Autumn Affair is an Australian television soap opera made and aired by Network Seven station ATN-7 in Sydney, and also shown in Melbourne on Nine Network station GTV-9. Television in Australia had only been broadcasting since 1956 and the Seven Network was the first commercial station to make drama a priority. The series was written by former radio writer Richard Lane.
It premiered on Monday 20 October 1958 and continued until 20 October 1959.
The series although not the first in Australia, with that credit going to children's series The Adventures of Long John Silver for the first drama series, Silver was produced for a United States and United Kingdom broadcast.
Autumn Affair however was notable as the first ever Australian-produced television soap opera to air in that country.
It was also the second regular Australian-produced dramatic television series of any kind, with previous locally produced drama consisting of religious series The House on the Corner. At this time the only other drama content produced locally was televised plays broadcast by the ABC.
Contents
Synopsis
Autumn Affair centre's around the love lives of a middle aged widow, Julia Parrish, and her daughter, Meg.
Cast
Muriel Steinbeck as Julia Parrish
Queenie Ashton as Granny Bishop
Leonard Bullen as Steve Meadows
Janette Craig as Meg Parrish
John Juson as Mark
Diana Perryman as Julie
Owen Weingott as Larry Muir
Production
The program was conceived from a conversation between radio writer Richard Lane and Len Mauger, station manager of Seven Network. There was a quarter hour gap in the schedule and Mauger was keen to develop use of video tape for drama. It was decided to make a 15-minute show using skills developed by those involved in The House on the Corner.
Originally conceived under the title Julia: An Early Autumn Affair, the title was later shortened to just Autumn Affair.
Many of the actors and writers involved in the production had previously worked on radio soap opera, and were inexperienced with television acting.
Episodes were fifteen minutes in duration, recorded as kinescopes in black and white, and were screened Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 8:45 AM. a part of the station's Today breakfast program.
There were three main conditions for the production:
it had to be written, produced and acted by Australians
it had to stand on its own as entertainment and compare with American imports
it had to be sold to other stations at comparable rates to the American imports.
The series went into production without a sponsor, as the station ATN7 wanted to gain experience in television drama production.
The cast comprised just six regulars; the story focused on Julia (Muriel Steinbeck), a widow in a love triangle situation with two men.
Filmink later wrote that "Steinbeck was... a natural choice to play the lead... She laughed, loved and suffered with jolly good decency – the quintessential Muriel Steinbeck part." Ailsa McPherson, who worked on the show as script assistant, wrote "for performance quality Autumn Affair relied heavily on Muriel Steinbeck's professionalism and her photographic memory. She had a prodigious capacity to remember lines and to be almost word perfect after reading them aloud only three or so times. It saved the episode on a good many occasions."
Later screenings
In 1964 HSV-7 Melbourne repeated the series, along with early 1960s Australian soap opera The Story of Peter Grey. In 1964 CTC-7 in Canberra screened the series along with Peter Grey, the station having not been in operation during the original run of the series. CTC kept the repeats on their schedule into 1966.