Inside Straight - Card Game (Episode Seven)

...and that's another thing, whenever you set a good hand you always scratch your head just like that.

– George (Roy Billing) reminds Steve (Phillip Gordon) how he accidentally gives his hand away while gambling

I had quite a few instances of people trying to wave me down . . . I tried to explain that we were filming a television programme, but she looked round and couldn't see the camera, so I tried explaining that it wasn't a real taxi, so she looked at the meter and everything and then started berating me.

– Roy Billing, on an unexpected arrival in his taxi, while filming in Wellington, The Press, 30 March 1983

... the plots show affection and loyalty, they show the guilty usually receiving some form of punishment, they show the little guy usually getting his money back.

– Reviewer David Hill in The Listener, 20 October 1984

There was a bloke that I used to know, he started playing the heavy numbers when he was a kid. Third year in he wins the main event. He believed that he could always win — at anything. You start to believe in luck, in something for nothing.

– George (Roy Billing) on gambling

I like you Steve and maybe for anything else I'd lend you the money, but not for the card game . . . because as I say I like you, and if you play you lose.

– Leo (Silvio Famularo) refuses to lend Steve money for gambling

The producer, Peter Muxlow, said that the original aim behind Inside Straight was to produce a commercial, urban-based series. The series was different from anything Television New Zealand had made before. "I think the series will polarise people. It is aimed at a specific audience and they should love it, but other people might hate it," he said.

– Producer, Peter Muxlow on the audience for Inside Straight, The Press, 27 August 1984

Wellington was a strange town — boring and respectable for most of the time and then all these interesting characters would come out at night . . . It felt like a sub-culture cut off from the rest of the world . . . We tried to go from there, taking some of those elements of taxi driving, gambling hotel work and that sort of night world.

– Inside Straight creator Keith Aberdein on the inspiration for the show, quoted from Trisha Dunleavy's 2005 book Ourselves in Primetime: A History of New Zealand Television Drama, page 162