AustLit

The pilot episode for a crime drama series that was apparently never made: no trace of it exists outside a script held in the National Film and Sound Archive. The NFSA describes it as 'A police and courtroom drama.'

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.'

A drama series set during the height of the Vietnam War, You Can't See Round Corners revolves around Frankie McCoy, a lonely, somewhat aggressive non-conformist who has spent all his life living in the inner-city suburb of Newtown. As the series progresses, McCoy is called up for National Service and although he initially fulfils his duty, he later deserts and heads back home to hide with friends. Other main characters include his girlfriend Margie and enemy Terry Howlett, the twenty-year-old leader of a small gang of thugs.

The television adaptation was contemporised by producer John Walters and screenwriter Richard Lane. Cleary's original novel is set in the Sydney suburb of Paddington during World War II. After deciding to bring the temporal setting forward to the (then) current Vietnam era, they also had to change the physical setting. Although Paddington had been a working-class suburb in the 1940s, the demographic had changed considerably by the 1960s. Newtown was subsequently considered the most appropriate location for a narrative set in a working-class suburb. Richard Lane records in Take One (1972) that he and Walters also deliberately introduced other contemporary issues into the narrative, notably the inclusion of the Greek community, which by the late 1960s had had an enormous impact on the Newtown district (p. 52).

The first satirical/comedy television series produced in Australia, The Mavis Bramston Show was effectively an adaptation of the stage revue format, the genre out of which many of its stars emerged as professional actors. The writers took aim at any number of contemporary issues, people, and social institutions, often garnering a good deal of controversy in the process.

The show's title derived from a long-held Australian theatrical in-joke concerning unimpressive overseas 'stars' brought out to headline local productions but who were in fact either second-rate performers or whose careers were in decline in their own countries. Such people became known as 'Mavis Bramstons.' In the TV series, the joke was played out by having the Mavis character (played by Maggie Dence) appear only at the beginning of each episode, as she arrives at Sydney airport and is greeted by the waiting press.

A loose anthology series, made in Sydney by ATN-7 and in Melbourne by GTV-9, and aired throughout 1959.

As with many early Australian anthology series, the contents were a combination of locally written material and overseas works; in this case, however, local content made up 50% of the series.

In response to the success of Lola Montez, Peter Stannard, Alan Burke, and Peter Benjamin were commissioned by ATN-7 and Shell to write a family-orientated musical for television. That production, Pardon Miss Westcott, was performed and broadcast live around Australia a few weeks before Christmas in 1959. Starring Wendy Blacklock and Michael Cole, it was orchestrated by ATN-7's musical director, Tommy Tycho, along with Julian Lee.

The musical begins in Sydney in 1809, just after Governor Bligh's departure and before Governor Macquarie's arrival, and tells the story of Elizabeth Westcott, a convict transported for serving a pompous magistrate at her father's inn in England his own lamb. She is assigned to work at Government House and quickly rules the roost. When she is granted a ticket of leave, Miss Westcott opens an inn in Pitt Street, with the help of an assortment of saints and sinners. A serving army officer, Richard, who was also on board the convict ship, is captivated by her and eventually overcomes the social gap between them by getting himself into trouble. All ends well.

Two people recently released from gaol inadvertently become involved in a baby-kidnapping.

A woman searches for her missing son, who may have been taken by her husband.

Australia's first soap opera and the first serial drama made in Australia (although it had been preceded by single-episode television dramas), Autumn Affair followed Julia Parrish, a middle-aged woman in a love triangle with two men.