An instalment of Australian Plays.
Alan Hopgood called it and And the Big Men Fly his biggest achievement in television
Premise
Gareth, a young university lecturer is newly married to Sybil. She keeps wanting to have sex. At first he agrees but then starts to worry he is not getting work done and starts denying her. This annoys her.
To make up for it he starts to take her to parties. He starts to wonder she is cheating on him with a colleague, Tony. Another colleague, Max, gives Gareth advice.
Gareth decides to accept being cuckolded by Sybil.
Cast
- Alan Hopgood as Gareth
- Sue Donovan as Sybil
- Joseph James as Max
- Robin Ramsay as Tony Champion
- Lyndell Rowe as Shirley
- Michael Duffield as Professor Garraway
Production
Hopgood said he "wrote it off his own bat... on spec". Took it to Oscar Whitbread who liked it.
"We needed a young beautiful woman" Hopgood told Susan Lever. They took Sue Donovan and "we taught her to act on the set. Now I'd just whistle and get 25 of them they'd all be fantastic they'd all be trained." Hard to get attractive actresses at the time they would all go into modelling if attractive. "In the early 60s it was hard to get a genuine Australian accent because we'd all ironed out our accent to go overseas."
"It was an inventive story. Another one of my weird ones... when I wrote of myself and I hope it worked for other poeple. It was a wild idea and it worked."
The show was recorded in late 1968. The Age previewed it, calling it "a delight" in an article dated 27 December 1968.
Hopgood's script was awarded an Awgie in March 1969. A complete copy is at the NAA - click here.
The show was not broadcast until December 1969.
CrewVideotape editing - David Hill. Film sequences photography - Bob Lord. Sound - Wally Shaw. Editor - Paul Thompson. Music composed and conducted by - Frank Smith. Lighting - Harry Myers. Technical producer - John Lewis. Design - Alan Clarke. Producer and director - Oscar Whitbread.
Reception
One critic for Canberra Times called it "the most painful Australian production I have seen since television started."
The Stage said "Much was expected from The Cheerful Cuckold, the first play written specially for television by Alan Hopgood. He is one of Australia's foremost stage play wrights and the script had won an award as the best for 1968. It started out well about a young unversity lecturer neglecting his duties through an. oversexed wife but drifted off into practically nothing by the end. The author himself took the leading role and gave a powerful performance, but else where acting was not up to standard and the production far too slack. "
Forgotten Australian TV Plays: The Cheerful Cuckold
by Stephen Vagg
September 7, 2022
Stephen Vagg’s series on forgotten Australian television plays focuses on actor-writer Alan Hopgood and his 1969 sex comedy, The Cheerful Cuckold.
I only ever met Alan Hopgood once, but the experience has lingered on in my brain as one of those “If only I’d known more about his career when I’d meet him, I would’ve said smarter things” exchanges.
It was at Neighbours in 2013, when I was working there as supervising script editor, and he was back on the show reprising his role as Jack Lassiter, the original owner of Lassiter’s Pub. The storyline involved Jack returning to Erinsborough with a terminal illness, and teaching Paul Robinson that there was More To Life Than Money. (It was a version of a storyline originally intended for Henry Ramsay, but Craig McLachlan hadn’t wanted to return to the show then).
Anyway, Stefan Dennis who played Paul Robinson was showing Hopgood around the complex, which included a stroll through the writer’s department; I was walking past and scored an intro. I knew Hopgood’s face – oddly enough not from his hundreds of TV and theatre credits but mostly his funny turn as a piano player in the rom com Hotel de Love, and from his appearance in Pacific Banana Unpeeled, a featurette about the making of the 1981 sex comedy Pacific Banana, which Hopgood wrote. We shook hands and he went on his way. I wish I’d known then the extent of his credits and his contribution to Australian culture because I would’ve had him talk to the writing team, but, alas, it was not meant to be.
Hopgood was never a critic’s darling, but his achievements were numerous and significant. These included writing the first hit stage play about AFL (And the Big Men Fly), the first stage play about Australia’s involvement the Vietnam War (Private Yuk Objects), the screenplay for a sex comedy that was for a decade the most popular Australian film of all time (Alvin Purple). He was on the writing staff of Bellbird, script edited and co-wrote Australia’s second sitcom (Barley Charlie), and in his later career managed to turn playwriting, of all things, into a lucrative enterprise, penning a series of stage pieces on health issues, the best known of which was The Carer.
Hopgood also had a thriving career as an actor, appearing in a stack-load of cinema (including The Blue Lagoon and Roadgames), TV (including long stints on Bellbird and Prisoner) and theatre (including a run in the legendary musical Lola Montez). AustLit do a very thorough biography of him.
Hopgood appeared in numerous early TV plays, some of which I’ve written about, including Sound of Thunder, Tragedy in a Temporary Town, Ned Kelly, Man in a Blue Vase, The Astronauts, Who Killed Kovali?, The Teeth of the Wind, She’ll be Right, You Can’t Win ‘Em All, Lola Montez, and How Do You Spell Matrimony?.
Hopgood had a sort of ageless character actor face, with expressive eyes, a bulbous nose and excellent speaking voice. He was versatile and thus eminently castable: in the above-listed plays alone, Hopgood’s roles included outlaw Dan Kelly, a singing gold rush miner, a champion tennis player, a South American revolutionary and an Australian astronaut.
Hopgood had been acting professionally for nearly a decade before his writing career got going with the Aussie rules comedy And the Big Men Fly, which he wrote hurriedly as a last-minute replacement for the MTC when another play fell over. It was a big success, being filmed for TV in 1963, and later turned into a 1974 TV series, and its sequel, the 1981 sitcom And Here Comes Bucknuckle. Hopgood was then called in to script edit and write for Barley Charlie, a GTV-9 sitcom created by two imported British writers. This show, barely remembered, Australia’s second sitcom, took a little while to get going, was axed, then started rating highly, and the makers were unable to get the show back together again. You can see an episode here.
Which brings us (eventually) to The Cheerful Cuckold, written by and starring Alan Hopgood. It was produced by the ABC in 1968 at their Ripponlea Studios in Melbourne and broadcast the following year as part of Australian Plays, a brief anthology drama series.
Other instalments in that series included Tilly Landed On Our Shores; Pat Flower’s thriller Fiends of the Family; John Croyston’s take on the life of poet Lex Banning, Voyage Out; an adaptation of Oriel Gray’s famous stage play The Torrents (of “I tied in a competition with Summer of the Seventeenth Doll but no one put me on” fame); and Tony Morphett’s media tycoon family drama, Dynasty, which later spun off into a series.
The Cheerful Cuckold is a comedy about university lecturer Gareth (Hopgood), with a very hot wife Sybil (Sue Donovan, then married to Terry and mother of Jason), who has a high sex drive. Gareth comes to believe Sybil’s sexual demands are hampering his ability to get any work done and thus hurting his career. He starts denying Sybil his lovin’, which results in various comic consequences, including her possible infidelity with another lecturer (played by Robin Ramsey).
It’s a sexual comedy of manners, very much in the spirit of Restoration Comedy, with fantasy sequences, literate dialogue and educated types behaving badly. You can read the whole script via the NAA, incidentally – it won an Awgie. The Cheerful Cuckold contains several interesting correlations with Hopgood’s most famous work, the film script for Alvin Purple: to wit, it’s about a nebbish-looking man who is catnip to the ladies, a comic treatment with a serious subtext (male insecurity about sex). There are also some potshots at academia, as exemplified by Michael Duffield’s dopey Dean.
The play prompted a slight moral panic, with reports that Sue Donovan appeared nude in the opening sequence (the character is meant to be nude under a sheet and displays bare shoulders). This made the tabloids and got everyone a little sweaty – within a few years Number 96 would leave it for dust, but for the ABC in 1969 this was racy stuff.
The Cheerful Cuckold is quite entertaining and culturally fascinating in its comic depiction of sex. Hopgood does well in the part, as one might expect considering he wrote the script. Donovan has a lot of charisma. Oscar Whitbread directed.
Incidentally, there was a second season to Australian Plays in 1970. Hopgood wrote one for that too, a thriller called Ritual. There was also Hal Porter’s Eden House, Richard Beynon’s Face of a Man, John Kiddell’s Catalyst, Peter Yeldham’s The Juggler and John Croyston’s Chimes at Midnight.
Hopgood was extremely busy as a writer and actor almost up until his death earlier this year, when the cancer he’d been fighting for over 25 years finally got him.
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| The Stage 24 Dec 1969 |
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| Canberra Times 10 Nov 1969 p 15 |
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| Canberra Times 4 Dec 1969 p 29 |
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| NAA Script |
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The Age TV Guide 23 Oct 1969 p8 |
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| The Age 3 Dec 1969 p 21 |
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| SMH 1 Dec 1969 TV Guide |
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| The Age 27 Dec 1968 p 2 |
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Alvin conception hopgood - came from talk with shrink in London who told them about therapists who help people with sex hang ups. Came up with idea of a guy who had magnetism for women which was a nuisance as got in the way of normal life, couldn't hold down a job. Goes to psychiatrist for assitant with problem. Shrink wanted to use him as a sexual surrogate.
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