Blue Hills (radio serial)

Hilda (Nellie Lamport) serves tea to Dr and Mrs Gordon, seated, (Queenie Ashton and Gordon Grimsdale) and Peter Frobisher (Max Osbiston). (ABC Blue Hills publicity photograph from 1949)

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Blue Hills, written by Gwen Meredith, was an Australian radio serial about the lives of families in a typical Australian country town called Tanimbla. "Blue Hills" itself was the residence of the town’s doctor.

Blue Hills was broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) for 27 years, from 28 February 1949 to 30 September 1976. It ran for a total of 5,795 episodes, and was at one time the world's longest-running radio serial. Each episode lasted 15 minutes.

Actors

Actors who played long-running roles in Blue Hills included:

• Queenie Ashton
• Grant Bailey
• Philippa Baker
• Barbara Brunton
• Neva Carr Glyn
• Myrna Dodd
• Gordon Grimsdale
• Nellie Lamport
• Ethel Lang
• Nigel Lovell
• Max Osbiston
• Gwen Plumb
• Callum Ross
• June Salter
• Zachary Sykes
• Rod Taylor

Signature tune

The famous opening signature tune was taken from a short orchestral piece called Pastorale by the British composer Ronald Hanmer. Until Hanmer moved to Australia in 1975, he had no idea that his work had been used by the ABC and had become so famous in Australia (although few Australians could have identified its composer). He later re-worked this short piece into a longer orchestral work titled Blue Hills Rhapsody, which he recorded with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra.

See also

• The Archers — the present 'world's longest running soap opera' (its 15,000th episode was broadcast in 2006).

External links

• Listen to the theme from 'Blue Hills' on australianscreen online
• The theme from 'Blue Hills' was added to the National Film and Sound Archive's Sounds of Australia Registry in 2008