emily symons speaks out! thirty four years ago!

As is so often the case with these interviews, I have precisely no memory of meeting Emily Symons, though you'd think I would because I thought Marilyn was a great character on Home and Away. This so-called interview was very early in Symons' career - she had another decade on H&A ahead of her, then a long stretch in the UK on Emmerdale, and then back to Australia and to H&A. That's a career! 

 

Most impressive easter egg in this piece I think is that I misspelled Henri Szeps' name as Henry early on, then misspelled dyed as died later, as a kind of, you know (trails off...)

guy pearce he's

In 1991 I was editor and main writer of a terrible magazine called Star. Or perhaps Star! Anyway, this is a layout page with various copy edits, apparently printed out exactly 32 years ago. Sorry no Guy Pearce pics.  I think I have posted a version of this so-called interview (what else would you call it?) previously. I hope you're not allergic to exclamation marks. Or obscenely huge and malformed possessive apostrophes.

This was on the back of that. 

scott michaelson 32 years ago

In the continuing series of old interviews I just want to throw away and can't believe I've kept this long... my memory is that I would bring along a list and actors like Scott Michaelson would agree that it was part of their job (a dumb part, I imagine) for them to answer questions about whether 'physical attraction was important' or whether they'd 'ever been broken-hearted', blah blah. Anyway, he comes out of this a very straightforward and honest person. He's no longer an actor but a manager. 

 

elspeth ballantyne tells all

It was 31 years ago today or thereabouts that Elspeth Ballantyne had the pleasure of talking to me about her role on Neighbours and of course a little bit about her time on Prisoner. What shocks me the most about this fax to the UK magazine Inside Soap is that I was invoicing, and presumably got, £100 for this sack of shit (and a tiny little sack of not much shit, either). Talk about the glory days of print publishing. 

Blah to that! 

exclusive! guy pearce interview!

Not that exclusive actually. It seems like I sent this to Idols, the celebrity photograph agency, on 2 August 1991 to provide editorial to go with photographs of Guy Pearce. I suppose this was the few months of my life when I was trying to be a freelance writer of some description and using the very few contacts I had, mostly via Smash Hits, to achieve that not-very-dear dream. Is this interesting? I can't know. 

I have always liked Guy Pearce so it's nice to have done this, I don't remember doing it at all. It's almost possible that I cobbled this together out of other people's interviews with him but more likely I spent ten minutes with him on the phone and he delivered these goods. This was the time just after Neighbours when he did a quick small role on Home and Away and was also working with the director Frank Howson who was wasting no time at all putting together a bunch of Guy Pearce films, all of which eventually came out to limited success. Heaven Tonight is the one that has a particular fame as a funny 80s (though of course it's 90s) old-pop-star-vs-young-pop-star 'just gotta do my thing' movie. But there were others, Young Flynn came out some years later as Flynn (IMDB lists it as something else entirely - My Forgotten Man if you can believe that!) and if GP actually did write the soundtrack for Friday on my Mind, well... I don't know what to say. 

 

Perhaps you'll be interested to see what this was all printed out on the back of - it's layouts from Smash Hits at the time, waste paper I guess, probably printed out to be proofed (hence the deletion symbol on the dash below). 

I also really liked Betty Boo and in fact I bought her Boomania LP a few years ago but couldn't play it because it was scratched to bits. Anyway it checks out that Smash Hits would have been getting her to review the singles at this time because she toured Australia in July 1991 and indeed this was the time of the infamous incident where she was revealed to be miming to a record at a Frankston nightclub appearance. Big deal! She was good. Look at the singles she go to review! A lot of well-known artists but I can summon barely any of these tracks to mind, although 'Make Out All Right' is a title I recognise  - that and 'Rush You'. 

Still amazing to think we had pen pals, but at least by this stage (due to a complaint from a parent on entirely justified grounds) we stopped printing our readers' addresses and instead had some poor moderator to filter letters. 

And finally... the page that the printer always created whenever you turned it on. 

Now, having shown you these pages, I'm going to put them in the recycling. 

more josephine mitchell just for you: 'it's hard to beat a good lettuce'

EXCLUSIVELY for you. I don't know when I wrote this. So let's just put it here so I can put it in the recycling and there's room for a little more air in the house. 

jo mitchell 31+ years ago

Not only did I write this I put my damn fool name on it. I don't remember what Inside Soap precisely, but I think it was the Attic Futura (where I worked on various magazines) soap opera magazine. But I might be getting that mixed up with something else. 

JM was a very smart person I enjoyed talking to at least once but probably more than once. She's a month younger than me. She has a degree. In Mediaeval and Religious Studies.  

E Street was hilarious. I'd like to see it all again from beginning to end. Please. 

if you read only one interview with tom oliver today...

...you will no doubt want to make it this one, by the iridescent 'Jean MacElroy' who was one of my many noms-de-plume while I was hackily hacking out el cheapo pieces on Australian soap stars etc for the British colour press. This story must have been from 1992, as (a) that's when TO returned to Neighbours after a shorter stint in the late 1980s; and also, in 1992 yeah, he was 54. The rest of the story shows, if nothing else I suppose, my sinister fascination with old television. I hadn't realised until I started busting into my manila folder of old soap star interview transcripts/beat ups that I had such an abiding interest over such a long time, there you go. 

Unfortunately I was the vessel of a vicious lie from TO to the readers of whatever this appeared in (assuming it did) over thirty years ago: we said that The Shifting Heart was 1969. So wrong! It was 1968:

Melbourne Age 21 August 1968 p. 6

And here's a feature on TO from the following year. 

Melbourne Age 29 January 1969 p. 2

Enjoyed all that? Good. Because this is a new feature of this blog, always full of surprises, going forward for some time to come! Thrilled? You are!!!