Sun-Herald (Sydney, NSW : 1953 - 1954), Sunday 15 August 1954, page 23


Dad And Dave, And

Then The War

When he

returned to Sydney after his year with Sorlie he found it impossible to get back into radio, but his experience with his beloved sideshow people stood him in good stead and he picked up a job as a side-show spruiker at the Royal

Easter Show.

There are many Sydneysiders who have never heard Peter Finch intoning Shakespeare on a West End stage, but they have had the rarer experience of hearing Australia's future greatest actor yelling above the Show-grounds babble: "Come on! Come on! Seven hoops a bob! Come and have a deener's worth! Come on!"

Gradually he worked his way back into radio, finally signing a contract with 2GB B.S.A. Players, which turned out 15-minute commercial serials like a factory: serials with names like "The Purple Spider," Sulieman Strikes Again," "Master

of the Gobi Desert," "Leaves From Another Woman's Diary." Sometimes 36 15minute episodes were made each week; often it was necessary to work until 2 a.m. to get a shipment away

to Melbourne.

Once poor Sulieman found himself in a doublebarred cell, surrounded by squads of police, and the poor script writer was to be seen wandering around the Sydney bars hopelessly moaning, "I can't get him out! I can't get him out!" But revelation came, as in radio it always did, and Sulieman was able to escape by sending an S.O.S. to his gang by means of a small portable radio transmitter which he had concealed in his hair!

It was about this time, too, that Finch made his first film, the small part of a country back in "Dad and Dave Come to Town."

"It had wonderful, naive slapstick lines," Finch says, chuckling. "I had gone to see Dad (Bert Bailey) to ask him for his daughter's hand and he had the idea I was trying to buy a sheepdog, and I can still remember old Bert looking at me through his whiskers and saying: 'Well, you'll 'have to chuck 'or in the dip every now an' then, son; she gets a bit dirty after a while.' " It

looked finally as if Finch was off at last to a steady and lucrative career. He had a contract with the A.B.C. and more work than he could fit in: he was already being noticed both as a juvenile lead and as a promising character actor. But the course of his destiny took another unexpected swerve. War broke out and the bottom fell out of acting.

And the rising young actor Peter Finch found himself as Gunner NN 2605 (specialist group 2 sailing in the Queen Mary for the Middle East with the 2/1 Light AA. Regiment. Aboard the liner he organised the ship's concerts. ("In the Red Sea, with three shows a night, the toughest work I've ever done in show business"), but he is still dry

"Come on! Have a deener's worth!" he was

shouting to the Showground crowds.

paraging about his military

service.

"I had a singularly undis-tinguished career as a gunner, he admits. "The unit didn't get into very much in the Middle East, and then we were shipped back to Darwin where, to offset the boredom, I began to organise a little battery stage

show."

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