Cirrus@Austlit

A sitcom centred on the culture clashes between an immigrant Italian taxi driver and his wife (both determined to preserve the traditions of their homeland) and their children (all distinctly Australian in their outlook).

For a detailed, episode-by-episode synopsis, see Film Details.

A co-production between the ABC and television companies in both Scotland and Germany, the series followed the adventures of the survivors of the Mary Jane, wrecked in her passage across the Pacific with a mixed group of passengers, including convicts, militia, and settlers. The survivors, finding themselves on what Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, calls 'a nondescript Pacific island', accustom themselves to their new surroundings, including interacting with the island's native occupants and with the survivor of an earlier shipwreck.

As a co-production, the series used British, German, and Australian actors, and a mixed British and Australian crew. According to Moran, 'The series was not the first ABC drama series shot on film but it was to be a sign of things to come at the newly acquired Atransa Studios at Frenchs Forest. There the trend was towards coloured film productions with fairly high production values, often historical in setting, in familiar genres such as action adventure and in conjunction with overseas investors'.

Reuniting script-writer Gordon Chater and Ralph Peterson (who had previously successfully worked together on the highly successful sit-com My Name's McGooley - What's Yours?), Snake Gully with Dad and Dave was a modernised and updated version of Steele Rudd's popular characters--albeit a version that, as Don Storey notes in his Classic Australian Television, was based more on the 1930s' radio version than on the original novels.

Just as the radio version had updated the setting to a contemporary 1930s, Peterson's television scripts updated the setting again to the early 1970s, moving Dad and Dave further away from the late nineteenth-century selector culture of Rudd's original narratives. In this version, then, Dad and Dave are farmers on a small, struggling farm.

Despite these alterations, Storey notes that 'ATN-7 held high hopes for the series. The same combination of Ralph Peterson and Gordon Chater that worked on the McGooley series, couple with well-known and liked traditional Australian characters should have guaranteed success.'

It did not. The series was poorly received by both critics and viewers. Storey concludes that 'Budget limitations notwithstanding, the fact remains that a major shortcoming of the series was that the characters did not work well in a modern setting. It can be argued that if the traditional setting could not have been maintained, then the series should not have been made at all.'

Series exploring the covert activities behind Japanese lines of covert operatives working from a secret headquarters in Sydney.

According to Don Storey, in his Classic Australian Television, Mirams determined not to dwell on Japanese treatment of prisoners of war nor to show the Australians as incorruptible heroes, but did intend to counter the idea that the war was won entirely by American soldiers.

According to Storey,

Mirams could only provide money for the pilot. Each episode cost approximately $23,000 for a return of only $18,000, which over 42 episodes amounted to a loss of almost a quarter of a million dollars. At one stage cash flow became so tight that Thompson and Sumner went 'on strike' until they got paid. To cover his debts Mirams sold his rights in the series to Paramount Pictures. Consequently, Mirams made nothing from the show despite excellent overseas sales.

Albert Moran, in his Guide to Australian Television Series, notes of script-writer Ron McLean that 'McLean was never one to get precious about originality and Spyforce cheerfully plundered such stories as Callan, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, the James Bond stories and The Bridge on the River Kwai for many of its narratives.'

Storey sums up Spyforce as follows: 'The show improved as it went on - the episodes became tighter and faster, and the directing proved more imaginative. The lead cast gave excellent performances, and the special effects got better - all testimony to the short-cuts and improvisation which the series is legendary for.'

Like The Adventures of the Seaspray and Barrier Reef, The Rovers was an adventure series based around a ship (in this case, an island schooner called the Pacific Lady). The concept allowed for a great degree of mobility, so that, in Moran's words (in his Guide to Australian TV Series), they 'drop anchor, go ashore and "have adventures".'

The crew consisted of Captain Sam McGill (called 'Cap'), Cap's ten-year-old grandson Mike, freelance wildlife photographer Bob Wild, and journalist for Wildlife magazine Rusty Collins, 'whose editor agreed to her accompanying the party on the boat as long as it doesn't cost him anything' (according to Don Storey, in his Classic Australian Television).

Moran says of The Rovers that it 'was a bargain basement variation of the Barrier Reef formula' (despite the fact that Barrier Reef didn't air until nearly two years later, in February 1971). But Don Storey similarly notes that

To be fair, The Rovers could not be considered a ground-breaking pinnacle of artistic achievement, following as it does the well-trodden path taken by Seaspray, Skippy and Woobinda. However, for all its predicability and happy ending, The Rovers is a slick, well-produced and entertaining product, with a balance between the dramatic and the light-hearted that appealed to adults and children alike.

A spin-off from the highly successful My Name's McGooley - What's Yours?, Rita and Wally represented a re-structuring of the original series after Gordon Chater (the titular McGooley) decided not to continue in the role. As Don Storey notes in his Classic Australian Television, McGooley had departed from the series three episodes before the actual final episode of My Name's McGooley (apparently visiting an old girlfriend in Queensland, from which location he sends word that they've decided to elope to the United States). Meanwhile:

Wally has received a promotion to an office job as a 'junior salesman' - in fact, he is the oldest 'junior' salesman in the firm - and he becomes desirous of moving to a more exclusive suburb befitting his new 'executive' status.

Selling the Balmain house, Rita and Wally move to the Sydney North Shore, where the plotlines are focused largely on 'keeping up with the Joneses' scenarios. It was never as popular a program as its predecessor. As Storey notes:

Although Wally had become the focus of the McGooley series, the character of McGooley was nonetheless an important ingredient. And Wally had changed - now he was in a white-collar job, and the emphasis had changed from 'battler' Wally in working-class Balmain to 'fish-out-of-water' Wally in his new 'executive' job and residence on the North Shore. Without McGooley, and with the other characters in a North Shore setting, Rita and Wally began to drift into middle-class dullness.

The program was wrapped up after twenty-three episodes, in a scenario that represented a return to the show's beginnings: to quote Storey, 'Wally had just given himself the sack from his job, and the outlook for the future was looking bleak for the Stiller household. Then McGooley and his mates turn up on their doorstep', facilitating a move back to Balmain (albeit outside the actual program).

Australia's first successful sit-com, My Name's McGooley's - What's Yours? blended domestic and social realism in an exploration of working-class Australian life.

According to Don Storey's summation of the program in his Classic Australian Television, My Name's McGooley - What's Yours? focused on

working class battler Wally Stiller and his wife Rita, who live with Rita's father Dominic McGooley, a crusty old pensioner. Their house is in Balmain, an inner suburb of Sydney that was then still largely working class. In classic sit-com tradition, early episodes centred on the farcical situations that McGooley blundered into, which were exploited for their comedy potential. As the series progressed, Wally Stiller became the protagonist, and the emphasis shifted to social issues within the family structure, with McGooley reacting to Wally's middle-aged ocker outlook on life.

Created by Ralph Peterson, who originally intended the program for British commerical network ITV, My Name's McGooley made use of actors who were already under contract to ATN-7 (both Gordon Chater and Noeline Brown, for example, had been working on The Mavis Bramston Show), as well as attracting John Meillon back from England to take the role of Wally.

Highly successful with audiences from the outset, My Name's McGooley ran for nearly ninety episodes before Gordon Chater left the program (and moved to a new vehicle, The Gordon Chater Show, still on ATN-7). With McGooley absent, the program was heavily re-tooled and re-invented as Rita and Wally.

An anthology series of spy stories, with an ensemble cast. Three episodes were written by British script-writer Bob Kesten, and three were co-written by Ralph Peterson and Rosamund Waring.

For an episode-by-episode synopsis, see Notes.

'On New Year's Day the small town of Wollendale in South Australia was threatened by a fire in the surrounding hills. How it escaped and resumed its normal life is told in this programme. The story and its characters are fictitious but are based on actual and recent events in South Australia.'

Source:

Radio Times, 29 March 1962, p.32.

A review of this production in the Times notes:

The setting is Adelaide in the eighteen seventies. The placid community there are becoming slightly inflamed by the whiff of jingoism from the home country. The hero–a schoolmaster–is firmly turned down as a suitor for the hand of a colonel's daughter. No: education must give way to defence. The colonel's big chance comes when a Russian gunboat is rumoured to be lurking round the coast; supported by a politician, a newspaper editor, and a building contractor he sets about whipping up public enthusiasm for a standing army.

'The solitary gunboat is magnified into a whole flotilla, and slogans such as "Arm for peace and prosperity" begin to engage the community in industrious preparation which sweeps the financial speculators towards wealth and the colonel towards an eminence far above his position at the head of a Saturday afternoon cadet force.

'There is no savagery in this satire; and what follows is pure farce. The alarm sounds one night and the army march off to do battle, only to find that they have been mistakenly alerted and that during their absence they have been legislated out of existence.'

Source:

'Night of the Ding-Dong', The Times, 3 February 1958, p.12.

A trilogy of stories reflecting a socialist view of Australian life in the 1950s, with a particular focus on mateship. Joe Wilson's Mates, based on Henry Lawson's 'The Union Buries its Dead', shows union members in a country town holding a funeral for an unknown tramp who carries a union card. In Frank Hardy's A Load of Wood, men in a make-work job during the Depression assert themselves by stealing firewood from a farmer and distributing it to the poor. The third story, The City by Ralph Peterson, follows young lovers trying to make a life in the hustle and bustle of Sydney.

Ralph Peterson's second play, dating from 1954, Night of the Ding Dong is a comedy set in Adelaide just after the Crimean War, when the locals feared a Russian invasion.

'FACT and fantasy are fatally confused in Docker Starkie, who is Peterson's central character.

In fact, he is an ageing ex-champion making a comeback in a second-rate fight because he needs money.

In fantasy he is back in his boxing heyday, trying to believe he needs just the "feel" of the canvas under his feet, to recapture all his old skill.

The two become as one in the ring, where Starkie dies.

That is just the main thread of the story. Before Docker makes his last journey to the ring we see a stream of "pre-lim boys"–the youngster blinded by resin from his opponent's gloves and wisely deciding to go back to the paint factory; the punch-drunk old-stager in danger of losing his reason altogether; the flashy spiv who is to earn his money by "taking a dive"; the cheerful Cockney on the way up; and the bear-like moron.

Through it all runs an unspoken indictment of the boxing racket.'

Source:

'Sydney Writer's London Stage Hit', Sunday Herald, 26 October 1952, p.12.