Everything you always wanted to know about The Flying Doctors. Dedicated to Lenore Smith and Christopher Stollery.
 

Chapter 5 - The new flying doctor

This chapter is part of the book The Inside Story by James Oram. It's a book about the actors of The Flying Doctors and it was published in 1990. You get to know a lot about the actors and about working for the most popular Australian TV series.
Only to obtain second hand via websites like E-bay these days.

The producers had a problem. Who on earth could they get to replace Andrew McFarlane, the lanky, easy-going actor about to take wings after two years setting his stamp firmly on the lead role in The Flying Doctors. Casting agents were consulted. Actors auditioned. Talent scouts unleashed. But no one, it seemed, could project the exact mixture of easy intelligence, laconic humour and tall, bronzed Aussie good looks integral to the part.

Then someone had a brainwave. If they couldn’t join ‘em, why not beat ‘em? Get someone who was the complete opposite, introduce him towards the end of that year’s series, get him established and then let the fans confront the same dilemma as the producers when Andrew makes his shock announcement. Hopefully they’d come to terms with the fact that there was only one Andrew McFarlane and copycats were out of the question.

And what was the opposite to a dedicated country doctor? An alcoholic city doctor, of course!

Daring by any standards, the ploy worked, mainly because no one bothered to tell Robert Grubb, the new Flying Doctor, just exactly what they were up to!

When he auditioned, Robert thought his role was that of a third doctor with Andrew McFarlane and Liz Burch still sharing the leads. At that stage he’d never even seen the show. They called him in for an audition and, as far as he knew, it was just a story about a community in a small town. A little bit like A Country Practice in the outback. When he read the script he realised it was about a doctor who wrongly diagnoses his wife. She dies of cancer and he hits the bottle out of guilt.

‘I thought wow!’ Robert said later. ‘They’re really stretching the parameters here. Doctor leaves city after death of wife, becomes alcoholic in country town. The tyranny of guilt matched by the tyranny of distance. It has great Chekhovian qualities.’

A graduate from the National Institute of Dramatic Art, Robert naturally wanted to play Hamlet, and this looked about as close to high drama as he was ever going to get on the small screen. It wasn’t until rehearsals that he discovered they were actually looking for someone who they hoped would develop into a hero to replace Andrew, but by then he’d put so much into developing the anti-hero that it was too late to change.

‘So there we were, me playing the role of the city slicker alcoholic doctor right to the hilt and being told, at the last minute, that in the next episode he quits the drink and that’s that.

‘I thought, wait a minute, what happened to my Chekhovian character? And they said, well, we can’t have a guilt-ridden doctor getting sloshed in front of the kids at 7.30 p.m. at night. He reforms, that’s what happens. Bang goes the character I’d spent weeks perfecting.

‘I ended up compromising. Because he was from the city, I made him very different, even to wearing expensive suits, silk shirts and Italian shoes. Andrew always wore moleskins and short sleeves and that sort of thing. I felt it was a good contrast with plenty of potential.

‘Anyhow, it came off. As the character developed I was slowly accepted by the townspeople even though I’d scoot around in a Porsche wearing sunglasses and looking like something out of Miami Vice. We got a lot of comedy value out of it. It’s always good to know the unpopular fellow is going to be caught out. You play it to the hilt at the start so he has further to drop.

‘Ironically, three months later I had a break and went to Adelaide to do the stage production of Wild Honey and there was this marvellous part of a doctor who hits the bottle and keeps saying wonderful things like: "I love people. I just can’t stand sick people. They make me depressed." ‘

Robert roared with laughter as he told the tale.

An extremely talented actor, Robert made the role very much his own. He has a good feel for outdoor action with juicy parts in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Gallipoli, Phar Lap, Robbery Under Arms, Sarah Dane and Five Mile Creek (with new co-star Liz Burch).

‘The Flying Doctors is very real. The episodes are based on actual events. I told a funny story about Sam Neill when we were making Robbery Under Arms and they leapt on it and turned it into a subplot for one of the episodes.’

The story is worth repeating, not only because it’s very funny but also because it gives an insight into the genesis of film scripts. This one came from a camp-fire chat while the team was shooting way out beyond Minyip, but it could just as easily have been a couple of paragraphs from a newspaper, something overheard in a bar, a passing comment from a cab driver, something the neighbour said to the scriptwriter’s wife, or even, on occasion, history itself.

Robbery Under Arms was being shot in the scorching outback heat beyond Port Augusta in South Australia. Sam had the day off and thought he’d indulge in a little horse riding. He approached one of the cockies (an all embracing term for the Australian bush worker) and asked where the horses were kept.

This was before Sam leapt to world fame in the lead role of the television series Riley Ace of Spies and movies such as Dead Calm, A Cry In The Dark and The Hunt For Red October, but he was already well known on Australian screens. The cockie eyed him up and down. Sam Neill or not Sam Neill, he was as good as him any day.

‘Over the hill,’ he grunted. Sam eyed him suspiciously. ‘Any problems taking one for a bit of a ride?’

‘Not if you can saddle it,’

‘Yeah,’ said Sam, and headed off, irritated at being treated like some city new chum. When he was almost out of earshot, he caught the cockie’s parting words: ‘And you’ve got enough time.’

He didn’t know quite what to make of that, but he was damned if he was going back to ask what it meant. He trudged into the silent heat, and eventually came to some horses in the shade of a horse float.

He says now that if he hadn’t been so determined not to be taken for a mug by the cockie, he’d have had a good look around for the usual guard dog. As it was, he missed him, a mangy, ugly blue heeler, the world’s best (and meanest) cattle dog. He had one eye, a couple of broken teeth, a half torn off ear and looked about as old as Methuselah. He was tied to a typical outback dog leash; a section of one inch chain, then a great heavy bit you could tow a truck with, then the inevitable length of wire attached to a frayed piece of rope that wouldn’t hold a Chihuahua. Only a madman would step inside the radius of that leash. A madman, or a careless actor.

Sam found a saddle, slammed the door and headed for the horses. They sighted each other at the same moment. Sam might have been careless, but he was no madman. The saddle hit the dirt as he hit the toe, the blue heeler on its feet and howling towards him, fangs bared, eye aflame, the chain clanking at his tail. Sam made the length of the tether about two feet ahead of the dog. It was like a cartoon. The chain snapped tight – clang, boy-ong! The heeler’s teeth were inches from his throat. Sam stared for one horror-stricken moment and took off again, the dog baying like the hound of the Baskervilles.

It had to happen. The weak link in the chain lasted just long enough for Sam to reach the top of the hill and to catch his breath. He hunched over, panting, just as the howls started getting closer again. Sam didn’t look back. He raced to the only protection in sight – an old broken down truck at the side of the road. He dived into the front seat as the dog hit the side of the truck like a charging buffalo.

His relief at such a narrow escape was but momentary. He surveyed his predicament. Here he was trapped inside a baking metal coffin with the mercury around 130 degrees and a baying fiend outside waiting to kill him. Exhausted, helpless and terrified, Sam knew he’d disappear into a small puddle of perspiration before anyone found him. ‘Here within lies poor Sam Neill, done to death by a mad blue heel.’ He tried to raise a laugh, but it just wouldn’t come. Neither did help. The dog settled back on its paws, staring at him. Time passed. They both dozed in the heat.

He was awakened by a thump at the window on the driver’s side. Two bloodshot eyes in a grizzled, leather-brown, grey-bearded face peered at him.

‘What are you doin’ there? Waitin’ for rain?’

Sam stared in disbelief and then horror, as the blue heeler woke baying for fresh blood.

‘Holy suffering shit!’ yelled Greybeard, yanking open the door and hurling himself into the driver’s seat. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘You didn’t give me any time,’ snapped Sam, suddenly in no mood for stupid questions. ‘Now look what you’ve done. Woken the bloody thing up.’

‘Strike a flamin’ light,’ said Greybeard, shaking his head. The dog dozed on its paws once more and they quietly pondered their plight. Then the old boy noticed something. The dog was off to one side and the last length of rope lay snaked across the track downhill from the truck’s right-hand wheel. He nudged Sam.

‘When I say go, let off the handbrake. Easy, mind.’ Bewildered, Sam took the handbrake, wondering what the crazy old coot had planned. There was no way that dog would stand for being run over. It would probably eat the truck.

‘Now!’ hissed Greybeard and Sam eased off the handbrake. The truck slowly rolled forward until the wheel was over the rope. ‘Pull on the brake!’ The truck jarred to a halt as the dog set up a frantic baying.

‘You bloody little beauty,’ chortled Greybeard, and without another word pushed open the door and headed over the ridge and out of sight. Sam figured the blue heeler would either strangle itself or break free at any moment.

‘Now or never,’ he yelled, leapt to the dirt and broke at least the four minute mile getting back to the film crew, where the cattle dogs were trained to behave politely and the cockies must never be asked any questions, ever, about anything.

‘Anyhow,’ said Robert, as he rounded off the yarn, ‘I used to get a good laugh out of this and they stitched it into one of the scripts with Peter O’Brien as a young bushie, Sam Patterson, and I was the city slicker doctor who didn’t know anything about cattle dogs. It really worked.’

It’s all part of the true-to-life quality that puts The Flying Doctors in a different league from the standard soapie. His relationship with Lenore Smith’s Sister Kate Wellings was typical. Like Robert’s role, it grew largely from the actors’ own input.

They both made it clear from the start they didn’t want any romantic involvement, just two people who happened to be working together. They wanted to avoid the old doctor-nurse romantic cliché that inevitably degenerated into a screen marriage as soon as the ratings started to flag.

They felt, like everyone else on the series, that The Flying Doctors really had something going for it and they didn’t want to diminish its potential. The scriptwriters went along with the idea and everything was hunky-dory – at first.

Then they found an interesting development. To keep them emotionally apart the scripts started featuring lots of arguments between the two; snappy, bickering little things that in real life often disguise an attraction between two people.

Robert and Lenore suggested that they have a reconciliation where they realise they’re actually quite alike and that’s the reason they’ve been so stand-offish with each other. The director went along with the idea and they had three episodes where the two of them were constantly at each other’s throats. Then they sat down and had a talk about it all and discovered how they really felt about each other and the romance, stormy as it was, eventually led to a classic screen wedding. It was one of those rare occasions where the actors virtually take over the direction of the plot from the writers and producers.

At one stage the acting was so torrid that rumours began that they were also a number off-screen, which, seeing as Robert was happily married, set the cat among the pigeons. He laughs about it now, but it brought home a few lessons.

‘The business of on-screen romance is thrown at kids all the time and they think because it’s happening there it has to continue off screen. It’s all part of the nonsense that’s fed to them every day. I have two kids, Emerson, aged eight and Hayden, aged five. I’m very careful about what they see on the television. I can’t stand all this murder and mayhem. Even news bulletins seem preoccupied with violence and sudden death. The one programme I let them watch on television after 7.30 p.m. is The Flying Doctors, not because I’m in it, that tends to confuse them even more, but because it’s wholesome viewing. But even that’s not sacrosanct when you get the media hinting at romance that could break up the family. On-screen romance is nothing like that. Fair enough if you’re single and you meet someone you’re attracted to, but usually you end up just good friends. Or the opposite applies and there’s something between the two of you that doesn’t click, in which case romance is the last thing on your mind.

‘You work as mates. You spend every day developing things together and it is a highly professional relationship; one that doesn’t allow any escape or interruptions like romance. It is a funny sort of thing. You are invading someone else’s space, touching, cuddling and kissing and you do become very close. I suppose because you are an actor the deeper implications don’t apply just as a doctor can’t afford to let himself get too emotionally involved with his patient.’

Whenever he feels himself perhaps losing control somewhere he always thinks of the story about Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson after they’d had a terrific blow-up.

They were due to shoot a scene with a close-up of Brando talking to Nicholson. But Brando said it would be better not to have Nicholson actually in front of him at the time. Instead he selected a block of wood and spoke to that. He didn’t want his antagonistic feelings captured by the cameras. Brando believed that no matter how good you were at masking your inner feelings, these things did leak onto the film somehow.

‘Mind you, Brando could also have been having a go at Nicholson,’ laughed Robert. ‘Telling him he’d rather talk to a block of wood!’

He’s very strong on screencraft, which is another reason Robert likes The Flying Doctors. Because it’s being shot on film, he only has one camera to deal with. He can’t stand the multi-camera situation with people just sitting there and waiting for the lens to train on them.

‘With these great hefty units swishing around all over the place you don’t really know where the right one is at any time. There’s a certain knack to knowing which camera the director is planning to use. You can find yourself acting your piece to the wrong camera and act yourself right out of the scene. You can also get the sense that someone’s acting for one camera and you’re acting for another. With a single camera it’s set. You rehearse a couple of times and you do it and you know exactly what’s going to pop up on the screen. As a person who has done a lot of stage work I believe you can channel all your energies into one area, in this case the camera.’

Happily, the role has also led to the possibility of Robert fulfilling his lifetime ambition – to act in Europe. The Flying Doctors is the top-rated show in Holland and Belgium and popularity is climbing steadily in the United Kingdom and other European countries. He was flown to Holland last year to take part in a television spectacular and the Dutch were even planning to shoot a couple of episodes of one of their top sitcoms in Australia and have a visit from the Flying Doctor written into the script.

In Europe these days, he’s seen as the typical Australian – which he is – playing out the adventures of a remarkable profession – which the Flying Doctor is. He’s perfect for the part; craggy good looks, keen, penetrating eyes and a whimsical sense of humour. And he loves the outback and its people.

‘It is a fascinating place full of very resourceful characters. I once read a book, One Thousand Things to do with a Piece of Wire. I loved that. Australians have a reputation as the world’s greatest improvisers and that’s where you see them at their best; inventing a myriad of different ways to endure in the harsh bush. Not that you have to be a bushie to be a great improviser.

‘My father’s got this nice little vegetable garden out the back of the house and whenever he goes to the rubbish dump he brings back more than he took down there. He came back one day with a whole lot of computer parts. Mum said, "What on earth are you going to do with those?" They were flat and small and silver and he strung them up over his lettuce and they’d flap around in the wind and keep all the birds away. I love that adaptability and of course you see it all the time out in the bush. You just have to go along and see their fences and their gates.

‘The cockpit of the aircraft we fly in is on hydraulics in the studio and we used to have this little guy come around and pull levers and things and rock us all over the "sky". It was always breaking down and costing a fortune to get fixed up, so finally they got sick of it and they put it on tractor tyres with a piece of four by two underneath. A couple of stage hands would get on either end of this great big lever and wobble, wobble and off we’d go, up into the blue yonder. It worked out fine. We’d get in the cockpit and yell, "Yeah, that’s great. More wobble please." ‘

It’s got nothing to do with flying doctors, but don’t be surprised if you see shiny beer bottle tops or even old engine parts strung across a Coopers Creek vegetable garden in some future episode.

Quick pick Chapter 4 Andrew McFarlane - Chapter 5 Robert Grubb - Chapter 6 Peter O' Brien, Brett Climo - Chapter 7 Liz Burch, Rebecca Gibney - Chapter 8 Maurie Fields, Max Cullen - Chapter 9 Lenore Smith

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Robert