How we made Neighbours

Stefan Dennis, actor

I learned what my character, Paul Robinson, was like right away: in one of the earliest episodes, I was dumped on my Ramsay Street doorstep in a nappy, bonnet and bib, incredibly drunk, after a bachelor party in true Aussie-bloke style. My screen-dad Jim Robinson had to pick me up off the ground.

That was back in 1985. In those days, Australian soaps didn't have a great record for longevity: no one expected Neighbours to last more than six months. I was in the original cast – before Kylie, Jason, Madge and Harold.Most of the very first episode was a night shoot for Danny's nightmare scene involving the entire cast, so we were shooting in water at 2am every night, really cold. Danny's nightmare was about Shane who was a high-diver. Danny was always worried Shane would dive into the water and smack his head and die. So there was a sequence of us all in the street maniacally laughing at Danny, with smoke and mirrors and all that happening.That was January 1985.

It changed In those days, a soap had to make it in Australia first. There was no going straight to international markets. Neighbours initially aired on Channel 7, but it didn't take off. Then, after seven months, it was axed. But two months later, Channel 10 decided it might have legs, took it by the horns, did some promotional stunts – and it took off.

The show's original lineup was the Robinsons – Jim, Julie, Paul, Scott, Lucy and Helen Daniels, the grandmother. Plus the Ramsays – Madge, Maria, Shane and Danny. Other than that, it was just Des and Daphne Clarke. It wasn't for a year or so that characters like Scott, Charlene and Harold Bishop came on board.

It became a phenomenon in the UK, of course. It was vibrant: young, good-looking people with sunshine and bright colours and golden beaches. Around Christmastime the UK's so bleak, so to have this show when Christmas is hot summer and beaches and BBQs, so the sunshine and goodlooking people and happy attitudes appealed. That's exactly why the show didn't work in the US. The network tried to sell it in places like California, and they said 'What do we need a show like that for?' Neighbours and Home & Away appealed in much the same way, though Home & Away is a lot more dramatic – they got away with far edgier stories because their time-slot was half an hour later. Censorship on Neighbours has always been heavy. We're not allowed to show a gun being pointed, and blood is vetoed; the most violence you can have is someone throwing a punch. And there's a lot of language that can't be used. When the show started, we weren't even allowed to say the word toilet – not at all. So in Neighbours, nobody goes to the toilet.

It's been great being the show's badass, but for a while, my character got too evil, too moustache-twirling. He was high and mighty and incredibly wealthy because of his hotel chain, Lassiter's. According to the show, there are five-star Lassiter's all over the world: in New York, Paris, Sydney, Tokyo – and Erinsborough. That always amazed me. It also stunned me that he was a multimillionaire yet lived at 22 Ramsay Street. When his villainous ways got too big for the show, the producers thought: "We have to get rid of him – or give him a brain tumour that's been festering." Once it was removed, he was a squeaky-clean nice guy and of course fans hated him. We slowly had to build him back up to his bad old self.

We muck up an awful lot during filming. Me and Alan Fletcher, who plays Karl Kennedy, are incredibly naughty children on set. We all play pranks. And we're a bunch of potty-mouths. Our studio does cost 100 dollars a minute to run, so we can't muck up to the point that it holds things up – if we did, the domino effect would be astronomical.

Joy Chambers, actor

Reg Grundy first met Reg Watson in 1971, when the latter was making the British TV show Crossroads. Later, the two Regs came up with an idea while they were out sailing. They had noticed that there was very little communication between grownups and teenagers, and talked about how this phenomenon had been going on for centuries. Then Reg Watson said: "Wouldn't it be good to do a serial about a street where people actually did communicate with their kids?"

Reg Grundy [Chambers' husband since 1971] immediately saw it could be a hit – with the right family. That was the Robinsons, a widower and his two sons. In an early episode, Scott, one of the sons, asks his gran if she had sex before marriage – and remember, this is TV in 1985. She eventually tells him she had.

That was how Neighbours set itself apart. Also, few soaps had had a female character as ruthless as Rosemary Daniels, the tough businesswoman I played. She was the one who found Jim Robinson when he died of a heart attack. That was the funniest scene ever: I still don't know why the director wanted me to scream his name like that!

Alan Dale, who played Jim, wasn't happy on the show, but he was a good actor who's now doing very well. It's the same with Kylie. She learned all about the business on Neighbours – she has a lot to thank Neighbours for. In fact, a lot of people do.