TV That Wasn’t: Billion Dollar Baby

In the mid-1970s, one of the biggest shows on television was the US action series The Six Million Dollar Man. The tales of the artificially-enhanced Steve Austin (Lee Majors) was a hit with audiences and topped the Australian ratings in 1975.

The popularity of The Six Million Dollar Man and the arrival of its spin-off, The Bionic Woman, led the Reg Grundy Organisation to propose a send-up of the genre with a pilot — Billion Dollar Baby — for the Nine Network.

The comedy was to star Celebrity Squares host Jimmy Hannan as a swinging bachelor tasked with looking after the female-looking robot, known as SP721 or Robyn the Robot.

Model Cynthia Morisey, a former graphic artist who had competed in beauty pageants in Western Australia, beat 300 other hopefuls to play the part of Robyn, a robot who presents as human but possesses a bionic memory and a lack of emotions.

Also cast in the pilot was actor Louis Wishart as the professor who assembled Robyn.

The half-hour pilot was produced at the studios of GTV9, Melbourne, in mid-1976. It was hoped that the pilot would be accepted to spinoff to a 26-episode series.

Billion Dollar Baby was one of several new projects being considered by the Nine Network, with other titles including courtroom drama Case For The Defence, starring John Hamblin, and serial dramas The Sullivans and The Young Doctors.

By the end of 1976, Nine had The Sullivans and The Young Doctors in production and on the air — and both series went on to run for six years, succeeding in Australia and overseas. Nine had completed production of Case For The Defence but held off on airing it, with Nine’s Sydney station TCN9 offloading it to rival TEN10 in Sydney for airing in 1978. In Melbourne, it was years before GTV9 belatedly aired it in a non-ratings period in the early 1980s.

Billion Dollar Baby was nowhere to be seen. It was a double blow for Hannan, whose Celebrity Squares had just been cancelled after a 15-month run while Nine had Billion Dollar Baby under consideration. Morisey went on to appear in the comedy special Benny Hill Down Under in 1977.

Source: TV Times, 12 June 1976, 31 July 1976. The Age, 26 August 1976, 17 November 1983. Sydney Morning Herald, 29 August 1976.