Forgotten Australian Television Plays: Three from Australian Playhouse

by Stephen Vagg

Easy Terms

Pat Flower, best known for her small screen classic The Tape Recorder, originally wrote this and another work called The Lace Counter as stage plays for Robin Lovejoy’s lunchtime theatre program. This program folded before Lovejoy even read them, but once he did, he recommended them to the ABC who used them for Australian Playhouse. I have previously written about The Lace Counter. Like that, this involves a lot of word play and chat.

The plot of Easy Terms is about a wealthy woman (Gerda Nicholson) who talks to a salesman (Edward Hepple) and then her husband (Fred Parslow) appears. Oscar Whitbread directs. I’ll be blunt here and admit I wasn’t sure what was going on – this felt liked filmed theatre and it shouldn’t have been made for television. This wasn’t “experimenting with the form”, it was just doing theatre on the small screen. Most Australian Playhouse episodes went for half an hour but Easy Terms clocks in at forty minutes, and you feel every one of them. On the sunny side, the actors are fine, the camerawork is snazzy, and the set is great.

The Empty Day

This was also by Pat Flower. It was more of a thriller, Flower’s other genre, and concerns a teenage girl (Liza Goddard) who, while bored alone at home, invites a man (Stanley Walsh) inside, thinking that he’s a friend of the family, but she’s wrong.

It’s an interesting set up and there are some creepy moments, but the story feels as though it needs another twist. The two actors were fresh from England, giving this an British feel. John Croyston directed.

On the Hop

One of the briefs of Australian Playhouse was to unearth new local writing. Along with Pat Flower and Colin Free, the series could also make claim to Michael Laurence, a former actor who later went on to write some of the most successful Australian shows of all time, including Return to Eden and The Last Frontier (he also created the 1972 series The Godfathers). Laurence’s first script for television was On the Hop for the second season of Australian Playhouse in 1967.

It’s a comedy that reminded me a little of Slaughter of St Teresa’s Day, only considerably broader in tone. Like that, it seems to have been inspired by the life of Tilly Devine: Shirley Cameron plays Red Ruby, “Queen of Woolloomooloo”, who is retiring after receiving an inheritance from her late uncle, and is throwing a party with her “girls” (Carmen Duncan, Lynn Lee), male friend (Kevin Manser) and maid (Wendy Blacklock). Ruby then discovers the inheritance is a flea circus and shenanigans ensue.

The actors all ham it up in fine old style. It’s a strong showpiece for Cameron, an actress with hypnotic eyes, who had just returned to Australia after a long stint in England. It’s also fun to see Duncan chewing gum and acting trashy in a tight skirt; 1967 was a busy year for Duncan, she also had good roles in You Can’t See Round Corners and Hunter, among others. The director was Pat Alexander who doesn’t get all the fun out of the script: the camera work is a bit erratic for some reason. But it’s an entertaining half hour.

I have now seen more than half of the fifty-five episodes made for Australian Playhouse (eleven were never broadcast). The quality varies widely, from the excellent (The Tape Recorder) to the dire. In hindsight, the ABC definitely tried to make too many episodes too quickly but the pay off was considerable: the series gave early breaks to the writers who went on to make shows like Bellbird, Number 96, Contrabandits, Division Four, A Country Practice, Return to Eden and The Last Frontier. In terms of its brief to develop new talent, Australian Playhouse was a notable success, never more so than in the case of On the Hop.

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