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

'Kate was becoming part of my personality'

Source: VARA TV Magazine, Dutch TV guide, 1992

Lenore Smith has been trough it all. How she became, as sister Kate, from a shy country girl to a self-aware, assertive woman. How The Flying Doctors had a couple of lifesaving injections of romance and how the series, because of the changing taste of the audience, became a more continuing story.

And yet Lenore is here in Europe while in Australia new episodes are filmed. It is a strange idea, The Flying Doctors without Kate.

Lenore: 'That I have taken such a long break wasn't my own idea. The series would end definitely, they told us. For some of us it was a welcome end, for some a forced end. There was no doubt in anyone's mind that The Flying Doctors would really end. They even started a spin-off with Vic and Nancy and a few others. But most of us soon arranged commitments to theatre companies. And when the new episodes were made some of us weren't available anymore, including me.'

'I don't mind that this has happened. I've been playing Kate for such a long time that she was becoming part of my personality. I really had to shake her off when I was home. Also I noticed how tired I had become of all those intensive years. Only since a little while I've been up to new work.'

'Of course it helps when you've been on television for so long. People know you and feel at ease with you. But it also works against you, because there is a danger that you become popular because of the role you play and not for being the actress that you are. I have had a lot of offers for a role as a nurse. I'm really number one at the nurses-market!'

'I'm not really worried about typecasting, but the only thing I did in that sense was a trainings film for a nursing school. That wasn't easy at all: in contrary to the sets in The Flying Doctors, which were not genuine, these were shocking real. I was standing there in the intensive care between old people and babies who were fighting for their lives. It was shocking, I've learned a lot about being a nurse, while all those years I've been pretending to know everything about it.'

'When I take on something new, it will be television again because as a TV-actor you can make a living here. As a film-actor you have to try it elsewhere, because the film industry in Australia has reduced a lot. That means going to America and that's not for me.'

'Now when I'm looking back, my dearest memories of the series lie all the way in the beginning. Everything was new and exciting, and with the romance I had with Robert/Geoff, because that claimed more character play of me than ever before. But the working circumstances became increasingly bad, the location was moved from a cosy country village to a very less cosier village, an hour away from the city. It often seemed like the show had to stop, but at the last moment they somehow found money again or they found another way to save money.'

'In the beginning we had three weeks to film two episodes, it became two episodes a week with two filming crews. That way it wasn't getting any better for us. That also goes for the scripts, lately they weren't as good anymore. They had to get someone from Amsterdam to check the continuity! Well, writers!'

'When Christopher (Stollery) and I got more than a working relationship we were afraid for a while that they would put in a relationship between us. We never had problems working together, we were able to drop it when we were home. Actually thinking about it, we never talked about it!'

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Lenore