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Marianne — The Story of the Toymaker of Tiefencastel — Restored Video

10 Feb 2026

“Marianne” is the last of the seven “Christmas Pantomimes” produced at GTV9, Melbourne, between 1957 and 1963. Subtitled “The Story of the Toymaker of Tiefencastel” it is a fictional story set in a Swiss mountain village. It was by far the most ambitious of these Christmas fantasies, with a number of professional actors and singers and two dance companies. The story takes place in two completely different “realms” — the town square of Tiefencastel, and the magical, miniature world of Toyland.

Marianne was written and produced by Denzil Howson in September 1963, on the eve of his departure from GTV9 [1]. Perhaps with the knowledge that this would be the last of these annual productions, the staff of GTV9 delivered excellence in all areas for this final one.

The following (undated) notes about “Marianne” were written by Denzil Howson probably in the 1980s or 1990s, for an audience who by that stage would not have been familiar with all the names of performers. When referring to the Channel Nine “staffer”, Denzil is of course talking about himself.

Some Notes on
“Marianne and the Toymaker of Tiefencastel”

This production we believe is unique in the annals of early television in Australia.

It is a relic from the days when all Australian TV stations were devoting regular air-time to live children’s programmes emanating from their own studios.

Two years after the production of this programme, live children’s TV produced by individual stations had finished.

“Marianne” was shown nationally throughout Australia and was the last of a series of “End of the Year” pantomimes which we produced at Channel Nine. We produced seven in all, and they finished when the Channel Nine “staffer” who wrote and produced them mainly to satisfy his own frustrated dramatic urge, left the station, and no-one else was silly enough to assume the task.

“Marianne” has some wonderful performances from some very talented people — the incredible Ron Blaskett (and Gerry Gee), Frank Wilson (who had worked with Chaplin in London), Patti McGrath (Newton), Rosie Sturgess, Frank Rich, Ormonde Douglas (leading man with J.C. Williamson for a number of years), Addie Black, Joff Ellen, Norman Swain (Billy Bouncer from 3KZ), Denise Drysdale, Tony Sheldon, Cheryl Gray (Samantha Sang), Margot Sheridan (composer/pianist), Laurie Wilson (virtuoso organist), the Channel Nine Senior and Junior Choirs (many of the members of the Senior Choir had come from the Victorian State Opera), the Channel Nine Junior Ballet and the May Downs Dancers.

The programme was made in 1963, at a time when many people at Channel Nine were ready and willing to spend hours rehearsing something special like this purely for the enjoyment of being in it.

I don’t think that would happen today.

The Story of “Marianne” in Brief

Ron Blaskett and Gerry Gee arrive in the Swiss mountain village of Tiefencastel to visit the village toymaker, Fritz Hoffle. The Mayor of Tiefencastel arrives with his wife and his daughter, Marianne. He tells Hoffle that unless he repairs Marianne’s favourite doll by the next morning, he shall be turned out of his shop. Later that evening while Ron and Gerry are looking in the toyshop window, something magical happens and they are transported to Toyland. The next morning the Mayor and his family are overjoyed to find the doll repaired. All is forgiven and the story of Fritz Hoffle passes into local legend.

Watch the Restored Video (53 minutes)

Further Notes About the Production

  • The production features Tarax Show regulars: Norman Swain (“Uncle Norman”), Ron Blaskett, Gerry Gee, Patti McGrath, Joff Ellen and Susan-Gaye Anderson.

  • Other professional actors in the cast include: Frank Wilson, Frank Rich, Ormonde Douglas and Addie Black.

  • Dancers and chorus were: the May Downs Dancers, the Junior Nines Ballet, the Royal Octet, the GTV9 Junior Choir and the GTV9 Senior Male Chorus.

You can find a detailed synopsis, cast and crew lists and photo gallery for “Marianne” in the Tarax Show Christmas Pantomimes section of this website.

  • There are four original songs with lyrics by Denzil Howson and music by Margot Sheridan.

  • Most of the songs were pre-recorded in the GTV9 sound studio (Studio 4). The actors and chorus mimed to the tape replay during videotaping.

  • Musical accompaniments, both pre-recorded and “live” during videotaping, were provided by Margot Sheridan (piano), Laurie Wilson (Hammond Organ) and Billy Hunter (drums).

A full list of original songs by Denzil Howson and Margot Sheridan, together with lyrics and scores, can be found in the post The Songs of Denzil Howson and Margot Sheridan on this website.

  • The production showcases the considerable talents and capabilities present by the early 1960s at “Television City”, as GTV9 was known. These included: makeup department, costume department, scenery design and construction workshop, production music library, musicians, singers, dancers, comedians, actors and experienced technical staff.

  • “Marianne” was recorded to videotape on Saturday 7th and Saturday 14th September 1963 in Studio One at GTV9, Melbourne. (The production had originally been scheduled for Saturday 7th and Sunday 8th September, but restrictions imposed by the Child Welfare Department meant spreading the production over two weekends.)

  • Each production day was carefully planned in advance with a timetabled schedule for makeup and costume calls, camera rehearsals, and videotaping.

  • By videotaping over successive weekends, two completely different studio sets were constructed and utilised: (1) the Tiefencastel town square and toyshop, and (2) Toyland, which included the Court of King Cole, the Shoemaker’s shop, and the Toyland workshop.

  • Recording to videotape enabled a blending of material recorded with different studio setups. This can be seen in the three “time transitions” that occur in the town square. Firstly the historical flashback when Gerry explains to Uncle Norman “In those days this village square of Tiefencastel looked a little different to what it does today…”. The second example is when Ron and Gerry are looking in the toyshop window and are magically transported into Toyland. The third example is when Marianne and Gerry reprise the “Wishing” song and the historical flashback returns to the present day with Ron, Gerry and Uncle Norman by the statue, while the “Wishing” music track continues across the change of scene. Each of these would have involved replaying previously recorded videotape footage as new material was being recorded. In 1963 there was not yet a way to electronically edit videotape.

  • Some original documentation from this production has been retained in Denzil Howson’s personal collection. This includes the Producer’s Script, call sheets and prop lists.

The Long Road to Restoring Marianne

This is a summary of the restoration process for “Marianne”, which began in 2013.

For anyone interested in more technical detail, please refer to the 39 blog posts on Paul Howson’s “Film Restoration Diary” published between June 2014 and November 2019, starting with this post:

Specific posts are referenced below where they are relevant.

The source materials

Although “Marianne” was recorded to videotape [2], and was broadcast at the time from videotape, what has survived to this day is a copy on 16mm film, known as a “kine”. Kines have a much poorer picture and sound quality than the original videotape. In particular, the GTV9 film recording system captured only about 300 lines of vertical resolution.

For a detailed technical description of the GTV9 film recording system see:

In addition to the 16mm copy, there was also in Denzil Howson’s collection an original ¼-inch reel-to-reel tape (or first-generation copy thereof) from the pre-recording session of the songs in Studio 4. Unlike the film’s optical soundtrack with its multiple deficiencies, this tape retained excellent audio quality, with a wide frequency range.

Scanning the film

The “Marianne” kine was scanned in 2013 at Cutting Edge in Brisbane, at a resolution of “2K” (2048 x 1556 pixels). The following posts on the Film Restoration Diary document the scanning process and assessments of the result:

Jitter and stabilisation

The film scan had noticeable “jitter” — undesirable vertical and horizontal movement and distortion of the film frames. This was contributed to by both the “Spirit Datacine” scanner at Cutting Edge and mechanical vibration within the original GTV9 film recording system. The scanner also introduced “splice bumps” wherever there were splices in the film.

A custom software system was designed and coded which stabilised the jitter and repaired the splice bumps. A detailed technical description of this work can be found in the seven-part series “Home-Grown Jitter Stabilisation” in the Film Restoration Diary:

The choice of final resolution and why

Although the film kine was scanned at “2K” resolution (2048 x 1556 pixels), the television frames recorded to film had a vertical resolution of less than 300 “lines” and a horizontal resolution not much better. Hence it made sense to downsample the video to a resolution much closer to the level of detail actually recorded on the film.

The decision was made to do the final downsampling of the video from 2K as part of the stabilisation process.

Initially the target was PAL SD (720 x 576 pixels) for DVD release.

However, as time went on, it became obvious that DVDs were rapidly being replaced by streaming or downloadable video and that the “non-square pixel” compromise used for PAL SD and DVDs was out of date. So the stabilisation was run a second time with a new target resolution of 576 x 768 pixels.

Note that the copy presented here is hosted on Vimeo which has downsampled it to 540p — still more than enough to capture the detail available on the film kine.

Posts on the Film Restoration Diary that are relevant to this decision are:

Removing dust artefacts (“Dust Busting”)

Film inevitably suffers from dust and scratches. Automated dust-removal software called “Loki” was used to clean up some of these dust marks and to reduce the film grain without affecting sharpness unduly. This resulted in more of a “videotape” appearance. See:

Grading

Studio cameras of that era [3] had “camera control units” operated by one or more “technical directors” whose job it was to continuously monitor and adjust black and white levels and gamma for each camera. This was a kind of real-time grading system. Consequently, the tonality of the picture is generally correct and consistent.

However, there were places where some additional grading of the scan was done in Final Cut Pro to optimise the image quality.

Audio cleanup and equalisation

Considerable time was spent cleaning up artefacts in the scanned optical soundtrack. These included:

  • 50Hz hum (including sometimes up to the 5th or 6th harmonic).

  • Other kinds of constant frequency sounds, perhaps from ventilation systems or other machinery.

  • Unwanted background noises, thumps, film splice glitches, etc.

Equalisation was also required to compensate somewhat for the limited bandwidth of optical 16mm soundtracks. See:

Integration of the songs from reel-to-reel tape

While working on repair of the optical soundtrack scan, the idea arose of replacing some of the songs with the much higher quality versions available on the original reel-to-reel tape. This turned out to be practical and effective, although the taped songs required subtle re-timing together with restricting their bandwidth to around 6kHz to make an acceptable match with the film soundtrack.

Footnotes

[1] By the early 1960s, GTV9 had grown rapidly into a major enterprise and the new owners of the station had brought about a cultural shift with more emphasis on profits and less on creativity and local production. Denzil was aware that it was only a matter of time before live, original childrens’ programming would be phased out, as it was a year later when The Tarax Show was axed and replaced by re-runs of American cartoons.

You can read more about the history of the Tarax Show in the posts by Denzil Howson, Pioneering Children’s Television in 1957, and Ron Blaskett, Gerry Gee and The Tarax Show, on this website.

[2] Video tape in the form of Ampex 2-inch “quad” machines arrived at GTV9 in 1959. From that point on, each of the Christmas Pantomimes was pre-recorded in segments on videotape for later broadcast from videotape.

[3] The video equipment installed at GTV9 in 1956 was made by Pye in the UK. It was all based on vacuum tubes. The cameras used expensive “image orthicon” camera tubes. Transistors and “solid state” electronics was still about a decade away.