Australian TV Plays: Raymond Menmuir

ABC television pioneer who went on to direct The Avengers and Upstairs Downstairs
June 3, 2016 — 11.35pm
https://www.smh.com.au/national/gifted-abc-director-who-went-on-to-produce-the-avengers-and-upstairs-downstairs-20160602-gp9re2.html#ixzz4AxSAjAQr

Ray Menmuir 1930–2016

In the course of his life’s journey from Perth to Sydney and then on to the turbulent culture of London in the ‘60s, Ray Menmuir was a pioneer of Australian television drama and became one of the brightest and most talented TV directors in Britain.

Raymond Edward Menmuir was born on September 10, 1930, the first of four children to Edward Menmuir and Dorothy (née Williams). His father worked in motor vehicle insurance and, although never well-off, sent Ray to Wesley College. His strongly Baptist upbringing, with what Ray called its Calvinistic nature, gave him the discipline that marked his professional work.

By the time Menmuir left Wesley College in 1947, Perth was emerging from the strictures of the Great Depression and World War II, and theatre and music activity was flickering back into life. His literary skills got him a cadetship as a reporter with the Perth Daily News, but he spent his evenings as an actor and producer in the small but lively local theatre scene. This quickly led to a job as a radio producer for the ABC.

Menmuir had his first exposure to European culture when Perth hosted the first international Festival of the Arts in Australia in 1953. It included programs of French, Italian and Russian films, screened on summer nights at the University of WA’s outdoor Somerville Auditorium. Among the films he saw were Marcel Pagnol’s Cesar, Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves and Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes are Flying. They were revelations, not only of different ways of living but of new means of expression. They impressed him deeply, and later when he started in television with its rather static theatrical conventions, Ray strove to make his productions fluid, free and cinematic.

In 1956, aged 26, he was recruited to the national drama and features department of the ABC in Sydney. It was the first year of television in Australia. At TV training workshops the ABC conducted for staff, Menmuir soon impressed. He directed the second television play broadcast in Australia, JB Priestley’s The Rose and Crown, followed by the first play to be transmitted in January 1958 from the newly built studio complex at Gore Hill, this time an Australian work: Barbara Vernon’s The Multi-Coloured Umbrella.

All productions then were live-to-air, transmitted without stopping. This required exceptionally good organisation of design, cameras, sound, vision mixers, floor crew, lighting staff, technical crew and actors. Menmuir revelled in the creative organisation and complexity of the studio. His directorial style was defined by his insistence that the camera, the lens and light be an expressive element of the drama, not a passive recorder of the scene. His productions, including Alan Seymour’s Swamp Creatures, The Strong are Lonely and Dock Brief by John Mortimer, were innovative and flawless.

Menmuir’s greatest production achievement in those early years at the ABC was in 1960 when the ABC suspended peak-hour programs to transmit his live-to-air two-hour production of Shakespeare’s Richard II utilising all three of the ABC’s Gore Hill TV studios – a concept of such complexity and audacity that it was never repeated.
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In 1961, Ray and his then wife Heidi (née Isenmann) went to London to test his mettle in what was regarded as the most vibrant and energetic television industry in the world.

His talent was recognised immediately and, after directing Alan Seymour’s One Day of The Year for Joan Littlewood’s cutting-edge theatre in East Stratford, London, over the following three decades he was engaged by all the major UK production houses. His output was prodigious: more than 180 direction and production credits for filmed and television studio series and one-off teleplays.

Commencing with Z Cars, among Menmuir’s productions were No Hiding Place, The Avengers, C.P. Snow’s Corridors of Power for the BBC’s Wednesday play, The Duchess of Duke Street, The Nine Tailors, adapted from the novel of Dorothy Sayers with Ian Carmichael as Lord Peter Wimsey and The Onedin Line. He directed 12 episodes of Upstairs Downstairs, including the first that went to air.

In 1978, Michael Grade of London Weekend Television offered him what must have been the ideal engagement: as producer with full budgetary and artistic control of the increasingly popular high-budget series The Professionals. He produced 44 episodes of what became a “cult” TV series.
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Menmuir made two brief returns to Australia: the first in 1963 to produce Ned Kelly, the ABC’s entry to the Italia Prize international broadcasting competition, and then in the mid-80s, following his success with The Professionals, to advise Crawford Productions in Melbourne on a new police series Special Squad. In the same visit he directed the movie Fortress for Crawfords and HBO America.

Away from the furious activity of his professional life, his daughter Fiona remembers Ray as a quiet and private man with a strong and enduring love of nature. He cultivated a large organic garden in their home in rural Buckinghamshire in the 1970s and ‘80s using no sprays or chemicals. Later, at Mirrabooka on the NSW Central Coast to which Ray retired in the ‘90s, he planted out a peaceful garden with an eye to seasonal colours. He delighted in the native birds it attracted.

Ray is survived by his daughter Anna from his first marriage, his daughter Fiona and son Iain from his second marriage to Jennifer (née Cooper) who died in 2010, his partner of recent years Wendy Blacklock, his sisters Dorothy, Judith and Patricia and six grandchildren Annie (16), Abbie (13), Ella (12), Matilda (10), Flynn (8) and Isla (6).

Storry Walton and Tom Jeffrey