Part five of Love and War. Or of Wednesday Theatre. Or both. I'm not sure. It was filmed in 1966 so maybe Wednesday Theatre.
Premise
A woman, Mary, leaves a small town to stay in Sydney at a boarding house. She meets an alcoholic, Plonko, a landlady, and fellow boarder, a folk singer called Curtis. Mary's boyfriend Matt arrives and wants to know when she is coming home. Mary says she needs to sort herself out.
Matt is threatened by Curtis.
Cast
- Helen Morse as Mary
- Kit Taylor as Matt
- John Gregg as Curtis
- Beryl Cheers as landlady
- Donald Crosby as Plonko
- Robert McDarra as the Phantom Cougher
- Slim De Grey as Merv
- Ben Gabriel as Fred
- Frank Lloyd as The Green Tongue
- Lyn Lee as Barmaid
- Michael Boddy as Man
Production
It was written by Michael Boddy. According to a rehearsal script (below) it was originally known as "Episode for Mary".
It was recorded over three days, 11-13 December, 1966.
There was location shooting outside the Ambassador Hotel. John Croyston told Graham Shirley in a 2004 interview that Don Crosby was confused with a real wino. He said Boddy was so big Croyston would have to tie up the writer's shoes when the two men shared a house together. He says Boddy had a lot of regard for his own abilities as a writer and would get upset when it was criticised.
Crew
Producer and director - John Croyston. Script assistant - Rhonda McAvoy. Floor manager - David Hurst. Technical producer - Fred Haynes. Music - Richard Connolly. Designer - Desmonde Downing.
Reception
The Sydney Morning Herald TV critic Harry Robinson did what read like a hit piece on writer Michael Boddy, referring to all his recent credits. He disliked John Forrester Awaits the Light, All Fall Down, and Intersection. He called the latter play:
"Something more like a slow climbing lane... You have of course read the plot in many a magazine for women - but that need not have mattered had the girl and boy been in some way extraordinary or done extra ordinary things They were not. They were pleasant, normal, utterly unremarkable young people... The cast did what they could with it. Director John Croyston did what he could. But they could not bring to life an inert script. In a technical sense the writing was competent. What Mr Boddy needs is not more practice but more fire and drive in his imagination."
Bitchy!
(An aside: reporters on Boddy always seemed to refer to his weight.)
The Canberra Times said:
Like most critics with a few days off, I resolved not to turn the knob on any set that blandly outstared me in any motel. But it is like an ex-smoker with a packet in the house — curiosity eventually wins and so did last Wednesday night’s ABC series Love and War, showing the first locally-written pro duct in Michael Boddy’s Intersection. Watching with an “I don’t have to do this” eye and having had quite enough of last year’s and this year’s Australian Playhouse, I winced as young actress Helen Morse made her way primly across a busy Sydney intersection in one of those extraordinary white hats that seem to be the forte of CWA ladies. She was bound for a boarding house where she, not surprisingly, needed time to think about marriage back home in the country town with materialistic local lad Matt.
From here the play could easily have settled into life as she is lived in the pages of the weekly women’s magazines, but her awkward meeting with pop guitarist Curtis, played by John Gregg, and what he had to say about life impressed me so much that I happily settled down for the duration, scratching feverishly on the motel stationery “a sensitive and articulate play”. In a Pinter manner, Boddy has been able in this play to bring out the impending threat from what was actually a normal if not mundane, situation. And after all, what independent person has not had a few shudders at the marriage trap closing?
Where does this writer go from here7 London, perhaps? Can he afford to hang around in this country working for the three to four hundred dollars an hour peanuts offered for a one - hour play? So far his ability has been dissipated in ABC pantomime and an occasional part in ABC plays. He has a writing talent that invites audience participation and the ABC would be doing a greater service for national TV writing by gathering a stable of talent as is done with artists, giving them financial security and letting them get on with the job of reflecting life in this country instead of spreading their talent over the viewing audience like marmalade, for a return that would make even a very junior executive look up the “positions vacant” columns.
 " |
| Canberra Times 10 Oct 1967 p 15 |
 |
| SMH 2 Oct 1967 p 8 |
 |
| SMH 4 Oct 1967 p 16 |
 |
| SMH TV Guide 2 Oct 1967 |
 |
| SMH 5 Oct 1967 p 11 |
Forgotten Australian TV Plays: Two from Michael Boddy
by Stephen Vagg
October 2, 2021
Stephen Vagg’s series on forgotten Australian TV plays looks at two written by Michael Boddy, All Fall Down (1967) and Intersection (1967).
Michael Boddy (1934–2014) was a man of many talents, best known for acting and writing, but he did a lot of other things, including working as a farmer, columnist, nude model, teacher and director (see his obituary here).
I was mostly familiar with Boddy from co-writing (with Bob Ellis) the stage classic The Legend of King O’Malley (1970), but that was just one chapter in a storied life; another one was his stint as a “flavour of the month” TV scriptwriter in the late 1960s.
Over a short period of time, Boddy earned himself a significant number of credits, including episodes of You Can’t See Round Corners (1967) and Lane End (1972), as well as TV plays like John Forrester Awaits the Light (1967), Breakdown (1967), Curate of Bohemia (1972) and two I’m discussing today, All Fall Down and Intersection.
Both aired within a week of each other on the ABC in October 1967 and both were directed by John Croyston.
All Fall Down (1967)
This was an episode from the second season of Australian Playhouse, an anthology series that specialised in thrillers, comedies and dramas. All Fall Down, however, is basically a musical – despite running only 30 minutes it still packs in three songs and revolves around two musical performers, Katherine and Karen Kessey. The Kesseys were identical twins from West Australia, the daughter of Sheffield Shield cricketer Gwilym Kessey, who had some success in the 1960s and early 1970s, usually (though not always) as a duo – they appeared together on stage in Stop The World I Want to Get Off and on TV in shows like Emergency Ward 10 and The Persuaders. Katherine later married Bill Treacher, best known for his role in EastEnders.
The plot of All Fall Down revolves around a TV variety show hosted by the egotistical Larry (Barry Creyton), along with his long-suffering sidekick Amanda (Karen Kessey). Sarah (Katherine Kessey) wins a competition to appear on the show for a month, and winds up impressing the sponsor (Anthony Bazell) so much that she gets a permanent gig, resulting in Larry quitting. Michael Boddy was a regular performer on Crackerjack (1966-67), a Friday afternoon children’s variety show with Reg Livermore (a clip of him and Livermore is here), and presumably he drew on that experience for his script here.
The male actors in All Fall Down are all required for some reason to put their hands on the Kessey twins a lot. The considerable talents of Barry Creyton, a big star at the time due to his work on The Mavis Bramston Show, is curiously wasted in his stock villain part. Robert McDarra, an excellent actor best remembered for his role in the feature film 27A (1974), and famed for the real-life alcoholism that led to his early death, seems miscast as Ray, the producer with a crush on Amanda.
I wasn’t quite sure exactly what All Fall Down was meant to be – on one hand, it’s a light musical comedy about the adventures of the two girls, but there’s also all this heavy drama focus on Larry disliking Ray which doesn’t seem to concern the girls at all (is Larry keen on Amanda? Ray?). I wonder if that was the original focus of the piece, only for it to be rewritten to accommodate the Kessey twins. I could be wrong about that.
Still, All Fall Down gets points for novelty – as a thirty-minute backstage musical drama starring twins, Barry Creyton and Robert McDarra as a stage juvenile, with three song and dance numbers, there wasn’t much else like it made at the time.
Intersection (1967)
A few nights after All Fall Down, the ABC broadcast another script by Boddy and directed by John Croyston, Intersection. This was an instalment of Love and War, a series of locally-filmed plays that ran on the ABC in 1967 on the themes of love and war. The running time was one hour.
Helen Morse is excellent as a young girl from a country town who escapes to the city, feeling she is missing out on something. She stays at an inner-city boarding house where she encounters a drunk (Don Crosby, superb), a landlady (Beryl Cheers), an eccentric (Robert McDarra), some boozers at the bar (including Slim de Grey) and a folk singer (John Gregg), then her small-town fiance (Kit Taylor) comes to get her home. The fiance character, played by Kit Taylor, comes across, in performance and script, as an oppressive, jealous, possessive, manipulative man. After sampling this very small cross-section of people who live in Sydney – seriously, she doesn’t even go to the beach or the movies or even a shop around the corner – Morse decides [SPOILERS] to go home with her emotionally-controlling boyfriend. She doesn’t seem too happy about it, but she still goes, in what is an all-too-believable spirit-crushing finale.
Morse sings in one scene and I wonder if this wouldn’t be more successful as a musical – Gregg’s folk singer could have sung for instance, and the flowering dialogue might have been more effective in song form. Boddy has a small role as a drinker at a pub . This would make an interesting double bill with Enough to Make a Pair of Sailor’s Trousers, in which Morse played another country girl struggling in the big city.
Boddy kept busy in television over the next few years, then his attention drifted (or was forced to drift) more towards theatre and journalism. He had a varied, lively career, which included being a nude model for his artist wife’s 1973 Archibald Prize-winning portrait. As mentioned, his TV plays were only one chapter in a storied life, but they are worth remembering.
No comments:
Post a Comment