Underplayed Gems

Shell Presents (1959)

Shell Presents poster
Genre
drama television series
Country
Australia
Length
13 episodes
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How it feels

This is an Australian anthology TV series from the late 1950s. It presented a collection of separate plays, mostly dramas, with one live musical set in colonial times. The series was sponsored by Shell and won a Logie award for TV Highlight of 1959.

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What happens

Shell Presents is an early attempt at Australian television drama, being an umbrella title for several different productions. It debuted on 4 April 1959, and aired on ATN-7 and GTV-9, who split production of plays for the series between them. It was an anthology series, each program being a self-contained play for television. The series won a Logie award in 1960 for TV Highlight of 1959. As the title suggests, it was sponsored by Shell. It was described as "a very big deal for the station: major institutional sponsorship from international companies for locally produced drama." It would be followed by The General Motors Hour. Though it usually presented straight drama, it also presented a live musical production titled Pardon Miss Westcott, set in colonial-era Australia. A total of 13 productions aired under the Shell Presents banner from 1959 to 1960. There is little information about this series online, however, some of the productions are held at the National Film and Sound Archive. ATN-7 originally announced that the second episode of Shell Presents would be an adaptation of Children of the Sun by Morris West but that was not made. The first drama from GTV-9 in Melbourne was meant to be a production of Arthur Miller's All My Sons. Some of the productions were based on overseas plays (such as Thunder of Silence), while some were locally written, such as The Big Day (by Sydney author John Ford). An article in the 30 October 1960 edition of the Sydney Morning Herald called Australian TV is growing up, while not mentioning it by name, nevertheless provides some information on the series. The article said that the production of "modestly unpretentious" soap opera Autumn Affair provided some of the experience needed to produce Shell Presents productions like Johnny Belinda, and listed the cost to produce Pardon Miss Westcott at £5,000 (a considerable budget at the time). It mentions that work on a live drama production of the era started a month to six weeks before telecast, and that a video-tape of the final rehearsal was made so cast and camera crew could correct last minute faults. Five of the episodes may have been shown in Perth during 1960 on station TVW-7. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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