Australian TV Plays: The Valley of Water (25 March 1962) (Adelaide)

A 1962 Australian television drama that was made by Nine Network in Adelaide. It was the first one-hour television drama to be shot in South Australia.

Premise

A family live on a farm which is threatened by flood from a new dam. The old man does not want to move but his wife andson do.

Cast

Hedley Cullen
Barrie McEwin
Myra Noblet
Jack Taggart
Patrick Taggart

Production

It was based on an original play by Jean Allen, a housewife who lived in the town of Wolseley.

At the Adelaide Festival of the Arts in March 1962, the play came second in a Television Play Competition sponsored by Channel Nine. There had been 45 entries and they judges included Harry Death, executive producer of the TV series Jonah; local author Max Harris; Rex Heading, who would produce and direct the winner for Channel Nine; and Nine's general manager, Bill Davies.

First prize went to Wall to Wall by Anne Kinloch, which they decided not to produce (it aired years later); Heading later wrote that Wall to Wall "was a very different type of play which would have tested the technical facilities and ingenuity of the station."So Nine decided to produce Valley of Water.

The production was filmed at NWS 9, Tynte Street, North Adelaide. Rehearsals began on 12 February. The production was recorded in a full day session on 10 March 1962. The cast consisted of local actors including father and son team Jack and Patrick Taggart. Dean Semler was the floor manager.

Bill Davies talked about it at the Vincent Committee here

my station produced a South Australian play. We had a competition to find the hest South Australian play at the time of the Festival of Arts. We offered a prize of £300. We had 45 entries and we produced the winning play. It ran for 70 minutes and took the best part of a month to produce. We h:we onlv one studio and we had to hire a hall for rehearsals. our actors had other jobs we had to use them at night. The difficulties with limited facilities in a small centre are very great in terms of drama The Shell dramas made by G.T.V. and A.T.N. were very successful, as were ·the G.M.H. dramas. The time involved as well as the physical difficulties are great hurdles. The stations as such are not able physically to cope with a large burden of true dramatic production. A dramatic production is vastly different from a live variety show where the artists come in, rehearse, sing a few songs and go away again. A dramatic production is a painstaking business. It is the areas in which to do it and the people with whom to do it that we are concerned.

If you had to do it would you find the task insuperable7 -I could make one in a month. It took me a month to make one. To provide the full 78 hours of programmes a week would mean that one could not expect a great deal of drama, because you would not have the time to do it

Later Davies said:

In your statement you say, “ We have tried our hand at producing locally written drama for which we offered a cash prize”. Was that drama?—It was called “The Valley of Water ”. Just before the Adelaide Festival of Arts we announced that we were holding a competition for a drama a that had to be written by a South Australian. A housewife living near the Victorian border won the competition with “The Valley of Water”. It was a purely Australian story. The locale was set in South Australia. It was a typically d Australian story of a family living in an area to be inundated for a new dam. It was the story of an old man who did not want to leave his farm. His wife was happy to get out and their son was breaking his neck to get away. It was a story of conflict between people.

Were you able to sell that show to your associates?— Sydney took it. I do not think Melbourne took it. I am not sure about the others. We were very disappointed with this aspect. I know that Sydney took it as a favour to us.

Reception

The production was broadcast in Sydney on 2 November 1962 at 10.30pm.

The Sydney Morning Herald TV critic wrote "the most striking thing about its writing and production was how little they seemed to belong to visual medium" pointing out the production "missed the chance of letting viewers see and appreciate the open-air attractions of the" farm for themselves. The critic felt the script was obviously written for the stage "to judge from the abnormally high number of obvious curtain lines retained in the dialogue. For three parts of its length the play seemed a composite of the Blue Hills type of radio serial and a "human" documentary, with that accomplished actor Hedley Cullen having to submit twice to the indignity of having his most anguished silences interrupted by the recorded mooing of a cow. The play might easily have ended at the close of "Act Three" (so labelled), but the playwright decided at that point to focus her attention on Patrick Taggart's obstinate grandfather and encourage the play to become a study in obsession. The effect was melodramatic, but also a refreshing indication that the author had grown tired of the tidy banality of her semi-documentary beginning. It seemed to promise that she might be on the way to turning herself into a dramatist.

Max Harris spoke about it in Vincent Repoty

Bv the Chairman.—'Relating, your last remarks to “ The Valley of Water ”, whv did not that succeed?—It was quite obviously a noble effort but a terrible production. I would not have sold it to the Salvation Army for Sunday morning. The actors had never appeared on television before, the producer had never worked in the role before, and it was the first time the piece had been put on. They were losing their television virginities in this one and it was a fairly uncomfortable process. They could not have expected Sydney or overseas to buy that one.

Other Adelaide shows