Australian TV Plays: Goodbye Johnnie (26 April 1965)

I have never heard of this. A British TV production about the Australian withdrawl from Gallipoli to honour the 50th anniversary of the campaign. Why did we not know about this? It was for ITV.

Premise

ANZAC troops are ordered to withdraw from Gallipoli.

Cast

*Edward Judd as Sgt. Leo Roskams, who has lived in Australia about 13 year
*John Meillon as Cpl. Ernest
*Ernest Clark as Capt. Walker, an officer from HQ
*Ken Wayne as Digger

*Fredric Abbott as Lofty
*Jeff Ashby as Stan
*Brian Harrison as Collie
*William Job as Lt. McKenzie
*Anthony Nicholls as Narrator
*George Roubicek as Moora
*Sean Scully as Barnes
*Walter Sparrow as Blocker
*Brian Anderson as Mick

Production

It was written by Marc Bradel and directed by John Jacobs. Jacobs was Anglia's head of drama. He especially commissioned it after Marc Bradnel pitched him the idea.

According to The Stage "It shows how the bitterness and despair at the failure of the campaign which had begun with such high hopes was turned into a kind of victory when the entire Allied force managed to with draw without the loss of a single life. It is not a war story in the narrow sense. It is a story of men far from home, bewildered, and lacking any accurate knowledge of what is going on. "

The Johnnie of the title was Johnnie Turk". Except for two characters who are not written as Australians, Edward Judd and Ernest Clarke, the cast were Australians.

"I think I must have seen practically every Australian actor in this country who was available and fitted into the right age group,” Jacobs said. “It was surprising to learn just how many there were to choose from and, not only that, how many of them had some connection with the Gallipoli campaign through a relative who was there."

Edward Judd had to sound like someone who has picked up the Australian accent but is liable to lose it in moments of stress.

Jacobs hired Major-General Ashton Wade, BC, OBE, MC, who entered the army in the year of Gallipoli, to act as adviser.

A huge set was built at Anglia’s studio at Norwich

“You were either on the set or out in the street,” Edward Judd said “It was one of the most authentic sets I’ve ever come across. You really felt you were in the trenches. All over the place there were great beams of wood at a height of about five foot four inches which you had to remem ber to duck under -just as the soldiers themselves had to learn to do. “It was hard on the poor cameramen though,” he laughed. “They kept tracking back and banging their nuts!”

Using the entire floor space of the studio in this way was the deliberate choice of designer Robert MacGowan after he had done his own research on the Gallipoli campaign and had then put his ideas up to John Jacobs. “It wasn’t because we were short of space. It was because I wanted John to be able to shoot right round 360 degrees. We made it possible for him to look at every thing. in any direction, for a distance of up to 20 feet, by raising the booms on two islands and bringing the power cables and so on in from above. There’s one scene I’m parti cularly excited about. Edward Judd runs from the front line trench, through a communicating trench to one behind, and then back the other way in other words he does a sort of figure of 8 and the camera follows be hind him all the time. I think that being able to stay, as it were, down there in the trenches with him helps to put over the feeling that they had to live all the time underground and could never come up.”

Taking the Gallipoli penin sular trenches to Norwich meant filling the studio with over a thousand sandbags, tons of Tim ber. rifles, tin hats, bayonets, and all the odds and ends that eight months of improvisation caused to be used to lessen the hard ships. Also there was the mud with which the actors enthusiastically coated themselves not the noisome mud of the trench war fare in France but the particular sandy mud of that part of the world.

“I did a lot of research into the conditions,” Robert Mac Gowan told our reporter. “We found there was a lot of sand, not very much water, and a little snow. The trenches were mostly dug out of hard sand and shored up with wood. We reproduced them exactly as they were except that it wasn’t practical to incline the whole set as much as we would have liked-- the real trenches were set in the side of a hill.”

Theme music Wilfred Josephs, who wrote the theme music for the BBC’s series The Great War. has com posed an original score for Good bye Johnnie. Having already studied the period, he knew the details of the Gallipoli campaign he told Television Today. “The score almost wrote itself once I’d read the script which I think is very well written. I didn’t really have any problems once I had the feeling of the mood the director wanted. I like the story im mensely, largely because there are no spurious heroics. I found myself emotionally involved be cause I could put myself in the place of someone stuck there in the trenches.” The music is scored for the harmonica, which is played by Larry Adler. Larry also has to “double” for a soldier who plays the harmonica badly and, Wilfred Josephs remarks “It takes a very good musician to play badly and in this play Larry plays beauti fully badly!”

Goodbye Johnnie, recorded early this year, was the first play Edward Judd had acted in for television for four years (al though the episode of ABC’s The Human Jungle in which he ap peared was, of course, screened first). “I decided it was time I did a bit more television.” he told Television Today. “Although I’ve been in several films during the past four years 1 think people tend to kill you off and say “Whatever happened to him?” if they don’t see you on television. “But I also wanted to play this part because I find the whole Gallipoli story fascinating and extraordinary. It’s the most dramatic story any actor could appear in. And this play is particularly interesting to me be cause the character I play is, I understand, based on an uncle of Marc Brandel. “

Acting in television isn’t as frightening as it was when it was live or when you were never allowed to re-record unless the studio roof fell in. This produc tion seemed extra easy because John Jacobs is such a consum mate director. We started re cording at 7.10 and we were back in our dressing rooms by 9.20 having gone through it without a hitch.” Then he added. “I’ll tell you something that did shake me though: It was meeting Sean Scully again When I saw him last he was playing Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island and he came up to my shoulder. Now he’s 17 grown to six foot two, and I found had to look up at him He made me feel like a dwarf!”

For Anglia’s play on Monday, which commemorates the landing at Gallipoli, the entire studio at Norwic was transformed into the trenches of the ANZAC forces to recreate the atmosphere of the eight months of trench warfare which followed. A thousand sandbags, tons of timber, rifles, tin hats and bayonets, were moved in, and the designer Robert MacGowan erected two “islands” for the booms so that John Jacobs, the director, could shoot in any direction through 360 degrees. Wooden beams shoring up the trenches at a height of five foot four reminded actors and cameramen alike of the discomforts of living underground.

Reception

The Stage said “this was a worthwhile subject deserving of all the respect and care that all concerned obviously gave it. That its dramatic qualities were not fully exploited could be blamed partly on the unavoidably static nature of the action and partly... on Marc Brandel’s script which masked rather than revealed individuality... this was a fine documentary but it had too little light and shade to be fully enjoyed as drama.."

BFI link here.