the Mackay Inquest, Trimbole Extradition Court, Inquiry into NSW Police and the Colin Winchester Inquest.

Underbelly made a ludicrous attempt to portray the late anti-drug crusader Donald Mackay standing on a soapbox when in real life he held meetings behind closed doors in a softly, softly approach.

It was well documented that “Aussie Bob” was dining at a restaurant near Randwick racecourse on the night Donald Mackay was shot – not at the La Scala restaurant in Griffith as was portrayed in Underbelly.

And Donald Mackay’s wife Barbara, a devoted mother, never worked in their furniture emporium but was written into the business in Underbelly.

Small mistakes, you say? But they served to discredit Underbelly from the beginning.

Don and Barbara Mackay both wanted the hopelessly inadequate drug laws of NSW changed.

In the 1970s it was not illegal to grow marijuana because it grew naturally in this state. Kids smoking pot were fined more heavily than the growers.

In Griffith, corrupt police were in on the act, as exposed some years later by the far-reaching Police Royal Commission.

Bruno Trimbole – who anglicised his name to “Bob” – could, you would have thought, been portrayed as he was in real life. But “Aussie Bob” never grew oranges, nor did he live on a farm in a “grass castle” built from the proceeds of cannabis.

It was true, however, that Italian farmers grew cannabis [which they called “special tomatoes”] while corrupt police turned a blind eye. However, “Aussie Bob” was a streetwise bankrupt, a fearless gambler who burnt down his panel-beating and spray painting shop to collect insurance money before hitting the road to sell pinball machines.

He discovered kindred families of Italians in the amazing, tight-lipped network of the Honoured Society. The Honoured Society kept a “code of silence” and could be depended on by Trimbole’s “seed man” to organise huge commercial crops of cannabis. Every state was connected to the Griffith “crop sitters” and Aussie Bob’s backers were raking in millions.

Some greedy members of the Mob disappeared without trace, men like Nunzio Grecco, the builder of “grass castles”. Two other bodies retrieved from the Murrumbidgee River in May 1984 had had their hands bound and ears cut off, and were killed by a single shot between the eyes as a warning not to cross the Mob.

Trimbole opened the Texan Tavern nightclub frequented by corrupt police in Griffith in August 1972.

Trimbole initially raised his family on the breadline in Griffith until he struck it rich, rigging horse races, gambling hard alongside George Freeman (Peter O’Brien) and rubbing shoulders with the likes of Abe Saffron and Lennie McPherson.

Trimbole got involved with Terrence John Clark, the international drug runner and killer of perhaps six members of his New Zealand gang, around the time of Donald Mackay’s murder. They apparently met at the races where they could launder large sums of money.

Clark’s syndicate apparently utilised a large bundle of birth certificates Trimbole had acquired in Griffith to arrange fake passports for himself and the Mr Asia couriers who were running heroin between Singapore, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Perth.

Underbelly also touches on the the depths of angst between NSW and Victorian police.

Joe Parrington and Carl Mengler were rivals, each determined to crack the mystery of Donald Mackay’s disappearance in a classic “whodunnit”.

Officers searched building foundations in Griffith’s main street, Banna Avenue, local lakes were dragged and there was an investigation of a rendering works “mincer”. Even the intervention of an international clairvoyant made sensational headline news.

But the Mackay murder remained a mystery for six years until Canberra policeman Colin Winchester organised a whistleblower to grow cannabis crops at Bungendore to document how Italian cannabis growers organised themselves.

Gianfranco Tizzoni (played by Tony Poli) was caught red-handed leaving the Bungendore crop with a boot full of cannabis bound for Melbourne. Terminally ill with cancer, Tizzoni told Victorian police he arranged “the hit” on Donald Mackay, paying James Frederick Bazley $10,000.

NSW police were livid when Victorian police beat them to unravel the Mackay mystery.

The new Underbelly has identified Terrence Clark as the mastermind “Mr Asia”. That title, however, had always belonged to Christopher Martin Johnstone, whom Clark murdered in England on October 9, 1979 after a falling out over drugs.

Clark was given a life sentence in gaol.

Clark had also killed Gregory Ollard, Julie Theilman and Harry Lewis in NSW and arranged to have Douglas and Isabel Wilson murdered in Melbourne. These killings were documented by the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Drug Trafficking by Judge Donald Stewart in February 1983.

The Wilsons had been murdered by James Bazley, the man convicted along with Tizzoni and George Joseph of conspiring to murder Donald Mackay after a trial in Melbourne.

Whether people will start turning off Underbelly after the first two episodes may depend on the truth of the ongoing story line, particularly as viewed through the eyes of people who have lived through the Mackay saga for 30 years.

Viewers will remain curious about the portrayal of “Aussie Bob” who first corrupted Griffith’s detectives and a commissioner of police who in turn tainted a state premier, bringing down a minister in charge of gaols and a court of petty sessions magistrate.

Bloopers aside, though, Underbelly should continue to titillate television viewers conditioned to sex and violence.