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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Carrie Fairchild" data-source="post: 261902" data-attributes="member: 673">Holiday Island - 1981 to 1982 [MEDIA=youtube]v-nTF6XLhPk[/MEDIA]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.</blockquote>

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