Australian TV Plays: Australian Plays

Showing posts with label Australian Plays. Show all posts

AP#2.6 - Chimes at Midnight (26 July 1970)

The last of the Australian Plays series. I think some ones made/commissioned for it were shown on their own eg The Survivor.

Premise

During World War Two, Chester, an American soldier on leave in Australia meets an Australian girl. He meets her parents.

Cast

Robert Dunlap as Chester
Pat Bishop as the girl
Don Crosby
Lynn Murphy
Lyn Lee

Production

John Croyston wrote the script. He told Graham Shirley in 2004 it was "a kind of love story".

Robert Dunlap was an American actor who was in Australia to make a TV series. He had been in The Juggler.

Reception

The Canberra Times said it "was not a bad play, but it could be analysed out of existence. It did have some excellent moments, however... strong point of the play was that it seemed to be written with television strongly in mind. It was more than a televised stage play; it made use of various locations, instead of lodging the viewer in one obviously set-ish room, never to see the light of day. The characters were mobile. The filming was not im-aginative. Sensitive camera work could have brought the play nearer to success. The cast was competent, not stylish, and there were some new faces...It was... a relief not to see John Meillon and Lyndell Rowe who have been rather over-exposed in the other plays."

The Age TV Guide 19 June 1970 p 1

SMH 4 Sept 1969 p 6

SMH 26 July 1970 p 109

Canberra Times28 July 1970 p 14

AP#2.5 - The Juggler (19 July 1970)

Australian television play about a movie producer. The ABC commissioned it from Peter Yeldham, who was an Australian writer based in London at the time. Was this the first piece he'd done written expressly for Australian television?

Cast

Terence Cooper as a movie star
John Meillon as a movie producer
Sandy Gore
Robert Dunlap

Production

It was produced by Eric Tayler.

Was this the first TV script they commissioned Yeldham to write for Australian TV? Must check.

Dunlap was in Chimes at Midnight.

Reception

The Sydney Morning Herald said Cooper was "brilliant".

The Age called it "absorbing".

The Age 18 July 1970 p 21

SMH 26 July 1970 p 109

The Age TV Guide 19 June 1970 p 1

SMH 4 Sept 1969 p 6

The Age 23 July 1970 TV Guide p 2

AP#2.4 - Ritual (12 July 1970)

Play for Australian Plays by Alan Hopgood.

Premise

A young woman wakes to find herself in a strange room with a man she barely remembers from a party the previous night. There is something odd about the man and gradually she becomes terrified.

Cast

John Norman
Lyndall Rowe

Production

It was produced by Eric Taylor. It was Hopgood's first thriller script.

John Cameron called it "quite competent material in that it flows along and offers good scope for director and cast but seems to me absolutely pointless and rather unpleasant."

Notes from Neil Hutchison below show his typical disdain for Australian writing "of course it's perfectly playable but it's little more than the usual tedious exercise into psychopatheology. It has no distinction whatsoever and it's boring. But perhaps this kind of melodrama still has its place."

The Age TV Guide 19 June 1970 p 1

SMH 4 Sept 1969 p 6

Canberra Times 6 July 1970 p 15

Canberra Times 14 July 1970 p 12

the Age 9 July 1970 p 32

NAA Pt 10

The Age 8 January 1970

Age 9 July 1970

AP#2.3 - Catalyst (5 July 1970)

Ep three.

It was a business drama by "CF Barnes" or "Charles S. Barnes" a nom de plume for an Australian novelist.

Was this Morris West?

Premise

When minority shareholder Arthur Lambert moves out of the boardroom and becomes involved in the day-to-day running of the firm of Conquest Engineering, managing director Lionel Keyes and marketing manager Richard Parrish start to wonder about the security of their jobs.

Parrish makes a bid for power over Keyes.

Cast

Tony Ward as Don Harriman
Richard Parry
Peter Reynolds
John Warwick
Don Barkham
Brian Anderson
Kirsty Child

Totem Pole

I think it was adapted from Totem Pole by John Kiddell. Done on ABC radio in 1968 adapted by Joy HOollyer see here. This was reviewed here. ABC version broadcast on ABC in 1970 see here. Later adapted 1972 see here.

Kidell wrote a lot of YA novels. His works include Day of the Dingo (1957), The Giant of the Bush (1963), Euloowiree Walkabout (1969), Tod (1968). He "devised" The Battlers see here.

Articles on him here in 1969 lived in Hunters Hill. March 1969 said he lived off his earnings as writer big seller in USA but not known in Oz see here. July 1969 said Totem Pole been soldto BBC radio and also ABC radio and he helped write The Battlers see here.

Died 6 March 1987 see here