Weekend Warriors

Sun Herald

Sunday August 1, 1999

JANE HAMPSON

Three men who have endured a tough couple of years have hit back with a

sitcom about the great Aussie weekender, writes JANE HAMPSON.

Clothes piled in the corner, weights spread across the floor, the couch draped messily with a blue sheet, the ashtray overflowing: Gary Sweet's dressing room is dimly lit chaos, single guy style.

He's on the set of Dog's Head Bay, his first comedy and the first foray into television for Australia's best known playwright David Williamson and his wife Kristin. It's also a first of sorts for producer Hal McElroy, who, having spent four years making hits for the Southern Star Group, has formed his own production company with wife Di.

By their own admission, Sweet, Williamson and McElroy are emerging from challenging periods in their lives. Sweet endured a highly publicised separation from wife Johanna Griggs, Williamson engaged in open feuding with Sydney Theatre Company artistic director Wayne Harrison and decamped to Noosa, while McElroy suffered a serious car accident followed by a controversial split from Southern Star.

All three hope Dog's Head Bay will ease their mid-life crises.

For Sweet, the role of Alex Santorini, an obnoxious high-flying lawyer who buys a ramshackle weekender to placate his socialite wife Vicki (Susan Lyons), is a chance to reinvent himself.

"I guess I have been cast as a character with certain heroic qualities in the past," he said, referring to his high-profile time as Police Rescue's knight in white overalls, Mickey McClintock. "Remember when I used to be heroic? Now look at me. I'm the bad guy."

A familiar face on the small screen as star of Rescue and, more recently, Cody and the ill-fated Big Sky, this is perhaps the first time Sweet has not been cast as the ruggedly handsome leading man. While his famous blue eyes are as Newmanesque as ever, the hair is grey and receding. He is, after all, 42.

Sweet has a reputation for being a born clown off-screen, but Dog's Head Bay is his first attempt at a sitcom and he admitted to finding on-camera funny business quite demanding.

"That's not to say I'm not enjoying it but it's an exercise in concentration," he said, foraging for the ashtray, lighting up and setting off the smoke alarm in the process.

"Because David (Williamson) is a theatrical writer, every word is important. You can't throw lines away. You have to make sure you deliver each line as it's meant to be delivered."

Dog's Head Bay is, like Williamson's plays, heavy on social satire. As yuppies are wont to do, the Santorinis decide to renovate their beach shack, and every weekend escape the city for their place by the sea - much to the annoyance of their good-hearted Aussie battler neighbours, the Grants.

"Alex is sexist, racist, ageist. Anything with an ist, I think. He's egocentric, he's bombastic. He does have some redeeming features, but I'm struggling to find them," Sweet said, smirking.

It's the flipside of a drama such as Wildside, with its highly improvised style and gritty look. And although it sounds like another recent ABC success, SeaChange, which captured the mood of a stressed-out nation with its whimsical storylines, producer Hal McElroy explained the differences.

"This is a comedy about the Aussie weekend; what happens during the weekend and what everybody has to live with as a result of that," he said. "The self-important city folk invade this sleepy little hollow every weekend and then leave. They move in next to the salt-of-the earth, blue-collar family and then we discover they're related. Distant cousins. There's a family secret and that all starts to come out."

The characters, said Williamson, come not from his own experience of moving to Toorak-by-the-Sea (aka Noosa) two years ago but from a well-known Williamson play, Money And Friends.

"When I saw it, I thought, 'One day I want to take it further',", Williamson said, recalling the play's themes of wealth and status and their effect on relationships.

"There's all this bulls-t we go on about egalitarian Australia. There are differences and they're accelerating rapidly. In the 60s we had the second most equal spread of income - after Tito's Yugoslavia, I think! Now, according to a UN study two years ago, we're one of the worst."

Williamson has scaled back his prolific output since relocating to Noosa. "It was good to do nothing for a year," he sighed. But doing nothing is difficult for Williamson, whom McElroy described as "a workaholic. He just loves nothing more than writing".

And it's one of the perils of being an actor, noted Sweet, who can think of no place he'd rather be than "on set with the gang".

"But that's the kind of deal acting is," observed Sweet, who's been through a relatively quiet work period: a play at the Melbourne Theatre Company (a Williamson, The Club, no less), "a couple of guest spots" and that's about it.

"I lament the fact that actors get kind of bitter and twisted because they can't maintain (a high) profile over a long period of time. I've been lucky over the past seven years to be in a couple of good shows.

"What I miss most about not being constantly in work is the camaraderie of the crew and the cast on the floor. The most fun for me is actually being there, doing it on the floor with a big bunch of people and I can just be the goofball that I am."

Team McElroy

Hal McElroy's name has been synonymous with Australian film and television for the past 25 years. He produced, with his twin brother Jim, films such as The Cars That Ate Paris, Picnic At Hanging Rock, The Last Wave and Razorback and miniseries including The Last Frontier, A Dangerous Life and Which Way Home.

The twins parted ways in 1994 and Hal McElroy teamed up with the Southern Star Group, producing a string of successful series including Blue Heelers, Water Rats and Murder Call.

But after the public float of Southern Star in 1996, McElroy felt there was no place for him and has maintained a dignified silence about the split.

"I don't want to talk about it a lot, other than to say I realised . . . they had their own future plotted out and it didn't include me," McElroy said at the time.

He left when his contract expired in 1998, forming McElroy Television with his wife Di, who had worked as his unofficial business partner over 23 years of marriage.

For their first project, they have assembled some fine talent. Apart from the Williamsons as writers, Sweet as leading man and Susan Lyons as leading lady, they have hired director Simon Phillips, who has stage-dived from opera and theatre into the sitcom fray (he directed last summer's memorable Falstaff, with Welsh baritone Bryn Terfel for Opera Australia). The cast is rounded out with Vic Rooney, Shane Withington, Sebastian Goldspink and Sarah Pierse.

The Williamsons, Phillips and Sweet (who was offered the role of Alex at a party) were easy choices for the series, said McElroy. Filling out the rest of the cast, however, proved a greater chore.

"Because most of the other stuff they're performing is not as well-written, actors didn't know how to play it . . . they'd play the melodrama," McElroy said. "It was dramatic, but it wasn't funny. They just didn't know what to do. It's to do with confidence, it's to do with timing, it's to do with rhythm and it's to do with intelligence."

Perhaps his next project, a drama series called Above The Law for Channel 10, will be easier to cast. Apparently actors are already inundating Channel 10 with enquiries about auditions for the one-hour weekly series which goes into production in September.

Dog's Head Bay premieres on the ABC later this month.