English Summary
In 1993, SBS television ran a current-affairs segment on Inquest, a dance party staged inside the Old Adelaide Gaol and organised by five friends, all under 21: Daniel Michael, Josh Fechner, Ben Dry, Damian Creaser, and Paul Hamon. It was the debut show of the crew that went on to become Instantaneous Productions — covered in more detail in Paul's Rave Tales interview, elsewhere on this site.
The segment frames the event as a lesson in scrappy budgeting: the organisers describe running what would ordinarily be a $15,000 production for closer to $7,000 by handling flyer design, deliveries and setup themselves with a crew of around 30–40, on top of contracted suppliers for the bar (through Ayers House), toilets, arcade games, and lighting and sound. One of the group credits two years of a business degree at the University of South Australia for the event's financial planning.
On the night, advance ticket sales were close to a thousand — described as near a record for an Adelaide dance party not held on New Year's Eve — with two simultaneous dance floors, arcade games, and a sledgehammer "car bash" as a sideshow attraction. In a bit of dark comedy caught on camera, the car earmarked for the bash had been set alight shortly before the event, so patrons ended up smashing a burnt-out shell rather than the intact car originally planned. The segment closes with the crew saying they'd run it again if the night went well — which, given Instantaneous Productions' run through to 1994, it evidently did.