Showrunners, Shot Callers and Flying Typewriters

In April 1963, television producer Joyce Belfrage ended her four-year term at the ABC with a mighty crash. Having heard that Assistant General Manager Clem Semmler and the Television Producer's Assessment Committee were demoting her for a second time, she had had enough. Fuelled with rage for the unjust treatment she felt she had received at the hands of ‘pedantic’, ‘po-faced’ bureaucrats, Joyce left her Forbes Street office to drown her sorrows and think on her dilemma. She was torn between her loyalty to the organization's public service ideals and a growing vexation with the compromised production cultures that arose during the ABC's difficult transition to television. Returning to her office, Joyce stalked past her secretary and loudly declared she was finally ‘fed up’. Spotting the defective typewriter she had long been asking to have replaced, her frustrations spilled over. Joyce pulled down the cumbersome machine and heaved it out the window. Gloriously smashing onto the laneway below, it was a bitter reminder of her unrequited appeals for better conditions and the progressive diminution of her authority. In a final act of defiance, she took out her new crimson lipstick and scrawled a large, expletive-laden farewell to the ABC on the wall. ‘There, that looks better now’, she declared, and began to pack her things.

Not long after Joyce's rebellious departure, another female television producer was disrupting the status quo at the ABC. In 1963, Therése Denny returned from a long sojourn at the BBC. A highly regarded television producer, her agenda was to produce a series of documentary critiques of Australian society and culture. As one of the few producers invited to join the exclusive exchange programme between the two broadcasters, Therése Denny was a very different person from the inexperienced young woman who left the ABC in 1949, exasperated by the constant rejection of her requests to produce. Returning forewarned and forearmed, Therése used her BBC status ‘to sustain her authority within a production workplace that she knew to be insular, insecure and resistant to women in authority’. The conspicuous combination of her expertise and her gender proved troubling for many in the ABC establishment and many programmers were concerned about Therése's disruptive confidence.