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<Photo of Franky> Franky Doyle (Carol Burns) on top of the roof of Wentworth Jail, surveying the beckoning free world outside.... she makes the decision to break out of her hell-hole

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PROLOGUE:

THE BEGINNINGS OF A CULT

The security guard at KTLA-5 couldn't believe his eyes.  Outside on Hollywood's famous Sunset Boulevard were about twenty women motor-bike riders converging near the footpath in front of the TV station's main offices.  Engines revved and roared.  The din was ear-splitting.  As a colleague joined the guard behind the glass panelling in the foyer, fifteen more women bikies rode in from a nearby carpark, then another fifteen arced in from the opposite direction.  The two guards moved to the front door, prepared to disperse the assembly of fifty gleaming machines and their leather-clad riders.  The men stopped in their tracks.  Now there was an eerie calm.  The bikies sat silently, heads down in reverent prayer.  Passers-by, accustomed to bizarre events every day and night on Sunset Strip, seemed to sense the occasion and stood still in tribute.  It looked like a scene from the classic 1953 Marlon Brando movie The Wild One.  But this was Los Angeles, and it was 10 January 1980.  The bikies were paying respect to their favourite TV character Franky Doyle, a trouble-making lesbian bikie inmate of the fictitious Wentworth Jail in an offbeat Australian drama series called 'Prisoner: Cell Block H'.  The previous night on KTLA-5 Doyle had 'died' from a police bullet while trying to escape.  Now a small solitary wreath lay on the sunlit footpath and Doyle (played by actress Carol Burns) was being paid homage in a manner Hollywood usually reserves for its own dead cult heroes and heroines like Rudolf Valentino, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and Elvis Presley.  Then the bikies were moving off in a slow, orderly line, light on the accelerators as their gleaming, mechanical caravan headed off into the hazy shroud of another Los Angeles morning ling.  Across town other bikie groups of Franky Doyle fans would swell the ranks at official wakes to more than 3,000.  Only once before had Hollywood created an Australian cult hero, the swashbuckling, macho actor Errol Flynn - and he'd been dead for twenty-one years....