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This series, presented in a fortnightly children's television slot between 5
and 6pm (often sharing the hour with Children's Newsreel, BBC, 1950-59), began
in a decade of teenage rebels and rock'n'roll hysteria. In this context, the
ongoing narrative serialisation of the everyday lives of the Appleyard family
(the first of its kind in 'toddlers television'), seems in retrospect a peculiar
turn, especially during a tumultuous period when teenagers still seemed to be
regarded as children before they suddenly developed into adults.
To the majority of 1950s viewers (those few lucky enough to be in range of
the then limited broadcast signals), this domestic account of an average (that
is, upper-middle-class) Home Counties family must have appeared a little tame
and uneventful; although the constant close observation of a fictitious TV
family, instalment by instalment, may have made The Appleyards an addictive
entertainment in itself at a time when the first really successful British TV
soap, The Grove Family (BBC, 1954-57), was still a couple of years off.
In the series' early years, Frederick Piper's Mr Appleyard was a finely
spoken, if somewhat remote character; Constance Fraser made a slight, but
warm-hearted, Mrs Appleyard; and David Edwards and Maureen Davis gave a brief
display of young adult spirit as the teenage offspring John and Janet. Young
Tommy (Derek Rowe) and Margaret (Patricia Wilson) represented the tiny tots of
the family.
Producer-director Naomi Capon, who helmed the serial's early years, also
worked on more typical BBC fare for family audiences in serials such as
The Black Tulip (1956), from Alexandre Dumas; The Black Arrow (1958), from
Robert Louis Stevenson; and The Lost King (1958), from Rafael Sabatini.
The Appleyards is a particularly engaging example of trusting a children's
soap serial to tell itself, in a form simplified to suit its assumed audience,
seemingly pointing up the interests of some hypothetical child of the 1950s. The
family children remain concentrated and unaffected, while the family group as a
whole avoids becoming a mere showcase of 1950s (family values) British
convention.
In the beginning, the programme was transmitted live, and therefore no
episodes from this period are known to exist. Later episodes were telerecorded
onto tape but, apparently, were almost all wiped. Although the series ended in
1957, a seasonal special episode, Christmas with the Appleyards (tx.
24/12/1960), followed some three years later, in a very different TV context.
Tise Vahimagi
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Complete episode (27:55)
