person or book cover
Screen cap of Consider Your Verdict
form y separately published work icon Consider Your Verdict series - publisher   film/TV   crime  
Issue Details: First known date: 1961... 1961 Consider Your Verdict
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

Consider Your Verdict was a television adaptation of Crawford Productions' radio programme of the same name, which (according to Storey at Classic Australian Television) ran from 18 August 1958 to 1960, for a total of 312 episodes. Soon after the radio program ceased, Crawfords began developing Consider Your Verdict as a television program.

As they had with the radio version, Crawfords made a number of production decisions aimed at increasing the apparent authenticity of the program. According to Storey, these included consulting legal professionals (including the Crown Law Department, Victoria Police, and Melbourne University's Department of Law), limiting the actors playing witnesses to a brief overview of the script and requiring them to ad-lib their lines (resulting in an authentically hesitant delivery style), and occasionally casting actual legal professionals in roles (notably homicide detective Gordon Timmins and Eugene Gorman QC). The intention was to suggest that audiences were watching a broadcast of an actual trial; in keeping with this illusion, as Moran notes in his Guide to Australian TV Series, the program carried no production credits.

The majority of the cases were criminal cases (primarily murder), though the program did present some civil cases. Inexpensive to produce, the program occasionally suffered from the suggestion that it adhered rather too closely to legal process, rendering episodes slower and less dramatic than they might otherwise have been.

Notes

  • The documentary produced for HSV Channel 7's fiftieth anniversary includes material on and footage from Consider Your Verdict: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fF5Uz9_HLoY (Sighted: 7/10/2011)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Works about this Work

60 Australian TV Plays of the 1950s & ‘60s Stephen Vagg , 2019 single work column
— Appears in: FilmInk , 18 February 2019;
60 Australian TV Plays of the 1950s & ‘60s Stephen Vagg , 2019 single work column
— Appears in: FilmInk , 18 February 2019;
Last amended 1 Apr 2014 12:07:49
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