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ABBA The Movie (Review Film)

ABBA: The Movie is a 1977 film about the pop group ABBA's Australian tour. It was directed by Lasse Hallström, who directed most of the group's videos. The film has become a cult film among ABBA fans. Its release coincided with the release of ABBA: The Album, the group's fifth studio album, and features many songs from that album as well as many of their earlier hits, and one, "Get on the Carousel", unavailable anywhere else.

The film has a very loose plot which is little more than a vehicle to link together the concert footage. It concerns the adventures of Ashley Wallace (Robert Hughes), a naïve DJ on Radio 2TW, who normally presents a through-the-night country and western-themed show. In spite of this, he is sent by the station's boss (Bruce Barry) to get an in-depth interview ("Not an interview, a dialogue", demands his boss) with the group, whose fame and stature neither he nor Ashley have the first clue about, which is to be aired on the day ABBA leave Australia. Needless to say, Ashley, who has never done an interview before, singularly fails, mainly because he has forgotten to pack his press card, although the fact that he is unable to buy a ticket doesn't help matters either. Armed with his trusty reel-to-reel tape recorder, Ashley is forced to follow the group all over Australia, beginning in Sydney, and then travelling, in order, to Perth, Adelaide, and Melbourne, experiencing repeated run-ins with the group's very protective bodyguard (Tom Oliver), as well as his increasingly exasperated boss.

Eventually, Ashley has an unbelievably lucky chance encounter with Stig Anderson, the group's manager, who agrees to an interview. After attending a concert, Ashley sleeps in and misses the appointed interview time. Just as Ashley is about to give up (by this time, he doesn't even care that his press card—which has also been traveling across Australia, continually forwarded by the postal service—has finally arrived!), he steps into an elevator and finds himself face-to-face with ABBA. They agree to give him an interview, and he leaves Melbourne just in time to meet the deadline for the radio show to go out on-air. He puts together the final edit in the back of a taxi on the way back from the airport, as ABBA depart Australia for Europe. With only minutes to go, Ashley makes it back to the radio station where, having set the tape up on the studio's playback machine, he relaxes at his control desk to listen as the interview—which he worked so long and hard to obtain—is broadcast over the airwaves Down Under.

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