Australian Women's Weekly (1933 - 1982), Wednesday 5 November 1958, page 66


TELEVISION PARADE

• Breakfast TV is the big news in Australian television this week. Its champion is Sydney's Channel 7, which from 7 to 9 each morning presents a programme of music, news, and

Australia's first TV serial.

BREAKFAST-TIME

TV had to come. I am quite happy to accept it as something that is there if I want it. When that will be I don't know.

Ever had a party and faced the clean-up the next morning feeling rather jaded? Most of ATN'S breakfast-time pro-gramme so far is literally a hand-out of that morning after-the-night-before feeling.

More than half of the two-hour session is a tape recording of previous per-formances of "Sydney To-

night."

lt is too much for me to

pull the blinds down, shutting out the early morning sun-shine, and in the required gloom turn on the set and find Mr. Keith Walshe and others singing and dancing.

I may be peculiar, but ladies in full warpaint and baretopped evening dresses at 7.30 a.m. wiggling their way through seductive songs are not my favorite breakfast en-

tertainment.

My idea of a TV breakfast session goes with an electronic home where there's a TV screen set in the wall of every

room.

All you see in the morning is a clock face with the hands moving on in their inexorable way, and a background of music guaranteed to soothe those pre-coffee nerves.

I also want an emotionless voice to say, "Today's maxi-mum temperature will be so and so, and there will be a thunderstorm at 5 p.m.," so that I know exactly what to wear, and whether to take my umbrella.

For the mothers I'd have another ghost voice that says,

"Sit stiff," "Eat your por-

ridge," "Brush your teeth," "Clean your shoes," and other

suitable remarks.

To get back to TV as it is in the Breakfast Session, a pat on the back for the Toppanos, who appear with their own live show at 8.30 a.m. and provide some pleasant music and painless chatter.

The puppet puppy that

looks after the music and made its first shy appearance is sure to be popular with toddlers,

too.

At 8.45 the session ends with a 15-minute episode of the first Australian-made TV serial, "Autumn Affair."

"Autumn Affair" stars

ABOVE: Muriel Steinbeck and John Huson in "Autumn Affair," the first all-Austra-lian TV serial, big feature of Sydney's Channel 7 TV Breakfast' Session. Right: Janette Craig, who plays Muriel Steinbeck's daughter.

actress Muriel Steinbeck, a TV personality. She is photo-genic and looks like a real

woman.

She makes the heroine, an effortless writer of popular novels, come charmingly to

By NAN MUSGROVE

life, even in the face of the in-toned, dreary description that she is "43, in the early autumn

of life."

In the first episode of the serial Miss Steinbeck, 15 years a widow, welcomed back her steady admirer (John Huson) from a trip abroad.

Viewers were also treated to

a glimpse of her TV daughter, Miss Janette Craig.

I get the impression from the first episode that Miss Steinbeck is nervously on edge,

and from the look in her

steady's eye I think that be-fore long she is going to accuse him, with some justification, of being more interested in her daughter than in her.

All good stuff. I think "Autumn Affair," which is well produced, will be very popular, if anyone has time

to see it at 8.45 a.m.

Australia's other TV chan-nels, from what I am told most emphatically, are sitting

out the Breakfast Session happy to discover second-hand the results of Channel 7's ex-periment.

THE Shirley Temple Story-

book (Sydney Channel 7, Melbourne Channel 9, Sunday evenings once

month) has been a disap-pointment to me. I didn't like the first one, "The Nightin-gale," and I liked the last one, "Dick Whittington and his Cat," even less.

I think they are wonderful Christmas pantomime stuff, and the kids up to eight or nine might love them, but a Sunday night family entertain-ment they are a bit much.

I'm sure Beaver, who dis-appears from the 7.30 time-slot once a month for this Storybook, would find it all too corny for his taste, too young altogether. Personally I much prefer Beaver's enter-tainment to Shirley's.

The name is a misnomer, for Shirley Temple appears only briefly as an unruffled hostess to introduce the show.

Grown up, she is very pretty and would enhance any of new fairytales.

Shirley's three children are making their show-business debut in her Christmas edition of the Storybook in America.

The children, Susan, 10, Shirley's daughter by her for-mer husband, John Agate, Charles Black, jun., 6, and Lori Black, 3, are village to« in a Christmas show about "Mother Goose" characters.

EVERYONE must be a bit

tired of the puns on the title

of the popular TV show "Have Gun, Will Travel" (Channel

9, Tuesdays, 9.30 p.m.), but I saw one the other day speci-ally for us girls. It was "Have Cook-book, Will Marry". Actually it was the title of a printed cookery book. A

ready-made proposal to hand

to your beau?