by Stephen Vagg
The ABC’s first TV drama co-production with an international company, 1963’s The Right Thing
One of the things that held back Australian writing at the ABC in the 1950s and 1960s was fear. Fear of making something bad – “bad” meaning something that wouldn’t impress our British cultural overlords, or result in a bad review in a broadsheet newspaper, or an angry letter from a member of the public. Fear of working on something “cringe”, as the kids say now.
This fear was a main, if not the main, reason why until the mid-1960s the bulk of television plays filmed by the ABC were written by foreigners. Using foreign work enabled the ABC to invoke the “it worked overseas, so don’t blame us if you don’t like it” argument, which it often did. The basic philosophy of the ABC’ s head of drama, Neil Hutchison, was to film only the best possible Australian scripts and if that meant not filming any, well, he was perfectly prepared to do that, and often did (or did not, rather). However, some slipped through the net, particularly when Hutchison was distracted, or forced by upper management – a case in point being The Right Thing.
This was the first international drama co-production between the ABC and an overseas company – Associated Rediffusion. We are sure that the ABC would have preferred its international co-pro virginity to have been taken by the BBC, who it so relentlessly tried to imitate, but we are not sure that the BBC was interested – the first ABC-BBC co-production didn’t happen until 1966 with Kain.
Associated Rediffusion was a company linked with Britain’s then-sole commercial television network, ITV, which had a history of being friendly to colonial talent – far more so than the Beeb, which was a little on the snobby side. This was, in part, because in the late 1950s the ITV-linked ABC TV (not the Australian one, the British one) had hired a Canadian, Sydney Newman, to be its head of drama; Newman had enjoyed tremendous success rejuvenating British television drama, bringing over a lot of Canadian talent with him, such as Ted Kotcheff and Silvio Narizzano. Many Australians found a home at ITV/Associated in the late 1950s and early 1960s, including Peter Yeldham, Rex Rienits, Alan Seymour and Ray Menmuir, not to mention New Zealanders like Michael Noonan and Bruce Stewart. ITV also made TV series set (and sometimes filmed) in Australia such as The Flying Doctor and Whiplash.
In the early 1960s, Associated decided to co-produce a TV play with the ABC. The director would be Ray Menmuir [left], who’d been the ABC’s leading drama director before moving to London in 1960 (going over to supervise the London premiere of the Alan Seymour stage play The One Day of the Year) and being contracted to Associated.
It was hard to get a script that both the ABC and Associated Rediffusion agreed upon. Associated pitched Stella, a Peter Yeldham original about a woman in a small country town, but the ABC was reluctant: the ABC had rejected three Australian-set plays by Yeldham set in Australia filmed by ITV – Thunder on the Snowy, Reunion Day, and East of Christmas; Associated would film Stella on its own in 1963 (it was later turned into the 1980s film Boundaries of the Heart). Associated rejected a play suggested by ABC, Pat Hooker’s excellent Concorde of Sweet Sounds, which the ABC would film later in 1963. Alan Seymour wrote a play about Westerners in post-war Japan that was never made.
Eventually it was decided to film The Right Thing, an original comedy by Raymond Bowers. Bowers was a Perth journalist who emigrated to Britain in the 1950s and had considerable success writing entertaining murder mysteries set among the chattering classes – two of these had been filmed by the ABC, In Writing and It’s the Geography That Counts.
The Right Thing was totally unlike these – a comedy about a wealthy Australian family (played by Grant Taylor, Brigid Lenihan and Lola Brooks) who have a Spanish maid. While preparing a party to celebrate the engagement of the daughter (Brooks) to some rich man’s yobbo son (Jeffrey Hodgson), they encounter a visiting Spaniard, Jose (Alister Smart) who the mother mistakenly assumes wants to rent their spare room, which will enable the mum to give the maid a raise. Jose goes along with this and attends the party where it’s revealed he’s a retired matador, which leads to a bull fight being re-enacted at the party. Jose then reveals that he’s got a fiancée and hasn’t retired. He visits the family and their friends at the beach, they chat about bulls versus sharks, it seems like he’s going to fight with the yobbo but doesn’t, then he goes home.
The Right Thing is weird. It’s meant to be a comedy, with the object of satire, how Australian men treat women. It’s maybe a little like They’re a Weird Mob in that it’s about a foreigner being bemused by wacky Australian suburbanite ways, although unlike Nino in Weird Mob, who is a relatable dude needing a job and wanting a girlfriend, Jose just kind of politely floats through The Right Thing.
Critics whined about the dialogue not being realistic. Maybe it was but we didn’t feel that. It was the set up that didn’t feel realistic. A Sydney couple worried about paying for their Spanish maid coming across a Spanish matador in Sydney… Jose being in Australia in the first place, and rocking up at the house with a fish left by the yobbo, and taking a room to rent which he doesn’t really need, and hanging out with these people for no good reason…
We know that the Spanish have made their own contribution to Australian history, especially following the 1958 Spanish-Australian migration agreement, but it still seems odd to make a play about a matador and maid in Australia. We can’t shake the feeling that Bowers might have originally written this story with an English setting, where Spaniards are more likely to be found (Bowers spent a lot of time in Spain) – and the emphasis on “doing the right thing” could apply to English culture as well as Australian.
Nonetheless, The Right Thing contains of elements of interest. The depiction of the wealthy family: dad (Grant Taylor) worried about cash and doing “the right thing”, and mum (Brigid Lenihan) trying to get money, and the daughter getting married to a boorish idiot who doesn’t seem that interested in her; things like young men snapping female bikini tops and shoving steaks down their dresses, and everyone obsessed with beer and the beach, and Benita Collins’ character assuming (it’s implied) that Jose is gay because he wears scent. It’s a rare Australian drama of the time to focus on young people. The acting is fine, particularly from Grant Taylor, Brigid Lenihan and Noeline Brown, who plays one of Brooks’ friends.
We know that Bowers had an unhappy marriage in real life and his wife cheated on him with diplomats (this was splashed all over English newspapers in 1963), so there’s some fun to be had in reading hidden meanings into the script. But the exercise felt pointless. It’s dragged out over 80 minutes. The script feels flabby and padded, with lots of entrances and exits and shots of Sydney (beaches, the bridge etc). We kept waiting for Jose to fall for characters played by Lola Brooks or Noeline Brown or Brigid Lenihan or Benita Collins or Anna Volska (or all of them) but it didn’t happen. Nothing’s at stake – no one’s physical safety, or money, or relationship, or happiness. There’s some third act conflict between Jose and the yobbo but it doesn’t make sense because Jose’s got a fiancé and isn’t interested in any Australian girl. There is a lot – a lot – of chat about bullfighting.
Bowers might’ve been one of those writers who need genre to keep them in check or they go all over the shop. But maybe we simply did not “get” the script. If so, we are no orphan on that score – most contemporary reviews were confused, except “Ion” of Listener In TV who praised The Right Thing as “a comedy of manners” with “maturity and a mordant sense of humour” that “had something boldly constructive to say about this country.” Maybe. Perhaps “Ion” was dazzled by the CVs of those involved but he or she could’ve been telling the truth.
The ABC threw a lot of money at The Right Thing – there’s elaborate sets for a house with a pool and the beach plus plenty of extras. The money wasn’t really well spent. There are all these scenes of characters standing around listening to two or three people chatting and lots of scenes of all these characters lying on the beach. The same story could have been told for less money with fewer characters.
As mentioned, a young Noeline Brown plays one of the young friends of Lola Brooks. We talked about the play with Brown in an earlier interview.
“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 were the young surfy types.
“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.”
Brown recalls Ray Menmuir 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 peals 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.”
Critical response to The Right Thing was, on the whole, poor. There were no more co-productions between the ABC and Associated and the production was screened in the UK in August 1964 to minimal impact. Pretty much everyone associated with the play subsequently seemed to pretend as if it had never been made. That often happens with flops.
The main problem with The Right Thing wasn’t so much that it didn’t work – these things happen – but that it was so hyped. A returning director, an expat writer, a big budget, an international co-production. That sort of weight on a project is unfair – the ABC really should have pushed for something truly safer, like an adaptation of a well known novel or stage play, or more than one co-production, so the risk was spread. As it was, the experience of making the play (along with the experience of Ballad for One Gun) sent Ray Menmuir scurrying back to England where he spent the bulk of the rest of his career. Raymond Bowers never had his work filmed for Australian TV again, although he continued to have a long British career.
The unenthusiastic response to The Right Thing gave yet another excuse to haters of Australian writing within the ABC to push foreign scripts – for the 12 month period immediately following The Right Thing, the Commission gave us Corruption in the Palace of Justice, A Local Boy, The Late Edwina Black, A Provincial Lady, Rape of the Belt, The Four Poster, Luther, The First 400 Years, The Road, The Sound of Trumpets, The Physicists, Bertrand, The Sponge Room, Nude with Violin, On Approval, Continuity Man , I Have Been Here Before, Six Characters in Search of an Author, The Long Sunset, The Giaconda Smile, A Man for All Seasons and The Tempest… plus the Australian plays Split Level, Wind from the Icy Country A Season in Hell, The Angry General and Concorde of Sweet Sounds (and some plays filmed outside Melbourne and Sydney: Weather at Pinetop, and Drive a Hard Bargain). That’s not a large percentage from an organisation funded by the Australian tax payer. The success of locally-written Homicide and The Mavis Bramston made this attitude look silly and the ABC changed its approach. There’s no point being afraid in drama – what you need is courage, or at least a willingness to just get out of the way, but we don’t think that Neil Hutchison ever understood that.
The Right Thing is a mess but it’s a fascinating mess. You can see a copy of it now via the National Film and Sound Archive.
The author would like to thank Simon Drake and the staff of the National Film and Sound Archive for their assistance with this piece. Unless otherwise expressed, all opinions are mine.
