{"id":138660,"date":"2025-09-15T10:29:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-15T10:29:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/138660\/"},"modified":"2025-09-15T10:29:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-15T10:29:08","slug":"every-soap-had-a-villain-and-i-was-the-resident-neighbours-stefan-dennis-on-strictly-showbiz-and-getting-the-sack-television","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/138660\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Every soap had a villain, and I was the resident\u2019: Neighbours\u2019 Stefan Dennis on Strictly, showbiz and getting the sack | Television"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stefan Dennis joined the cast of Neighbours as Paul Robinson, the git, for its first episode in 1985. He declines to tell me how old he was then. \u201cSee,\u201d he says, with a glint of that Paul cunning: \u201cThat\u2019s gonna give my age away if I tell you.\u201d If I were to take a guess \u2013 looking at him today, in Boxpark in Wembley, pin neat and ready for anything (he could nip to the shops or go clubbing) in a Lacoste polo shirt, leaping on and off high chairs as gracefully as a cat, I would say early 60s. Wikipedia says he is 67 in October. My first and enduring impression is not his age, but the fact that he must, in some bigwig showrunner\u2019s imagination, be this year\u2019s Strictly Come Dancing<\/a> crown prince. That\u2019s just how it works \u2013 there are some irredeemably bad dancers who are fun to watch, there are some perfect physical specimens in their prime who look like the obvious contenders but then flame out, and then there\u2019s the person who thinks they can\u2019t cut a rug but has some inner dancer, that\u2019s waited a lifetime to be activated, like a sleeper agent. Sorry to spoil it, everyone, but he is definitely that guy.<\/p>\n

Anyway, back to his age, which he insists is undisclosed. \u201cThe reason is, I was doing Flying Doctors \u2026\u201d This is the Australian drama about the outback. It was on in the daytime, if you were at school in the 80s you only watched it when you were ill, and I wonder how much the memory of it \u2013 very high drama, slightly terrifying, wide-open scenery, absolutely millions of sheep \u2013 was coloured by having a temperature. Anyway, Dennis was in the original miniseries but didn\u2019t return for the series because, by that time, he was already Bad Paul in Neighbours<\/a>. \u201cAnd in the green room, I\u2019m reading a magazine, and there was my wife on the cover, my first wife.\u201d<\/p>\n

This would have been Roz Roy, at that time a hostess on the Australian version of The Price is Right \u2013 they divorced in 1989. \u201cAnd I turned round and said: \u2018That\u2019s my wife!\u2019\u201d It\u2019s funny, you can hear the disbelief in his younger self, that he has a job as an actor and a beautiful wife on a magazine, and someone\u2019s been employed to teach him to ride a horse. But anyway, he was playing a 19-year-old, and the director let it be known, \u201cjokingly, but I could see the seriousness under it\u201d that if they\u2019d known how old he really was, he wouldn\u2019t have got the gig. \u201cI actually did lose a job after that, when they found out how old I really was.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Paul, you\u2019re a very naughty boy\u2019 \u2026 Paul Robinson gets punched by David Bishop (Kevin Harrington) in Neighbours. Photograph: Fremantle Media\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n

It is impossible to overstate or explain how important Neighbours was, to those of us born in the 70s and 80s. Neighbours first aired in 1985 in Australia. It came to the UK in 1986 on BBC One and went out twice a day, like The Archers, the lunchtime one a repeat of the previous afternoon\u2019s. The title was cheesy, and when Dennis was originally asked to sign for six months, he said: \u201cIt probably will only last that long anyway \u2013 Neighbours, what a corny name.\u201d The title had nothing on the theme tune, which ended: \u201cThat\u2019s when good neighbours become good friends.\u201d<\/p>\n

I wonder how the show ever became a drama when everyone in it was so nice. Kylie Minogue (Charlene) was nice, Jason Donovan (Scott) was nice, Anne Charleston (Madge) was nice, Alan Dale, playing Dennis\u2019s dad, was nice. But Dennis thinks this is the root of its popularity. \u201cA lot of soaps are quite dark and quite heavy, you don\u2019t get a break from it. We still had the drama in there, but it was interspersed with lightness, be it comedy or just \u2026 lightness.\u201d But that, to my mind, is what makes its popularity so mysterious; how do you get engrossed in the love arc of two nice people who are nice to each other and are certainly soon to marry, or nine nice neighbours who are about to become good friends? And yet we were.<\/p>\n

Everyone is so nice \u2026 an early cast photo of Neighbours. Photograph: PA Images\/Alamy<\/p>\n

This wasn\u2019t lost on Dennis, who nearly broke his wrist in the late 80s, hanging on to a building, trying to escape a baying mob of teenage fans in Ireland. \u201cIt was Beatlemania, it was insane.\u201d In a town in the north of England, a lady came up to him and smacked him on the arm, saying, \u201cPaul, you\u2019re a very naughty boy,\u201d then scuttled off. He acts all this out, slapping me for effect, then hastily apologising. Paul was a scheming ratbag, always looking for a chance to get the better of people. Dennis is quite defensive of him and underlines stoutly that he was only like that because he got shot by his wife, Terry, after he had found out she had killed her former bank-robbing husband (a detail I\u2019d completely forgotten, because he seemed just born bad). \u201cEvery soap has a villain, and I happened to be the resident,\u201d says Dennis. \u201cBut Paul was always a likable one. He did some pretty nasty stuff but he always managed to turn it round with people.\u201d<\/p>\n

When the audition for Paul first came up, Dennis didn\u2019t want to do it. He was up for a part in a film, The Lighthorsemen, for which he thought he was destined, and not only because he could ride a horse. It\u2019s a great story about the Australian mounted cavalry in the Sinai and Palestine campaign of the first world war, but it was not a good film \u2013 and flopped \u2013 so it was probably just as well he didn\u2019t get the part. Neighbours, on the other hand, though dropped after seven months by its original channel \u2013 Seven (\u201cThe CEO, Ron Casey, went to his grave with that\u201d) \u2013 was picked up by another network, Channel 10, where it ran for the next 39 years.<\/p>\n

People sometimes explain Neighbours\u2019 popularity by its cast, which reads like a roll call of pretty much every Australian actor ever to be exported, except for Nicole Kidman. But the original cast had only 12 members (Minogue and Donovan were yet to join, Natalie Imbruglia was still at school and Margot Robbie was yet to be born). Dennis describes Dale, who played the widowed Robinson family patriarch Jim as a \u201clifelong friend\u201d. While Dale has cropped up in various shows since, from West Wing to Ugly Betty, other Neighbours cast members were straight-down-the-line soap actors \u2013 whatever made that peculiar magic, it wasn\u2019t star power. \u201cIt was very intimate, we really trusted each other, they were brilliant, Paul Keane [Des], Jason, although Jason was the second Scott, I was also dear friends with Darius [Perkins], who played the first Scott. Unfortunately, he died a few years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Dennis was a child, his older brother was killed aged 12 by a drunk driver. He\u2019s said of this previously: \u201cThe repercussions of someone getting behind the wheel on drugs or drink, it\u2019s devastating to the people around them. This happened decades and decades ago, and it still affects me today \u2013 I\u2019m more affected today than I was back then.\u201d The family were thick as thieves growing up on the Gold Coast \u2013 \u201clike Australia\u2019s Honolulu\u201d \u2013 always \u201cputting on shows\u201d (he leans into the microphone and says: \u201cDon\u2019t forget I put inverted commas round \u2018shows\u2019). His mum had acted at the Theatre Royal in the 50s, his dad was in the navy.<\/p>\n

He always wanted to be an actor, but trained as a chef \u2013 this was the 70s, a boring time for food, a great time for everything else, he says. If he could time travel anywhere in history, he says: \u201cOther people would go to the dark ages, I\u2019d go back to the 70s.\u201d Seriously? Why? \u201cIt was a naughty era. Promiscuous in every way, not just sex.\u201d He does an elaborate mime, starting with smoking a joint, then some completely indecipherable gesticulating. \u201cI\u2019d be branded as a bad boy if I started telling you stories.\u201d Show business suits him in every way: he doesn\u2019t overthink it, he loves performing, but he doesn\u2019t, one senses, love the discretion it requires. He\u2019d rather tell everyone everything.<\/p>\n

The resident villain \u2026 Paul Robinson, in trouble with the law in Neighbours. Photograph: Fremantle Media\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n

By 1992, he had done Neighbours long enough, and thought: \u201cI don\u2019t want to be typecast, I don\u2019t want to be working my whole life on a soap. Every young Australian actor has Hollywood in their sights.\u201d He did go over to the US, but says: \u201cI didn\u2019t know how the machine worked.\u201d Plus, this was a time before they realised that Australian actors could also do other accents. \u201cThey used to say: \u2018Your voice is so cute\u2019, but they didn\u2019t want to use it.\u201d<\/p>\n

He had been back and forward between Australia and the UK, doing publicity \u2013 he calls that gruelling 24-hour flight, \u201cthe long bus ride\u201d \u2013 and \u201chaving doors opened because of Neighbours\u201d, so when he moved to London, the work was nonstop, with more voiceover work than he could do and back-to-back stage jobs. He was in Blood Brothers in the West End: \u201cThere\u2019s another one, like Neighbours, it\u2019s pure entertainment.\u201d Is it? It\u2019s the least light entertainment you can think of, I say, given that the brothers both [spoiler alert] die, tragically, at the end. \u201cWell, sure, it\u2019s gut-wrenching, but it\u2019s also side-splitting.\u201d He met his second wife, Gail Easdale, when they were both doing a panto \u2013 she\u2019s a \u201csensational dancer. She gave it up to have children.\u201d They married in 2000 \u2013 before that, he lived for seven years with his best friend, the TV executive Nick Milligan. \u201cI\u2019d come over to England, and he said: \u2018Stay with me while you get on your feet.\u2019 So I said: \u2018I\u2019ll stay for about six months.\u2019 And I lived with him for seven years.\u201d Twelve years ago, Milligan and his eight-year-old daughter died in a horrific speedboat accident in Cornwall. \u201cIt\u2019s so sad, what happened,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

In the late 1990s, he started a production company. \u201cI was passionate about it, I was just not good at it. And I think I realised that I wasn\u2019t good.\u201d He and Easdale had their first son, Cameron, in 2002, and were intending to go back to Australia to build a house and raise their children. A last ditch success with his film company meant that Easdale went ahead: \u201cI left her by herself in a foreign country with a baby. I think she was very lonely. I still feel terrible about it.\u201d She must have forgiven him \u2013 25 years married with three just about or almost adult children, and they are still on the phone every quarter hour, talking about soya milk and being nice to each other. Cameron is studying law and is a beautiful singer, Declan is a marvellous actor but wants to be an astrophysicist, Darci is interested in neuroscience and is a natural dancer, has been since she was five. \u201cShe\u2019s the one I have to impress on Strictly.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018It\u2019s my job to make it work\u2019 \u2026 Dennis, shot on location at BOXPARK Wembley. Photograph: Alicia Canter\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

By the time he settled back in Australia in 2004, the call came to rejoin the Neighbours cast, because of course it did, and again, he didn\u2019t want to do it. \u201cI had the greatest respect for it. It\u2019s a brilliant show. But I felt I\u2019d been over in the UK, and I\u2019d done a lot of stuff that nobody in Australia would know about because it was on stage, or it was local TV, and I\u2019d just look like I\u2019d come back \u2026\u201d \u2013 he mimes a tail between his legs, at least, I think it was a tail \u2013 \u201cand said, can I have a job on Neighbours, please?\u201d Dale, who was living in the US by then, talked him into it. \u201cHe said: \u2018Don\u2019t be stupid, Stef. This is a great gig. And besides, you\u2019re not an actor unless you\u2019re working.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Two years later, in 2006, he got fired. \u201cThey said: \u2018We have to fire you, for doing your job so well.\u2019\u201d Wait, what? \u201cThey said: \u2018It doesn\u2019t matter what we\u2019ve thrown at you, and some of the things have been quite ridiculous and a bit over the top, you\u2019ve always made it work. It\u2019s our fault, not yours. The character has now almost become a caricature, he\u2019s too big for what we\u2019re trying to do.\u2019 Paul\u2019s return to Neighbours was was like evil on steroids – he would marry seven times in total, have unnumbered affairs, and it was this, more than his constant scamming of his associates (the phrase \u201cfool me once\u201d does spring to mind – he\u2019d been at this game for over two decades) that earned him a reputation for unalloyed mischief.<\/p>\n

After the firing, he told the production company: \u201cI\u2019m an actor. It\u2019s my job to make it work.\u201d Then, two days later, they had thought of a fix; instead of getting rid of him, they were going to make him an amputee. Originally, they were just going to remove his foot, but the stunt coordinator on Neighbours had himself lost his leg at the shin, and the producers figured they could use him as a stand-in for closeups. I don\u2019t understand at all what problem this solves, but I have to admit, the making of Neighbours sounds exactly like a plot in Neighbours \u2013 grisly and horrific but serendipitous and collaborative, engrossing and completely incomprehensible.<\/p>\n

Neighbours made it through Covid \u2013 indeed, the distancing protocols that were adopted for TV sets worldwide were devised on Neighbours, which just could not stop production, there would have been panic \u2013 and then had its finale in 2022, before returning in 2023 and lasting until 2025. It was an unbelievably star-studded affair, featuring not just Minogue but Donovan, Holly Valance, Robbie \u2013 Guy Pearce came back! Because of the UK hiatus, Dennis wasn\u2019t its longest serving character, but he was the only person to be in the first episode and the last, and it has certainly shaped his life. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t be sitting here talking to you today had it not been for my time in Neighbours. I wouldn\u2019t be doing Strictly. Whether it was the first seven years or whether it was the 29 years in total, I\u2019ve been extremely lucky.\u201d<\/p>\n

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