Easy Terms

Easy Terms is a 1966 television play broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. It was an episode of the anthology Australian Playhouse and was written by Pat Flower. Australian TV drama was relatively rare at the time.[1]

"Easy Terms"
Australian Playhouse episode
Episode no.Season 1
Episode 27
Teleplay byPat Flower
Original air date24 October 1966
Running time30 mins

Plot

For the smallest weekly payment, Miranda Vane can buy peace, truth and status, only to discove the hard stell stems from husband and salesman alike.[2]

Cast
  • Gerda Nicholson as Miranda Vane
  • Edward Hepple as the salesman
  • Frederick Parslow as Miranda's businessman husband

Production

Flower originally wrote this and The Lace Counter for Robin Lovejoy's lunchtime theatre program. This program folded before Lovejoy even read them but once he did he recommended them to the ABC and Crowley became the main contributing writer to season one of Australian Playhouse.[3] The play was shot in Melbourne with sets designed by Trevor Ling.[4]

Reception

The Sydney Morning Herald critic accused it and Marleen of having "hollow nothingness."[5]

The Sydney Morning Herald said "This was Miss Flower's sixth or seventh in the series — even the faithful have lost count — and it only increased the wonder at how her scripts are accepted so frequently. Set in an "op" art flat crammed with sterile bad taste, the characters were creatures who could not exist. They endlessly gave smart chatter such as: "Kiddies are only an afterthought" . . "My husband may pop off with a popsie" . . . "We can make our own earth here in Heaven." A sermon on the folly of selling one's soul for trashy possessions may have lurked there — may have, but who wants a sermon in a playhouse?"[6]

The Canberra Times said "there cannot be very many viewers left these days for the Australian Playhouse series on ABC, which has rapidly become The Pat Flower Show... Easy Terms makes a grand total for the authoress of nine out of twenty-eight, which is over thirty-two per cent. No one, I am sure, would be even inclined to comment and everyone would wish her luck if they were becoming more and more entertaining, but a play like Easy Terms, a creaking study of possession-culture "fantacised", was surely more suitable fora select audience in experimental Jane St. Theatre, Kensington, than for general entertainment."[7]

The Age called it a "plotless, formless hunk of tripe" in which "the actors went on just mouthing words."[8]

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See also
  • List of television plays broadcast on Australian Broadcasting Corporation (1960s)

References
  1. Vagg, Stephen (18 February 2019). "60 Australian TV Plays of the 1950s & '60s". Filmink.
  2. "TV Guide". Sydney Morning Herald. 24 October 1966. p. 13.
  3. The bulletin, John Haynes and J.F. Archibald, 1880, retrieved 23 March 2019
  4. "Drama's flat setting pop art". The Age. 20 October 1966. p. 29.
  5. "The Sydney Morning Herald - Google News Archive Search". news.google.com. Retrieved 12 June 2017.
  6. "On Television". Sydney Morning Herald. 25 October 1966. p. 14.
  7. "TELEVISION That silent report". The Canberra Times. 41 (11, 520). Australian Capital Territory, Australia. 28 October 1966. p. 15. Retrieved 25 February 2019 – via National Library of Australia.
  8. Monitor (29 October 1966). "The President on TV". The Age. p. 23.


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