Australian Women's Weekly (1933 - 1982), Wednesday 5 December 1956, page 48


TELEVISION PARADE

• The mystery man of television must surely

be John Godson, Channel 9 station announcer.

JOHN is the man who

makes all the station announcements and helps Chuck Faulkner with the newsreel commentaries. He also reads a number of highly expensive com-

mercials.

He is a pleasant an-nouncer with an attractive, relaxed voice.

However, so far, John has never appeared "on camera." Many people have rung the Channel 9 studios asking "Who's the man with the nice voice?"

John entered TV via radio. Aged 22, he has worked on three country radio stations, 2RG Griffith, 2CA Canberra, and 2AD Armidale.

He was teed-up for a trip to America, where he had arranged to spend some months studying TV with NBC, when he decided to ask TCN for a camera test.

John found himself on the TCN payroll shortly after-wards, and cancelled the American trip.

THE perennially topical

issue of whether private enterprise should run the high-ways is the topic of a live panel discussion on Channel 2 on Thursday, November 29.

The panel includes Mr. Frank Eyre, who will be chair-man of the discussion; Pro-fessor A. J. Francis, Professor of Civil Engineering at Mel-bourne University; Mr. D. V. Darwin, Chairman of the Vic-torian Country Roads Board; Mr. W. H. Talbot, of the Road Transport Association; and Mr. P. D. Phillips, an eminent member of the Vic-torian Bar.

IN another of Peter Scott's

delightful wild-life series, "Look," on Channel 2, on Friday, November 30, at 8.30 p.m., viewers go to the land of the flamingo. Escort is Wal-ter Higham, pioneer in film-ing wild life. He shows a film of flamingoes he took in the Camargue, a wild waste region of marshes and lagoons near the south coast of

France.

ON Wednesday, December

5, Channel 9 viewers who tune in at 8.30 p.m. will see "A Line in the Snow." This film, which is produced by Douglas Fairbanks, jun., deals with the Canadian Mounties' unofficial motto, "Get your man, no matter

what . . ."

Two Mounties track down a murderer who has eluded one of them for five years. The other Mountie is a rookie newly assigned from a desk job. They catch their man, and get involved in a snow-

storm.

They are forced to take shelter with a fur-trapper. In the events that follow the rookie graduates into the ranks of a fully fledged Mountie . . . and he gets his man.

SCENE FROM "A VERY BIG MAN," a drama of the people who live off the boxing ring. The film featured in Celebrity Playhouse on Channel 9 on Friday, November 30, at 8 p.m. This picture shows the fight manager (Pat O'Brien) giving his boxing discovery (Hugh O'Brian) a

tip before his last fight.

CHANNEL 9's filming of

"The World in Crisis"

last Wednesday night certainly caused a stir all over Sydney. Most people agreed it was a marvellous record of the world's trouble spots, but many disagreed violently with the sentiments expressed in it criticising Anglo-French in-tervention in the Middle East.

The film was, of course, American designed for domes-tic consumption in the United States, hence the eulogistic references to American foreign policy, which has been de-scribed less flatteringly in this country on a number of recent occasions.

PAT MONDEL, compere

producer of Channel 9's "Fun Farm," tells me that she has had more than 3000 letters from children since she started her show a few weeks ago.

Pat has quite a problem with her show, which is slanted towards children in the up-to-

12 bracket.

She must include in her show material suitable for the four to six year old kids, and also something that will keep the interest of the older chil-dren.

She averages only two or three hours' sleep a night, and her husband—well, he's in the electronic side of television

himself, so he doesn't get much time for sleep, either.

MOST of the film pro-

grammes shown on Aus-tralian television come from America or the United King-

dom.

Sooner or later all these programmes are reviewed by "Variety," the newspaper of

"show biz."

Here are excerpts about a few of the programmes you are seeing now.

WAR IN THE AIR (Chan nel 2): "This British effort is a worthwhile one, both as a historic document, and a video entertainment in the sense of a thought-provoking and in-terest-holding telefilm presen-

tation."

ROBIN HOOD (Channel 9 ) : "Punchy perforrnances, direction, and writing ably capture the flavor of medieval England. Camerawork and production is good."

FATHER KNOWS BEST (Channel 9) : "With the ease of long practice (Robert) Young and Miss (Jane) Wyatt slip into their parental roles with good effect. (Billy) Grey and Miss (Denise) Alexander make the agonies of adolescent love a poignant thing within

script limits."

WHEN television first

arrived at King's Cross it was watched by a number of children standing outside radio-television shops on old

butter-boxes.

Now the children take along

their special tele-boxes, elab-orate affairs that look as if they had Papa hard at work for a couple of nights making

them.

I'm told there's one with a hood for wet weather, too.