Australian TV Plays: Royston Morley pieces

The Stage 28 Jan 1960 p 9

Excellent resource. Link is here.

He only mentions Australian career briefly in part 2 here. He doesn't go into details about any of the productions, says he was out there for a few years and married an Australian.

He went out to train people for TV in South Africa, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. Invited back from Australia by Lew Grade who wanted to start commercial television.

Some bitchy comments by Neil Hutchison below. He didn't want Morley wanted Ian Atkins.

*1935 join BBC radio - goes to Alexandra Palace in 1937, worked on magazine picture Page - 1937 married first wife (marriage dissolved 1956, apparently he had children to another man's wife) - early dramas include Mourning Becomes Electra, Alice in Wonderland (April 1937), Romeo and Juliet (1937 with Michael Redgrave),. Says during this time actors got less for appearing on TV than radio because less people watched. The Unquiet Spirit (1939) had gay content.

*1938 Did play Thw White Chateau where used guns from the Territorial Army that made the paper because it scared Londoners

*WW2 worked as war correspondent

*1946-52 BBC TV drama producer inc directing King Lear (1948), Richard II (1950) The Final Test 1951 by Rattigan, Henry V (1951), The Petrified Forest (1951)

*1948 The Tarbernacle published - his first novel

*1949 The Canvas Rainbow - directed

*1950 The Desert in the Bed published 2nd novel

*Television training - 1952-56... Peter Cotes called him "the most rewarding of teachers" - students included Tony Richardson, Ken Tynan, David Attenborough

*The Whip (1952) - TV play wrote and directed

*1953 The Chactonybury Ring 3rd novel

*1953 The Guilty Party TV pay

* Pirandello (1954) stage play director

*Skin of Our Teeth (1956) - stage play director

*trained people in Sweden

*in 1956 recommended John Schlesinger be turned down for BBC training program (the one Tony Richardson had done) -

*Aug 1956 arrives in australia

*Sept 1957 return to Australia

*Oct 1957 criticised by Calwell

* 1 Nov 1957 marries Jan Bain

*Jan 1958 - Point of No Return

*March 1958 - Chance of a Ghost
*July 1958 - Sixty Point Bold

*Aug 1958 - The Gladys Half Hour

*Nov 1958 - Enemy of the Poeple

*April 1959 - The Seagull

*June 1959 Hamlet

*July 1959 - The Final Test by Terence Rattigan - directed for ABC radio -

*July 1959 - reviews book in The Age

* Sept 1959 - TV writer workshi

*Oct 1959 review of book by Sitwell

*April 1966 Cool Change Moving North reviewed in Oz - also here

* Jan 1960 reports that he was going to Canada to direct Heartbreak House and The Seagull in Toronto - did TV play Over My Dead Body

*Then goes to work for ITV

Some time in mid-war, a friend of mine whose family, living in Staines, had showed me much kindness, called upon me. He was Royston Morley, a drama producer for the B.B.C., who seemed to have read everything, and retained it all in his head. It appeared to bother him somewhat that, though a vast amount of English poetry was stored there, and could be poured out at any moment, crevices of his brain would stuff themselves with the words of almost all the popular songs he had ever heard. He thought that the mind has its limitations, which seems to me quite untrue. - Pamela Hansford Jonson "Important to Me" p 205