Drama play tracing a young singer’s rise to fame, and the pitfalls and sorrows she encounters along with success. Based heavily upon Baker’s own career.
Originating Station: TVW-7
Running Time: 60 mins
Cast : Dorothy Baker
Ron Graham
Alan Cassell
Airdate: 9:30 p.m Saturday May 18th 1963 (TCN-9)
List of notes
When listing wiped plays mention The Torrents
PORTRAIT OF A STAR
Reaching For The Knob
Portrait of a Star, Channel 9.
Tn some “viewing areas” Saturday nights A are considered suitable for some of the best television shows, with the lightest items last on the bill. In Melbourne you can see “Startime” from 10.30 until you fall into a dreamless sleep. But in Sydney anything can happen on a Saturday night, and, as an instance, I give you a recent “musical play” called “Portrait of a Star,” which flashed on to my screen at 9.30 and remained visible until about 9.45 when my palsied hand at last found the knob, and tuned out. “Portrait of a Star (60 min.),” said the programme notice, “is the first musical play from TVW, Perth.” It starred Melbourne singer, Dorothy Baker, who has since gone to England, and it told the story “of a young singer’s struggle for recognition, and her rise to fame and fortune, of the people who guided her and the pitfalls she encountered on the way up.” It all had a familiar ring,somehow.
Well, the producer and director, Max Bostock, started his portrait with a splash of everything. On a tiered stage, floodlit and surrounded with utter blackness, the chorus whirled and Miss Baker sang in a magnificently loud, flat and tuneless fashion. It was an impressive way of showing her humble beginning with the West Cottesloe Musical, Dramatic and Marching Girls’ Society, and I waited for James Mason to appear and say, “You can’t sing, but you can be taught. You
have that other indefinable something, the stuff from which stars are born.”
He didn’t, though. In the next shots, our star was backed against her dressing room door by a tide of newspaper photo-
graphers who fired questions at her but took no pictures. And what questions! How, they asked, had she become a star?
The rest was flashback. Miss Baker, as a teenager named Dorothy Baker, wearing a pony tail obviously borrowed from
a real pony, came prancing in to a deserted dance hall where “Steve” sat fooling with a piano.
After a hesitant beginning, Miss Baker suddenly proved that she can sing more like Vera Lynn than Vera Lynn can these days, and “Steve”, sharing our astonishment, engaged her on the spot Apparently without rehearsal, she turned up that night to sing, run shyly from the stage, be talked back on by Steve, and win feeble applause from an unseen audience.
It must have contained a talent scout from the nether regions, because immediately the cameras looked down on our girl dancing in some hellish pit, while fallen vestal virgins swirled around her and some fellow tap-danced, waving a top-pop record. The cameras descended for a shot over a cauldron of sulphuric acid, and the fumes spread, and a man and woman danced merrily in them, crying “Baba Lu!” Then more of our girl and the vestals in their pit. And the result of all that was a clipping, pasted on to an edition of, I guess, the “Nether Regions News”, proclaiming “NEW STAR DISCOVERED”. I almost cried with relief when a new voice declared that you get one and a half cups of flavor from someone or other’s coffee beans, and that broke the spell. The trembling hand reached the knob, and Gary Cooper said, “Hop onto the stage, ma’am,” and thank heavens it was a sane, old fashioned Wild West stage he was talking about.
Naturally, I missed the credits and cannot report who wrote, or daubed, the “Portrait”. Nor do I know “Steve’s” name, but whoever he was, he did very well and much more should be seen of him, if anyone’s really looking for new actors in television.
FRANK ROBERTS
