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form y separately published work icon Tilting at Windmills single work   film/TV  
Issue Details: First known date: 1974... 1974 Tilting at Windmills
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'In "Tilting at Windmills" Abigail plays Helen, a bright and breezy salesgirl who is attracted to Leonard Teale. Teale plays a slightly mad poet called John Stewart, who prefers retreat into his pagination, because reality i too depressing. He's a free spirit, who finds any form of restriction oppressive. But he's not a successful poet, in fact he hasn't sold any work at all. The sole outcome of years of poetry writing is a bundle of publishers' rejection slips. So he decides to make a living by selling television sets, which is how he meets Helen and falls in love with her. That's where things begin to become complicated. John, although he's a free spirit, is not a free agent. After 22 years of a soul-destroying marriage, he's waiting for a divorce. In the meantime he's been living with a girl called Laura, who longs for the on the third finger of her left hand; she longs for respectability. And she becomes resentful when she feels John is drifting away from her.'

Source:

'Abigail and Teale in Television Play', Australian Women's Weekly, 24 April 1974, p.15.

Notes

  • Television play.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • Melbourne, Victoria,: Australian Broadcasting Commission , 1974 .
      Extent: 55min.p.
      Series: form y separately published work icon This Love Affair Melbourne : ABC Television , 1974 Z1865503 1974 series - publisher film/TV

      Anthology series.

      This Love Affair was series of plays looking at new relationships all written by Australian writers. This Love Affair is sometimes called a trilogy, but contemporary newspapers and television guides state that it was a series of thirteen individual plays.

      So far, the broadcast details have been traced for the first twelve episodes, although the available information is, in some cases, limited to broadcast date, with no cast, crew, or author details.

      The reviewer for the Australian Women's Weekly noted that the series:

      began by looking moderately promising, and then settled to hours of harrowing for Sunday night viewers foolish enough to watch.

      Generally the stories were lull of misunderstanding women and insensitive men, or vice versa. The acting was awful and the entertainment value could be compared to those ghastly endured experiences that Pollyannas describe as 'character building.'

      ('Let's Have Some Happiness', Australian Women's Weekly, 31 July 1974, p.10).

      The series ran between 14 April and at least June 1974.

      (Further, this series was itself the first of 'a trilogy of anthologies on love and was followed by Out of Love (a quartet of plays all written by Brian Faull) looking at marriage breakdowns and the divorce in a trilogy called Separate Ways'.)

      Although some scant information is available about This Love Affair and Out of Love, the digitised script at the National Archive suggests strongly that Romeril's episode was originally considered for the series Time for Love which included his The Best of Mates.

             Number in series: 2
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Last amended 25 Nov 2014 14:50:19
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