Television: Big Shot

'Water Rats' newcomer Steve Bisley takes time off from "shooting a bloke in the shoulder" to talk to FRANCES GRANT.

The tail end of a cyclone is harassing the city of Sydney and it's proving another day of hard action on set for the Water Rats.

Actor Steve Bisley, on a break from filming, picks up the phone for this interview and outlines the case: "There's been pretty strong winds for a few days and I've just shot a bloke in the shoulder," he says by way of an introduction. Strewth, that sounds a bit hairy.
"Yeah, he was going to shoot me with a spear-gun so I had to shoot him. You know what it's like."

Bisley, who has just joined the Water Rats cast as Detective Sergeant Jack Christie, is accustomed to such hazards. He's done police work in dramas before.

"Yeah, I've played one or three," he says. "The first one was the Mad Max cop, of course, Jim Goose [Bisley's first feature film role]." He's also been on the beat in series such as Police Rescue and Cop Shop. "I don't know why people see me as a law enforcer, I don't know."

Is that a bit of a worry for an honest actor in Australia? "Oh no, there's some good cops over here," he says, then pauses to find a shot to fire back across the Tasman and finds the chamber empty. "You haven't got any [cops] in New Zealand, have you? You never hear about the police over there. What are they - nice people are they?"

The weather may be wet and wild but Bisley's humour is as dry as the great Australian interior. "Yeah, shoot `em, beat `em up, anything it takes," he says of the skills he's acquired playing cops in action-packed dramas.

He could already handle a gun, then, but did he have to learn to drive a boat for Water Rats? "No, I've been around boats all my life pretty well. I've got a yacht on the harbour here, so yeah, I'm pretty adept at boats."

The boat has a rival, though, in Bisley's recently acquired "quite fast" 900cc motorbike. "I'm a bit of a speed head, I suppose. The day after I bought it I rode it from Sydney to a place called Port Douglas, which is up past Cairns. So I did 6000km in a round trip - I was effectively doing 1000km a day."

Bisley grew up on the New South Wales Central Coast. His parents were both schoolteachers and also had a farm.
"So I really got the whole deal, I got the water and the land. We had horses and boats and all that stuff."

The taste for acting, however, didn't come until after he had left school, travelled and tried about "30 different jobs," including an 18-month stint as a private eye. "Then I was driving a truck and I thought I'd like to become an actor, try it at least. And I auditioned for the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney, with really no idea about what I was doing, and I got in and that's about it."

One of his classmates at a drama school was a chap called Mel Gibson. "I don't know what's become of him," he laughs. "Some people fall by the wayside, you know."

Bisley graduated from the drama institute in 1977 and has gone on to become, as a recent Sydney Morning Herald article described him, "one of the most respected actors in Australia."

He's had a host of high-profile theatre roles and won an Australian Film Institute Award for his part in the movie The Big Steal, in which he played a used-car salesman "so oily you could fry chips on him."

His television roles include parts on Halifax, Flying Doctors and GP. And most recently, on our screens here, he was the cowboy producer Prowsey on the scathingly funny satire on television current affairs, Frontline.
"Of course I followed a couple of pretty successful New Zealanders [the late Bruno Lawrence and Kevin Wilson], a couple of your homegrown lads, through that show."

And was that the real Pauline Hanson, Queensland fish and chip shop owner and ultra nationalist, on the show last year? "I don't think you could make anyone up to look like Pauline Hanson. That was her, that was the actual article."

What about those tight jeans required for the role? Were they a health hazard? "I think they could have been, yeah. I don't think I can have any more children," says the man who, for the record, notes he has a "partner and children from a previous relationship."

The strides are looser on Water Rats, which is just as well, given that the chemistry between Christie and Detective Rachel "Goldie" Goldstein (Catherine McClements) is making the show sizzle.

There's nothing will they-won't they about this storyline, he says. "We're more `come here, come here, get away, get away.' It is sort of fire and ice, I guess. And I don't think you can sustain that, whaddayacallit, USL - underlying sexual tension - for ever, otherwise you go mad."

After the interview he's off to film the next Water Rats scene in a hospital. "No I didn't put the person in the hospital," he says, then treats us to a bit more tough, laconic, big-city-cop attitude. "I have put a few people in, mind you."

Who: Steve Bisley

What: Water Rats

Where: TV2

When: Tonight, 8.30