An Australian TV play. 60 mins.
Premise
In a Sydney suburb, the two sons of a hard working pastry chef of continental background are struggling with their own ambitions.
Plot
Fred and George are the songs of a pastry chef, Pop. George wants to be a teacher. Fred wants to play cricket. Their mother worries about not being able to communicate with them.
George is seeing a girl, Jenny. Pop, who has a foreign accent, worries about the children and has a loving relationship with his wife.
George visits Fred at the cricket. Their grandfather, the mother's dad, gives George a tal about family. Jenny wants George to come to her party but George refuses. Fred gets picked in the team
Cast
- John Gray as Pop
- Edward Hepple as Grandpa
- Lynne Murphy as mother
- Graham Dixon as George
- Ken James as Fred
- Helen Morse as Jenny
- Bettina Smeaton as customer
- Sandy Harbutt (unbilled)
- Martin Harris (unbilled)
Production
It was written by John Croyston, who was better known as a producer; this was his first script for TV. He said it was a suburban story (told to Graham Shirley in a 2004 oral interview.)
It was directed in Sydney by Storry Walton.
The play was published in Fitzsimmons, Brian & Fitzsimmons, Brian (1969). Sight and sound. McGraw-Hill, Sydney.
CrewFilmed sequences. Photography - Bill Grimmond. Editing - Arthur Southgate. Sound recording - John Heath.
Studio sequences. Lighting - Barry Quick. Senior cameraman - Carl Schultz. Sound - John Bourn.
Technical producer - Les Weldon. Designer - Desmonde Downing. Produced and directed by Storry Walton.
Reception
The critic for the Sydney Morning Herald said the play "was not a work of genius, but it showed promise. The characters were fairly well drawn and their conflicts were credible though mundane. Troubles lay between father, and sons, mother and sons, between one son and his girl of a more affluent class. But the treatment lay flat. At one stage half the cast was explaining:. "We don't seem—you know what I mean—to get along or ... You know what I mean — understand each other." The cast did not help. All were flatter than the script and John Gray as the father gave a banal effort... Why did Storry Walton put up with the noise in the studio? And why didn't someone edit out the slow patches in the writing? All his faults counted against him, Croyston deserved a better first night. "
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| SMH 20 Oct 1966 p 12 |
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| SMH TV Guide 17 Oct 1966 |
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| Canberra Times 12 Oct 1966 p 11 |
Forgotten Australian TV Plays: Marleen, What About Next Year? and The Runaway
by Stephen Vagg
December 20, 2021
Stephen Vagg’s series on forgotten Australian TV plays looks at three different ones from 1966: Marleen, What About Next Year? and The Runaway.
The year 1966 is an interesting one in small screen Australian drama. Television had been broadcasting here for a decade and had established itself as the leading entertainment medium in the country, supplanting radio and cinema. It hadn’t been a great decade for local shows – in fact, sometimes it had been downright poor – but the success of programs like Homicide and Mavis Bramston proved that not only did Australians enjoy something homegrown, they could like it in large numbers. Quotas for local drama were introduced in 1967, but prior to that, the ABC increased its already decent output. This essay looks at three television plays from 1966. ...
The Runaway
The Runaway was, I believe, the first TV play from John Croyston, a former teacher who had been writing and producing for ABC radio. He would go on to become one of the ABC’s most significant writers and directors in the late 1960s and 1970s; he was a particular favourite of David Goddard, who became head of TV drama at the ABC in 1965 for several colourful years.
Goddard changed the way the ABC made television plays. They used to be just put on sporadically, but Goddard tried to ensure that they were broadcast in a thematically linked series eg. ‘Australian Playhouse’ (1966-67), ‘Love and War’ (1967), a series on greed (1968), Australian Plays (1969) – a practice that continued into the 1970s and 1980s. However, the ABC still did the occasional one-off stand alone play such as The Runaway. It aired on Wednesday Theatre, a weekly show that ran from 1965 to 1969, which broadcast various dramas, operas and specials, some of them Australian-made.
The Runaway is a 60-minute drama about two brothers, Gary (Graham Dixon) and Fred (Ken James, later famous as the middle, sensitive brother on Skippy and the egotistical star on The Box). They have a pastry chef dad, who I think is meant to be a New Australian (John Gray), a mum (Lynne Murphy aka Mrs Richard Lane) and her father (Edward Hepple). The main character is Gary, who wants to go to university and read books and is sort of dating Jenny, played by Helen Morse. Jenny, looking gorgeous, throws herself at Gary and he isn’t into it, so maybe Gary’s got a few things to figure out apart from what career he wants to do, but that really isn’t unpacked.
It’s a slower moving sort of drama with some effective moments, slightly reminiscent of British TV dramas that were in vogue at the time. The director was Storry Walton, who’d just made a mini series about two brothers, My Brother Jack, and would go on to collaborate a number of times with Croyston (one of which I’ve reviewed, Casualty). As a cricket fan, I appreciate how brother Fred was a cricket player and there’s a scene where Greg and grandma go to watch Fred play. I think this might have made it the first Australian TV drama to touch on cricket – though one never knows, there may have been an episode of Consider Your Verdict or Homicide on it.
I asked Storry Walton for his thoughts on the play and he was kind enough to provide the following:
“John Croyston’s screenplay for The Runaway came out of a continuing debate in the ‘60s about the nature and style of the new medium of television compared with the cinema. Producers had already worked out that television – a small screen in a small living room with a small family audience – was a medium of intimacy, compared with the experience of the wide vistas of the big cinema screens in their big theatres with big audiences. And the little television screen gave greater opportunity to use the close-up to ‘see thinking’, to explore the human condition in the closest possible way – the shrug, the momentary wince, the close interplay of people in small spaces.
“The Runaway was conceived by John as a close-up exploration of family life, closer than the cinema view, and dwelling on mood and character as much as plot. In a way, it was an exercise in claustrophobia, where people’s anger and love and frustration are all mixed up and throttled by their physical closeness.
“I directed the screenplay accordingly, with the cast mainly confined in small spaces and the screen filled with the physicality of the characters and their interactions closely observed.
“It was one of the earliest roles for Helen Morse, fresh out of NIDA and for Ken James, who had also won a precious place at NIDA, but left after a couple of months for a major role in the long-running series Skippy. Both went on to long and distinguished careers.
“The exterior scenes were shot by the legendary cinematographer and DOP Bill Grimmond, who also went on to shoot over 60 episodes of Skippy. Against the ABC’s rules to shoot on 16mm, we shot on higher quality 35mm because I wished to ease the visual transition between film sequences and the electronic cameras of the television studio, which largely succeeded.
“Looking at it after all these years, I reckon it’s pretty slow and repetitive and I think I could have better served John’s script with more dynamic direction. I think we would have both agreed that a bit of editing would have helped too. A newspaper critic said it was not a work of genius, but showed promise. Promise of what I wonder? Promise perhaps that the ABC would continue its experiments in screen drama with Australian writers, themes and styles. Actually, that was a promise kept – for all the next few years.”
As mentioned, by 1966, Australian drama was beginning to get some momentum – the quotas that started in 1967 would finally give it a secure foothold. The ABC had not yet entirely shifted to an all-Australian line up – in 1966 alone, they did versions of two pays by Canadian Arthur Hailey (Collision Course, Flight into Danger) but by 1969 all Australian drama would be locally written. It took us thirteen years to grow up, but we got there in the end.
The author would like to thank Storry Walton for his contributions to this article.
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