Australian TV Plays: Jenny (28 March 1962)

Jenny (28 March 1962)

The second in a series of TV plays by Australian writers in 1962. The first was Boy Round the Corner.

A rare TV play that focused on a teenager. By George F. Kerr.

Plot

Jenny is a 16 year old girl whose father Roger, an actor, and mother Margaret, a television personality, have been separated for 15 months. Jenny has a boyfriend, Michael, a law student.

Margaret tells Jenny she has met a Melbourne businessman, Rex Porter, that she wants to marry.

This sends Jenny out looking for her father and boyfriend. She winds up at a party at Kings Cross being held by beatniks.

She gets a cab driver to take her to The Gap where she intends on committing suicide. However the cab driver talks her out of it and takes Jenny home to her father.

Roger returns and he and Margaret realise how troubled Jenny is. They decide to try again for her sake.

Cast

Carolyn Keely as Jenny
Joan Winchester as Margaret Playford
James Condon as Roger Playford
Grant Taylor as Rex Porter
David Yorston as Michael
Lex Mitchell as the beatnik
Tony Carere, Joan Morrow and Kerry Collins as beatniks

Play Hunger of a Girl

The play appears to be based on a stage play written by Kerr called Hunger of a Girl. This was set in the Blue Mountains and was about a 17 year old girl whose parents are separated and who reacts badly when her mother falls for another man. It results in the girl attempting to seduce a young man so he will kill the other man. This does not work. The girl accidentally kills the other man.

This play was sponsored by the Elizabethan Theatre Trust and produced by the North Sydney Independent in September 1960 with Leonard Teale (father) and Joan Winchester (the mother), Veronica Rouse (daughter), Ben Gabriel (lover), Connie Chalmers (mother's secretary), Graham Hill (girl's teenage admirer). Peter Summerton directed.

The Trust was under the direction of Neil Hutchison at the time. See here.

Kerr talks about the play in a letter to the editor here.

The Sydney Morning Herald called the play "commendably smooth" but felt it became contrived in the second act. It said "the first half reproduces all the features of English drawing room comedy as it was in the middle 1920s". A Bulletin review is here.

The Independent didn't show another Australian play until 1962 - "Grotto" by Robert Wales.

Production

It was the first of a series of six Australian plays to be produced by the ABC in 1962 (to air in Sydney that is, Boy Round the Corner aired in Melbourne first.)

Patricia Hooker worked as script assistant.

Rehearsals took place on March 12, 13, 14, 16, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 26, 27 and 28.

Technical producer - Harrie Adams. Assistant technical producer - Phil Pearson. Grams - Terry Moss. Floor manager - Alex Ritchie. Assistant floor manager - Brian Bruty.

Thoughts on the script -

There was a lot of infidelity in early Oz TV drama but little of it focused on its impact on the kids. That is in its favour.

I'm not sure Kerr was a very good writer. Everyone talks like they're in a play, and an English play at that. This is especially notable at the end where the husband and wife chat about Jenny like they're, well, on stage.

There's two scenes where Jenny talks to "a beat" - a beatnik. There is some slang. So that is novel - a depiction of the Australian beatnik scene. They go to a coffee bar and everything. (The play's sympathy is clearly with Jenny's other love interest though, the hard working lawyer).

I loved how Jenny's dad Roger was a working actor who toured nine months of the year with "the firm" and how he didn't want to do radio. The scene where Jenny decides to kill herself by jumping off the Gap and described in dialogue as something that has happened... and it's Jenny's dad reporting it to the mother. (Was this censorship? It's not very dramatic.)

A rare Australian TV play that focuses on a teenager - Jenny of the title, 16 years old living in Vaucluse, mother is a TV personality, dad is a busy stage actor (they did exist). Mum and dad are getting divorced. A young guy is keen on her.Jenny's dad reporting it to the mother. (Was this censorship? It's not very dramatic.)

Reception

A critic from the Sunday Sydney Morning Herald called it "first rate drama" until the last five minutes when "it collapsed into nothingness" because it left unanswered the central question, namely "Should the partners of an unsuccessful marriage forgo their own chances of happiness for the sake of their children?... Did author Kerr simply throw up his hands and give the whole thing away?"

The critic from the Sydney Morning Herald said "the play had all the searing truth and genuine emotion of a piece of eminently marketable woman's magazine fiction."

Lesley Dare of TV Times called it a "laudable attempt" but said Kerr "never quite succeeded in making his story convincing".

The Listener In TV critic said eKerr "has had considerable experience in adapting scripts and writing original plays for the ABC. He should know how to construct a tight story with climactic interest and some sort of plausibility. Jenny did not have these qualities... a rather grubby and pointless little affair."

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....

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Jenny

Jenny had its antecedents in a stage play Kerr wrote called Hunger for a Girl. This was set in the Blue Mountains and concerned a 17-year-old girl who reacts badly when her mother, a romance novelist, falls for another man. It results in the girl accidentally killing the other man. The play was produced by the North Sydney-based Independent Theatre in September 1960 with Leonard Teale and Joan Winchester starring in the leads. A review is here. The production was sponsored by the Elizabethan Theatre Trust, then under the artistic direction of Neil Hutchison who was head of ABC television and radio drama when Kerr arrived in Australia. (Hutchison gave a few of his former television cronies a gig at the Trust during his time there – for instance, Raymond Memnuir directed a production of Candida and, most famously, the Trust presented Alan Seymour’s The One Day of the Year).

Kerr rewrote Hunger for a Girl extensively for television as “Jenny”. It aired as part of a season of six Australian television plays in early 1962 (the others were Boy Round the Corner, The House of Mancello, Funnel Web, The Teeth of the Wind, and The Hobby Horse). Jenny was directed by Henri Safran, one of the ABC’s best drama directors in the 1960s, and the script assistant was Pat Hooker, who later wrote the classic A Season in Hell, among others.

The plot of Jenny focuses on, well, Jenny (played by Carolyn Keely), a 16 year old girl whose father Roger (James Condon), an actor, and mother Margaret (Joan Winchester), a television personality, have been separated for 15 months. Jenny has a boyfriend, Michael (David Yorston), a law student. Margaret tells Jenny she has met a Melbourne businessman, Rex Porter (Grant Taylor), who she wants to marry. This sends Jenny out looking for her father and boyfriend, and she winds up at a party at Kings Cross being held by beatniks (Lex Mitchell, Tony Carere, Joan Morrow and Kerry Collins). She gets a cab driver to take her to The Gap where she intends on committing suicide. However, the cab driver talks her out of it and takes Jenny home to her father. Roger and Margaret realise how troubled Jenny is and decide to try their marriage again for her sake.

There’s much to admire about Jenny. There was a lot of infidelity in early Oz TV drama but little of it focused on its impact on the kids, so that is refreshing. So too is the fact that the lead character is a teenager – that was incredibly rare. Even rarer is that Jenny depicts the Australian beatnik scene: Jenny goes to a coffee bar and everything, where a beatnik has dialogue like “Want to talk? Sit and exchange ideas for a couple of hours. Couple of days maybe? Tell you all about the H bomb, Cuba, Liz Taylor, White Australia?” I loved how Jenny’s dad Roger was a working actor (“the best actor in Australia”) who toured nine months of the year with “the Firm” and how he didn’t want to do radio.

Other things are less impressive. Kerr was a middle aged man and weighs the play far too much towards the middle aged father character over the mother and Jenny, and clearly admires the law student more than the beatniks. Everyone talks like they are in a play, and an English play at that, except for the beatnik, who is a caricature. There are lots of scenes of people describing things that we really should have seen, particularly the climax where Jenny decides to kill herself by jumping off the Gap and is talked out of it – this, the climax of the play, is all conveyed via exposition.

Still, Jenny was a decent attempt to make something different.

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.