Adventure Island & The Magic Circle Club
Vale Godfrey Philipp (1936-2011) - creator of these iconic Australian children's TV shows from the 1960s
[A version of this piece was originally published in The Drum, June 2011.]
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A friend alerted me to a two-line obituary announcing a memorial service in Fitzroy for a ‘Godfrey Pettersson Philipp’.
Is this our Godfrey Philipp? he asked. We are both sometimes-researchers and forever-fans of the classic 1960s Australian children’s television series Adventure Island.
I rang a man at the funeral home. He rang someone else, then rang back and said, Actually, yes it is.
Back in 1964, in the middle of the swinging sixties, Godfrey Philipp -- the brilliant and flamboyant producer-director whose credits included the top-rating pop show Go – gathered together a young and hip team to create an innovative television series for children called The Magic Circle Club. His collaborators included writer and journalist John Michael Howson (The Mavis Bramston Show, Ray Taylor Tonight), a young Bruce Rowlands from the rock band The Strangers, and a host of actors, dancers and special guests.
Two years later they moved across to the ABC and began production of the immensely popular high camp fantasy, Adventure Island, which screened nationally every weekday afternoon from the thick of the Menzies era right through to the Whitlam years.
Philipp and his team combined elements of fairytale, pantomime, vaudeville, cabaret and soap opera, together with a glittering set, original songs, an extraordinary and loving attention to detail and a host of camera tricks to create an exciting and enchanting world for little children.
Each afternoon the opening sequence would draw us in – through a map of Australia, along a path through a glittering forest, into a house, and then into the pages of a story-book where the characters from Diddley-Dum Diddley were frozen, waiting for us to animate them with our attention.
It is said that cinema creates an ‘I’ and television creates a ‘we’. From the intimacy of our living-rooms, we bonded across the space of the nation as we became emotionally embedded in this special inner world. The characters would catch our eyes, sneak up to the camera and whisper something just to us, and they were naughty just like we were. It delighted every one of our senses over and over. Made us laugh and cry and think.
As Howson described it when I interviewed him about the program, before Magic Circle and Adventure Island, children were generally regarded as ‘little consumers’, with most existing programs – like the Tarax Show -- produced via corporate sponsorship. Children’s television was also considered a place where old has-been actors went just before retiring. Low-status, low funding. With Adventure Island, however, and with Godfrey at the helm, everyone wanted a part. The cream of sixties show business were guests at one time or another, including Toni Lamonde as Miss Flickers and Mary Hardy as Wanda Wise.
However, when I produced a radio documentary about Adventure Island with ABC’s Claudia Taranto back in 1991, the Logie winning series was a black hole in the cultural memory.
At the time, Baby Boomers dominated media production and twenty-five years earlier they were too old to watch it themselves, and too young to have had children watching it. It was considered unimportant and a little daggy, like much that was of peculiar interest to those of us who were children in the sixties and adolescents in the seventies (the original ‘Generation X’, before the marketeers co-opted the term and used it for a later and more visible generation).
And it was just children’s television, after all.
Nevertheless, when we went on Triple J to talk about our documentary, the switchboard lit up the second we played the opening theme song. ‘I thought I must have dreamed that program,’ was a common response.
At the ABC we had to beg to be able to view episodes at the archives at Gore Hill. It took a few false starts to find a suitable week’s worth, because most of the footage, stored in untouched canisters, was beginning to rot.
The series was axed by ABC management in 1972, at the height of its national popularity, despite bags of mail from traumatized children, despite questions in parliament.
Some speculate that it was Philipp’s involvement with the Australian Labor Party (who at the time had been in opposition for twenty-three consecutive years) that prompted the bureaucrats at the National Broadcaster to ditch the program.
Indeed, Philipp directed the unforgettable 1972 launch of the ALP’s ‘It’s Time’ campaign at the St Kilda Town Hall. How fitting that he was the one to orchestrate that magical moment when Gough Whitlam and Lionel Murphy entered through the back doors and strode through a euphoric crowd to make history.
As to why the Labor government didn’t make any moves to save the series when they won the election, it may have been that the reformists of the time had a low opinion of fantasy and frou frou, believing that children needed a more wholesome diet of reality-based and educational programming.
It’s also likely that the deciding factor was simple penny-pinching. Sesame Street had begun in 1969, and it was cheaper to import it, complete with American accents and idiom, than it was to invest in a local product and support local writers and actors. They also ran repeats of Adventure Island for as long as they could, until 1976 when colour television consigned it to the storage vaults.
For cast members, the axing of Adventure Island was like losing a dear friend. For Philipp it was like a betrayal from the industry to which he had given his all.
Later, Philipp devised a new series called Rainbow. It won a Logie award for Excellence in Children’s television in 1979, but was never picked up by any network and, as far as I know, has never been screened.
I’m glad that Sumner House, the Brotherhood of St Laurence residential care place where Godfrey lived in obscurity for the past ten years of his life, took the trouble to organise a small memorial gathering. I’m glad that Clown was able to attend, and Percy Panda; and Bruce Rowlands to play some of the old songs on the piano. I’m sorry Fester Fumble wasn’t alive to be there, and that Mrs Flowerpots was unwell, and that Liza and Nancy were too far away. Although I’m sure they were all there in spirit.
If I close my eyes I can be there too, and feel the room hush, as they play the video of the closing Friday song:
It’s time to say goodbye, goodbye,
and time is just the reason why…
Think of us, a little bit,
‘cause we’ll be thinking of you.