Based on a play by Ludovic Kennedy about the Derek Bentley case, a landmark in the battle against capital punishment, along with the cases of Ruth Ellis and Timothy Evans. All have been turned into films, incidentally. The Bentley case was filmed as Let Him Have It.
Apparently this was a big success for the ABC, relatively. They repeated it and were very proud of it.
It may be the oldest Australian TV play which still exists in recorded form.
Premise
A 19-year-old, Jim Tanner, lives with his mother and father and is slightly intellectually disabled. He is fired from his job and decides to accompany a friend, Ted Clift, on a robbery. During the robbery, Constable Albert Tomkins is killed.
Tanner is caught and arrested. He is sentenced to death for murder.
In prison, Tanner is taught to read and write and forms a strong bond with the prison chaplain and Warer Graves. Many appeals are made for clemency, but they are unsuccessful.
The widow of Constable Tomkins visits Jim's parents, and offers to sign a petition for clemency. This is rejected.
Jim is executed by hanging.
Cast
- John Ewart as Jim Tanner
- Neva Carr Glyn as Mrs Tanner
- Douglas Kelly as Mr Tanner
- John Alden as prison chaplain
- Don Crosby as Warder Graves
- Deryck Barnes as Warder Barty
- Myrna Dodd as Cons Tomkins' Widow
- Richard Meikle as Ted Clift, Jim's accomplice
- Frederick Powell as inspector
Original play
Kennedy's play debuted on stage in 1954 in England. (It debuted in Aldershot and eventually transferred to London). It was highly acclaimed. A review is here.
This was Kennedy's first play. He was married to film star Moira Shearer. He later wrote 10 Rillington Place about another miscarriage of justice which became a best seller and a film. (He was told about the case directly as a result of writing Murder Story.) An obit of him is here.
Murder Story had been performed for British TV in 1958 as an episode of ITV's Armchair Theatre. (In 1956 saw a the release of a British film against capital punishment, Yield to the Night. In 1958 there was a Hollywood film against capital punishment, I Want to Live!) The 1958 production was meant to air in 16 Feb but Kennedy was running for Parliament in a by election so it was delayed. Just until March.
The play was adapted for Australian radio in 1954 with John Ewart in the lead. This production was highly acclaimed.
It was adapted again for ABC radio in 1960.
It was done for Canadian TV in 1954, 1959 and 1960. The 1959 Canadian production appears to have aired in US in 1960.
Production
In January 1958 the ABC Weekly reported that the ABC were seeking the rights to adapt the play for TV. (I read an article somewhere that said John Ewart pestered them to get it.)
Alan Seymour, later legendary for writing The One Day of the Year, adapted the script.
The show was filmed live at ABC's Sydney studios at Gore Hill.Ray Menmuir directed. There were some exterior shots.
The NAA has a copy. Not online but record is here.
Adaptation - Alan Seymour. Sets - Jack Montgomery. Technical producer - Les Weldon.
Reception
According to The Age after the show screened in Melbourne "viewers and ABV-2 staff were visibly upset by the realism created" and "ABV-2 hostess Corinne Kerby was too upset to introduce the succeeding feature."
That's a good review!
The production was well received critically, the Woman's Weekly reviewer saying "Murder Story" and its actors engrossed—indeed hypnotised—me."
"I did nothing but cry" said Frank Thring of TV Week.
The show was repeated in January 1960 - when announcing this The Sydney Morning Herald said the production "was regarded as one of the ABC's best TV productions."
There was a production of Kennedy's original play put on at the Independent Theatre in Sydney shortly after the TV play aired.
Raymond Menmuir, John Ewart and Alan Seymour worked together again on Bodgie (1959), also based on a British play (in that case one written by an Australian, Rex Rienits). An advertisement of that production stressed the praise that Murder Story received.
Repeat
The TV play was repeated in Sydney on 30 December 1959 and Melbourne on 27 January 1960. Repeats were not common at the time.
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| SMH 19 May 1958 p 16 |
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| The Age 11 Jul 1958 p 30 |
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| ABC Weekly 21 May 1958 p 34 |
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| The Age 18 July 1958 p 25 |
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| Australian Womans Weekly 18 June 1958 p 13 |
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| SMH 19 May 1958 p 15 |
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| The Age 11 July 1958 p 22 |
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| The Age 21 Jan 1960 p 35 |
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| TV Week |
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| ABC Weekly 29 Jan 1958 p 6 |
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| TV Times |
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Forgotten Australian TV Plays: Murder Story
by Stephen Vagg
April 25, 2021
Stephen Vagg’s latest article on Australian TV plays looks at the 1958 anti-capital punishment drama, Murder Story.
Early Australian TV plays rarely took a strong line on political issues. Presumably, this was due to not wanting to offend anyone (always an issue for TV networks, especially when the ABC was involved); there also would have been a reluctance to risk boring the audience – polemics can be hard going, as anyone who has watched a lot of political theatre can attest. There were the occasional exceptions, such as Murder Story, made by the ABC in 1958.
This was based, like so much early Australian TV drama, on British source material – specifically, a 1954 play by Ludovic Kennedy. Kennedy was a writer perhaps best known at the time for being Mr Moira (The Red Shoes) Shearer; he went on to become a noted author and broadcaster on British television.
Kennedy’s inspiration for Murder Story was the real-life Derek Bentley case. Bentley was a 19-year-old small-time criminal executed in 1953 for the murder of a police officer during the course of a robbery; Bentley didn’t actually fire the gun – his 16-year-old accomplice did – but he swung anyway, in part because he was heard to shout out “let him have it” just before the fatal gunshot. (There was a 1991 British film about Bentley called Let Him Have It.) Bentley’s hanging became a cause celebre for anti-capital punishment activists in England, along with the executions of Ruth Ellis and Timothy Evans – whose lives were, incidentally, also turned into features (Dance with a Stranger (1985) and Ten Rillington Place (1971) respectively, the latter being based on a book by Ludovic Kennedy. Incidentally, Ellis’ life is sometimes called the inspiration for another anti-capital punishment film, the superb Yield to the Night (1956) with Diana Dors, but those similarities were coincidental). They never made a feature film out of Murder Story, but the play was adapted for radio and TV in Britain and Australia.
I recently saw a copy of the Australian TV production and it’s fantastic. The plot concerns a 19-year-old, Jim Tanner (John Ewart), who lives with his mother (Neva Carr Glynn) and father (Douglas Kelly) and is slightly intellectually disabled. Jim gets fired from his job and decides to accompany a friend (Richard Meikle) on a robbery, during which the latter kills a police constable. Jim is arrested, tried and sentenced to death for the crime. In prison he is taught to read and write and forms a strong bond with the prison chaplain (John Alden) and a warden (Don Crosby). Appeals are made for clemency, including by the dead policeman’s widow (Myrna Dodd), but they are unsuccessful and Jim is executed.
Kennedy stacks the deck to make his point in Murder Story, to put it mildly: Jim is shown to be a decent kid, a bit dim, with nice parents, who clearly doesn’t deserve to die; all the characters feel sorry for him, even the wife of the constable who was killed. The play is still dramatically powerful; indeed, it has some of the most emotionally devastating moments I’ve seen in early Australian TV: the prison chaplain explaining the logistics of execution day to a disbelieving warden; Jim’s parents wondering what they did wrong; the chaplain delivering a final letter from Jim to the parents; the final scene, with a hood put over Jim’s head on the scaffold as the camera fades to black. The story builds skillfully and relentlessly (Alan Seymour, of One Day of the Year, did the adaptation), Ray Menmuir’s direction is confident, sensitive and sure, and the production design is perfect. John Ewart occasionally overacts (always a risk for actors playing someone with a disability) but is always touchingly likeable, and has a brilliant final scene. The other actors are excellent, notably Don Crosby as a warden who suffers a crisis of conscience about the death penalty, and Douglas Kelly as Jim’s bewildered father; Richard Meikle also impresses as a bad boy killer (I’m surprised Meikle never had a crack at Hollywood; he would have made a great gangster over there).
I wonder if Seymour and Menmuir ever discussed relocating the story to Australia – after all, that’s what happened on their next TV collaboration, Bodgie (also starring Ewart and Kelly), an Australian-ised adaption of the British play Wide Boy. Murder Story could have easily taken place here – the death penalty was still in effect on these shores in 1958 (Edgar Cooke was executed in 1964, Ronald Ryan in 1967). However, that probably would have been too hot for the ABC to handle. I can’t blame them on that one: it would have been hard enough to get Murder Story on air in the first place.
The ABC were very proud of Murder Story. They repeated the production on air several times – something not common with their TV plays – and would refer to it in their advertising for other shows (eg. Bodgie was promoted as being “from the people who gave you Murder Story”). They had every right to be proud: it’s sublime work, powerful and moving, and easily one of the best early Australian TV dramas.
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