Cirrus@Austlit

An episode of the BBC's Sunday Night Theatre, based on the 1893 story of the same name by Mark Twain, in which two eccentric brothers make a penniless sailor the focus of their bet involving a million pound note.

As with all episodes for the first three years of Sunday Night Theatre, this episode was aired live, and no recording of it was ever made. Little is known, therefore, of the cast and crew members who were involved.

Of Rienits's authorship, however, Bill Strutton, writing from England on the forthcoming release of the 1954 Gregory Peck film The Million Pound Note, says:

'The famous Mark Twain story was first turned into comedy script form in this country [England] by Australia's Rex Rienits, who wrote it for television.

'Though the Rienits adaptation is not the one used in the film, it seems likely that its appearance as a highly successful TV comedy jogged filmdom's elbow with the reminder that Twain's richly witty story was a natural for the screen.'

Source:

Strutton, Bill. 'Wed in Film and Fact', Australian Women's Weekly, 18 November 1953, p.45.

An adaptation of the musical play Chu Chin Chow. Chu Chin Chow ... on Ice ran for three months, and was aired on the BBC as part of its Sunday-night theatre programming.

'Queensland in December: the temperature is 115 degrees in the shade, the land is parched, and the cattle are weak; in the hot blue of the sky no cloud loiters with a promise of rain; and only the hopeful, stubborn courage of the pioneer sustains the farmers in their proud belief that they are working 'God's own country.' It is an epithet which has a doubtful ring to the young bride out from England. Beginning a new life with her farmer husband in conditions separated by a polar distance from those she has known in her comfortable English home, Stella wilts amid the 'alien corn.' The odds seem against her.'

Source:

Radio Times, 24 September 1954, p.14.

'Mr. Iain MacCormick [...] tried in The Safe Haven to marry a skeleton out of the cupboard of Victorian melodrama with the nonchalance and colloquialism and intimacy of modern domestic comedy. Into a Scottish country house of the present day, ruled by a very career-minded young businesswoman, there saunters from nowhere an old man (Mr. Finlay Currie), who turns out to be none other than the profligate father of her Canadian husband and his wastrel brother. Ignobly, they contrive to keep the dreadful fact a secret, but–thanks to an affectionate child (Miss Carole Lorimer)–paternity must out, and the wife (Miss Pamela Alan) is distressingly confronted by her father-in-law.'

Source:

'Creative Material for Television', The Times, 26 April 1955, p.16.

'Clostin is not a pleasant man to have dealings with. He is agreeable enough to meet for he has charm and an easy manner. But he is in all things an opportunist, a schemer. He married for money, calculatingly, and for all his casual airs there is something calculating about everything he does. From the very beginning of tonight's play Clostin is planning something. For much of the time he is improvising, feeling his way, trying cleverly to find out what his wife Anne has in mind, where Peebles fits in, what Hurst has learnt from the others. And if this shrouds the play in mystery that is as it should be, for it is a play of detection, a subtle account of a battle of wits.'

Source: Radio Times, 30 December 1955, p.15.

'Setting out at first to illustrate how a discontented young industrialist can be seduced by Communist trade unionists, he enlivens this austere topic by implanting Pringle, the young man, in a devout Catholic family.

'Having thus touched domestic conflict alight, Mr. MacCormick displays Pringle's loyal girlfriend waiting wanly over cups of coffee while he attends wicked meetings, and confronting him, when he arrives, with a gaze of mute accusation. Quite the strongest of the situations is the one in which Pringle's eldest brother brutally unmasks himself as the hardened party member responsible for all the previous agitation'.

Source:

'B.B.C. Television', The Times, 17 June 1957, p.3.

'There are no crowds, no violence, and action is confined to a single set–the house of a commander of native infantry. Although some disturbance has taken place in the district before the play opens, it is not in the thick of the uprising, and the house serves as an outpost where there is still leisure for discussion. But discussion is made urgent by the knowledge that attack may at any time be renewed: there is no division between plot and comment on India at large.

'Three groups are represented–Indian troops, British officers and British civilians. Of these, the civilians are the least convincing. One is a fledgling memsahib whose part is limited to voicing obtuse snobbery; the other, an altogether too enlightened Scots girl, acts almost as Mr. MacCormick's raisonneur by stepping outside the action and speaking in glowing terms of Britain's role in India.'

Source:

'B.B.C. Television', The Times, 28 October 1957, p.5.

'The period is 30 years after the Mutiny, the theme of the first play, and Mr. MacCormick now turns to affairs that were then overshadowed by immediate crisis. The central figure, Jock Robinson, is the son of the military hero of the first play; and he illustrates the theme of service in the life of a district officer. Jock is a more effective hero than his predecessor because he is a greater fanatic. His one concern is to improve conditions in his district. To this end he neglects his hot-blooded wife, endangers his career by flouting regulations, and finally secures victory by blackmail.'

Source:

'B.B.C. Television', The Times, 4 November 1957, p.3.

According to contemporary reviews in The Times, 'It has two subjects–the fight against disease in India, and the end of individualism among the British Raj. Mr. MacCormick relates these themes by taking as his central figure a doctor who, after struggling hopelessly against epidemics, comes at length to join a Government hospital.'

Source:

'B.B.C. Television', The Times, 11 November 1957, p.3.

'Sandy Robinson, a commissioner in the district of Dalpore, has orders to maintain the peace while natives are pouring in both directions over the India-Pakistan border. Lacking men and transport of his own, he manages to secure a shaky alliance with the local leaders, and reduces the amount of bloodshed in spite of skirmishes by a Communist faction. The leaders, as Mr. MacCormick depicts them, are unprincipled politicians over whom Robinson towers, like a reproving father, sorrowfully convinced that they are not ready for self-government.

'Having the balance tilted all one way need not, of course, vitiate the play's effectiveness. But apart from the scenes of political squabbling, with the right always on one side, the play diverges into domestic and romance byways inhabited by the commissioner's humdrum wife and his ivory-skulled son who courts an Indian girl with quotations from Kipling.'

Source:

'B.B.C. Television', The Times, 18 November 1957, p.3.

'It concerns an unfortunate Russian woman who married an American soldier, and as a penalty for this breach of Soviet etiquette, spent eight years in a forced labour camp. Prematurely aged she comes to London, where her cause us ardently espoused by a newspaper whose hard-bitten girl reporter and flinty editor (Blunt by name) track down the husband to a United States Air Force base. In vain. He has remarried and refuses point blank even to meet his first wife again; there is nothing for the unhappy woman to do but to press Blunt's hand in silent gratitude and embark for Russia.'

Source:

'The Uninvited', The Times, 24 November 1958, p.12.

'The Selways were introduced [...] neither as prospectors who struck lucky nor as ambitious farmers. Arriving in the country in the 1870s their one aim was to amass capital and get back to the old country leaving an unfriendly climate and alien society behind for ever. But it is never quite possible for them to leave; and as their plans for return are pushed further and further into the future, the sound of a mocking bird drives home the title's meaning.

'The episode is solidly constructed to convey information about the management of land. Jack Selway arrives in Sydney and promptly falls into the hands of a group of profiteers who dispatch him into the bush to take charge of a smallholding. His belief that they have treated him generously is soon exploded; he learns that he has been made a "dummy" in a campaign against a "squatter".'

Source:

'Clarity in Saga of Australia', The Times, 26 January 1959, p.6.

'The Long Summer [...] succeeded to some extent in avoiding the anxiety to impart information on all conceivable subjects connected with Australian life which marred the first episode, though some sizable chunks of constitutional history were conveyed during the beginning in rather awkward exchanges designed, ostensibly, to put the son newly returned from Cambridge in touch with local affairs or explain to the farmers what was going on in the centres of government. On the whole, however, education had given place to the exploration of personal tensions between members of the Selwood [sic] family: two brothers in love with the same girl, who happens to be the wife of one of them; a sister taking up with the local bad lot out of boredom, and so on.'

Source:

'The Long Summer', The Times, 2 February 1959, p.12.

'The third section of the cycle, The Lost Years, saw Selways of three and ultimately four generations dealing with changing conditions during the depression and the immediately pre-war period. By now the family history is so intricate that anyone coming fresh to the series must have been sadly mystified last night by frequent veiled references to events that have gone before, while those who saw the earlier sections had to spend the first half hour sorting out who had grown up into whom.

'On the other hand, there has been a sufficient proliferation of Selways in the intervening years to permit of more variety than was possible before. They now move quite freely between Sydney and the old homestead at Billabilla. There are errant aunts and their offsprings to be reclaimed, a politician uncle to be heard on the radio, and some suggestion, now that they have largely abandoned their vocation as Archers of the Outback, ever ready with useful hints about the intricacies of sheep-rearing, that there is life beyond the confines of a sheep-farm.'

Source:

'The Lost Years', The Times, 9 February 1959, p.12.

'Because the Selways have been the chief characters in the story since it began in 1873, Miss Foster felt obliged, on parting from them in 1958, to tell us something about all the surviving members, as well as to remind us of figures in the family's past. All this seemed to be a routine matter. Her preoccupation with the Selways generally made it impossible here to give the necessary space to what promised to be the main incident, the overcoming of prejudice entertained by some "old" Australians against the "new".'

Source:

'Full Circle in New South Wales', The Times, 16 February 1959, p.12.