Heart Attack (13 Jan 1960)

 A thriller written by George F. Kerr, to follow Kerr's Blue Murder. It was very much in the vein of something like Dial M for Murder.

I've struggled to discover who directed this. It got a terrible review in The Age. It ran for 76 minutes.

Premise

Dr Brian Wynter is just back from a holiday to Australia to work at a hospital in London. It seems he might be promoted. But Wyner 's career is threatened by a blackmailer called Pearce. 

Pearce had learned of Wynter's affair with another woman before his marriage and threatens to tell the doctor's wife, Judith, unless he is paid. 

Dr Wynter pays him off but Pearce keeps asking for money. Dr Wynter decides the solution is murder. 

Wynter considers killing Pearce but doesn't go through with it. He confesses all to Judith who forgives him.

Cast

• John Morgan as Dr. Wynter
• Beverley Phillips as Judith Wynter, his wife
  
• Edward Brayshaw as Pearce
• Wynn Roberts as Dr. John Rutherford
• Marcella Burgoyne (or June Brunelle) as Clare Mackay, the other woman
  
• Bruce Archer
• Carol Armstrong
• June Brunelle
• Campbell Copelin
• Edward Howell
• Kendrick Hudson
• Carole Potter

Production

In John Croyston's oral history with Graham Shirley, he said the ABC were going to do a play but couldn't get the rights so Kerr went home and wrote a new one in two days using the same cast and sets. I used to wonder if it was Blue Murder, because he said Ray Menmuir was the director. But I found out from TV times that it was Heart Attack.

What happened was the ABC were going to film Mine Own Executioner as the first play of the year. But they could not get the rights (they did manage to film it later) so Kerr had to wrote a play in a short period of time (TV Times said ten days). Brian James was originally to play the lead - he did in Executioner - but he disliked the script so they hired John Morgan. Morgan's wife was heavily pregnany and she gave birth three days into rehearsal.

It was Edward Howell's twentieth appearance in live television drama; he had appeared in six in Sydney before moving to Melbourne to star in Black Chiffon. Howell went in for an operation shortly after taping.

(Those other plays included Ruth, The Big Day, Tragedy in a Temporary Town, Til Death do Us Part, Black Chiffron, The Passionate Pianist, The Sub Editor's Room, Rose and Crown) 

It was directed by Will Sterling. Sterling says that the third camera broke down during filming so they couldn't do as planned for 40 minutes.

The NAA have photos. Not online but see record here. 

Thoughts on script - look not very good but not awful. Main issue is it's dragged out. Also it's fake drama - he confesses to the wife, who doesn't really care. He thinks about killing the blackmailer but doesn't do it.

Other versions

It was adapted for ABC radio in 1960.

Broadcast

It showed in Sydney on 9 March.

Reception

Janus of The Age said it "had one of the feeblest plots ever peddled on Melbourne TV... 65 minutes of incoherent mush" and suggested the ABC "stick to imported scripts" for a while.

That critic later said it "set Australian TV playwriting back several years" and then at the end of the year called it the worst Australian drama of the year^..

What got into Janus of The Age about this? Was it that bad?

The critic for the Sydney Morning Herald called it a "routine medical-domestic drama... given a routine performance... the play bad a kind of tired professional finish but no real originality in its plot or its techniques"in which the leads "all acted competency but without much real conviction.

Frank Thring of TV Week called it "that turgid and interminable little essay in ennui... about which absolutely nothing was surprising except that it was directed by william Sterling who doesn't usually waste his talents on the desert air and that during its treacly course Miss June Brunell gave a quite remarkable impersonation of Barry Humphries...

 

SMH 10 March 1960 p 17

The Age Supplement 29 Dec 1960 p 3

The Age Supplement 14 Jan 1960 p 2

SMH 7 March 1960 p 15

SMH 7 March 1960 p 16

The Age Supplement 7 Jan 1960 p 11

The Age Supplement 21 Jan 1960 p 3

The Age Supplement 29 April 1960 p 3

TV Times Vic 8 Feb 1960

TV Times 22 Jan 1960

Forgotten Australian Television Plays: Four from George F. Kerr
by Stephen Vagg
February 27, 2022
Stephen Vagg’s series on forgotten Australian television plays looks at four written locally by George F. Kerr: Enemy of the People (1958), Blue Murder (1959), Heart Attack (1960) and Jenny (1962).

Some time back I did a piece on the Australian TV play She’ll Be Right (1962), which was written by a bloke called George F. Kerr. Kerr was an Englishman who came out here in 1957 and wrote a bunch of things for ABC television and radio, as well as a stage play, before heading back home in 1962. During that five-year period, he was probably the busiest writer on Australian television. An ABC Weekly profile on him is here.

Kerr had an interesting backstory (I’m going to repeat some stuff from the She’ll Be Right piece, apologies). He was an accountant who enlisted in the army at the beginning of World War Two, was captured and made a POW, during which he presumably had a lot of time to think about what he’d really like to do with his life. When Kerr got out, he decided to try his luck at writing and managed to sell some TV scripts, receiving particular acclaim for A Month of Sundays (1952), based on his war experiences. He was a drama editor at the BBC for several years, before moving to ITV in 1955 to work as a script editor and drama executive, penning several early episodes of the legendary anthology series Armchair Theatre.

Kerr moved to Australia in 1957, accompanied by his wife who Kerr had met by being her tutor while she was at school, which would get him arrested now, but I guess the times were different.

In 1950s Australia, having an English accent and the words “BBC” on your resume carried a lot of weight at cultural institutions. Kerr was one of many English given key jobs – others around this time included Neil Hutchison, head of ABC drama, Hugh Hunt, head of the Elizabethan Theatre Trust, John Sumner, head of Union Theatre (which became the MTC), and Royston Morley, a writer-director at the ABC. This didn’t pass unnoticed, or uncriticised at the time – indeed Labor MP Arthur Calwell, then deputy leader of the Federal Opposition, gave the ABC a serve in Parliament about it at the time, pointing out their in-house jobs could have gone to Australians.

Kerr’s Australian TV credits include Symphone Pastorale (1958), A Little South of Heaven (1961), Farewell Farewell Eugene (1960), The Dock Brief (1960), The Concert (1961), and The Multi Coloured Umbrella (1958).

Today, I want to talk about three scripts Kerr wrote which I have read via the National Archives of Australia, but haven’t seen (I’m not sure copies exist). They are Enemy of the People, Blue Murder and Jenny. I will also talk about a play he wrote which I haven’t read or seen, Heart Attack....
 

Heart Attack

Heart Attack is a script of Kerr’s that I have not read. I would normally be reluctant to discuss it but the story of its inception is too interesting for me to ignore.

The ABC had planned for its first TV drama production of 1960 to be an adaptation of Nigel Balchin’s novel Make Mine Executioner (you may recall the 1947 feature film with Burgess Meredith), directed by William Sterling in Melbourne. It was all cast and ready to go when a problem emerged locking down the rights – the ABC decided to get Kerr to whip up a quick play that could use the same cast and sets. What he came up with was Heart Attack.

Brian James, who was cast in the lead role of Mine Own Executioner, disliked the script so they replaced him with John Morgan instead; all the other cast returned. Morgan plays a doctor called Wynter, whose career is threatened by a blackmailer called Pearce (played by Edward Brayshaw) who has learned of Wynter’s affair with another woman (June Brunell). Pearce threatens to tell the doctor’s wife, Judith (Beverly Phillips), unless he is paid off. Dr Wynter does so but Pearce keeps asking for money, so Wynter decides the solution is murder.  It sounds very Dial M for Murder like and took place entirely in London.

Reviewing the production, “Janus” of The Age said Heart Attack “had one of the feeblest plots ever peddled on Melbourne TV… 65 minutes of incoherent mush” and suggested the ABC “stick to imported scripts” for a while. That critic later said it “set Australian TV playwriting back several years” and then at the end of the year called it the worst Australian drama of the year. It was probably the most vicious sustained critical attack I have read on any Australian television play.

Frank Thring of TV Week called Heart Attack a “turgid and interminable little essay in ennui… about which absolutely nothing was surprising except that it was directed by William Sterling who doesn’t usually waste his talents on the desert air and that during its treacly course Miss June Brunell gave a quite remarkable impersonation of Barry Humphries.”

The critic for the Sydney Morning Herald described it as a “routine medical-domestic drama… given a routine performance… the play had a kind of tired professional finish but no real originality in its plot or its techniques” in which the leads “all acted competency but without much real conviction.”

Like I said, I have not seen or read Heart Attack, and one has to be careful believing everything critics tell you. But maybe the ABC shouldn’t have done a play cranked out in a few days – although they liked it enough to adapt it on radio.

Oh, and Mine Own Executioner was filmed by the ABC in April 1960. Janus of The Age said the production was a “waste of time”. But then Janus argued that the ABC should make less Australian dramas, so stuff him. There was plenty of good material out there, it’s just that the ABC wasn’t filming it...

In 1962, George F. Kerr moved back to England where he resumed his TV career, but his credits seem to dry up after the early 1970s. I don’t know what happened to him, though according to IMBD he died in 1996. He wasn’t a very good writer, at least not in my opinion, based on the sample of his Australian works I have read. He was not terrible, just not very good, yet such was the power of his accent, the ABC gave him a heap of juicy appointments over a five year period, including writing Australia’s first anthology series (Killer in Close Up), and teaching Australia’s first TV drama workshop.

I don’t want to be mean with this piece, truly, I think it was marvellous that Kerr survived as a POW, he obviously had a strong work ethic, there are good things in all the plays I’ve discussed today, and I would’ve loved to have listened to a radio serial he wrote that was broadcast during the 1958-59 Ashes, LBW Smith.

But I do think that it’s good to be reminded not to be over-impressed by overseas experts on matter of culture especially when those experts don’t really understand the country they are in.

The author wishes to thank Graham Shirley for his help with this piece. All opinions are my own.