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).
My Name's McGooley - What's Yours?
( dir. Ron Way
et. al. )agent
Sydney
:
Channel 7
,
1966-1968
Z1832889
1966-1968
series - publisher
film/TV
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.
