Forgotten Australian TV Plays: The Quiet Season and Enough to Make a Pair of Sailor’s Trousers

by Stephen Vagg

One of the genres best suited to the television play was/is the love story; television’s intimacy and ability to use close ups and editing, not to mention stand-alone storylines, makes it particularly ideal for tales of the heart. One of the most famous television plays of all time was a love story: Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty. Others include the guy-cry-terminally-ill-sports-player-bromance Bang the Drum Slowly, and Ted Willis’ interracial love saga Hot Summer Night (filmed as Flames in the Street).

Early Australian television rarely tackled love head on. Perhaps there was unease at dealing with such emotional material; directors (who tended to be the ones who picked what scripts to film) preferred dealing with love as the motivating emotion in a thriller, say, or the subtext of a comedy, rather than an honest exploration of human emotions.

Nonetheless, there were some love stories: Dark Under the Sun told of the romance between a white woman and Aboriginal man. Vacancy in Vaughan Street concerned a middle-aged woman finding love at a boarding house. Season in Hell concerned the doomed relationship between Rimbaud and Verlaine. And there were two plays which I’m writing about today, The Quiet Season and Enough to Make a Pair of Sailor’s Trousers.

The Quiet Season was written by John Cameron, author of the groundbreaking TV play Outpost and later head of drama at the ABC. It’s set in a small town where a spinster/bachelorette shop keeper (Nonie Stewart) has a romance with a visiting boarder (John Nash) who is staying at a guest house. This runs for 30 minutes and was shot in Brisbane in 1965 at the ABC’s Toowong Studios, with some location work at Woody Point. I think it’s actually set in Victoria, though it could easily take place in the Sunshine State. (Random fact: Dark Under the Sun was written by a Brisbane writer, Chris Gardner who lived at Woody Point… which is part of Redcliffe, one time home of the Bee Gees, Rupert McCall and William McInnes. So, an artistic hotspot up there, clearly.)

The Quiet Season is a simple, effective tale, not as technically polished as Sydney/Melbourne productions around this time, it has to be admitted (they didn’t have the same amount of practice, of course), but moving, with impressive sets. The script is very much in the Marty mode of lonely, no-longer-young people trying to find love. (Another inspiration would be Terence Rattigan’s play Separate Tables, about lonely people at a boarding house… the influence of that play is clear on Vacancy on Vaughan Street too). You can access some information about The Quiet Season at the NAA.

Enough to Make a Pair of Sailor’s Trousers was made in 1967 as an episode of Australian Playhouse. It was written by Barbara Vernon, whose life and career stands as an inspiration to those worried the parade might have passed them by. Vernon was an Inverell radio announcer who wrote plays on the side for the local theatre company; one of said plays, The Multi Coloured Umbrella, was picked up by the Elizabethan Theatre Trust who gave it a stage production in 1957; a year later the play was filmed by the ABC. This production received criticism because of its frank depiction of sex (hey, it was 1958), causing the ABC to scurry away from filming an Australian script for the next 18 months. Vernon, to her credit, kept writing and the ABC, to its credit, gave her work. In 1967, they not only produced her script for Enough to Make a Pair of Sailor’s Trousers, they launched Bellbird (1967-77), which Vernon story edited as well as wrote, and turned out to be the first hit Aussie soapie.

Enough to Make a Pair of Sailor’s Trousers is a charming love story about a 17-year-old (Helen Morse) from the country staying with her sister (Heather Christie) in Sydney. Sister kicks her out so she can shag her boyfriend (Gary Shearston) (that’s what’s implied), and sister finds a romance with a sailor on leave (Allen Bickford). Their courtship involves walking around Sydney and visiting the then-being-built Opera house which is amazing. The key subplot concerns Christie’s and Shearston’s characters – he wants to marry her, but she doesn’t want to live in the country and she speaks some very feminist lines about wanting independence.

This play was a real surprise – well observed, with three dimensional characters, empathy and humour, nicely handled by director Pat Alexander. It does seem like an episode of, well, Bellbird but a very good episode of Bellbird, and you can see why Vernon made such a good fist of TV; she was a good writer. (You can read the whole script online here.) Helen Morse is utterly lovely – she had X factor from the beginning. Gary Shearston was a folk singer at the time, which is random.

Both The Quiet Season and Enough to Make a Pair of Sailor’s Trousers were perfectly decent, 30 minute tales that did credit to those who made them. And a reminder that Australians are perfectly capable of making decent love stories when they so choose.

For more articles like this, read:

60 Australian TV Plays of the 1950s & ‘60s

Annette Andre: My Brilliant Early Australian Career

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