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SONS AND DAUGHTERS |
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- 1982-1987 - 972 x 30 minute
episodes - |
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Sons and Daughters was the Australian night-time serial with,
as the title song wailed, love and laughter, tears and sadness and
happiness... Well, it certainly had tears and sadness. The Grundy produced
series began screening in January 1982 on Channel Seven and was an instant
hit, with half-hour episodes screening Monday through to Thursday in an early
evening time slot. Clearly inspired by those earlier tales of love and angst The Restless Years and The
Young Doctors, Sons and Daughters concentrated on the family dramas and
romantic exploits of a group of fresh-faced youngsters making it in the big
bad world. Certainly the series used the same casting format to those earlier
soaps, with a sturdy bunch of experienced actors supported by a repertory of
attractive newcomers. Sons and Daughters also owed a lot to the US daytime serials
which had long been airing in Australia. With almost a complete lack of humour or irony and a pervasively dire undercurrent, many
of the storylines were of the old-fashioned romantic and domestic variety. In true daytime
tradition the main storylines centred on two
interconnected families, one wealthy and powerful, and the other ordinary and
working-class. The opening storyline neatly brought the two groups together
and exposed a few long hidden secrets when young working class hunk John
Palmer (Peter Phelps) met and fell in love with defiant rich-girl Angela
Hamilton (Ally Fowler). As the
advertisements breathlessly announced, the two were in fact twin brother and
sister who had been parted at birth and raised separately. It soon transpired
that their unwed parents, Patricia Dunne (Rowena Wallace) and honest truck
driver David Palmer (Tom Richards) had taken one of the offspring each after
their affair ended and they went their separate ways, eventually both
marrying another. While a shocked John
and Angela, not surprisingly, soon parted, the scene was now set for a torrid
affair for Patricia and David though each was currently married. Patricia to
successful, but rather naive, businessman Gordon Hamilton (Brian Blain) while
David was stuck with kindly but dull hausfrau Beryl Palmer (Leila Hayes). The other major
player was Fiona Thompson, played by former Number
96 favourite Pat McDonald. The wise and worldly Fiona was
light years away from nosey Dorrie Evans, the
character Pat McDonald had played in Number 96. A
former madam, “Aunt Fiona” was long acquainted with the parted lovers Pat and
David, and was a strong woman with all sorts of powerful friends and
connections while offering a shoulder to cry on and the wise voice of reason
for the show’s other characters. She had raised baby John, all the while
secretly mourning the loss of her own child, years before. Naturally there were
plenty of other glamorous adult children to go around. Most notable
was Ian Rawlings as Gordon’s spiteful, ambitious and womanising son Wayne Hamilton. Others in more
decorative but less interesting roles were former Restless Years
actress Kim Lewis as Jill Taylor, a former prostitute boarding with Fiona.
Stephen Comey as Kevin Palmer and Ann Henderson-Stiers as Susan Palmer were Beryl and David’s other
children, while Antonia Murphy portrayed Kevin’s fiancée Lyn and Andrew McKaige was Susan’s fiancé Bill Todd. THE
SERIES PROGRESSES
After eighteen
months of predictable soap romances and break-ups most of the younger cast
members had left the series, with the exception of “Mr
Nasty”, Wayne Hamilton. Several fresh faced replacements joined, most notably
Amanda Morrell (Alyce Platt) and Andy Green (Danny
Roberts) who quickly found themselves just as popular as their predecessors
had been. Danny Roberts had actually been one of the handsome young stars of
Nine Network police opera Waterloo
Station that was launched
at the beginning 1983 but had quickly flopped. These new characters
worked well enough, though it had become obvious that the youngsters were no
longer the bread and butter of the series. Patricia, or “Pat the Rat” as she
became known, had quickly emerged as the show’s (and Australia’s) leading
star. Super-bitch Pat had frequent spiteful rows with most of the other
characters in the series while romances with David only seemed to wane during
her frequent affairs with handsome young (or wealthy) toy-boys. One minute
she would be ruined financially and on the verge of a nervous breakdown while
the next a rich new husband or a business scheme gone right would return her
to the top of the heap with her claws freshly sharpened. Gordon had divorced Patricia after she had an affair with David.
Gordon went on to marry Barbara Armstrong (Cornelia Frances). Barbara, a
no-nonsense rural neighbour, had been introduced in the show’s early days as
a guest character to last perhaps three weeks. Liking the character, the
producers quickly decided to make her a permanent character. [1] The assertive Barbara quickly became one of the most popular
characters in the series with her vehement exchanges with Patricia
particularly riveting. Eventually, healthy
ratings prompted Channel 7 to increase the number of (half hour) episodes
screened each week from four to five. To help fill this extra screen time an
additional family was integrated into the proceedings. The O’Brien family,
Mike (Ken James) and Heather (Rona Coleman) and teenage kids Katie (Jane
Seaborne) and Jeff (Craig Morrison) were introduced when they moved into the
house next door to Beryl Palmer. They brought with them a new romantic
interest for Beryl in the form of Mike’s brother Jim played by Sean Scully,
while their lives were endlessly complicated by the appearance of the shady
businessman Heather had worked for back in Perth, Roger Carlyle (Les Dayman), and his son Luke (Peter Cousens),
also a friend of Jeff’s. Though initially
successful and despite many varied storylines bringing them into contact with
other characters in the series (Mike and Roger in business dealings involving
Patricia, Katie’s business and romantic association with Wayne - actually
Wayne’s double, friendship between Beryl and Heather) their storylines
eventually petered out and within eighteen months the O’Brien family and all
the associated characters had been written out of the series. THE
NEW BITCHES
Finally after three years
of ruining the lives of the other characters and winning the coveted Gold Logie for her riveting if melodramatic portrayal, actress
Rowena Wallace finally decided to leave the series; news which no doubt gave
the producers a few nervous breakdowns of their own. After several
convoluted storylines Pat eventually departed but not before former star of The Box, Judy Nunn, had joined the series playing
down-to-earth doctor Irene Fisher, and much vaunted replacement bitches Karen
Fox (Lyndel Rowe) and Leigh Palmer (Lisa
Crittenden) appeared. Shortly after that (possibly
because the fireworks generated by Karen and Leigh hadn’t sparkled quite as
brightly as planned) former Number 96 sex kitten Abigail was brought on board as Caroline Morrell,
the recently returned mother of Amanda Morrell. Caroline quickly
took off as the most popular of the new strong women in the series, finding
herself in Pat the Rat territory with scheming, bitchiness and a rocky
reconciliation with her ex-husband, who had more recently been married to
Patricia in the series, Steven Morrell (Michael Long). Caroline blossomed
into a glamorous and somewhat sympathetic would-be business woman who was
nonetheless never nearly as nasty as Pat had been. The real nastiness was
left to Leigh (who ended up staying with the series one year) while Caroline
became more a chaotic comic heroine. Meanwhile the icy Karen Fox found her business association with Gordon had fizzled. In love with Wayne, she plotted to make him believe he accidentally killed courier Bob ‘Mitch’ Mitchell. Mitch was merely knocked out after an altercation with Wayne. Karen told Wayne she had disposed of Mitch’s body when she had actually paid him to disappear. Finally discovering that she had blackmailed him into marriage, Wayne threw her out, and Karen was later found drowned in ornamental lake on the Dural property. After a murder investigation well underway, Gordon’s friend Liz Smith returned and was horrified to learn of Karen’s recent death in the pond. Liz had slapped her during a verbal confrontation in the garden, sending a stumbling Karen into the pond. Liz didn’t know that Karen had been knocked out in the fall, and stalked off not realising she was drowning. While these episodes
were certainly a lot of fun to watch the decline in ratings since the
departure of Rowena Wallace’s Patricia convinced the producers that Pat the
Rat had to come back. With Rowena Wallace unwilling to return, in true 80s
super-soap fashion the writers developed a convoluted storyline with former The Box sex symbol Belinda Giblin taking over the
role of Patricia. The script had her returning from South America and
plotting revenge, with a new cosmetic surgery face offered as explanation for
her drastic change in appearance. Happily emphasising the
absurdity of the idea, the writers highlighted the plastic surgery angle by
making it the focal-point of the storyline: Patricia returned to Australia
calling herself Alison Carr and did not reveal her true identity to anyone,
not even her faithful socialite friend Charlie Bartlett (Sarah Kemp.) This
placed Patricia/Alison in a good position to exact revenge as her former
enemies had absolutely no idea who they were dealing with. Meanwhile David had
tracked down a meek and tearful Patricia look-alike who had undergone plastic
surgery in the same hospital at the same time, while also suffering amnesia.
Mistakenly identifying her as Patricia, David married this gentle-natured
woman and brought her home to Australia where she tried to come to terms with
her previous incarnation as an arch-bitch. Implausible as it
all sounds, rather than pine for the original Pat, die-hard fans seemed to rejoice
in the audacity of the writers and the series remained compelling as ever,
while crazy and outrageous Dynasty style plots and major catastrophes
balanced somewhat uneasily alongside more down-to-earth plotlines like
Charlie being re-united with her adult son Adam (Adam Briscombe),
Adam’s romance with a mellowing Leigh, and Beryl’s romance with new neighbour Rod Campbell (David Bradshaw.) Despite Belinda Giblin’s excellent performance as Alison and the
cavalcade of big-haired super-bitches and over-the-top plot-lines, the
ratings failed achieve their former glory resulting in further cast changes.
Leigh Palmer departed, and Charlie’s adult children, and Rod Campbell and his
daughter Jessie (Annie Jones) came and went. However there were bigger plans afoot
behind the scenes and soon after a more drastic purge of characters would
occur. CAST
SHUFFLES
Samantha Morrell
(Sally Tayler), Amanda’s rather similar sister who
had conveniently joined the series earlier in the 1985 season just as Amanda
left, was hurriedly written out shortly after 1986 season began on air.
Recent cast addition Willie Fennell, who played the comical elderly blunderer
Spider Webb, also made an abrupt departure. Dr Irene Fisher, a fun character
with an eye for the gentlemen, and surprisingly the highly popular Barbara
Hamilton were also hastily written out of the series in a very rushed and
unsatisfactory manner. Barbara’s portrayer Cornelia Frances described her work on the series in her 2003 autobiography ‘And What Have You Done Lately?’ She had wanted to stay with the series, having described her work on the show as “one of the most enjoyable professional periods I have ever had.” Frances says she was accustomed to the hard work and long hours associated with acting in a serial, having spent several years as a key player in The Young Doctors. The main difference was that, with the large amount of location shooting in Sons and Daughters, the early morning rises sometimes had to be even earlier for the commute to the filming locations. The main hitch arose during her final year in the series when a personality clash with a new female director developed, and with whom several “polite disagreements” were endured on set. After said director was suddenly promoted to producer on the show, Frances reports that while most other regular cast members were receiving their contracts for the following year, hers was not forthcoming. Then one day the panicked hairdresser rushed in to report that Barbara was scripted to be permanently scarred in a horrific road accident. Then another director approached Frances on set to reveal that “I think I should warn you that Mrs Producer has asked all the directors what we think of you and whether or not we like working with you, and how we think you play your part.” After this Frances confronted the smiling producer, who finally revealed that she had decided to let Barbara go after the writers expressed the opinion they had reached the end of Barbara’s worth. Nevertheless Frances herself reports that she received many comments of support and concern from the directors and writers, while even the head writer declared that ‘We had some wonderful future storylines for Barbara, but unfortunately “Mrs Producer” just wants you out, for whatever reason.’ And so Barbara was permanently out. [2] In the storyline she was indeed scarred in the car accident while after the same smash Gordon experienced amnesia. When he “recalled” his memory only to happily believe he was still married to Patricia/Alison, a tearful Barbara accepted defeat and abruptly departed. Meanwhile a host of
new and mostly younger characters were quickly introduced. These included
handsome hunks Glen Young (Mark Conroy) and Craig Maxwell (Jared Robinson),
Fiona’s prickly niece Janice Reid (Rima Te Waita), vivacious Debbie Halliday
(Shannon Kenny), Fiona’s old friend May Walters (Georgie
Sterling), and temperamental young fashion-designer Ginny Doyle (Angela
Kennedy). There was a new love interest for Caroline in the form of
businessman Doug Fletcher (Normie Rowe), and other
twists saw the re-emergence of Susan Palmer (now played by Oriana Panozzo.) According to the
producers these new characters were added in an attempt to recapture the more
down-to-earth nature of the earlier episodes, while the big business intrigue
and outrageous plotlines were markedly toned down. Fiona and Janice now lived
together in the new boarding-house they opened. Their characters began an
on-going comedy double-act, while the house itself became a new vehicle to
bring guest characters into the proceedings. Craig Maxwell identified Beryl
as his long lost mother. It was soon learned that Craig’s mother was actually
Beryl’s look-alike, the similarly-monikered Ruby
(also played by Leila Hayes), an unscrupulous tart. Craig also formed an enduring
romantic association with chauffeur Debbie. Glen quickly caught Alison’s eye
and a turbulent love affair resulted. Mark Conroy and
Jared Robinson had clearly been cast for their model-like good looks and,
especially for Conroy in his opening scenes, the opportunities for showcasing
these newcomers bare-chested, in tight jeans or in tiny swimming trunks were
rarely missed. Clearly Conroy and Robinson were key figures in the show’s
attempted revamp, and unusually for cast newcomers, instantly gained a position
in the show’s opening titles “mug-shots” montage. Usually new characters,
even much publicised key characters like Caroline
and Alison, would wait several months before their picture made its way into
the opening titles. Sadly these attempts
to revitalise the series were not particularly
successful. Former fans did not return to the series, while young newcomers
to soap viewing seemed to prefer Neighbours, a more clean-cut serial that had been
launched at the start of 1985. FINAL
REVAMPS
Towards the end
Beryl and Gordon, who had stood as the more stable halves of the two original
parental relationships in the series, decided to get married. They did not
seem particularly well matched; the move seemed a fairly arbitrary method of revitalising the characters
who had come somewhat surplus to requirements in the
evolving storylines, despite their importance to the character structure at
the start of the series. Finally the producers did manage to lure Rowena
Wallace back to the series, though sadly, what would have been top news two
years before seemed pallid indeed to an indifferent viewing public who had
switched off in droves from a series obviously past its peak and showing no
sign of improving. Rowena’s on-screen re-appearance (not playing Patricia but
rather Pat’s long-lost identical twin sister, Pamela Hudson) sadly came too
late to save the series and indeed coincided with both the shift to a
non-ratings time slot and the news that the series had been quietly axed.
Poor Rowena played out her scenes to little fanfare and the series quietly
ended (in Melbourne, at least) well into the summer non-ratings period of
December 1987, shortly after Rowena’s 10 week stint ended. Though David Palmer
had departed at the end of 1986, many old hands stayed on to the end: Fiona,
Charlie, Beryl and Gordon, Wayne and Andy all remained, while successful
characters Alison and Caroline continued their outrageous scheming. Sons and Daughters was one series to really pick-up on the
current tastes and trends of the day with the early cloning of The Restless Years before adopting the tone of the glamorous US
super-soaps just coming into vogue. Apart from Return to Eden
which lasted just one season, Sons
and Daughters is the one
successful Australian soap to deal with wealthy and powerful business people
and their money-making schemes. While this led to successful ratings at the
time it seems Sons and Daughters dated rather quickly when the vogue passed. THE 96TH PARALLEL
There are also some
interesting parallels between Sons
and Daughters and the
grand-daddy of all Australian soaps, Number 96. Both series were
made in Sydney and two of Number
96’s biggest stars, Pat
McDonald and Abigail became big stars of Sons and Daughters. Though Number 96 dealt with comedy and raunchy sex and sin
storylines totally absent from Sons
and Daughters, both
series seemed desperate to maintain top ratings, attempting to earn them by
constantly axing central characters or violently killing off less important
ones in all manner of creative ways (both series used bomb-blasts, shootings
and shark attacks to great effect). In fact, both series both really lost the
plot with a jarring cast shake-up that had been designed to boost the already
sagging ratings. The sudden cast changes coming at a time when the series was
beginning to show subtle signs of wear only served to turn away even more
viewers, and in both cases the series never recovered from the overly drastic
changes. Thereafter there was a high turnover of assorted new characters and
lack of focus in the later storylines leading to the inevitable demise of the
series. Both series ran a
similar length, but ten years apart; Number 96 ran
from March 1972 to August 1977 while Sons and Daughters ran from January 1982, with the final episode airing in Sydney in
August 1987. Like Number 96, Sons
and Daughters ran for the
first few years as half hour episodes stripped in a week-night time slot, but
later switched to showing two one hour episodes a week. In yet another
co-incidence, in both series’ final year Melbourne broadcasts only, the
number of episodes shown each week was reduced from two to one, so in
Melbourne the final episode was not seen until December.
IMPACT
In all 972 half-hour
episodes of Sons and Daughters were produced. The series was screened in
the UK in the late 1980s to some success. Early episodes of the show were
repeated by Channel 5 in the UK in 1998, however the
show was taken off after the first two hundred episodes or so. Luckily for
fans the show returned to Channel 5 in January 2002. The series resumed where
their earlier repeat run had ended, with episodes screening at 4.00 am
weekends. The final episode was reached in November 2005. The show has also
been repeated several times in Australia since its original run but has never
reached true cult status. Network Seven repeated the series in an early
morning weekday slot in the late 1990s. Then Australian pay-TV operator Foxtel repeated the series on the UK-TV channel (well,
the series had achieved success in the country). Starting 1997 Foxtel broadcast the entire series at the accelerated
rate of five half-hour episodes a week. The final episode was reached in
April 2000. In the late 1990s Sons
and Daughters was
repeated on the PRIME network which transmits to country regions of Victoria,
and on GWN in Western Australia. PRIME had reached the late-1985 period of
the series when it was taken off on 15 December 2000. Co-incidentally GWN removed the show from their schedules that same day. PRIME viewers really
were left hanging when Sons and
Daughters disappeared.
The various storylines all seemed to be building to a climactic high-point in
preparation for the end-of-year cliffhanger for 1985. Unlike some years, this
time the writers managed to place practically all of the characters in some
sort-of perilous position for the year’s final fade-out, with at least two
involved in a potentially deadly disaster. PRIME’s final episode finished with Gordon’s
recently appeared brother James (Nick Tate) announcing to Gordon, Barbara,
Wayne and Caroline that he was going to marry Alison and his wedding present
to her was giving her control of his business involvement within the company,
making the despised Alison their business partner. A worried Fiona was hiding
her illness (cancer) from everyone while her doctor, Irene, was pressuring
her to get treatment. Andy was enmeshed in a troubled romance with a
blind-girl Kelly, while Charlie was impersonating a prim academic to impress
her new beau Tom. David’s new wife Sarah - initially believed to be an
amnesia-suffering Patricia - had run off and left him, and Beryl had ended
her romance with neighbour Rod Campbell after he
had raised his hand to hit her. Had the series remained on-air, we would soon
have seen that year’s big cliffhanger. This included a claustrophobic
Caroline locked in a cupboard during a robbery of the Hamilton mansion while
Gordon and Barbara were away, attending Wayne’s wedding to Mary Reynolds
(Tessa Humphries). Meanwhile in Melbourne, Beryl looked on helplessly as
Rod’s jealous housekeeper Doris Hudson (Carole Skinner) locked herself in the
house alone with Beryl’s baby son Robert threatening to smother him to death.
Alison had learned the true identity of Wayne’s fiancée (she was actually his
long-lost sister) and she and James rushed in his small plane to stop the
wedding. Miles from civilisation their plane ran
out of fuel, and crashed into dense forest. In October 2006 the
Seven Network began repeating Sons
and Daughters at 10.30 am
weekdays. This repeat run started from episode one but was discontinued in
March 2007. In July 2008 the Seven Network resumed rerunning the serial, at midnight
each Wednesday night (technically Thursday morning). [3] Two special DVD
retrospectives featuring selected episodes of Sons and Daughters were released in 2006 and in 2007. REMAKES
Sons and Daughters has inspired five remakes produced under license from the original producers and based, initially, on original story and character outlines. The remakes are Verbotene Liebe (“Forbidden Love”), Germany, 1995 to present; Skilda världar (“Separate Worlds”), Sweden, 1996-2002; Apagorevmeni agapi, Greece, 1998; Cuori Rubati, Italy, 2002-2003; Zabranjena ljubav, Croatia, 2004 to present. |
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Originally uploaded May 2000 Last updated 6 July 2008 |
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