“We were born and raised in Erinsborough. Sending us back to a country that we’re not from, with no return date, just made no sense.”
“All the good ones leave and us rubbish actors are always left behind,” says Alan Fletcher – better known as Dr Karl Kennedy – to the man beside him.
The Australia of the 1980s looked a little different than today, but not entirely. The 1986 census found more than half the population cited Anglo-Celtic origins. Twenty-one per cent of Australians were born overseas, and almost a quarter had a parent born overseas. When she took the helm, the show was still popular, but not as much as in its heyday. She says she wanted to bring the show into the 21st century.
Bower says criticism came from within the team behind Neighbours as well within the production company . Channel 10 were also “very nervous”, she says. Introducing the family drew a mixed reaction from the public. Joab was heartened by handwritten notes he received from fans in the UK. “There are little nuances that happen within families that don’t have an Anglo Saxon/Anglo Celtic background.”
“I wanted to introduce them slowly, and particularly with the backlash being so fierce, we put a little go slow on the whole thing.” We were born and raised in Erinsborough. Sending us back to a country that we’re not from ... just made no sense.“We weren’t just written out, we were sent back to India, which is exactly what a lot of the racist comments [from the public] were.”
A “film school snob”, it wasn’t the entry-level job he’d been hoping for, but over the years he says he fell in love with the characters and would continue to write for the show for around two decades. “I was reminded by a fellow writer of a story we once did about a Middle Eastern asylum seeker who was on the run and the local teenagers tried to help him whilst learning about the reasons people flee to this country … but when the part was eventually cast he was turned into an Irish backpacker who’d overstayed his visa.”
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