Shell Presents

1 9 5 9 – 1 9 6 0 (Australia)
13 x 60/75 minute episodes

As the title suggests, this Australian television anthology series was funded by major corporate sponsorship from the Shell Oil Company.

Running from April 1959 to March 1960, the series consisted of 13 live television plays, with stories alternating between adapted international scripts and brand-new, original Australian stories. The production was split between Sydney’s ATN-7 and Melbourne’s GTV-9.

At the time, Australia lacked the infrastructure to simultaneously broadcast episodes nationwide.

For the episodes performed live at ATN-7 Sydney, a kinescope recording was physically flown to Melbourne to be broadcast a few weeks later, with the arrangement reversed for productions broadcast from GTV-9 in Melbourne.

Key episodes of the anthology included ‘They Were Big, They Were Blue, They Were Beautiful’ following two lovable rogues just released from prison who become innocently entagled in a kidnapping plot; ‘Pardon Miss Westcott’, the first musical comedy specially written for Australian television; ‘Thunder of Silence’  starring a young John Meillon in a localised adaptation of an American play about a middle-aged couple who take in a European refugee and his daughter; ‘Reflections in Dark Glasses’,  a psychological thriller written as a star vehicle for Muriel Steinbeck; ‘No Picnic Tomorrow’, presenting a romance between a newly arrived Greek immigrant and an Anglo-Australian woman; and ‘Johnny Belinda’, set in post-war Cape Breton, where a a doctor’s efforts to tutor a deaf/mute woman are undermined when she is raped, and the resulting pregnancy causes a scandal.

Episodes

Johnny Belinda | Other People’s Houses | Tragedy in a Temporary Town | They Were Big, They Were Blue, They Were Beautiful | The Big Day | Thunder of Silence | Ruth | Tongue of Silver | Rope | Pardon Miss Westcott | No Picnic Tomorrow | Reflections in Dark Glasses | Man in a Blue Vase