A Chronological History of Australian Soap

[Carrie Fairchild]

I was a bit confused when it turned out to be just a movie because it had the feel of a pilot episode (no pun intended) and I kinda expected it to continue.

It was a pilot for a potential series (International Airport) but it wasn't picked up, so they put it out as a TV movie.

 

[Carrie Fairchild]

Arcade - 1980

While Skyways was short-lived and mostly forgotten, Arcade was short-lived and remembered for all the wrong reasons. Much like Eldorado in the UK just over a decade later, Arcade became a byword for expensive failure in the Australian TV industry for years after it's brief run.

In 1979, Rupert Murdoch bought the 0-10 Network. The new management were keen to increase the drama output and also wanted to launch a new soap as it's flagship series for the rebrand of the channel from 0-10 to Network Ten in January 1980. There were plans for a Melbourne horse racing drama called Centaur but Ten passed on it and started looking at an earlier outline for a drama set in a Sydney shopping arcade. Alarm bells should have rung when it was revealed that network execs wrote the initial ideas for the series on the back of napkins during a boozy lunch. Further alarm bells should have rung when one of the ideas being considered was having a massage parlour with a peephole in the arcade, that allowed the neighbouring photography shop to film porn films.

In an attempt to recreate the glory days of Number 96, Bill Harmon was brought in as special consultant along with writers David Sale and Johnny Whyte. The fact that the team had produced nothing but duds since 96 (The Unisexers and a handful of failed pilots for 96 spinoffs) didn't seem to faze Ten. The decision was made to go in hard. Arcade would be stripped five nights a week at 7pm in an attempt to unseat ratings powerhouses The Sullivans on Nine and Willesee at Seven on Seven. As Ten wanted the show on air by January to coincide with the rebrand, they decided to forego making a pilot, such was the rush to get it on the air.

In the absence of any pilot or preview clips for the press, the Arcade team began to hype the series as best they could and the press seemed to eat it up. Executive producer Peter Benardos claimed that "Arcade will be the biggest and most ambitious show ever made in the history of television". TV Week helped with the talent search as Bill Harmon stated that they were seeking "actors with limited experience" to appear alongside the more experienced cast. Ten spent the equivalent of $4m in today's money on what would be the most elaborate and expensive set ever built for an Australian TV series at the time.

After months of reading and hearing about the show, it finally premiered in a 90 minute special in January 1980. Mike Dorsey of Number 96 and variety stars Lorrae Desmond and Syd Heylen were among the familiar faces on the arcade whose denizens included an alcoholic dry cleaner, a Chinese family with a newly arrived long lost daughter, polar opposite sisters who ran the bookstore and a sporting goods shop run by couple where the wife was convinced that her recently returned brother in law was a hitchhiker killer.

Arcade flopped straight out of the gate. The shows it was hoping to topple actually increased their ratings after it launched, with Arcade trailing last in it's timeslot, behind even the low rated ABC news. In addition to it's ratings woes, the show struggled with production issues. The decision to hire inexperienced actors proved fatal, as laughable scenes where an actress could be seen reading directly from her script on the table in front of her made it to air. To give the arcade an authentic feel, they hired hordes of extras to play shoppers who would wander between the stores. This only resulted in high noise levels on set with viewers sometimes struggling to make out what was being said over the noise of so many people moving around. Bill Harmon was only there to get the show off the ground and departed after the opening episode, leaving Johnny Whyte in charge. Actors and crew felt that his scripts were dated & a subsequent disagreement about the writing led to David Sale quitting.

There were talks of opening a bar/nightclub in the arcade, in order to get characters into a pub type setting but it never happened as Ten quickly shut up shop after just six weeks on air and after only 30 of the 49 produced episodes had aired. "The biggest and most ambitious show ever made in the history of television" was no more but would be mentioned for years to come as an example of overhyped TV fiasco.

 

[Willie Oleson]

Not that every successful soap opera had sprung from the idea of "man! have we got a story to tell!" but the development of Arcade seemed to be only rooted in greed, ignorance and impatience.

To give the arcade an authentic feel, they hired hordes of extras to play shoppers who would wander between the stores. This only resulted in high noise levels on set with viewers sometimes struggling to make out what was being said over the noise of so many people moving around

One bad decision after another, it's almost tragically funny.

 

[Mel O'Drama]

Arcade was short-lived and remembered for all the wrong reasons. Much like Eldorado in the UK just over a decade later, Arcade became a byword for expensive failure in the Australian TV industry for years after it's brief run.

One bad decision after another, it's almost tragically funny.

I've never head of Arcade, but the premise and all the teething troubles immediately make me think of Victoria Wood's spoof soap, The Mall (which, as well as being a loose sequel to Vic's earlier Crossroads satire Acorn Antiques, is also partly based upon... Eldorado):

 

[Alison Carr]

Regarding Airport based soaps, I actually posted elsewhere about this only last week but there was the Sky One series Mile High, it ran for 39 episode sand I think was very good.

 

[Carrie Fairchild]

I've never head of Arcade, but the premise and all the teething troubles immediately make me think of Victoria Wood's spoof soap, The Mall (which, as well as being a loose sequel to Vic's earlier Crossroads satire Acorn Antiques, is also partly based upon... Eldorado):

I love The Mall. The chocolatier lady is based on Trish from Eldorado.

Arcade has a lot in common with Eldorado - the ill advised rush to get it on air, the equally ill advised decision to mix experienced actors with amateurs and the sound problems. It also shares DNA with Albion Market which coming five years later, proved that there still wasn't much good drama to be mined from a shopping precinct setting.

 

[Carrie Fairchild]

Punishment - 1981

With Prisoner a success internationally and it's original US broadcaster KTLA-5 willing to financially back more of the same, Grundy's started work on a male version of the show. Punishment followed the lives of the staff and inmates of Longridge Prison in New South Wales. Grundy's dream team Reg Watson and Alan Coleman would be responsible for creating and directing respectively, with $85,000 being spent on building elaborate double storey interior sets. Punishment was unusual at the time in that Grundy's were producing it first with an eye on international sales, with sales to Australian network coming second (Paradise Beach and Breakers would take similar approaches years later). As it happened, Prisoner's network Ten bought the Australian rights although the pilot did air first in the US on KTLA-5.

Much of the action was based (a bit too closely it would appear) on the original Prisoner format. Barry Crocker played straight laced Governor Alan Smith whose officers included sympathetic Mike Rogers (Ross Thompson) and bent screw Jack Hudson (Ken Wayne), who were basically the Meg and Vinegar Tits of Punishment. Fresh off his success in Mad Max, Mel Gibson added a bit of star quality to proceedings as prisoner Rick Munro. He departed after the pilot, leaving behind repeat escapee Robbo (the Doreen of the show, played by George Spartels), lifelong inmate Larry (the male Lizzie played by Mike Preston) and top dog Arthur (Jon Ewing) who was supposed to be the male Bea. Wanting to draw in the female Prisoner audience, a number of wives and girlfriends dropped in and out played by the likes of Kris McQuade, Anne Haddy and Cornelia Frances.

Bruce Best came onboard as producer after the pilot and realised that no clear plans had been made for storylines beyond the initial episode. Faced with writing for a bunch of Prisoner character clones and getting little or no feedback from Grundy's or Ten, Best decided to reinvent the show as a grittier drama in order to distance itself a bit from it's predecessor. He also threw soap convention out the window by filming with single cameras rather than the standard multi camera technique. Ten clearly weren't enamoured with the end result as they premiered the series in a Friday night death slot in February 1981 before puling it off the air after only 3 episodes. The final 23 episodes weren't aired until November during the non ratings period. Bruce Best has admitted in hindsight that the show may have been just too gritty while star Michael Smith pondered that maybe it didn't work "because the audience knew they were watching a clone". In addition to this, he raised a good question about the fact that Ten were airing three hours of prison drama a week "How many nights do you really want to sit at home watching people in prison?".

 

[Carrie Fairchild]

Holiday Island - 1981 to 1982

After the high profile axing and subsequent press coverage of Hotel Story in 1977, Crawford's and Ten felt that there was still an appetite for a glamorous Love Boat-esque soap opera. Going back to the drawing board, they came up with Holiday Island. Set on a tropical island in the Whitsundays on the Great Barrier Reef, it would feature a regular cast who would be joined by a rotation of guest stars, who would drop in and out to face a mix of romance and peril including cyclones, hostage situations and kidnappings.

The pilot was filmed to be filmed on Moreton Island near Brisbane, not exactly the tropical Whitsundays but close enough. On arrival, the cast and crew were faced with non-stop rain, resulting in them spending most of their time in the bar waiting for the torrents to end while Hector Crawford rang continually from Melbourne asking for updates on how much the delays were costing him. Due to lack of infrastructure in Queensland at the time, Ten decided to use their news crew from Brisbane to shoot the pilot. They didn't factor in that the news crew only knew how to shoot news and had no experience of the technical side of shooting a drama. When the rain finally stopped and with some semi tropical establishing shots cobbled together by the inexperienced film crew, filming returned to Ten's Nunawading studios in Melbourne where $300,000 had been spent building the outdoor hotel set including a swimming pool, where the rest of the series would be shot. While the greyness of a Melbourne winter may have suited Prisoner (which was also shot in Nunawading), it didn't add much to the tropical feel of Holiday Island. Directors tried to shoot around the weather, using canopies and awnings to hide the bleak Melbourne sky but breath could still be seen coming from actor's mouths as they stood bikini clad in the freezing cold. The surreal nature of a tropical show being filmed in Melbourne was balked at by the newspapers, which producer Gwenda Marsh believed was the beginning of the show's troubles as the public would never buy into the show as the concept was deemed to be too unreal.

Amid already unfavourable coverage, Holiday Island premiered in June 1981. It opened with the show's resident villain Jason Scott (Steven Grives) returning to the island and his abandoned wife Angela (Caz Lederman) as he fled gambling debts. His brother Neil (Nick Tate) was romancing Angela in his absence and running the resort, managing a staff including ferryman Wally (Tom Oliver), whose trademark of smacking the bikini clad bottoms of the women onboard wouldn't fly on today's TV, and all rounders Zack (Peter Mochrie) and Lisa (Alyson Best) who mucked in with everything from weddings, lifesaving and surf contests. Emerging from the wreckage of Skyways was Brian James and Gaynor Martin. James' Skyways character George was transferred over from the airport but Gaynor Martin played a new character, Kylie. Overseeing the various dramas was island owner Emily Muldoon (Pat Kennedy), whose wealth became a target for the scheming Jason. Aside from the ongoing dramas and romantic entanglements of the regular cast, guest stars including Rebecca Gilling, Ray Meagher and Rowena Wallace dropped in to play out storylines involving witchcraft, bodybuilding contests and sunken Portuguese treasure. Rowena Wallace remembers "It was absolutely insane but the people I felt most sorry for were the extras. Those poor girls in bikinis turning blue, purple and rigid as we watched. It was so ridiculous, it was surreal. And the scripts were dreadful. We all knew it as never going to work".

Initial reviews included "Horror Day On Iceland" and "Arcade With Palm Trees" but as time went on, despite the various production failings, critical response wasn't as harsh. It also enjoyed some success in overseas sales with it airing in a handful of European countries. It made no odds though, as ratings in Australia were consistently low and after 64 episodes, Holiday Island closed for business. As soon as the end was announced, production stopped immediately, meaning storylines were left unresolved. The show ended with Emily dead and bad boy Jason in line to inherit her fortune. Holiday Island lives on today on our screens as the hotel set was eventually revived a few years after the show ended, redesigned to become the Lassiter's set in Neighbours.

 

[Willie Oleson]

Fresh off his success in Mad Max, Mel Gibson added a bit of star quality to proceedings as prisoner Rick Munro.

It's the OZ from OZ! I'd love to watch an episode (or more).

Due to lack of infrastructure in Queensland at the time, Ten decided to use their news crew from Brisbane to shoot the pilot.

Haha, wonderful.

Can't wait to read what the book has to say about the crème de la crème of Australian soap opera, Sons & Daughters.

 

[Carrie Fairchild]

It's the OZ from OZ! I'd love to watch an episode (or more).

All there seems to be online is a few brief clips from this nostalgia show. Starting at 1 minute in, it covers Holiday Island, the aforementioned reading lines directly from the script scene in Arcade and a bit of Punishment.

 

[Willie Oleson]

I want the Holiday Island on DVD! Actually, I want everything in this thread on DVD.

 

[Carrie Fairchild]

A Country Practice - 1981 to 1994

​

A Country Practice began it's life in 1979, as In General Practice, a script written by Bellbird's James Davern for a script competition run by Ten. After a tussle between Ten and the Writer's Guild about who was best suited to judge such a contest, the Guild won out and had representation on the judging panel, leading to two arty one off plays taking first and second prize with the more mainstream In General Practice coming third. Ten had a three month option on the script but never picked it up, leading to Davern shopping it to rival network Seven. The Seven boss in Sydney was behind it but other state managers had reservations about the lack of cliffhangers and unlikeable characters. The Sydney support got it over the line and the show was commissioned for 52 episodes.

Now called A Country Practice, the show premiered during a non ratings period in November 1981. It followed the lives of the residents of the fictional Wandin Valley, a small town in rural New South Wales. The practice in question was run by Dr Terence Elliott (Shane Porteous) and newcomer Dr Simon Bowen (Grant Dodwell) alongside receptionist Shirley (Arcade survivor Lorrae Desmond) who was in a relationship with the town cop Frank (Brian Wenzel) and was the mother of the town vet Vicky (Penny Cook). Molly (Anne Tenney) and Brendan Jones (Shane Withington) were the young couple swapping their city life for the farm while a trio of older characters provided comic relief - busybody Esme (Joyce Jacobs), RSL Club manager Cookie (another Arcade escapee Syd Heylen) and his best mate Bob (Gordon Piper).

A Country Practice followed the same template set by Cop Shop with standalone stories playing out across the two episodes per week, while the regular's personal lives provided the serialised drama. What set it apart from other shows at the time was the focus on gentle drama and social issues as opposed to bedhopping and violence. The formula worked and within two years of being on the air, it was Australia's number one show. Not that the lack of salaciousness meant there wasn't a surplus of drama. Unlucky in love Dr Elliott blamed himself for his young son's death and hit the bottle to deal with it. His heroin addict daughter Sophie (Katrina Sedgwick) would die from AIDS while his socialite wife Rowena (Carmen Duncan, playing another estranged wife) and son CK (Peter Phelps) left him for Europe. Romance blossomed between Frank & Shirley and Simon & Vicki, while Australia wept in 1985 as Molly succumbed to cancer as she watched Brendan and daughter Chloe flying a kite.

As with every long running series, cast turnover was inevitable but headlines like "A Country Crisis" still began circulating in the likes of TV Soap after Anne Tenney, Penny Cook, Grant Dodwell and Shane Withington all left in quick succession in 1985/86 and insiders began predicting the show's demise. Cook and Dodwell's Vicky and Simon were actually due to be spun off into a medical sitcom set in Sydney but James Davern didn't have great faith in spinoffs being successful and the plan was scrapped. The prophets of doom were proven wrong about the show's days being numbered as a raft of new characters came along and slotted right into the action, becoming some of the show's most memorable stars, including Matron Maggie (Joan Sydney), ranger Cathy (Kate Raison), nurse Lucy (Georgie Parker) and Luke (Matt Day), another stray teen that Frank and Shirley took under their wing.

As the end of 1991 came around, the show celebrated it's tenth anniversary. A Country Practice was now the longest running drama on Australian TV at the time and was still pulling in awards after a decade on air. However, Seven were getting antsy about ratings and age demographics and decided to write out older comedy characters Bob and Cookie. On top of that, Lorrae Desmond, decided to leave the show. With three original cast members gone within the space of a few months in 1992, producers tried again to fill the gaps with new characters. However, by mid 1993, Seven decided that the show was to end. The final episode aired in November 1993, twelve years after it's debut, with Wandin Valley being razed to the ground in a bushfire. When it ended, A Country Practice held the record for longest running Australian drama ever (12 years, although Number 96, The Sullivans and The Young Doctors surpassed it in numbers of episodes).

The end, however, was not the end. Having originally passed on the show over a decade earlier, Ten decided that they wanted to pluck it from cancellation and breathe new life into the concept (which they had done to great success with Neighbours a few years prior). The new A Country Practice debuted in 1994 but it was a pale imitation of the original. Amidst the new cast including Jane Hall and Vince Colosimo, only three stars crossed over from the original - Joyce Jacobs, Joan Sydney and Andrew Blackman. The emphasis shifted away from social issues and comedy to affairs and bedhopping, while the change in location (it was now shot in Victoria) and complete lack of references to the absent characters from the original, proved discombobulating for viewers. It was soon shunted out of primetime to a 5.30pm slot on Saturdays before the axe fell again, after only 30 episodes. The show is still highly regarded today and is often referenced as a highlight in Australian TV history. It also enjoyed successful international sales, airing in Europe and Africa. As is de rigueur in the TV industry, there were rumours of a reboot in 2018, with Fremantle (the company that rebooted Prisoner as Wentworth) attached to the project. To date, these have remained just rumours, with no official word on anything going into production.

 

[Mel O'Drama]

Australia wept in 1985 as Molly succumbed to cancer as she watched Brendan and daughter Chloe flying a kite.

I remember this sticking in my mind when I read about ACP in a book about soaps around 1988. A while later, the first episodes I recorded when trying to get into the series happened to be this two-parter. I barely knew the characters and it still reduced me to a blubbering wreck.

I could only bring myself to re-watch it once. It was the day I failed my driving test and I was feeling maudlin anyway, so it fitted the bill perfectly.

 

[Willie Oleson]

I wonder if I would like A Country Practice. Maybe it's my subconscious (and not too logical) connection with James Herriot, a tv series that I didn't like when I was young (because I hated all animal-centered TV series).

 

[Carrie Fairchild]

I wonder if I would like A Country Practice. Maybe it's my subconscious (and not too logical) connection with James Herriot, a tv series that I didn't like when I was young (because I hated all animal-centered TV series).

My recollections of it are minimal so I wouldn't be able to give an accurate recommendation. In my head, the drama was a bit gentler than most soaps, so I was actually surprised to read that issues driven plots were it's thing.

 

[AndyB2008]

Punishment - 1981

With Prisoner a success internationally and it's original US broadcaster KTLA-5 willing to financially back more of the same, Grundy's started work on a male version of the show. Punishment followed the lives of the staff and inmates of Longridge Prison in New South Wales. Grundy's dream team Reg Watson and Alan Coleman would be responsible for creating and directing respectively, with $85,000 being spent on building elaborate double storey interior sets. Punishment was unusual at the time in that Grundy's were producing it first with an eye on international sales, with sales to Australian network coming second (Paradise Beach and Breakers would take similar approaches years later). As it happened, Prisoner's network Ten bought the Australian rights although the pilot did air first in the US on KTLA-5.

Much of the action was based (a bit too closely it would appear) on the original Prisoner format. Barry Crocker played straight laced Governor Alan Smith whose officers included sympathetic Mike Rogers (Ross Thompson) and bent screw Jack Hudson (Ken Wayne), who were basically the Meg and Vinegar Tits of Punishment. Fresh off his success in Mad Max, Mel Gibson added a bit of star quality to proceedings as prisoner Rick Munro. He departed after the pilot, leaving behind repeat escapee Robbo (the Doreen of the show, played by George Spartels), lifelong inmate Larry (the male Lizzie played by Mike Preston) and top dog Arthur (Jon Ewing) who was supposed to be the male Bea. Wanting to draw in the female Prisoner audience, a number of wives and girlfriends dropped in and out played by the likes of Kris McQuade, Anne Haddy and Cornelia Frances.

Bruce Best came onboard as producer after the pilot and realised that no clear plans had been made for storylines beyond the initial episode. Faced with writing for a bunch of Prisoner character clones and getting little or no feedback from Grundy's or Ten, Best decided to reinvent the show as a grittier drama in order to distance itself a bit from it's predecessor. He also threw soap convention out the window by filming with single cameras rather than the standard multi camera technique. Ten clearly weren't enamoured with the end result as they premiered the series in a Friday night death slot in February 1981 before puling it off the air after only 3 episodes. The final 23 episodes weren't aired until November during the non ratings period. Bruce Best has admitted in hindsight that the show may have been just too gritty while star Michael Smith pondered that maybe it didn't work "because the audience knew they were watching a clone". In addition to this, he raised a good question about the fact that Ten were airing three hours of prison drama a week "How many nights do you really want to sit at home watching people in prison?".

Interestingly George Spartels was later to appear in Neighbours alongside Elspeth Ballantyne during the 1992 revamp it had in Australia.

George had appeared in the early years of Prisoner as David O'Connell's friend Herbie.

 

[AndyB2008]

The Sullivans - 1976 to 1983

In 1976, Crawford were pitching a show about an undercover nun to Channel Nine. Unsurprisingly, Nine weren't exactly enamoured with the idea and told them they were looking for a family drama in the vein of US hit Little House On The Prairie. Crawford dug out a script about a family during wartime that Channel Seven had knocked back the year before (not the last time Seven would regret turning away a soap hit) and The Sullivans was born. The eponymous family lived in Melbourne and consisted of parents Dave and Grace and their four children - John, Tom, Terry and Kitty. The action began in 1939, with British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declaring war on Germany and followed the character's various trials and trauma from there.

Despite Nine being keen to get the show on air as soon as possible, it took six months to get it off the ground and it ended up premiering alongside the previously discussed poor relation The Young Doctors. While Grundy made no secret of Doctors' soapy aspirations, Crawford refused to sully it's production with such a term and called it a "meticulously researched period drama". The show was noted for it's attention to detail when it came to period set design and costumes. It also used newsreel footage to propel the story along and even shot some scenes in black and white. While much of the drama was derived from their home lives, they also recreated scenes of conflict in places including Crete, Palestine, Yugoslavia and North Africa. These were all shot in and around Melbourne (a single olive tree was shot around extensively to recreate Crete) with the exception of one trip to the Netherlands to films scenes for a week.

The heady mix of family drama and wartime conflict proved a winner for Nine and the show soon became the number one show in Australia, pulling in a haul of TV awards along the way. Lorraine Bayly, as matriarch Grace Sullivan, became the show's breakout star but by 1979 she was tiring of the slog of fame and the filming schedule and asked to be written out. To keep her onscreen for as long as possible, they filmed scenes before her departure that were slotted in over a six month period after she was gone (EastEnders did something similar a decade later to keep Dirty Den onscreen after Leslie Grantham's departure). Grace would appear periodically in scenes set in London where she had gone to care for presumed dead but newly returned, ex amnesiac son John (Andrew McFarlane had left the series for 18 months to make another series, his departure and return leading to TV movie The John Sullivan Story) Producers hoped that Bayly would change her mind and return but when she didn't, Grace was killed off in the Blitz.

There was much debate among the producers over the years about whether the show should continue after the war had ended. They decided that it would and that the show would time jump to the 1950's and focus on stories about the Korean War and the Snowy Mountains hydroelectric scheme. However, when Paul Cronin announced that he was leaving the show as patriarch Dave Sullivan, producers initially insisted the show would go on but later conceded defeat in the face of his impending departure and falling ratings and called time on the series. Unlike others that came before it, it wasn't thrown around the schedules in it's dying days and maintained it's place in the primetime schedule, bowing out with it's head held high in a feature length finale in early 1983. By the time it ended, well known actors including Belinda Giblin, Vivean Gray, Myra De Groot, Sam Neill, Sigrid Thornton and Kerry Armstrong had all done stints on the show. One regret of the producers was that they killed off too many of the regular cast, making it difficult to revisit the drama in years to come for TV movies and miniseries. In addition to it's super successful run in Australia, The Sullivans was the first Aussie soap success story overseas, airing in 30 countries and paving the way for the likes of Neighbours et al. Beginning a week apart back in 1976, The Sullivans and The Young Doctors both ended a few weeks apart in 1983. Their demise marked the end of Channel Nine's first and last successful soap operas. As we'll see, despite numerous attempts in the years that followed, Nine were never able to recapture their magic.

Ref the Channel Nine soaps later, they suffered primarily because Nine put them into competition with other soaps and drama.

For one example, the last Grundy/Nine soap we will see later with Anne Charleston and Maggie Millar was put into Knight Rider's slot of 7.30pm in Sydney and Melbourne against Sons and Daughters (from Grundy, and which was airing Ms Wallace's exit eps) and US series V, which Ten plugged in to grab the Knight Rider audience. (Depending on which city, it was either the short-lived weekly series or the mini series/The Final Battle.).

Nine Adelaide had said soap at 8.30pm due to SAD and even worse competition in The A-Team airing at 7.30pm. Unfortunately it meant it was up against films.

 

[Carrie Fairchild]

Sons and Daughters - 1982 to 1987/88

The most popular of the Aussie soaps on this forum, there's not a lot about this show that hasn't already been discussed over on the S&D superthread, so this post won't be too heavy on character or plot details as I think we know most of the story already. Grundy's were keen for another saga from Reg Watson, but exhausted from the slog of writing The Restless Years, The Young Doctors and Prisoner, Watson wasn't keen to commit to another long running serial. Instead, he came up with the opening concept of twins separated at birth (John & Angela) being unknowingly reunited 20 years later and falling in love, and handed it over to Restless Years writer Bevan Lee, to flesh it out with the help of writers Maureen Ann Moran, John Allsop and Ray Kolle (who would later create German soap Unter Uns for Grundy's). Lee stated that "Reg Watson basically delivered us a South American telenovela".

Sons and Daughters premiered in January 1982 amidst attention grabbing ads with taglines like "Brothers and sisters usually fight. These two are in love". The show also had a unique selling point of the action being set in both Sydney and Melbourne, meaning the age old issue of Sydney shows not rating well in Melbourne and Melbourne shows not rating well in Sydney, hopefully wouldn't be a problem. The ploy worked, as viewers tuned in and the show became an instant hit. It also quickly became evident who the breakout star was, as viewers worldwide fell in love with runaway mother turned scheming society snob Patricia "Pat The Rat" Hamilton. Rowena Wallace wasn't that keen on the role to begin with, stating that when she first auditioned, she thought it was "a boring role. A cardboard cut out, two dimensional society bitch. I wasn't excited about it at all and certainly didn't expect to get the part". When she did get the role, she realised it wouldn't work unless they rounded out the character and worked with the writers to turn Patricia into "someone everybody sort of knew. People would say to me, she's just like my mother, my wife, my daughter, my mother in law. There was something that the audience identified with in her".

Patricia's schemes, her feud with Fiona (Number 96's Pat McDonald) and her love triangle with David (Tom Richards) and Beryl (Leila Hayes) drove much of the early drama alongside a backdrop of business affairs, long lost children, presumed dead husbands, plane crashes and exploding wheelchairs.
As the show became more and more popular, new "sons and daughters" began entering the dramatic fray including Patricia's old flame Martin Healy (Paul Sonkkila) and his kids (including Brett Climo), the O'Brien family and Barbara Armstrong's (Cornelia Frances) extended clan including her brother Stephen Morell (Michael Long) and battleaxe mother Dee (Mary Ward). One controversial addition to the cast was Fiona's presumed dead son Terry (Andrew Clarke). For some reason, Bevan Lee had a bet with someone that he could turn a rapist into a hero in the space of ten weeks, so he wrote the storyline where Terry raped Jill (Kim Lewis) and subsequently set about getting the audience on Terry's side in the aftermath. Lee admits "it wasn't very politically correct but nevertheless, we got some great story possibilities out of it".

While the various dramas of the new and old characters' kept the masses entertained, it was the travails of Pat the Rat that continued to be the main attraction. So it came as a shock to fans in 1984, when Rowena Wallace announced that she as leaving the show. Wallace said "It wasn't just that the work was so hard...…..it was more the nature of the character. Patricia was always so manic, forever crying, one month an alcoholic, the next a drug addict....I just didn't have the energy to do it anymore". Knowing the character was too good to lose, writers sent Patricia off on the run to South America in 1985. Hiding out in Rio, she was the victim of a violent assault necessitating face altering plastic surgery, leaving the door open for Pat the Rat to return with a new face later on. In the meantime, producers tried to fill the superbitch void by signing up 70's soap siren Abigail to play Stephen's ex-wife from hell, Caroline Morell. The press and promos all hailed her as the show's glamorous new schemer "If you thought Pat was a Rat, you haven't seen anything yet. Tonight, Abigail makes her debut as Caroline - Super bitch!". Alas, "Caroline the Cat" as some press hailed her, was more of a pussycat than a tiger when compared to the woman whose shoes she was supposed to be filling. It wasn't until the following year, when Patricia re-emerged as Alison Carr (now played by Belinda Giblin) that the bitch factor was put back into the show. The fact that she sounded nothing like Rowena Wallace and was noticeably shorter than her raised some laughs among critics but the recast injected the show with a much needed (albeit temporary) ratings boost.

By the mid-80's, the show was suffering from the usual wear and tear of an ongoing soap. Many of the original cast had left for pastures new, including twins John (Peter Phelps) and Angela (Ally Fowler), Jill, all of the original younger Palmers (Lynn, Kevin and Susan) and Barbara (following a fiery car crash). After 600 episodes, Bevan Lee also handed over writing duties as he "was ready to go insane" while later addition Danny Roberts (who played Andy Green) was getting restless but despite being openly critical of the show, was kept on, such was his character's popularity. It's glory days behind it, Sons and Daughters was no longer being stripped across 4 nights a week and was repackaged as twice weekly hour long episodes. Now watching as a viewer rather than the writer, Bevan Lee could see that the show was losing it's way following the infamous 1986 cliffhanger where various characters were placed in peril after being bitten by a snake, kicked in the head by a horse and chased by a shark. Lee said "You utterly believed, in some strange shape or form, the human truth of S&D, at least for the first three and a half years. People believed it because it was almost like reading a novel. Other serials were patchwork, but we had this rich, ongoing saga. We downplayed the melodrama because if you believed everything these silly people were doing, it was bound to work". However, after the animal attack cliffhanger, he said "The audience gets to a point where they won't invest emotional energy in the show because they're always getting burnt".

In a last ditch attempt to revive the flagging series, producers harked back to it's telenovela-esque beginning with one of the show's wildest plot twists yet. The foundation was laid in an August 1986 TV Week cover story "Return of the Real Rat" where Rowena Wallace announced her interest in reprising her iconic role. Seven and Grundy's were keen too, but were afraid of tying themselves in knots trying to explain how Alison and Patricia were now co-existing, so they turned to original writer Bevan Lee to come up with a comeback plan in 1987. Promos were purposely vague in order to entice viewers who were wondering just how Pat would return. "The sparks are flying when Pat the Rat meets a tougher rat as Rowena Wallace reclaims the title of Superbitch". With nods to Prisoner, Rowena emerged as former sparring partner Beryl's prison cellmate Pamela, who turned out to be the long lost twin of Patricia aka Alison. The brief burst of publicity wasn't enough to turn the tide as the show was axed soon after the big reveal. Wallace later considered her return to be a bad career move, stating money and clouded judgement as a result of taking cortisone for her bad back, as the reasons she accepted the offer. As she was only contracted to return for 10 weeks, Rowena was long gone by the time the show wrapped up. Only four actors stayed the course for the full 6 years - Leila Hayes (Beryl), Pat McDonald (Fiona), Brian Blain (Gordon) and Ian Rawlings (Wayne). Now only airing once a week, the series drew to a close after 972 episodes in late 1987 / early 1988 (depending on which city you were in) with Fiona helping deliver twins at her boarding house, in a nod to the opening episode.

Gone but certainly not forgotten, Sons and Daughters has enjoyed a healthy afterlife. The concept has been remade 7 times to mixed success in countries including Sweden and Indonesia (it's German offshoot Verbotene Liebe was the most successful, running for 20 years). After it's initial run, S&D has been repeated continually, both internationally and in it's native Australia, where it's also been made available to stream on Seven's website in addition to it's DVD boxset releases. In an era of remakes, it remains to be seen whether the much loved series will emerge, Patricia style, with a new face for a new generation but we can only dream.

 

[AndyB2008]

Sons and Daughters - 1982 to 1987/88

The most popular of the Aussie soaps on this forum, there's not a lot about this show that hasn't already been discussed over on the S&D superthread, so this post won't be too heavy on character or plot details as I think we know most of the story already. Grundy's were keen for another saga from Reg Watson, but exhausted from the slog of writing The Restless Years, The Young Doctors and Prisoner, Watson wasn't keen to commit to another long running serial. Instead, he came up with the opening concept of twins separated at birth (John & Angela) being unknowingly reunited 20 years later and falling in love, and handed it over to Restless Years writer Bevan Lee, to flesh it out with the help of writers Maureen Ann Moran, John Allsop and Ray Kolle (who would later create German soap Unter Uns for Grundy's). Lee stated that "Reg Watson basically delivered us a South American telenovela".

Sons and Daughters premiered in January 1982 amidst attention grabbing ads with taglines like "Brothers and sisters usually fight. These two are in love". The show also had a unique selling point of the action being set in both Sydney and Melbourne, meaning the age old issue of Sydney shows not rating well in Melbourne and Melbourne shows not rating well in Sydney, hopefully wouldn't be a problem. The ploy worked, as viewers tuned in and the show became an instant hit. It also quickly became evident who the breakout star was, as viewers worldwide fell in love with runaway mother turned scheming society snob Patricia "Pat The Rat" Hamilton. Rowena Wallace wasn't that keen on the role to begin with, stating that when she first auditioned, she thought it was "a boring role. A cardboard cut out, two dimensional society bitch. I wasn't excited about it at all and certainly didn't expect to get the part". When she did get the role, she realised it wouldn't work unless they rounded out the character and worked with the writers to turn Patricia into "someone everybody sort of knew. People would say to me, she's just like my mother, my wife, my daughter, my mother in law. There was something that the audience identified with in her".

Patricia's schemes, her feud with Fiona (Number 96's Pat McDonald) and her love triangle with David (Tom Richards) and Beryl (Leila Hayes) drove much of the early drama alongside a backdrop of business affairs, long lost children, presumed dead husbands, plane crashes and exploding wheelchairs.
As the show became more and more popular, new "sons and daughters" began entering the dramatic fray including Patricia's old flame Martin Healy (Paul Sonkkila) and his kids (including Brett Climo), the O'Brien family and Barbara Armstrong's (Cornelia Frances) extended clan including her brother Stephen Morell (Michael Long) and battleaxe mother Dee (Mary Ward). One controversial addition to the cast was Fiona's presumed dead son Terry (Andrew Clarke). For some reason, Bevan Lee had a bet with someone that he could turn a rapist into a hero in the space of ten weeks, so he wrote the storyline where Terry raped Jill (Kim Lewis) and subsequently set about getting the audience on Terry's side in the aftermath. Lee admits "it wasn't very politically correct but nevertheless, we got some great story possibilities out of it".

While the various dramas of the new and old characters' kept the masses entertained, it was the travails of Pat the Rat that continued to be the main attraction. So it came as a shock to fans in 1984, when Rowena Wallace announced that she as leaving the show. Wallace said "It wasn't just that the work was so hard...…..it was more the nature of the character. Patricia was always so manic, forever crying, one month an alcoholic, the next a drug addict....I just didn't have the energy to do it anymore". Knowing the character was too good to lose, writers sent Patricia off on the run to South America in 1985. Hiding out in Rio, she was the victim of a violent assault necessitating face altering plastic surgery, leaving the door open for Pat the Rat to return with a new face later on. In the meantime, producers tried to fill the superbitch void by signing up 70's soap siren Abigail to play Stephen's ex-wife from hell, Caroline Morell. The press and promos all hailed her as the show's glamorous new schemer "If you thought Pat was a Rat, you haven't seen anything yet. Tonight, Abigail makes her debut as Caroline - Super bitch!". Alas, "Caroline the Cat" as some press hailed her, was more of a pussycat than a tiger when compared to the woman whose shoes she was supposed to be filling. It wasn't until the following year, when Patricia re-emerged as Alison Carr (now played by Belinda Giblin) that the bitch factor was put back into the show. The fact that she sounded nothing like Rowena Wallace and was noticeably shorter than her raised some laughs among critics but the recast injected the show with a much needed (albeit temporary) ratings boost.

By the mid-80's, the show was suffering from the usual wear and tear of an ongoing soap. Many of the original cast had left for pastures new, including twins John (Peter Phelps) and Angela (Ally Fowler), Jill, all of the original younger Palmers (Lynn, Kevin and Susan) and Barbara (following a fiery car crash). After 600 episodes, Bevan Lee also handed over writing duties as he "was ready to go insane" while later addition Danny Roberts (who played Andy Green) was getting restless but despite being openly critical of the show, was kept on, such was his character's popularity. It's glory days behind it, Sons and Daughters was no longer being stripped across 4 nights a week and was repackaged as twice weekly hour long episodes. Now watching as a viewer rather than the writer, Bevan Lee could see that the show was losing it's way following the infamous 1986 cliffhanger where various characters were placed in peril after being bitten by a snake, kicked in the head by a horse and chased by a shark. Lee said "You utterly believed, in some strange shape or form, the human truth of S&D, at least for the first three and a half years. People believed it because it was almost like reading a novel. Other serials were patchwork, but we had this rich, ongoing saga. We downplayed the melodrama because if you believed everything these silly people were doing, it was bound to work". However, after the animal attack cliffhanger, he said "The audience gets to a point where they won't invest emotional energy in the show because they're always getting burnt".

In a last ditch attempt to revive the flagging series, producers harked back to it's telenovela-esque beginning with one of the show's wildest plot twists yet. The foundation was laid in an August 1986 TV Week cover story "Return of the Real Rat" where Rowena Wallace announced her interest in reprising her iconic role. Seven and Grundy's were keen too, but were afraid of tying themselves in knots trying to explain how Alison and Patricia were now co-existing, so they turned to original writer Bevan Lee to come up with a comeback plan in 1987. Promos were purposely vague in order to entice viewers who were wondering just how Pat would return. "The sparks are flying when Pat the Rat meets a tougher rat as Rowena Wallace reclaims the title of Superbitch". With nods to Prisoner, Rowena emerged as former sparring partner Beryl's prison cellmate Pamela, who turned out to be the long lost twin of Patricia aka Alison. The brief burst of publicity wasn't enough to turn the tide as the show was axed soon after the big reveal. Wallace later considered her return to be a bad career move, stating money and clouded judgement as a result of taking cortisone for her bad back, as the reasons she accepted the offer. As she was only contracted to return for 10 weeks, Rowena was long gone by the time the show wrapped up. Only four actors stayed the course for the full 6 years - Leila Hayes (Beryl), Pat McDonald (Fiona), Brian Blain (Gordon) and Ian Rawlings (Wayne). Now only airing once a week, the series drew to a close after 972 episodes in late 1987 / early 1988 (depending on which city you were in) with Fiona helping deliver twins at her boarding house, in a nod to the opening episode.

Gone but certainly not forgotten, Sons and Daughters has enjoyed a healthy afterlife. The concept has been remade 7 times to mixed success in countries including Sweden and Indonesia (it's German offshoot Verbotene Liebe was the most successful, running for 20 years). After it's initial run, S&D has been repeated continually, both internationally and in it's native Australia, where it's also been made available to stream on Seven's website in addition to it's DVD boxset releases. In an era of remakes, it remains to be seen whether the much loved series will emerge, Patricia style, with a new face for a new generation but we can only dream.

Actually, with the reformatted episode format to two one hour episodes, it looked like Seven had lost faith in SAD by this point (the last episodes in 1987/1988 to add were aired in a non-rating period, which shows how much love they gave it by then).

From an article I read on the SAD website, it was put (in Sydney at least) into the Sunday timeslot against the popular 60 Minutes on Nine and then Monday against the popular Knight Rider, again on Nine. It's as if Seven wanted it to be killed off.

Media pundits actually expected SAD to fail against David Hasselhoff's leather jacketed crime fighter, but SAD to theirs (and Seven's) surprise proved to be formidable competition against the Hoff.

 

[AndyB2008]

Later, Nine decided to dump the Hoff to make room for Possession, another Grundy soap (which Don Battye was also EP of, hence why he took his eye off the ball not noticing Posie Jacobs destroying SAD) and put it in competition with SAD in the Sydney and Melbourne markets (probably to take advantage of the news Rowena Wallace was leaving).

Whereas Knight Rider gave Sons and Daughters a lot of competition, Possession despite the likes of Maggie Millar couldn't even make a dent against it. Not helped by the fact Rowena's final episodes of SAD were airing at the time.

And Nine dumping KR for Possession meant Ten got in with V to hoover up that audience. (Depending on Sydney or Melbourne, it was either the mini series or the later weekly series).