Bellbird

1 9 6 7 - 1 9 7 7 (Australia)
1508 x 15 minute episodes
53 x 60 minute episodes
134 x 30 minute episodes

Bellbird followed the lives of a community of country folk for more than ten years and became Australia's first successful soap opera.  Australian radio had a rural soap since 1944 (The Lawsons, later called Blue Hills) but Bellbird, made by the ABC, went to air in 1967 and built up a devoted following in country regions all over Australia

Like Britain's radio serial The Archers (launched in 1950), Bellbird depicted the lives of simple country folk (in the fictional town that gave the show its title) and had an educational slant, with mini-lectures on new farming techniques and such, slipped into the characters conversations.

The main couple, Olive and Joe Turner, were played by Moira Carleton and Terry Norris, who came to represent the average Australian bloke (and turned to politics after stardom in Cop Shop). Other popular characters included local policeman Constable Des Davies (Dennis Miller), his wife Fiona (Gerda Nicolson), and nasty stock and station agent John Quinney (Maurie Fields). Elspeth Ballantyne, better known as Meg Morris in Prisoner, played young Laura Chandler during the show's early years.

Bellbird  originally screened for 15 minutes at tea-time four nights a week (Monday through Thursday) as a lead-in to the 7:00pm news. During the final stages of the program one 60 minute episode was screened each week (episodes 1509 though 1562) before the series finally switched to 30 minutes for the final 134 episodes.

Life was usually simple for the town's residents but Bellbird was not without incident. In May 1968 actor Robin Ramsay received a lucrative offer to work in Japan and opted to leave the series. Because of the various entanglements of the character, it was decided the only way to write out the show's nasty real estate agent, Charlie Cousens, at such short notice was to kill him off. When Charlie fell from the top of a wheat silo, the TV Times letters page was busier than ever before. This incident remains the show's most famous moment, and the skilfully assembled sequence has been repeated many times over the years in various Australian television retrospectives.

The series was taped in the ABC's Melbourne studios in Elsternwick, with some location work filmed  in the Victorian country town of Daylesford. James Davern, who was to become the creator of A Country Practice, directed the first episode, and was closely involved as script editor and then executive producer for seven years after that.

A feature film version of the series was produced in 1971. Imaginatively titled Country Town, the film was the brainchild of two of the show's stars, Terry McDermott and Gary Gray. The film had the town gripped by a severe drought when young reporter Philip Henderson (Gerard Maguire) arrived to stir up old tensions. The town's people eventually rallied together to hold a fund-raising gymkhana, and a pub gathering finally broke into celebrations as the much-needed rain arrived.