Kylie. Julie Aspinall
and us to let us get on with things. They were very supportive.’
Kylie wanted to continue with the show for a second season, but her part was written out. She was devastated – but, as so often happens in showbiz, it turned out to be for the best because something much bigger was waiting around the corner. After obtaining her Higher School Certificate, Kylie landed the part that made her an international success: Charlene in Neighbours. Initially contracted for just 12 weeks, Kylie was so popular that she stayed with the show for two and a half years. And, almost overnight, Kylie Minogue became a real star.
‘I like to think that I made Kylie famous by not casting her in The Henderson Kids II,’ Alan said. ‘It was to be about the lead kids moving from the country to the city to start a new life. Kylie’s character didn’t move with them, so she didn’t feature. I think she was a bit disappointed, but it turned out to be the best thing for her, because she went straight on to land the role of Charlene in Neighbours. If she’d been in the second Henderson Kids she wouldn’t have been able to go for it.’
Truth be told, while Neighbours made Kylie, Kylie should be able to claim at least a certain amount of credit for reviving Neighbours. The show had actually premiered in 1985 as the brainchild of Reg Watson, who had also been responsible for such gems as The Young Doctors, Sons and Daughters and Prisoner (Cell Block H) when he was head of Drama for the television production company Grundy Organisation I. The idea was a simple one: take three families – the Ramsays, the Robinsons and the Clarkes – put them on the same street – Ramsay Street – and watch them interact. Reg was determined to get it exactly right: according to the Neighbours official website, he wrote 20 drafts of the first script before he was satisfied with what he had done.
Now came the search for a location. After a considerable search, a location scout found a cul-de-sac called Pin-Oak Court in the Vermont district of Melbourne. According to the website, the houses were more upmarket than the show’s producers had originally wished for, but the location was ideal: it was a quiet, out-of-the-way street near the studios (where indoor scenes would be filmed), which was also accessible via the rear, where large vehicles could be parked out of camera range. The scout checked with the real-life neighbours who lived on the street – the Bauers, the Aldingers and the Pierces – and everyone, thinking the programme would be a short-lived phenomenon, agreed to allow the street to be used for the new show.
So, location and script agreed upon, it was time to cast the new series. The producers decided a mix of established actors and newcomers would suit the feel of the programme, and so they picked Alan Dale and Anne Haddy, both well-known faces on Australian television, and Elaine Smith, a newcomer. The first episode was broadcast on 18 March 1985 and was greeted with a waft of indifference from the rest of the world. Neighbours was born – and no one cared.
Nor did this indifference show any signs of abating. Producers, writers, actors and directors did their best, but to no avail: they simply could not generate interest in their new programme. Finally, Channel Seven, which broadcast the soap, pulled the plug after just 170 episodes. Neighbours was a busted flush.
Except that it wasn’t. Most of the people connected with the programme had assumed that that would be it, but they were wrong. Producer Ian Holmes retained faith in his new concoction and got in touch with a different broadcaster, Channel Ten, to offer the show to them. The channel took it on – making Neighbours the first show on Australian television to be dumped by one channel and taken up by another – while Grundy decided to tweak its new creation, getting rid of some characters that were not quite right and introducing a couple of younger ones, such as Charlene – originally brought in just for a few weeks as a foil to fellow newcomer Scott. Kylie landed the role of Charlene, while Jason Donovan was cast as Scott.
But still the show didn’t take off and, according to the website, it was only then that someone realised what the really fundamental problem was: the programme was set in Melbourne, so viewers in Sydney weren’t tuning in. There is great rivalry between the two cities and it was generally felt that Sydney made a point of being indifferent to its upstart sibling, hence the lack of interest in the show. Channel Ten, having recognised the problem, acted fast: it spent AUS$500,000 on promotion, flying a cast member to Sydney every weekend to make personal appearances and sponsoring a ‘Neighbour of the Year’ competition in which the winner won a colour TV. The ploy worked. Ratings began to climb and the show began to attract interest from abroad – including the UK.
Neighbours was first shown on British television on 27 October 1986, when it was aired by the BBC in the morning and at lunchtime. As in Australia, there was initially only casual interest from the viewing public. When the school holidays began, though, it was a different matter: children and teenagers alike latched on to the new show and did not give up on it when they were sent back to school. Back in term time they watched at lunchtime and even skipped lessons to get their daily quota of soap, until one schoolgirl had a word with her father and suggested Neighbours be moved to a new slot in the late afternoon when everyone had come home from school. The schoolgirl in question was Alison Grade, her father was Michael Grade, then the BBC’s head of programming and Michael very sensibly took his daughter’s advice. The programme was moved to 5.35 p.m., it went on to attract audiences of up to 16 million in its heyday and – in an unrelated move – Alison Grade went on to get a job with Thames Television, Grundy’s sister company. In a rare example of universal harmony in the cutthroat world of television, everyone was pleased and no one – as yet, that is – had anything to lose from the move.
David Wood was certainly happy for his girlfriend, who had auditioned successfully for the part of Charlene. ‘Getting the part was everything she ever wanted. I was delighted for her,’ he recalled in 1989. ‘She’d had disappointments before. No one wanted to know when she tried to release a single before Neighbours – but she soldiered on.’
It was while working on Neighbours that Kylie again encountered her old friend Jason Donovan: in fact, her very first scene had her punching his character, Scott. Charlene herself was very different from Kylie. Lenny, as the character preferred to be known, was a tomboy who left school at the earliest possible opportunity to become an apprentice mechanic. Her normal attire was khaki overalls but that was the full extent of her rebellion – her mum refused to let her live with Scott, and so ultimately, in a prelude to her leaving the series a couple of years later, Charlene married him and moved to Brisbane, where they have now settled down with their son Daniel. In fiction, if not in life, the couple were allowed to live happily ever after.
The wedding, filmed in July 1987, marked a high spot for the show. It attracted a record number of viewers all over the world and intensified speculation that Kylie and Jason were a couple in real life as well as on screen. ‘It was a really tiring day,’ said Kylie of the now-legendary TV wedding. ‘I must have walked up and down that aisle 20 times while we were trying to capture the right mood. I’m sure it made a beautiful scene but for me at the time, I had to think of it as a day’s work. It was really weird with the wedding. I’d have people coming up to me thinking I was really getting married. They were so excited and their whole lives seemed to be revolving around it. People look up to you so much and I stop and think: Why? I’m just a normal person and it’s quite frightening in a way that they’re all watching everything that you do.’
Even before the wedding, though, the show’s popularity had soared sky high, as did that of its diminutive star. At the 1987 Logies, the Australian television equivalent of the Oscars, Kylie was given the award of television’s most popular actress. She was 18. ‘When it was announced I just went in to shock,’ she said at the time. ‘I certainly don’t remember seeing anyone in the room while I was on stage. Honestly, I didn’t think I’d win. I just wish I’d been better prepared. I was so nervous and really excited at the time and I forgot to thank all the people on the show. I am really grateful for what I am doing,’ she continued. ‘I am really lucky, going from school to a full-time job like this in a show which is so popular. It wasn’t until later, when somebody asked me what Logie I’d won and I actually had to say it – Most Popular Actress – that I realised how important it was to me.’
Kylie