Forgotten Australian TV Plays: The Queen’s Bishop

Read time: 5 mins

Stephen Vagg’s series on Australian TV plays looks at one of the most obscure ones, which is saying something: The Queen’s Bishop from 1968.

by Stephen Vagg

In the early 1960s, the dominant genre of Australian television drama was the TV play. There were soaps such as The Story of Peter Grey, but back then, they were on in the day time; there were mini series like Stormy Petrel but these tended to be rare special events; there were some series like Consider Your Verdict and Emergency but they did not have the prestige or publicity of the television play.

By the end of the decade however, the TV play was on the way out. The commercial stations didn’t make them anymore and they would become sporadic on the ABC, very much in the shadow of regular series, serials, and mini series.

What happened? Well, Homicide, really, then The Mavis Bramston Show, and My Name’s McGooley What’s Yours? And then Bellbird and Contrabandits and You Can’t See Round Corners… all these shows had a bigger impact than the TV plays. This was echoed in television around the world, in part because the penny was dropping that recurring series and mini series have a massive advantage over TV plays: they aren’t starting from scratch every time.

The Queen’s Bishop was one of several television plays the ABC broadcast in late 1968; I reviewed the others, such as The Cell, The Shifting Heat and Cobwebs in Concrete, so it was time to do this one.

It was by Joan Baldwin, a writer about whom I have been unable to find much (maybe it was a nom de plume). Indeed, I don’t know much about the background to this play – it’s rather an oddity. I thought it might have even been a British script – the characters are from a well off family, dad was a rural MP, and everyone talks in a quasi-British accent – but there are references to wombats and magpie nests so I assume it’s Australian.

The storyline revolves around the matriarch of said family, Lady Jessica (Eve Wynne), who is dying. This puts in doubt the position of Justina (Nancy Graham), secretary to Lady Jessica’s husband, Sir Leonard (John Warwick). Basically, the two boys, Bede (Ron Graham) and John (Tony Thurbon) want her out, as does Bede’s wife (Betty Lucas) but John’s wife (Helen Morse) is more sympathetic. The cast also includes Sheila Kennelly and Marion Goddard – the latter was, I believe, daughter of David Goddard, head of ABC TV drama and the time and sister of Liza (Skippy) Goddard, the actor.

There’s a lot of awkward exposition and backstory to get through, the script felt as though it needed another draft and the characters needed to be bitchier. However, the basic dramatic situation is sound, there’s an excellent performance by Betty Lucas as the bitchy daughter in law and it’s always fun to see Helen Morse. It was interesting. John Croyston directed and one of the cameramen was Carl Schultz, who later turned film director (Goodbye Paradise).

The ABC didn’t stop making television plays after 1968. Instead, they made them in clumps as part of anthology series: you had Australian Plays, Behind the Legend, Quality of Mercy, Seven Ages of Man, Lawson’s Mates, Norman Lindsay Presents, Naked, Seven Deadly Springs, Obsession, Premiere, Shorts, Game of Life, Spring and Fall, Under the Skin, Studio 86, Winners, Touch the Sun, Verdict, Australian Theatre Festival, A Place in the World, and so on. The commercials occasionally got in on the action too with shows like Michael Willesee’s Australians and Two Twisted and SBS had Six Pack. It’s remarkable how few of them seem to have lingered on in the popular memory, except for maybe Winners and Touch the Sun. This is a bigger topic for another article, but the bulk of Australian television plays seem to have all had the impact of The Queen’s Bishop – developed, planned, made, broadcast, forgotten.

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