Australian TV Plays: The Right Thing (2 Oct 1963)

The Right Thing (2 Oct 1963)

The ABC do an Australian play! Hurray! Will Frank Roberts hate it? What do you think?

Some interesting names in the cast: Grant Taylor, Anna Volska, Tom Oliver, Noelene Brown.

Premise

Clarrie Hamlin, a wealthy hotelier, and his wife Vera are preparing for a party to celebrate the engagement of their daughter Elena to Bill, the son of another hotelier. The Hamlins have a Spanish maid, Pilar, who Vera wants to pay more, but Clarrie refues. Vera decides to take in a lodger to cover this cost and tells Bill she will take in a friend of his.

Bill visits Elena down at the beach. A Spaniard, Jose, is admiring Elena's figure as she spears fish. Bill sees this and, annoyed, dumps fish on Jose.

Jose then takes the fish to Elena's house and meets Vera, who assumes he is a friend of Bill's, and offers him a room to stay. A bemused Jose agrees and winds up going to the engagement party.

Bill sees Jose at the party and is not pleased by his presence. A friend of Bill's, Tony, recognises Jose as a famous matador who has since retired. A fired up Bill insists on enacting a bull fight, with Bill as the bull, resulting in Bill and Jose crashing into the pool. This earns Jose the respect of Bill.

Clarrie orders Vera to get rid of the lodger but Vera insists she needs the extra money to pay the maid and Clarrie relents; Vera tells Elena that is how you treat a man, like a "dominant bull".

Jose reveals to Elena how the misunderstanding occured - he was the son of a poor man and was taught fish were valuable so he returned it to her house. Jose reveals he has a fiancee and says he will not stay in the house because Bill would be unhappy.

Cast

Alastair Smart as Jose Gomez
Grant Taylor as Clarrie Hamlin
Brigid Lenihan as Vera Hamlin
Lola Brooks as Elena Hamlin
Jeffrey Hodgson as Bill
Patri Nader as Pilar
Colin Gorman as Judder
Tom Oliver as Stan
John Creighton as Dig
David Yorston as Tony
Noeline Brown as Shirley
Benita Collins as Jean
Anna Volksa as Emma
Donald Philps as Bluey
David Broad, Michael Kissane, Hans Bommel, Phillip English, Tony Allen and Russel Coburn as male party guests
Katie Doig, Christine Van Dyke, Carol Ingham, Delia Jackson, Carol Finlayson, Robyn Richardson, Jane Graves as female party guests

Production

The play was an original written by Raymond Bowers, an Australian living in London, better known for his thrillers eg In Writing, It's the Geography that Counts. It was mapped out at a lunch early in 1963 between Bowers and director Ray Menmuir in London and was commissioned by Associated Rediffusion.

It was directed by Memnuir who had recently returned to Australia after several years in London. It was hoped the play would be the first in a number of co productions between England and Australia.

Menmuir felt the future of Australian television was in international markets. He told The Stage "It is becoming obvious that any television network, national or commercial, cannot live on its own domestic audience. And it is not merely a question of economics. Television has done extremely well in its five or six years in Australia; but we are now at the cross roads. There is no more time for childhood; we have to jump out into direct competition on the open market. “Mass media audiences are led by the attitude of the producing organisation. If their growth is slow the audience tends to be reactionary. We need the stimulus of open competition.”

Scenes were shot in a house on Sydney's North Shore, the Cahill Expressway, the Sydney beach of Longreef, and the Harbour Bridge. It was telerecorded and later shown in London by Associated-Rediffusion. It was the first of a series of exchange programs between the ABC and the British television company.

Alister Smart, who played Jose, had also recently returned from England.

Menmuir came back from England to make this and Ballad for One Gun. He brought a lighting director and a vision mixer from England. Menmuir told Tom Jeffrey for the NFSA, “There’s nothing more distracting from a director to have bad cuts”. When he got to England he understood difference between changing cameras and a cut. However he says there was resentment from the crew for Menmuir bringing in interlopers. He told Jeffrey, “there was a lot of resistance to its polemic and certainly there was a lot of antagonism and I thought a lot of really bad manners as far as our guests were concerned.”

Bridget vision mixer - someone said “this is the first time we’ve had a women here”.

Camera rehearsal took place at Gore Hill on Sept 23-25. It was transmitted on 2 Oct.

The cast included Noelene Brown who told Filmink magazine:

“I don’t know how I came to be cast. They were after some beach babes and I guess I qualified. (Laughs) We had to wear bikinis. I brought my own, as you had to then. Anna Volska, who was also in it, was the same. David Yorston and Tom Oliver [later Lou from Neighbours] were the young surfy types.

“We weren’t the family that was involved in the story. One of the sons from the family [the prospective son-in-law] had all these friends he used to meet, and we played them.

“I remember feeling The Right Thing script was written by someone who had been away from Australia for a long time and I found some of the material a little dated.”

“Alister Smart had returned from the UK and had put on a little weight so he was keen to shed a few pounds to play the lithe and sexy Spaniard. I remember having lunch with him and I was eating heartily, and he was consuming two slimming biscuits [yes, there were such things].

“I remember it was a nighttime shoot. I was working at the Music Hall in Neutral Bay at the time. It was a freezing night, my teeth were chattering so much there was all this steam coming off my lips, so they gave me some alcohol. Then, when I rushed to the Music Hall to do my first appearance, I forgot my lines. I learnt early on to not mix alcohol and work. (Laughs)

“The actual beach scenes were shot in a studio. I’ve got a photo of us on a riser in the studio reclining on the sand. It was shipped there for the day and beach umbrellas, and a lot of hot lights on us.”

The director was Ray Menmuir who Brown recalls as “a charming person who’d come out from England to do the show, but he certainly went back afterwards. He was a very good director.

“The actual scene I had to do was in the swimming pool. I was talking to the Spanish guy who was central to the script. It was an old-fashioned kind of Australian 1940s sort of family and everyone was scandalised by the foreigner.

“I was supposed to be in the pool at the family home in the evening and the Spanish guy comes along and has a chat. I was supposed to dive into the pool, swim along and chat. I couldn’t swim or dive and didn’t know I was going to have to do these things (laughs). And there were no stunt people. But you do what you have to do. I dived in the best I could, and emerged with water coming out of every orifice… I remember it being a difficult moment for me. Ray Menmuir burst into peels of laughter. I was able to do it again.

“I remember the play got notices that the cast was better than the script. That happened a lot in Australia in the early days because a lot of writers were writing for radio and hadn’t got the rhythms of writing for the screen.”

My thoughts on the script. It's a weird one. Not really a comedy, not really a drama. It seems to lack focus. Who is the main character? Jose? I guess. But he's a mystery to us.

Critics whined about the dialogue not being realistic. I didn't feel that. The set up didn't feel that realistic. A Sydney couple worried about paying for their Spanish maid. A Spanish maid. Coming across a Spanish matador.

It felt contrived - Jose turning up at the house, the misunderstanding. I kept wondering what the point of it was? An analysis of Australian family life? Culture clash drama-dy.

There were glimpses of something interesting. A look at the middle aged couple, the dad worried about cash and doing "the right thing" and the mother insistent on a maid and taking in a lodger to pay for it and the daughter getting married. And things like men snapping the bikini tops of women, and shoving steaks down the dress of women - it glimpses that sort of boorish behaviour. Then it pulls focus to this matador.

I know Bowers had an unhappy marriage in real life and his wife cheated on him. I got some fun out of reading hidden meanings into the script. But the exercise felt pointless.

I'd like to see it mind - the script at many exteriors, beach scenes, scenes at Manly. It was one of the rare Australian TV plays to depict contemporary young people. Not sure Bowers, a middle aged man who'd been living in London for around a decade, was the best person to capture them but there you go.

Crew

Ray Menmuir - director. Douglas Smith - designer. Bill Munro, Leigh Spence - floor managers. Rosalind Wood - wardrobe. Doreen Castle - make up. David Tapp - technical producer. Mevin Johnson - assistant to producer. Tony Hepher - lighting supervisor. Bridgitte Booth - vision mixer. Terry Moss - grams op. Tina Matis - script assistant.

Reception

Rod Serling saw the play and disliked the script but praised the acting.

TV Times (Frank Doherty who knew Bowers) wrote his review to the author in the form of a letter basically saying it didn't ring true.

The TV critic from the Sydney Morning Herald said "there was polish in the filming and the script" of The Right Thing but "the fun is wearing a little thin... The insistence on heavily accented Australiana may be more acceptable to overseas audiences than home viewers but the comedy was very well handled."

The Sunday Sydney Morning Herald called it "one of the biggest turkeys the ABC has given us this season... a dreary and slow moving 90 minutes... almost redeemed by the first class acting of its stars." And this was Valda Marshall who was normally so positive.

The Listener In said "this study of a non cultlrual society may have been one sided even a trifle malifcioous but it wads unrecognisably recognisable... not the stuff to win high ratings. It was a comedy of manners rather than smarat lines and its pace was somethimes slowed by wordiness. Nonetheless the script had maturity and a modrant sense of humour... How rare - and how stimulating - to see an Austrlaian made televison play tht has something boldly constructive to say about this country and makes no bones about saying it:.

The Bulletin wrote that in the play "Australians are pre-1939 characters who drive 1963 cars and live in contemporary homes. The males are Flintstones; publicans and beach boys in conflict with a kind of supple European valor which baffles them, though the girls understand it well enough.... All of the players acted splendidly to the script, and with an English television showing lined up, Raymond Menmuir and his crew were able to step beyond the usual confines and do a fine indoors-outdoors production."

England Screening

It showed in England on 12 August 1964 on ITV.

The Age TV Guide 3 Oct 1963

SMH TV Guide 30 Sept 1963

The Age TV Guide 3 Oct 1963 p 3

SMH TV Guide 23 Sept 1963 p 4

AWW 23 Oct 1963 p 15

SMH 3 Oct 1963 p 13

SMH 6 Oct 1963 p 74

The Bulletin 19 Oct 1963 p 37

From script

From script