Shorty’s Christmas cracker
Cast your mind back to Cyclone Damian for clues to what the 2019 finale of the country’s favourite soap has in store.
‘ It’s a dangerous place to be, Ferndale at Christmas,” says Maxine Fleming. “Everyone knows that. You’re not safe even if you go on holiday.”
Yes, we have arrived at the Shortland Street Season Finale
( TVNZ 1, Thursday, 7.00pm) and the annual cliffhanger, when things go terribly wrong and at least one urgent calamity is left unresolved as the show goes into its summer break.
The “Christmas cliff” is something that Fleming, Shortland Street’s producer, starts planning with her writers in June or July each year.
“We start thinking about which of these stories are going to help lead to something big at Christmas. Some kind of villain and a threat to the hospital or our core characters needs to be involved, obviously, and we just go from there.”
The cliffhanger, of course, isn’t just one night of television, but a journey. This year’s run home began a couple of weeks ago with Cyclone Damian causing havoc at the clinic.
“The cyclone was just a little practice run,” says Fleming. “Embedded in there for sure are the beginnings of what’s coming for Christmas. There were big clues in that episode about where we might be going.”
The cliffhanger has become such a tradition that it’s easy to forget that in its early years, Shortland Street didn’t have one
– because the show didn’t stop for the Christmas break.
“I was a writer on it back then and I can’t remember how we managed it!” says Fleming. “But I do remember having to go in there as a storyliner on New Year’s Day or something. No one else was in the building but us.”
The show won’t entirely be going away this year, either. Its three-week break will be filled with several short, web-only episodes with a jauntier tone.
“It’s only the second year
we’ve done it, so we’re still fine-tuning things,” says Fleming, “but I think this year we’ve really hit on the right idea. It’s very funny.”
But there’s the serious business of what goes down at Christmas to get through first. Do they worry about repeating themselves?
“It’s actually really hard not to have at least one element of a Christmas cliff that’s not happened before. We’ve pretty much done it all in the past 27 years. But we always try to come up with something new. It’s a matter of trying to find twists in the stories themselves so that people still get a surprise.”
Shortland Street: Summer Holiday, TVNZ OnDemand from Thursday.