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CHANCES |
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- 1991-1992 - 127 X 60 minute episodes - produced by Beyond Productions for the Nine Network - |
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Contents |
Chances started as a straight family drama with some
sex. Chances ended with an Egyptian Sun Goddess and some sex.
This was the straight drama that panicked at its low viewing figures, then lost its mind in a bid for ratings. The main opening storyline introduced a
large extended family gathered at a lavish party. Meanwhile viewers knew that
there was about to be a $3 million lottery win. Early publicity emphasised the mystery element of this premise; each
character had bought a ticket and while it was suggested that one of the
assembled family members would win, viewers would have to watch the premiere
episode to find out who. The main couple in the centre of the family, Dan and
Barbara Taylor (played by John Sheerin and Brenda Addie), were revealed as the winners and ensuing
storylines explored the changes wrought by the sudden windfall. Dan and Barbara
proceeded to hand out large sums of cash to their children, their parents and
their brothers and sisters. These relatives included a crusty granny, a young
fashion-model daughter, and a vivacious blonde hairdresser who shared salon
space with her cousin - a straight male hairdresser who everyone assumed was
gay. Dan’s neighbour and best friend Bill Anderson
was played by former The Sullivans actor Michael Caton.
Bill regularly smoked marijuana to ease the on-going pain of injuries
sustained during the Vietnam War, where he had fought beside Dan. Deborah
Kennedy played Dan’s sister Connie Reynolds, a mid-thirties divorcee
struggling to raise two teenage sons on a nurse’s income. She was soon given
the former Taylor family home as a gift as the new millionaires move to a
more salubrious neighbourhood. Meanwhile Tim
Robertson was Dan’s brother Jack, unhappily married to Sarah (Anne Grigg). THE SERIES
EVOLVES
The series premiered
29 January 1991. Unfortunately it quickly flopped in the ratings despite the
frequent (and frequently incongruous) nude scenes, so the writers set about
revamping the show. After a few months the series output was reduced from two
hours a week to one, which meant the large cast needed to be drastically
reduced. In quick succession many members of the original cast were written
out of the series. Couples divorced and moved away. The children went off to boarding school.
The divorced sister Connie left with her son to take up a new job as nursing
sister at an Italian skiing resort where she would attend to frost-bitten
toes and sprained ankles. Eventually the
marriage of Dan and Barbara also disintegrated. Barbara went off to work in a
brothel - although only doing the books - before leaving the series. Husband
Dan quietly departed soon after leaving just Michael Caton
as the stoned Vietnam Vet, the blonde haircutter, and Dan and Barbara’s adult
son Alex. This last-mentioned
character, played by Jeremy Sims, had emerged as the show’s most popular character and he
quickly became the new star of the series. A mercenary, sexy, and amusingly
devious advertising executive, Alex was soon joined by Patsy Stephen as
Angela, an assertive business partner with whom he enjoyed a love-hate
relationship. Continued low
ratings prompted the show’s move to a late-night timeslot while the writers
threw in all sorts of crazy plotlines and weird elements to spice things up.
New storylines examined man-eating plants, devil worshippers, Israeli secret
agents, ghosts of the past and of the future, and a scantily-clad female
angel on a Harley Davidson motorcycle. Then some neo-Nazis arrived to hunt down a valuable
Third Reich artifact (in Melbourne!). This sought-after bauble, the Eva Braun
necklace, turns its wearer into an Egyptian Sun Goddess. Then there was the
father-daughter team of inscrutable oriental villains who spoke very slowly
and regularly met in darkened, mist-filled rooms to plot their latest scheme.
Number 96 legend Abigail, an actress frequently called upon to spice
up ailing Australian soaps, showed up as a TV sex therapist named Bambi
Chute, a voluptuous blonde who proved to be a veritable expert in her field.
Other storylines focused on Alex and Angela’s dealings with their various advertising
clients and the creation of weird and wonderful promotions. PREVIOUS
FAILURES
To best understand
the crazy, some might say desperate, measures employed by the series to draw
in curious viewers, one must consider that by 1991 the Nine Network had
suffered a solid decade of soap opera misses with the Crawford’s produced The Flying Doctors (1986-1993) their solitary drama series success. The various
new serials to replace The Young Doctors and The Sullivans
had all been fast failures: Taurus Rising (1982) was a slick, big-budget attempt by
the Grundy Organisation to emulate the then
successful US dramas of greed and wealth, Dallas and Dynasty, starring Alan Cassell, Diane Craig,
Annette Andre, Michael Long and Andrew Clarke. The low ratings generated by the $4.5
million filmed serial showed that Australian audiences preferred their
glamour and intrigue with an American accent. With Waterloo Station (1983) Grundy Productions looked to the
success of Crawford’s blend of light soap opera and police drama Cop Shop and here also threw in familiar elements of
their earlier successes Sons and Daughters and The Restless Years. Here the young cast struggled with the rigours of the police
training academy, their fathers were policemen, and in the many beach scenes
the muscular policemen worried about their petite girlfriends following them
into their dangerous profession. Possibly the show’s most interesting figure
was the matronly owner of the guest-house played by Jennifer West. Several of
the show’s characters lived at the guest house while future intrigue was hinted-at with her
secretly slipping banknotes from a hidden stash in the building’s basement
whenever the bills were due. Another cast standout was actor Steven Grives as a dashing villain who was ultimately killed in
a violent police shootout. Sadly the show quickly flopped, lasting only a few
months on-air. Few viewers stuck around for the final episode to learn the
truth about the hidden money and West, who seemed destined to be the next big
soap diva, quickly disappeared from the television scene. Cast member Jenny
Ludlum as a policeman’s wife survived to act in Prisoner some
years later while cast-standout Danny Roberts was quickly cast in Sons and Daughters on this show’s demise. Roberts thereafter
enjoyed a successful run in that serial and continued into the subsequent
(but short-lived) soap The Power, The Passion (1989). Starting Out (1983), was a Grundy’s produced youthful romance devised by Prisoner creator Reg Watson
about a bunch of Medical students living in a cosy
shared household on-campus. Leander Brett, Yves Stening,
Nikki Coghill and Peter O’Brien played students
while Jill Forster, Maurie Fields, Gerard Maguire,
Anne Phelan and John Hamblin appeared as university professors and other
oldies. Attractive youngsters like Tottie
Goldsmith, who played a young hairdresser, were also on hand to help flesh
things out. The good looking youngsters and talented seniors appearing in the
poorly-publicised series attracted few fans and the series was quickly cancelled. Meanwhile Kings (1983) was a gritty drama with Ed Devereaux
heading a working class family living in suburban Sydney. The show was the
first production of PBL which had been established
in 1982 specifically to package drama for Channel Nine. Each episode of this
drama took two weeks to film and it was planned to premiere the series
out-of-ratings to allow it to slowly build a solid audience. Unfortunately the
failures of its new 1983 soaps prompted Nine to premiere Kings early, in July 1983, midway through the television season. This
placed the new series in direct competition with other shows that had by then
been long established in the television schedules for that year. Kings failed to generate high ratings and after five weeks it was taken off
air and further production halted. After the highly publicised failure of Taurus Rising,
Nine, and Grundy’s, tried it again with Possession
(1985) a similarly slick-looking melodrama but a smaller-scale videotaped
production. It featured Anne Charleston as an overdressed Dynasty-style
bitch, Darien Takle as the wealthy and lascivious
Louise Carpenter, and Maggie “Prisoner” Millar as Louise’s sardonic assistant
Claudia Valenti, while the key characters that started
things rolling were young Jane Andrews (Tamasin Ramsay)
and her childhood friend Kathleen Dawson (Tracey Callendar).
The show featured many expensive possessions such as lavish country estates,
flash cars, and a high fashion wardrobe, and stories focused on devious
schemes, espionage, family secrets, and cunning business deals. It even had a
macho action hero in the form of police detective Vince Bailey (David Reyne). Mimicking recent real-life events the first
episode opened with a bungled spy-training-drill in a plush city hotel before
switching to the even more frightening dramas of the preparations for Jane’s country wedding.
Low-ratings led to the addition of new cast members and a story revamp. Briony Behets came in as Eve
Cambridge, the mother of a temperamental child-actor. Alexandra Fowler,
previously of Sons and Daughters, brightened thing up as mischievous
rich-girl Nicola Shannon. By this stage Possession had
switched to a late-night timeslot where few viewers got to see the new improved version
of the show and it quietly died, though with 52 one-hour episodes produced it
lasted longer than most failed Australian soaps. Nine then turned to
Crawford Productions in an attempt to turn their soap fortunes around with a
new style of show that eschewed the light-weight Grundy’s formula. The result
was Prime Time (1986) in which Peter Kowitz,
Chris Orchard, Nina Landis and Sonja Tallis fell
flat in a failed drama about the behind-the-scenes action on a television
current affairs program, proving that Nine can have flop dramas of all styles and flavours. Finally Family and Friends (1990) was an earnest family oriented drama
built around the rather clumsy premise of a vendetta between two families -
the Chandlers and the Italian Rossi clan - stemming from an incident told in
flashback that occurred decades earlier. With a cast including such TV stars
as Abigail, Anne Phelan, Justine Clarke, Adrian Lee, and later Rebecca Rigg and Alyce Platt, this
drama demonstrated that you can only succeed with such a mundane title if
your show stars Jennifer Aniston. TAKING
CHANCES
After this long line
of failures Channel Nine were desperate to succeed so when they took Chances they insisted that each episode contained a certain quota of nude
scenes in a bid to attract publicity and viewers. In the event it attracted the
former, but not the latter. The show’s producers, Beyond Productions,
reluctantly agreed to the nudity proviso and proceeded to make the straight
family drama they originally envisioned, with the required flesh slotted-in
during the early stages of each episode. That way they could get the nude
scenes out of the way before getting on with the business at hand. In any
event the remaining components of the show turned out to be as dull and
uninspired as the nudity. Chances was shot in Channel Nine’s Melbourne studios in inner-city Richmond and
cost about $110,000 per episode. It was rumoured that the producers, who had at that time
only made the magazine program Beyond
2000, were making a loss
on the series but were so keen to break into TV drama they continued
production while absorbing this loss. [1] Though Channel Nine did persevere with it
longer than most of their other ratings flops, the show was out of production
and off the air by early 1992. Coincidentally over
on Network Ten another serial, E Street, had also started as a serious and
thoughtful straight drama series, and also switched to a more playful, flashy
mode to boost its flagging ratings. That serial had enjoyed a successful
increase in ratings as it increased the fantasy elements, but eventually
burned itself out with increasingly outrageous and bizarre plot twists after
four years. LEGACY
In 1992 Chances
screened on Sky Television in the United Kingdom. It enjoyed a late night
repeat run on the channel in 1995. There have also been three different
two-disc DVD releases of episodes of Chances. Each
volume includes eight complete episodes, which are taken from the later, more
fantasy-oriented period of the series. Volume three takes viewers up to the series
finale. |
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Originally uploaded June 2000 Last updated 21 June 2008 |
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