by Stephen Vagg
I’ve written about the ABC anthology series Australian Playhouse (1966-67) before. This piece will cover three plays from that series, Watch It, Objector and Boy with Banner. I’m mostly going to talk about Banner because of its writer, but I want to touch on Objector and Watch It because I’m not sure what other piece they might fit in.
All episodes were filmed as part of Australian Playhouse’s first season in 1966. Watch It reunited the director and star of the mini-series My Brother Jack, Storry Walton and Ed “there was more to me than playing the dad in Skippy” Devereaux. It’s a light comedy about two blokes who run a watch shop, played by Devereaux and John Armstrong. A man comes off the street with a sob story about a watch (Ed Hepple, excellent as always), who may or may not be a conman, and the police (Don Crosby, ditto) get involved. There are fun moments, superb production design with all those watches and Winifred Green, who pops up as a customer, is terrific – I wish she had a bigger role. The script is credited to Richard Barry, who wrote a lot of variety comedy for Australian television in the 1960s, notably for Dawn Lake and Bobby Limb.
Boy with Banner was made but never actually aired, which wasn’t uncommon – there were around ten or so Australian Playhouse episodes that were filmed and spiked. Sometimes I think this was a mistake – eg. David Sale’s The House, Pat Flower’s Caught Napping – but in the case of Boy with Banner, I think the ABC made the right decision, because it isn’t very good. It is utterly fascinating, though, in its depiction of the Vietnam War protest movement circa 1966.
Boy with Banner starts with a young man, Noel (Lindsay Edwards, who later became a TV personality in Tasmania) hoisting a placard, ‘Christ Died for Peace’ on a war memorial as part of an anti-war/conscription march… He gets conked on his head and winds up in hospital. There’s hand-wringing from his widowed mother (Patricia Kennedy), who thinks she raised him wrong, and his Korean War veteran brother (Peter Aanensen), who blames him for being spoilt, going to uni, not playing sport, and just kids these days in general. His girlfriend (Pamela Duke) thinks he’s awesome. So far so good, it’s all set up as solid generational conflict.
But as the play goes on, Noel says that he doesn’t know why he did it and in comes a psychiatrist (Norman Kaye) and army chaplain (Syd Conabere). The chaplain thinks the problem is the boy didn’t go to Church, the psychiatrist thinks it’s because Noel’s father died when he was a toddler, and the fact that the brother is a moron. And everyone’s attitudes get more and more broad at times, while at other times, they’re played straight. A nurse (Julie Day) offers sympathy although she suggests Noel join the non-combatant core. The chaplain comes in and says an army is needed for peace. Noel has a fantasy sequence where he imagines his mum, brother and girlfriend espousing their views. Then Noel confesses to his girlfriend that he didn’t believe in what he was marching for, he just did it for kicks, and that he put up the banner as a dare. Jenny is let down.
I had to watch Boy with Banner a few times to get what it’s going for. I think it’s a send up of various attitudes towards war protestors – the people against Noel are depicted as idiots: the fussy mother, pompous clergyman, incompetent shrink and meat head brother. Noel is depicted as a bit of an idiot too. The most sympathetic is Jenny, the girlfriend, because she at least has a definite belief.
The work is tonally inconsistent – sometimes broad satire, other times sincere. I would love to have known what the writer and director were going for. I don’t think it works – surely it would have been more effective if everyone had just presented their point of view seriously and empathetically – but it’s interesting.
Boy with Banner was directed by Chris Muir, about who I’ve written a few times previously, and written by Michael Wright, about who I have not, in part because I didn’t know a lot about him. I still don’t know that much, but he is definitely worth noting.
Wright was from Adelaide, and he dreamed, like so many, of being a writer. He sent off his work to the only realistic port of call in the 1960s apart from Crawfords, the ABC. It put on some of his radio plays and sent him to a writers’ workshop in 1965 held by Colin Dean and Alan Burke, along with actors Richard Meikle and Lola Brooks; among his fellow writing students was a young Stuart Littlemore, long before Media Watch (and of course his appearance in the 1979 crime classic Money Movers).
Wright was fortunate to be knocking on the ABC’s door when it was actively looking for new writers for its anthology series Australian Playhouse. Two of Wright’s scripts were filmed for the series: The Parking Ticket (on which he shares a co credit with Max Colwell) and Boy with Banner. Only The Parking Ticket aired.
Regardless of the fate of Boy, the ABC (or rather, I suspect, its new Head of Television Drama, David Goddard) liked Wright and he was part of the very first writers’ team that worked on the iconic soapie Bellbird (1967-77), along with Barbara Vernon (the head writer) and Janet Kehoe.
Wright subsequently found a particular niche writing family adventure series – he did scripts for episodes of Skippy (1967-69) (one of which won him an Awgie), Woobinda Animal Hospital (1968-70), and especially The Rovers (1969-70) (he worked on the latter with Ron McLean). He was also on the Channel Seven mini-series The Battlers (1968), which no one much remembers now, in part because it stars Vincent Gill in black face playing an Aboriginal boxer based on Lionel Rose.
In November 1969, Wright was killed in a car accident, leaving behind a widow and three children. The Australian Writers’ Guild rallied around and raised some money to be sent to his widow. It was very sad.
Australian Playhouse made two other episodes which dealt with the Vietnam War. Shadow on the Wall, an odd Christ allegory, which aired as a stand-alone episode. And Objector, by Tony Morphett, probably the leading Australian screenwriter of the 1970s; this was his television drama credit. I haven’t seen Objector, but I’ve read the script – it’s about a young man (played by John Derum) who plans to object if his number comes up in the conscription ballot lottery, much to the annoyance of his father (Sydney Conabere). As would be expected from a script by Morphett, it’s well constructed, strong drama – one of the best scripts in the whole Australian Playhouse series. The story is a little in the vein of One Day of the Year – father versus son, with a son’s girlfriend offering ten cents. Moving ending. (Sidebar: David Goddard liked Morphett’s writing, giving him a script on Delta and green lighting Morphett’s adaptation of his novel Dynasty into a television play, which became a series and really launched Morphett as a writer.)
So anyway, there you have it, three episodes of Australian Playhouse. A comedy about conmen that acted as a showcase for topflight character actors, an odd comedy-drama about a Vietnam War protestor, and a look at a young man faced by conscription. It really was an interesting show. The ABC could do worse than to think about reviving something like it in 2024.
