Farewell to Neighbours: “I thought ‘I’m too good for this! I’ll never do this!’

TV Tonight speaks with Geoff Paine, who spent just a year with Neighbours.
After a brief return in 1989 it would be 28 years before he asked to return.

Before he joined Neighbours in 1986, Geoff Paine was a Drama student at the Victorian College of the Arts.

In his 3rd Year the students took a visit to the Neighbours studio during its initial run at Channel Seven studios.

“We were taken around the corner from South Melbourne to Dorcas Street where they were shooting it, and told, ‘You guys are going into acting. Here’s what a television set looks like in terms of shooting.’ And I thought ‘I’m too good for this! I’ll never do this!’ he laughs.

“A couple of months later, I was in a gorilla suit in Vermont. That’s what hubris is. The arrogance of youth.”

Paine was just 21 years of age when he joined the relaunched series on 10, famously arriving as a gorilla gram. ‘Clive Gibbons’ initially kept his medical degree a secret from Ramsay St. residents.

“The theory was that Clive Gibbons was actually from a very staid medical family, forced into medicine at an early age, a very conservative guy. He basically qualified and then dumped the whole thing and said, ‘I just want to live my life and have the childhood I missed out on,” he continues.

“I once got the Friday night cliffhanger”

“I once got the Friday night cliffhanger. In terms of writing the show, you had to have cliffhangers to get people back from the ad break, an episode cliffhanger to get them back tomorrow and a Friday night cliffhanger to get them back on a Monday night.

“So that was the famous line where Clive had to look after Max Ramsay (Francis Bell) who was having a heart attack or something. I said, ‘It’s okay. I’m a doctor’ and then the credits rolled.

“I think that was Clive’s only Friday night cliffhanger!”

Paine quit the show after only a year.

“I enjoyed it but I felt the character was getting so sickly sweet that Diabetes Australia was going to ring up and say, ‘Okay, you have to stop now.’

“I basically quit and just became a jobbing actor”

“So I basically quit and just became a jobbing actor, grabbing any work I could. I worked in the corporate area, ran a video production company and all that sort of stuff. A few years ago I rang my agent to say ‘Can Clive come back?’ Initially they thought ‘Maybe’ but later Clive came back as this very serious CEO at the hospital and I realised, of course, that very few of the writers were actually alive when I was there originally. So they had no memory of the character. They started from scratch.

Gibbons, whose name was not a reference to Bill Oddie despite what Wikipedia suggests, could be readily injected into any Erinsborough scenario.

“He had this childish, playful cheeky side, but also this kind Doogie Howser thing going on. One minute he’s performing a tracheostomy on a kitchen table, and the next he’s hired by people in the street to deliver rhyming couplets to Mrs. Mangel or something.”

“The joke I make is that Clive put Kylie Minogue on the pill.”

Young Doctor Clive was certainly skilled in all things medical, even if there were limits on what could screen in a G classification.

“The joke I make is that Clive put Kylie Minogue on the pill. The idea that someone would even talk about the pill was just shocking,” he remembers.

“I diagnosed Daphne (Elaine Smith) as expecting a baby but I couldn’t tell her she was pregnant because of the G classification in those days.

“It gave me scope to play and improvise a little bit.”

“But I do remember one of the writers saying, ‘Clive is so much fun to write for, because you can kind of do anything with him.’ So it gave me scope to play and improvise a little bit. I was following dear old Francis as a rewriter …he’d grab a pencil and just make stuff up on the spot and change things. Basically no-one stood up to him. So I thought I could do the same thing.

“But things started to change. One of the reasons was because they sold the show to non English-speaking countries, it was much cheaper for them to have the actor stick to the script and have their script translated, than having to go back and monitor what was actually said!”

There were romances, notably with Susan Cole (Gloria Ajenstat), plus Sally Wells (Rowena Mohr) and later Sheila Canning (Colette Mann) and Jane Harris (Annie Jones).

“Clive proposed to Susan on the crest of a hill but Susan was so taken by it her pram started rolling down the hill. A car that happened to be carrying 4 Neighbours characters swerved and flipped and they nearly ended up being killed, but of course were just badly shaken and bloodied,” Paine recalls.

“The car not only flipped over once, it flipped entirely over and landed only a few feet from the camera crew.”

In 1989 Paine very nearly starred in a spin-off vehicle, with a medical pilot City Hospital set to screen on 10 -until the network was sold by owners Westfield. American television executive Bob Shanks tried to turn around what was then an ailing network and in the process killed off City Hospital before it started.

Paine, who had relocated to Sydney with his newly-married wife, were forced to abandon plans for a Queensland honeymoon.

“We had given up our rental in Melbourne, realising we could not afford to live in Sydney. So we drove back to Melbourne. We didn’t really have a honeymoon, took our stuff out of storage and started life again. That’s showbiz.”

It wasn’t until 2017 that Clive Gibbons returned permanently as COO of Erinsbrough Hospital, having grown into the gravitas required of such importance.

As one of the show’s heritage characters, how does Paine take stock of the show’s exit at 37 years?

“It’s extraordinary the show ran as long as it did. The fact that (The Age) Green Guide is packed with so much more viewing material is indicative of the way things have changed over the past 30 years. So in a sense, it feels like the end of an era the same way that a car factory closes, or a coal-fired power station closes. The market’s made a decision… we work as long as we can up until the point where it doesn’t make financial sense to someone.

“The industry will miss the idea that like any factory, people learnt a bunch of skills.”

“I do recognise that type of TV has been swamped by basically the 21st century and thousands of hours on YouTube and everything coming down the internet. But the industry will miss the idea that like any factory, people learnt a bunch of skills. For me it was get the script, make some decisions, learn your lines, and don’t slow down. It was fast-paced and that is a type of skill in and of itself.

“In TV your objective is to make sure that the 20 people looking at you – the crew- are not having their time wasted. The two most important devices in that first year were the alarm clock to get me up and the tape deck that I used to record my lines.”

But he also recognises that even in soap, there were inherent social lessons imparted from the vision of creator Reg Watson, a testament to its endurance with viewers in Australia and especially the United Kingdom.

“The appeal of almost any show is a group of people who may have ended up together by chance, but grow to develop the kind of qualities of an extended family. They would immediately tell everyone next door, what’s going on… family secrets are shared, people have to confront each other and all that sort of stuff.

“They all liked each other and were kind of equal, in a sunny, sunny world.”

“An English academic once contacted me with a paper he was writing that suggested that an entire generation moved towards Labor in Britain, courtesy of growing up with a daily dose of a community where an architect could live next door to a plumber, a homemaker, a gorilla-gram. They all liked each other and were kind of equal, in a sunny, sunny world. We know that the world is not like that, but they grew up thinking that could exist.”

Indeed. The multi-generational mix was key to Neighbours longevity, with Paine himself, personifying a younger character seeking advice, eventually maturing into one of the show’s wiser senior residents.

“There were sometimes words of wisdom from the older characters, but then those characters themselves were subject to the same flaws as the younger characters.

“That’s the nature of life. We’re often very good diagnosing other people’s problems but we have our own.

“I think they nailed that.”

Neighbours Finale Week:
Wednesday July 27 6:30pm – 8pm 10 Peach
Thursday July 28 7.30pm – 9pm on 10 and 10 Peach

Attention British fans: TV Tonight will be filing a finale story following the Australian broadcast.