Interview with Peter Cotes from 1990. He came to Australia and made some TV plays.
Tape 1 - talks about childhood and family. Being a Boulting. A bit bitchy about brothers calls Roy "an unhappy man". Says "actors on the whole are very stupid people" except his wife Joan. Talks Donald Wolfit working with Herbert Wilcox. Tape 2 - talks about acting. A lot about Herbert Wilcox and Anna Neagle. Very bitchy. Tape 3 talks about Wilcox and his brothers and father. Tape 3 more film stuff. Tape 4 talks about Upturned Glass. Tape 5... Talks about directors, including Brian Desmond Hurst who would "flaunt his homosexuality" and who PC disliked. Mentions Carol Reed's nice manners. Mostly talks about acting. Tape 6 talks about Joan and Basil Dean. (This is boring interview). Tape 7 40 minutes in talks about studying under Royston Morley along with Ken Tynan and Tony Richardson.
Tape 8 41 mins in finally talks about Australia. After three years "I accepted a very big contract well big by those days to go to Australia and I opened up the drama dpt they had no drama there. They had Graham Kennedy... Most of their stuff came from American. It was a receptible for all the crap everywhere in the world, Australia, until they made their own... I went over and did the first drama series they ever had. And it was called... [he struggles to remember name] He says he's got books and books and books of "his Australian adventure" Remembers year 1961. Became an executive. After experience of Associated Rediffusion "I was capable of living up to the title of executive to the hilt". Then the interviewer gets him back to Associated.
Tape 9 34 mins talks about going out to Australia again Channel 7 Melbourne - liased between Melbourne and Sydney in a plane. "I not only taught a whole crew how to do it but I also directed myself four productions". Backed by General Motors. Says "was very well reecived... there were so many phonies who'd gone out there and kidded the boys. I was a bloody Pom but jolly well received later on" when they saw how hard he worked. He said would ask them to do half what he did. He was senior producer and directed first four TV productions. Says they were an hour and a half. Found good cast. Found Scottish actress called Sophie Stewart who came out to Australia. Played Marigold. I cast Dixon who played with Roberty Morley. Some of the actors were completely Australian. Bill Hodges became more Australian than the Australians. Talks about Hodge, married an Australian girl who had a lot of money. Cotes says it was a "very happy" time and only went home because his mother was sick. Said Joan liked it. She went to Australia expecting another Canada and was agreeably surprised. Later on said was sad couldn't say. Cotes says there for a year. Says trained people who became feature film director. His immediate bosses were the Melbourne Herald. Then 1961 went back to script a documentary for World Wide Pictures in the Snowy Mountains. A dramatised documentary showing Count Streslecki who opened up Snowy Mountains.
Tape 10 he talks about The Mousetrap and getting sacked as director of Bitter Harvest the 1963 film.
Tape 11 and 12 talks about his brothers and other matters.
Tape 13 resumes interview. He's really mean spirit about people. Tape 14 talks about Young and Willing and Bitter Harvest briefly. And Goldwyn. Makes vaguely anti-Semitic cracks about Hollywood moguls. Mentions Constance Smith at the end. Tape 15 mentions Richard Burton test for Waterfront.
Tape 16 39 mints talks of being taught by Royston morley with Ken Tynan. Says Morley hired by Michael Barry. "It was a very nice job for Royston he had all this clay and he liked hearing the sound of his own voice." Tape 19 up to 35 mins.
Directed Hot Summer Night on stage in England in 1958 see review here.
Arrived in Oz March 1961 to work for HSV-7. To make six plays. Wound up making four at a cost of 26,000 pounds and only one was shown. "My wife and I came here to found a drama department. The plan didn't include the plays being 'canned'. I was under the impression they would be televised while we were still in Australia... four plays in six months is not a failure when you have to start from scratch. Live drama is prominent on British TV but the sponsor set up s different. In Australia it appears the sponsor has to pay a proportion of the production costs."
April 1961 interviewed on TV show for ABC called People - see here. Flew back Aug 1961.
Picture of him on top of Mt Kosziusko in 1962.
 |
LITV 25 March 1961
|
 |
LITV 3 Dec 1960
|
The Australian Women's Weekly Wed 19 Apr 1961 Page 54
Boost for local TV drama
By NAN MUSGROVE
The arrival in Australia of Peter Cotes, one of Britain's leading tele- vision producers, is a shot in the arm for live drama on commercial TV. MR. Cotes, under con- tract to Melbourne's HSV7 for six months, will produce six dramas in that time. The first of them will prob- ably be George Bernard Shaw's "Candida." They will be seen on TV all over Aus- tralia. Mr. Cotes is accompanied by his wife, actress Joan Miller, who will appear in the plays he produces. Mr. and Mrs. Cotes, who are soon to move into their own home in Melbourne, are delighted with Australia and what they have so far seen of live theatre here. When they visited Sydney they hadn't seen enough of Australia's live TV to give a real opinion, but it was obvious that they both had their reser- vations about what they had seen.
Mr. Cotes said courteously that he believed it to be bad- mannered when a guest in a country criticised his host with- out having given him a chance to display all his talents. Talent quest The talent Mr. Cotes is looking for is not only among actors and actresses; he is ex- tremely anxious to promote and produce the work of Aus- tralian playwrights. "I will produce plays by famous overseas playwrights," he said, "but all the time I will be looking for an Aus- tralian play, preferably one which is indigenous to the Australian scene."
A tip for the playwrights who feel they might have a play for him — Mr. Cotes can't stand half-hour plays. He thinks they are just a beginning and an ending, without the important middle part. I told him I thought they were often better than a half- hour play padded to fill an hour. "I mean plays of quality," he said. "Take those two ex- cellent films 'Marty' and 'Twelve Angry Men.' Both of those were written originally as hour-long TV plays."
Mr. Cotes is for more and more live TV drama, believes that it is the only way TV will "come of age." "I think live carama is abso- lutely essential to TV. It is far more exciting than any film, done as it is at the moment of seeing."
Programme director for HSV7, Peter Randall, who was squiring the Cotes' on their Sydney visit, told me that he believed HSV's importation of Mr. Cotes was a natural development in commercial TV following the producers' and technicians' teeth-cutting on variety shows. "It is a bold enterprise," he said, "but we, are now ready and poised to undertake it."
During Mr. Cotes' visit here, 12 young directors and pro- ducers at HSV7 will be train- ing with him in drama pro- duction, observing and learn- ing his methods. Mr. Cotes, 48, founded the none Help British TV producer Peter Cotes with his wife, actress Joan Miller. Drama Division of Associated Re-Diffusion, Britain’s com- mercial TV undertaking, which has been responsible for some excellent TV. He has also produced featured plays for the B.B.C. On the legitimate stage he has produced in London’s West End, in New York, and many European capitals.
Wife plays part, too
YOU can see now why Mr. Cotes is such a shot in the arm for local TV. But that’s only half the story. His wife, Joan Miller, one of the most experienced dram- atic actresses in British TV, will also play a big role in helping to boost the quality of live drama here. Joan’s TV career goes right back to 1936 when she pre- sented the first programme shown on British screens. “It was the first of a series called ‘Picture Page,’ in which I interviewed celebrities,” she said. “I was also in the last programme when TV shut down just before war was de- clared.” After 25 years as an actress in theatre, films, and TV, Joan believes very strongly that TV is the most demanding medium of the three. But demanding or not, it’s a medium in which she has consistently brought the praise of hardened critics, so her performances on Australian screens should be a treat for viewers.
 |
Vic TV Times March 1961
|
 |
NAA Melb
|
 |
|
We soon managed to take time out from working in England when, after periods of concentrated work in both the film studio and theatre, we were offered a joint contract to travel to Australia. This turned out to be a fruitful engagement and we found, despite the then low standard of Australian television, that inaugurating a drama department and output in Melbourne’s Channel 7 was the type of pioneering work natural to our dispositions and talents.
We attempted to bring — and I like to think we did help bring, — from what happened after our departure — a radical change in the fare meted out as punishment to some viewers who wanted relief from the monotonous diet of panel games and done-to-death American serials and series. It was a diet that proved indigestible to thoughtful viewers, and for the rest it was a long-suffering endurance test of the sort the earlier TV viewer in England had absorbed before the war. There was a steady exposure of such personalities as the local favourite, Graham Kennedy, with his boy-next-door, stock-in-trade gift-of-the-gab, and it must be said, a more professional host in Gerald Lyons, who became a local celebrity through his interviewing of media personalities as they passed through Melbourne on their way to such other centres as Sydney, Perth and Adelaide — where yet more local channels were to be found. In later years many of those who worked with me at Channel 7 found themselves, as locals (producers, writers, technicians, actors), being given chances which they took and made good.
But our visit was long before many good films had started coming out from Down Under, and such a notable achievement as the film Picnic at Hanging Rock was a dream still unrealized. Indeed, when we were there the only channel of consequence transmitting at the time was ABC TV, the government station, and I watched it with some interest while still busily stockpiling films for TV during our defined limited engagement. Channel 7 was to be networked throughout that vast land and three of the plays I directed (Candida, Long Distance and Suspect, with Joan playing widely contrasting roles in all of them) proved a welcome change from those episodes from the dregs of the American TV market.
Looking back I like to think that the English exports played some not entirely negligible part in introducing higher standards to crews and artistes who were only too willing to cooperate and often hungry to learn. None of the pieces — all of them stage plays I’d adapted for the small screen — proved too highbrow for the majority of viewers. And as for the reaction of the press to our visit, our intrusion into the native telly scene proved manna from heaven. A staple diet of professionalism was a change from the ‘mechanical crap we are fed all the time for the most part — inadequately acted, indifferently directed and primitively photographed’, as one TV critic put it in his column. In other words, we two pommies were welcomed by press and public alike with open arms and chorus of praise.
Since then there’s a brand new Australian movie and TV industry born out of the ashes of its former self and standing comparison with the output from other countries throughout the world. Nowadays, it’s not only their wines that are for export but often their TV and film productions as well.
We returned to England refreshed from our labours and glad to have worked among so many friendly folk. We left behind many warm hearts, and knew that the radical alterations in hours, working conditions, exercised through the testing of local talent, as well as producing four full-length feature films for cinemas and television, had done nothing but good for the locals and left us satisfied with the overall journey we’d made for so many months past. That output had been backed by an initially resistant Melbourne Herald which had financially interested itself in TV and had brought the two Brits over to impart their know-how to the locals. They finally had the satisfaction of getting the whole of our output sponsored by the powerful General Motors Co. and it was their name that presented the ‘Hour’ attached to their product.
No comments:
Post a Comment