CHANCES - A Brief History Of WTF

 

The story of Chances begins with Lynn Bayonas – quite arguably the Verity Lambert of Australian television. A long-established writer-producer, and a proud feminist in the blokey network culture of the day. Her decades in television, which included running a bunch of the country’s most popular dramas, also included work on a wide variety of SF and fantasy projects, mostly for kids – ranging from the ABC’s early-‘70s Alpha Scorpio to '90s/2000s projects like The Girl From Tomorrow and the post-Buffy take on Arthurian myth Guenivere Jones.

With Chances, she and Brendon Lunney pitched Nine a straight drama series – following middle-aged Aussie battler Dan Taylor and his wife Barb as they won the lottery, and their lives and the lives of their three grown kids were turned upside down.

Dan (John Sheerin) and Barb (Brenda Addie) with Dan’s old Vietnam buddy Bill (Michael Caton)

But after they made their pilot, Nine was only willing to pick it up if they turned it into a raunchy adult soap, in the vein of ‘70s Aussie hits Number 96 and The Box, with boatloads of boobs and buttloads of butts. And so Chances entered the world of contractually-obligated nude scenes, and intense network meddling. (Bayonas reported that at one point, she got a phone call during recording to complain that there wasn’t enough breast visible… the executives had actually tapped directly into the studio video feed. She gave them a rocket for that.)

The show launched in January 1991 with loads of fanfare… and everyone hated it. The critics ripped it to shreds, and the cast were unhappy “just doing Home and Away with the odd cutaway of some tits”, as Jeremy Sims put it. A big problem was, the soap goings-on were too ordinary to justify the raunchy excess… which is sort of a broader problem with the way Australian soaps work in general.

You see, American soaps are relentlessly upper-class -- and the whole Lifestyles of the Rich And Angsty approach allows a certain degree of extravagance in the storylines, which is how you could get Luke and Laura going on missions of international intrigue. British soaps, on the other hand, are determinedly working-class -- things have been grim oop north on Coronation Street for going on fifty years now. But Australian soaps are pure middle-class suburbia… again it’s part of our national character, shunning either extreme. Being aspirational while hating tall poppies, looking down both on American excess and those whinging bloody Poms. And that’s why something like Neighbours looks sun-drenched and escapist to pasty Brits, and kind of downmarket to Americans.

But with Chances trying to be an Australian show about the rich… Well, Dan Taylor was still too grounded in a Ramsay Street kind of suburban life, he couldn’t get into the wretched excess. And the writers seemed to have the same problem. Trying to cover fairly ordinary soap material but with extra wobbly bits hanging out… Everyone seemed faintly embarrassed by the whole thing.

So after a short while, in the immortal words of Lynn Bayonas,
”There weren’t enough sleazebags to keep it on the air.”

The show was cut back from two one-hour episodes a week to one. Large chunks of the sprawling Taylor clan got the boot. And the crew started refocusing the series on the characters that worked. Chief among them was Dan and Barb’s son:

Alex Taylor: advertiser, womanizer, generally likeable bastard. He was the closest this show could get to a J.R. figure; rather than being a fish out of water in the world of the rich and decadent, he was diving into that water as hard as he could.

And they had a huge advantage in that Alex was played by Jeremy Sims – now one of Australia’s most acclaimed stage actors and directors. They quickly realized they could give this guy anything and he could play it. He later became known for a great performance as Hamlet… well, the first time he played Hamlet was in Chances’ next-to-last episode, at a costume party. About which more later…

Their other secret weapon was Bill, Dan’s beer-soaked pot-smoking buddy from their tour in Vietnam… so convincingly inhabited by Michael Caton that we have to wonder how many of those spliffs were real. His reactions and comic timing were enough to lift scenes from trashy to treasure:

(Michael Caton was already a bit of a star from The Sullivans, but was still a few years away from his defining role as the ultimate Aussie bloke in The Castle, which made him a beloved cult figure. One of the most astonishing second acts imaginable, in a career which has stretched from the original Australian cast of Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar to Packed To The Rafters and presenting Hot Property...)

Gradually the storylines began to shift focus towards the infighting and intrigue at Alex’s advertising agency. The production team were consciously deciding to make the show more outrageous so the raunchiness would fit the tone… for example, revealing that Cal Lawrence –

-- the pool boy with whom Alex’s mum was having an affair, was in fact an international jewel thief.

But it still wasn’t enough to help… the Nine Network struck again, and the show got moved out of prime-time and into late-night. The main reason it wasn’t cancelled outright was because the network had committed to a two-year contract up front.

And so Lynn Bayonas, her story-editor-turned-producer Gwenda Marsh, and writers including Everett DeRoche went out for a very long and probably very liquid lunch, and tried to figure out what to do with the show… and they realized that the best way to make something of the show was to go right into cult territory. To embrace camp head-on, and go into big-picture storylines of good and evil… with “good” represented by the amoral sex-obsessed staff of Alex’s advertising agency.

And so Alex was contacted by the mysterious Crowley Lander:

...the world’s fifth-richest man, a crippled and dying Howard Hughes figure, with a taste for all-pervasive video surveillance and using mind-altering pharmaceuticals like “Chaoticum” to brainwash people into doing his bidding.

Turned out that Crowley (played by Barry Hill) had been manipulating Alex’s life for ages -- including rigging the lottery win which kicked off the series. It was all part of Crowley’s murky plan to groom Alex as his successor, corrupt his soul… and mate Alex with his daughter, so they would conceive a child into which Crowley believed his soul would be reborn. (Or something like that. Crowley’s plan was a bit of a moving target.)

Here we have Alex being conditioned, which involved dosing him with Chaoticum and forcing him to watch what the other characters in the show – including his mum – had got up to. (I adore the idea that the way to completely snap Alex’s mind was to get him ripped to the gills and make him watch Chances…)

At this point the show was definitely into cult territory, but not quite outright fantasy yet… but Lynn and Gwenda were egging the writers on to get even more extravagant. Everett DeRoche remembered pitching a storyline as a gag… only for Gwenda to say “You’re finally getting the right idea”!

And that’s when they came up with Bogart Lo:

A smiling, inscrutable ex-triad gangster, shown here with his scheming dragon-lady daughter Lily, and his pet Venus flytrap named Igor, to which he would threaten to feed bits of whomever had displeased him.

Later he added a hunchbacked assistant, named Bruce.

(Noted SF critic John Parker said that the moment when he knew Chances was something special was a scene when Bogart and Bruce had been interrogating Cal with a cattle prod, but realized he was in fact innocent… Bruce slunk into the scene, and offered the somewhat crispy Cal a tiny tube. “Vitamin E cream?”)

The main thing that kept Bogart on the right side of being an appallingly tacky stereotype – aside from the general glee with which Lawrence Mah played him, relishing the chance to play a villain in a decade where he said no one dared cast him as a baddie – was that he didn’t actually fit the expected racial role. The idea underpinning the whole Yellow Peril image is of the swarthy outsider threatening the normal wholesome community… but by this point in Chances, there was no normal wholesome community to threaten. If anything, Bogart and Alex were the good bad guys.  When he hired Alex to help him rebrand, presenting himself as an ethically upstanding gangster who confined his killings to drug dealers and thus protected civilians from the real scum out there – the show started cocking a snook at the entire media establishment, right from the heart of Murdochland.

And around this time, the crew realized something wonderful was happening. Now that they were out of prime time… the network had stopped caring. There must have been a slow dawning awareness that they could do whatever they wanted.

The funny thing? Getting outrageous actually allowed the writers to take their writing more seriously. Every one of the staff I talked to pointed out that the camp inspired them to find the reality and humanity in ludicrous situations. The dialogue got wittier and braver, the plot twists bolder, the sexual aspects slotted in as a good-humored part of the fantasy rather than a sleazy afterthought, and they started feeling like the characters actually meant something. They were actually telling stories they cared about. In short, unlike in the early days of the show, they weren’t just jerking off.

The result was a truly startling blend of storytelling from scene to scene. In one episode, they could intercut between earnest soap drama about Dan and Barb’s failing marriage (complete with Bambi Chute, a sex therapist played by ex-Number 96 star Abigail, giving a quite serious lecture about the sexual anxieties of the middle-aged male), mind-game power-plays with Lo and Lander, and Cal’s involvement with a group of Neo-Nazis who wanted to steal a necklace that belonged to Eva Braun.

And then the Nazis were revealed to be transvestites. And the necklace left its wearer possessed by the spirit of an Egyptian goddess, who wanted to complete a sex-magic ritual to rule the world. And it was on for young and old.

The Eva Braun necklace is the moment when the show tipped over into outright genre territory – here’s an excerpt…

And that’s when the floodgates opened. Suddenly they were doing past-life regression, subliminal messages, and international adventure… all on a quarter of the budget of late-‘80s Doctor Who. And Crowley Lander’s masterplan turned out to be that he would actually swap minds with Alex, and live on in his body.

Here’s a pair of clips, both starring Brenda Addie, showing how the show transformed…

From Neighbours to Blake’s 7 in three months! The show was still unmistakably an Australian soap opera, with all the shortcuts and slapdashery that implies… but that became part of the fun, as they just went for it. It’s a strange thing to say about a show with so many nipples on display, but there was something childlike about it, in that the storytelling was completely gleeful and unashamed. Too much of a pleasure to be a guilty pleasure.

(It was somewhere around the Nazi lingerie parties that John Parker fell in love with the show. How? He and a roommate were channel-surfing late one night, astonishingly there wasn’t any foreign-movie porn on SBS, they flipped over to Nine… and spent the whole hour just going “…they DIDN’T. Oh my God, they DID." Once they picked their jaws up off the floor… the next week they’d brought all their housemates in to watch. And they all started bringing their friends. Till by the end of the show’s run their loungeroom was standing-room only! That’s how most people I know discovered Chances -- you didn’t just switch it on, you had to have a dealer. But once people actually found it, they stayed utterly hooked.)

Here’s a sampling of what Chances threw at the audience in the space of about eight months:

Kate Langbroek as a Lander henchwoman, Miss Severity De Sade. Kate is now well known as a presenter, and these clips still get dredged out once in a while…

Wanda Starcross (Danielle Fairclough): the receptionist at Alex’s advertising agency, and the most universally competent woman alive. Yoga instructor, judo expert, psychic virgin, MBA, wholehearted New Ager (she actually was a dolphin in a past life), computer hacker (she got into NORAD using the password “BIGTITS”)… she was the closest thing to a moral center in the show, and the only one who could keep these maniacs functioning.

(By this point, with four different characters having been dosed with Chaoticum, it was hard to be sure how much of a given episode was meant to be actually happening. I got through several scenes of the bit with a stoned Bill meeting a dwarf in an amusement park before I realized that, no, this wasn’t a prolonged dream sequence…)

The Zambucca tribe: when Cal is sent on a mission to the Kratatang Archipelago, he gets captured by a tribe of Amazons who threaten him with death by snoo-snoo. Cal asks their queen Lagoona how she speaks such good English. She responds, serenely, “Club Med. I taught archery, and volleyball, and brought the secrets of the outside world back to my people…”

Elvis Presley, agent of Satan. See, the reason why he’s not dead is because he sold his soul to the devil… and now he’s recruiting. Here he’s after the soul of Alex’s coworker Sean Becker (Stephen Whittaker), possibly not realizing that the soul of an ad-man might be difficult to locate and extract.

It was somewhere around this point in the story that the cast underwent another purge. Familiar faces like Bambi, much of Lander’s gang, and even old Dan and Barb Taylor were finally written out. And Lily Lo (Katherine Li) resurfaced after a few months’ absence, during which time she had apparently done a crash course in acting.

The end of Dan and Barb’s storyline in particular marked a weird sort of turning point… not only was it the last farewell to the original format, but it was also oddly affecting. As I waited to find out what Crowley had done to Dan after his mysterious disappearance… I suddenly realized I actually cared about the character. In Chances! John Sheerin’s hangdog, grumpy, terminally normal figure in the midst of all this mayhem and chaos had actually formed a memorable character story, about a man whose life was spinning out of his control. You know how people talk about how shows like Buffy use all the outrageous fantasy stuff as a metaphor for the struggles of real life? Chances, with way less craft but ten times the chutzpah, had touched some of that same territory. The collision between mundanity and surrealism was getting into the same ground as the books of Paul Magrs, where the communications officer on a starship goes home to a grubby contemporary flat above a fish-and-chip shop.

But anyway. With the grownups gone, the brakes came off –the remaining cast members “just laughed and laughed”, according to Jeremy Sims. Freed from any pretence of being a family saga, the last remnants of conventional soap could be shaken off. See, on some level, no matter which country it’s made in, a soap opera is a story about how a community works – reflecting the shared values of the society which produces it (even if often in the breach). You look at Days of Our Lives or whatever, and even when the characters are being outrageous and transgressive you have a clear sense of the attitudes of the normal society they’re transgressing against. The relationships of the characters define a community, its boundaries become visible, the events dramatize how the society deals with them.

But this is a soap for an era where there’s no such thing as society. The last vestiges of a normal world in Chances become a joke… Bill and Dan’s sister Sharon (Mercia Deane-Johns) were “the last of the Mohicans” of the old guard – meaning conventional values were represented by the town drunk and the town tramp. And those two became a sort of bewildered Greek chorus to events… as summed up by the wonderful sight of Shazza and Bill bemoaning the loss of family values and common bloody decency in the world today, while watching a news bulletin about a loincloth-wearing maniac cutting the nadgers off a warthog at the zoo.

This act of detesticularization was committed by Utangi…

…a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde Tarzan figure, the jungle god of the Zambucca tribe who needed a diet of specially prepared warthog balls to retain his civilized form.

Then there was the theft of the Platinum Platypus…

…which was being presented to a thinly-disguised Charles and Diana on a royal visit down under. Cal’s plan involved getting a nude model (with a hammer-and-sickle painted on her buttocks) to snog the Prince, nicking the platypus in the confusion, diving into the harbor, and then staging his own death in the propellers of a nearby yacht. Of course this all gets intertwangled with an assassination plot, which culminates in the shouted line “THE BOMB IS IN THE PLATYPUS!!”. Oh, and meanwhile Cal has it off with the Princess, while Shazza teaches the Prince a few tricks to keep her happy…

Meanwhile, Alex was hallucinating a dark alter ego (played by the wonderful Peter Webb), courtesy of Crowley Lander’s pharmaceuticals. Yep, it’s Harvey from Farscape a decade early. Their back-and-forth rapport was wonderful, as Alex took the piss mightily (“Come on, spook! Speak when you’re spoken to!”) and commented on the storylines (“Oh come on, this is just a tacky version of Oedipus!”) But dark Alex gave just as good as he got. (“So you’re the dark side of my nature.” “No, you’re the dark side of your nature. I’m… *shrug* a little darker.” “If you’re my evil twin, then how come you don’t look like me?” “…Maybe I’m what you’re supposed to look like.” The fact that by the end of the show, this last bit actually made sense was probably the crowning glory of Chances plotting!)

Note also that Alex’s alter ego is the same actor as one of the transvestite Nazis above. Coincidence? Well, yeah, I think so… but who knows?

And all this mayhem actually added up to an oddly poignant little story of dad-shock, as his alter ego tries to convince Alex that his unborn child – with Lander’s daughter Imogen (Ciri Thompson) – is going to ruin his life, and it’s better to keep the kid from ever being born. By now we’re into pure fantasy-as-metaphor, with Alex having visions of his son as the Antichrist, and the end of his playboy lifestyle implying the end of the world.

Alex wasn’t the only one going off into la-la land… the show began to discover the glee of doing dream sequences. So they riffed on everything from Hammer horror to Wagnerian opera, while Bill’s straight-up Chaoticum-induced sex fantasies seemed positively tame by comparison.

The best one: Sean Becker from the advertising agency falls asleep while guarding a million-dollar shipment of frozen bull semen, and dreams an elaborate bullfighting fantasy with Alex being humiliated in a bull costume. Then Crowley Lander turns up in the dream. “What are you doing in my dream?” “I’m not in your dream,” rasps Lander. “I’m in Alex’s nightmare!” And Alex is the one who wakes up…

Meanwhile back in the real world, they’d introduced a Lander flunky named Soixante Neuf (“that’s a bit of a mouthful,” commented Sean – yes, they also did the “Read my lips, Soixante Neuf” joke), who proved even more impervious to the charms of the various root rats of Chances than Wanda was. Alex, taking a page from Torchwood fifteen years early, tried a pheromone spray which was supposed to make him irresistible to women… only to find out that Miss Neuf was such a dyed-in-the-wool masochist that her greatest pleasure was denying herself pleasure. She got off on not getting off. So when Alex fronted up expecting a conquest, all she had to do was say no, get a massive orgasm for her troubles, and walk away… telling him the spray smelled like cat piss in the bargain.

That actually sums up the sexual morality of Chances quite neatly. (Astonishingly, yes it did have one.) When I interviewed Gwenda Marsh, she said that their approach was that any sort of fantasy or fetish was fair game for them to play with, as long as any actual sex was consensual. So you could have a Nazi dominatrix menacing Sean’s privates with a laser (pointer – remember their budget), but when Alex tried to use the Eva Braun necklace to get his co-worker Angela to sleep with him, not only did it fail but she flat-out told him it would be rape. (They stuck to that throughout – though admittedly to modern eyes in a couple of cases the guys' consent seems pretty dubious, most notably when a drug-addled Alex is molested by one of Lander's scientists.) And Bayonas and Marsh’s attitude towards treating characters as sex objects was to try to provide as much perving material for women as for men – out of all the regulars, the two who showed the most skin were probably Cal and Alex! (Though Lily Lo later gave them a run for their money.)

This formed a weird sort of remnant of a moral center, in a show which had gone from a (rather non-family-friendly) family saga to an anything-goes power struggle. The weird thing is that this show was still about what Lynn Bayonas described as “the bigger picture of good and evil”, even as the normal community and family which were supposed to represent these values had been completely blown apart.

And that’s when the vampires showed up.

Or more accurately, Dr. Vladimir Caldura and his sister Circe -- who were so obviously befanged that the only question was whether the whole “caped aristocrat with an aversion to sunlight and flash photographs” routine was in fact a bluff, and they were really just ex-employees of Romania’s Ceaucescu family on the run. That didn’t stop Mark Neal as Caldura chewing his way through every bit of Universal-era vampire shtick – and Liza-Marie Syron’s spacey goth-chick performance as Circe, complete with what was either meant to be a Slavic accent or a speech impediment, was basically a pwototype Dwoothilla. And wonderfully, the shtick was in large part a cover for Caldura’s actual medical experiments – he was playing Dracula to distract from the fact that he was basically Frankenstein!

(Alex questions whether Cal’s noticed that every time they go over to Caldura’s mansion, it’s always dark and thundering, while every time they go back to the agency it’s sunny. Cal shrugs. “Nah, that’s just Melbourne weather…”)

The ratings were of course hopeless; there was no chance that Nine would renew the show. But astonishingly, according to Lynn Bayonas, the cult audience almost saved it anyway – a bunch of management folks at the ABC were huge fans of the late-night version of Chances, and they almost brokered a deal to pick it up. Only the thoughts of the publicity of your tax dollars at a public broadcaster being spent on a wacky raunchfest with such a bad mainstream reputation, seem to have torpedoed it.

The last three episodes of Chances were burned off in late-night within one week… and the writers pushed things even farther, ramping up the ominous hints about Alex’s destiny and revealing that both Caldura and Lander were involved in plots to take over the world. The first phase of the action climaxed in a costume party at Caldura’s, where Alex as Hamlet ended up swordfighting Caldura to keep him from cutting out innocent Wanda’s heart for a transplant… but that was only a prelude to the final episode, which went for an outright metaphysical final battle.

In which… Well, seriously, it’s like trying to explain the final episode of The Prisoner. Suffice it to say it involved an angelic visitation, a computer virus that can infect human minds, the heaven where books go when they’re burnt, Josef Stalin, and the fate of Crowley Lander’s pet dog. Plus one more flash of Alex’s bum for good measure.

Remember… this was a soap opera.

And for a show which began with nothing more outlandish than a lottery win to end with Alex talking to God in the Melbourne Public Library reading room is something to be treasured. (God even had mixed male and female voices – Gwenda and Lynn’s last poke at the patriarchy.)

The funniest thing? After all the wackiness of the previous weeks, the final episode is genuinely affecting. Seeing all these characters who have weathered so much daftness suddenly realize that the party may be over, on a global scale, gives them a pathos they’ve never had before. That whole disintegration-of-the-community thing I was talking about above? Has become the story by the end.

Because astonishingly, on some level, the writers were still taking this seriously. You know the old Doctor Who line about how “I’m serious about what I do, just not necessarily about how I do it”? Chances is the flipside of that – it does loads of silly things, and knows they’re silly, but the way it does them is still weirdly sincere. It’s like Douglas Adams said about The Pirate Planet, his Doctor Who story which was similarly trying to do outrageous things while having serious drama in the midst of it; he talked about how it’s on a knife-edge, and having a cast member who just treats it as a joke can tip the whole thing off balance. Chances walks that line up to its last episode, and that’s what makes it all the more astonishing. You come to gape, you get sucked into the story.

And take a moment to think about what this show is. It’s a soap opera, which means it’s looked down on by proper drama types (and especially by SF fans who wouldn’t touch that with a bargepole); it’s doing fantasy and SF, so it’s looked down on for that by soap purists too; it’s an Australian soap opera, which means it’s looked down on by the Americans and the Brits (and by a good chunk of Australians thanks to the cringe factor); it’s terminally horny, which means it’s looked down on by people who think they’re above all that sex stuff… this show could not have been more set up to be despised and dismissed if they’d tried. But they went for it.

And that’s an especially precious thing in the Australian TV industry, where the networks’ idea of innovative thinking is generally “Hey, let’s commission a show about lawyers who are based above a police station – and call it Above The Law!” (I swear I’m not making that up either.) The opportunities for writers to think outside of conventional boxes are deeply limited down here – Gwenda Marsh said Chances spoiled her for television, and the only place she’d found that kind of freedom since then was in kids’ shows. Even just a matter of months before her death Lynn Bayonas told me that if she saw another ordinary Aussie coplawyer show she was going to put her foot through her TV – I can only hope that somewhere up in the dome of the Melbourne library, she immediately gave the boot to a whole bunch of tubes showing Nine’s Cops: LAC.

So much TV is made with a cringing fear of alienating the audience. But with Chances… thanks to the network’s early decisions, the audience came pre-alienated. So they literally had nothing to lose.

Lynn said – and every one of the writers I spoke to had a similar feeling – that Chances was the most fun she’d had in her whole long career. And this is a woman who worked with Orson Welles! In fact, she’d picked up from her years as Welles’ assistant a lot of his freewheeling, exploratory approach towards storytelling – she was always skeptical of stories which were too consciously, conventionally structured. As she once said, “If you’ve got your characters right and you know the story you want to tell, you’re on a journey -- and sometimes that journey is going to lead you into unexplored territory, with side roads and side alleys to take.” And the soap opera form, with its serialized long-term improvisation, its room for unexpected subplots and odd cul-de-sacs, is actually a great format for experimenting with story -- which is so rarely used up to that potential.

In a strange way, Chances was kind of the equivalent of sixties New Wave SF – pure experimentation, often gratuitous or self-indulgent or half-assed, but that’s the only way you can do something genuinely new. Think Dangerous Visions – sometimes you get innovative works of genius, sometimes you get masturbation fantasies and snot vampires. But what you’ve got, most of all, is writers at play.

And that’s what made Chances so remarkable. It went from a completely cynical network exercise, to the most fearless show on the box.

Plus! Free boobies, and Jeremy Sims’ arse! What’s not to love?