Colin Free

Colin Free (1 September 1925–26 May 1996) was an award-winning Australian writer best known for his work on television.

Biography

Colin Free was born on 1 September 1925 in Sydney, Australia and died on 26 May 1996 in Goulburn, Australia.[1]

At the start of his career, Free wrote for the theatre, notably Hamlet in Shadow, which was performed in Sydney in 1954 with a cast featuring Moya O'Sullivan.[2]

By the mid-1960s, he concentrated on writing teleplays for the BBC and the ABC,[3] as well as for radio.[4] He was most frequently associated with ABC-TV where he developed the original treatment for the popular soap opera Bellbird, created the adventure series Delta, and served as script editor on the historical miniseries Rush and Ben Hall.

Assessment

Leslie Rees called him:

An author of remarkable facility and flexibility of mind" who in his stage plays "showed a rich gift for words in dramatic and lyrical contiguity, a derisive sense of characterization, a volatile and inventive calling-up of scene both past and present, and what Alexander Archdale described as “‘Pirandellian ingenuity”—all this without quite being able to draw his reins together and spin the horse past the winning-post, meanwhile murmuring in its ear something really striking. Similar qualities of flair, energy, but inadequate clearness of line marked some of Free’s ever-ranging, elusive contributions to a further A.B.C. series, Delta, illustrating the investigations of a young group of itinerant scientists into dubious practices around the countryside. But in the short bucolic comedy, A Walk Among the Wheenies, he was entirely successful.[5]

Selected awards

Selected credits

References
  1. Austlit. "Colin Free: (author/organisation) | AustLit: Discover Australian Stories". www.austlit.edu.au. Retrieved 10 October 2017.
  2. "Hamlet Story Re-told In New Play". Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 - 1954). 24 April 1954. p. 17. Retrieved 10 October 2017.
  3. Connolly, Richard (2011). "ABC Radio: Culture and the Spoken Word" (PDF). johntranter.com. Retrieved 10 October 2017.
  4. "Classic soap Flashback: Bellbird". ATV Today. 31 January 2015. Retrieved 10 October 2017.
  5. Rees, Leslie (1987). Australian drama, 1970-1985 : a historical and critical survey. Angus & Robertson Publishers. p. 384-385.



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