As Shortland Street marks its 10th anniversary with a special on Sunday, we dug back into the files to find out what BARRY SHAW, the Herald's TV critic then, thought of the very first episode:
It looked, at the start, like Casualty with wheels - twice as fast and half as
long.
Then, with Dr Warner in bareskin mode with eager Jill, the pneumatic aerobic instructor, it seemed like Chances reborn.
There was also a touch of Neighbours, in the pert blonde junior receptionist Kylie, oops Kirsty Knight, and quite a lot of The Young Doctors in characters like country-girl-come-to-town nurse Allison Rayner and would-be ladykiller male nurse Steve Mills.
A mother-figure was manifest in Marjorie Neilson, a busybody - but a caring one - behind the receptionist's pad. A father-figure could have stepped right out of The Sullivans in her spouse, Tom Neilson.
There was Dr Hone Ropata, the quiet one, an orthopaedic specialist just back from Guatemala, who could have been kith and kin with Larney Tupu's quietly efficient physician in Country GP.
Shortland Street, the first five-day-a-week soap on New Zealand television, the first indigenous soap since Gloss, seems to owe a lot to all those, mostly Australian, medical dramas ...
But if initially imitative, which was to be expected, Shortland Street looked in its first hectic instalment to have the makings of a genuine Kiwi carbolic. Watchable, too.
What it seems to have above all those other medical dramas and kookaburra soaps is a frenetic pace unlike anything of its kind before ...
Whether intentionally or not, the sexchange between the thrusting Warner (Michael Galvin) and the accommodating Jill (Suzy Aiken, how could you?) was a riot.
Before you could say press-up, they were down to it ... It was disappointing that the Shortland Street makers, bearing in mind the largely teenage and younger audience they are after, thought this steamy bit of sex necessary ... its appearance in the first episode of a production out to woo and win the same sort of young audience as doted on Neighbours suggested it was there as titillation to interest those with an appetite for soft porn.
As prolonged as the sex sortie was brief, last night's breech birth drama did furnish a childbirth trauma that could have graced, with distinction, a major movie or mini-series.
This was the appropriate time and place for Temuera Morrison's Hone Ropata to put his personal stamp on the Shortland Street scene.
This Morrison did with a minimum of histrionics and an admirable display of macho control that bodes well for the future of Shortland Street.
If every soap must have its resident bitch - and Lisa Crittenden's po-faced senior nurse is clearly Shortland Street's - it must also have a hero. Hone Ropata is he.
* Shortland Street: The first ten years, Sunday, TV2 7.30pm
As Shortland Street marks its 10th anniversary with a special on Sunday, we dug back into the files to find out what BARRY SHAW, the Herald's TV critic then, thought of the very first episode:
It looked, at the start, like Casualty with wheels - twice as fast and half as
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