BRETT WALKS A SENSITIVE PATH

Heroin is flavour of the month. You can tell it's arrived as a fashionable society ill because now it occupies a key storyline in Australia's top-rating drama, Blue Heelers.

The producers, smart blokes that they are, have hitched the issue to Maggie Doyle (Lisa McCune), possibley the most popular person on television. Maggie's brother Robbie (Brett Climo) has just arrived in Mount Thomas, and he's brought along a nagging heroin complaint with him.

"When the producers first approached me about doing the role, I didn't say no, but in the process of the meeting I said, 'Look, I'm not the right person for this job'," Climo says.

"Having done some medical dramas before and seen the heavy-handed way in which they sometimes approach any sort of addiction or illness, you actually don't want to put yourself up there to be laughed at by your peers or other producers. They reassured me that the reason they were looking for someone like me to do it was because they really wanted a normal person. I'm not trying to put myself up on a pedestal here."

"I'm trying to say because of the work I've done (A Country Practice, Flying Doctors), people usually align me with 'clean'. And if you look at who I'm playing the brother of - that delightful, wonderful person Lisa McCune - I guess Robbie had to have nice bones in his body."

"Whether this works out or not, I would tend to think it will rate very well anyway because it is a topical issue."

It sure is. But Blue Heelers is still striving to entertain and a couple of junkies sitting around on the nod does not exactly make for scintillating television.

"Fortunately the episodes aren't in the Trainspotting genre," Climo explains. "I don't think we're particularly interested in portraying a junkie as such. We're trying to show the emotional turmoil that he creates around him."

"So I think the show has done it in a very intelligent way. You could say television is being used to it's best advantage."