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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 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 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 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 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 things 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 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 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 |
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Originally uploaded June 2000 Last updated 1 January 2010 |
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