Me, myself and Alf
After nearly three decades playing the same character, where does Alf ‘ya flaming galah’ Stewart end and Ray Meagher begin?
Over lunch, atop the Skytower, Ray Meagher is telling me a tale about when the Queensland Rugby Union changed homes from Normanby Oval, Brisbane, to a new stadium at Ballymore.
At the same time, they agreed a new pourage sponsorship, which meant the local XXXX brew was replaced by Victoria Bitter.
It outraged the old timers, who swore to savour every last drop of the local product at the old ground before the move. Only later did they find the lines had been changed the moment the deal had been done, and they had unwittingly and uncomplainingly been drinking the interloper.
Alf Stewart, Meagher’s alter ego, would have been one such curmudgeon.
Over his 29 years as the small business-owning, surf clubchairing cornerstone of the Summer Bay community, the fictional seaside home of Australian soap opera Home and Away, Alf has stuck to a single brand of beer (never stated, but clear by the shape and colour of the bottle that it’s VB). Throughout, Alf has steadfastly ignored product-placement arrangements and new producers who felt he might like to drink from a glass.
‘‘I fought for Alf to drink VB,’’ says Meagher. ‘‘I think he’s a VB beer man. The art department would do various deals with different grog companies, so a different grog would show up every now and again . . . but any bloke Alf’s age, if they drink a brand of beer, it becomes sacrosanct.’’
And as for pouring it out of the stubby: ‘‘Why would you put it in a glass? It was born in one, a nice and cold one’’.
As Meagher approaches the point of the tale – that Alf’s consistency makes his character – the wine waiter arrives. After a lengthy discussion about it’s relative dryness, a Hawke’s Bay chardonnay is ordered. He pauses. ‘‘There goes Alf out the window.’’
Meagher – who is enjoying a filming break to play Bob the Mechanic in the Auckland stage production of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert – holds a world record for his near three decades playing Alf. He was there for Home and Away’s first episode in 1988, and as the final year of his current contract looms, is the show’s only remaining original cast member.
How deeply entwined does an actor become with his character when they’ve spent nearly 30 years together?
Alf, reckons Meagher, is about 70 per cent based on his own
‘I see [Alf] as an archetypal knockabout Aussie bloke, basically. And you could just about say that about me, or Bob the Mechanic from Priscilla. They are variations on a theme.’ Ray Meagher
personality, the other 30 per cent a quick-to-anger, slow-to-apologise, slightly cranky old-school Ocker. ‘‘I’d hope I’m a bit more tolerant than Alf and I have a little bit more of a pleasant outlook on life . . . . ’’
Meagher says he doesn’t see Alf as a living creation: ‘‘I’d like to say I had thought that deeply about him.’’ But actually he really has: he reckons Alf arrived in Summer Bay from the bush, so insists on him wearing RM Williams boots and moleskin trousers.
He makes sure the wardrobe department never iron or clean Alf’s battered wide-brim hat.
‘‘I see him as an archetypal knockabout Aussie bloke, basically. And you could just about say that about me, or Bob the Mechanic from Priscilla. They are variations on a theme’’.
And if storyliners want Alf to do something out of character, Meagher will wade in. As the glue in a soap world, which like any other, is routinely rocked by murder, drugs, explosions, abortions, and tragic accidents, Alf represents reliability.
‘‘They can’t all write accurately for every character, so you protect the integrity of your own character . . . I’ve really protected Alf’s integrity and the way audiences expect him to react in any given situation, I am sure he reacts that way in 99 per cent of them.’’
When Alf first came along, Meagher was a jobbing actor of some standing. He had played 10 years of A Grade rugby in Brisbane, played a handful of games for Queensland, and scored a try in a trial for the 1969 Wallabies team that toured South Africa, before moving to Sydney three years later to pursue acting seriously. His first extended gig was on a long-running theatrerestaurant show, and the cab licence he bought as a backstop was used barely a half-dozen times, although he kept it for a decade just in case.
Film and TV work followed, and when Home and Away’s pilot came along in 1988, Meagher had just filmed a mini-series called The True Story of Spit MacPhee, alongside the late British acting great Sir John Mills, and had signed on for another, True Believers, recounting the history of the Australian Labor Party.
For Meagher, it looked like an easy week’s work. To his surprise, Channel Nine picked it up and he was duly offered a two-year contract. ‘‘That seemed a lifetime,’’ he says, so he bargained them down to six months . . . then another six months, then a year, then three. Now he’s on five-year contracts, but with the right to opt out at six month’s notice.
At first, he was seduced by the ease of living at home and not travelling too much for work.
Later, he says, staying with the soap was about being a realist.
Put it this way, he says, say there are 15 movies shot a year in Australia. Say only 10 of them have good supporting roles for a man of his age. Say he gets offered half of them, and each represents two week’s work. So that would be only 10 weeks of work a year. And Meagher likes working.
Instead, he does 38 weeks a year on Home and Away, starting as early as 4.30am some days, finishing as late as 8pm, and learning his lines every night for the next morning’s shoot.
For the past 20 years, he’s used the four-week Christmas break afforded him to travel to the UK and play in pantomine in places like Birmingham, Southampton, Bournemouth, even Mansfield (‘‘you ever been to Mansfield? they sell it in a very romantic way, but when you see young girls vomiting in the street as you come out of the theatre . . . ’’), often alongside his old mate, British comedian Bobby Davro.
This year, he’s doing Priscilla instead, his third tilt at the show after runs in Sydney and the West End. He surveys the scene spread out before him, and says: ‘‘I loved panto, but this beats the hell out of Southend-on-Sea’’.
His enthusiasm for Alf remains undimmed as long as the
scriptwriters give him one substantial storyline a year.
He’s seen spouses die, discovered long-lost children, been in a coma (‘‘did some of me best acting in a coma’’), and last year was struck down by posttraumatic stress while leading a school trip to the Australian War Memorial.
‘‘If I get one of those I am happy, I don’t mind saying ‘here’s your tea, here’s your coffee’, ‘hey get down from there young fella’,’’ he says. There was some angst during the soap’s ‘Braxton years’, the 2011-2015 spell where Summer Bay was dominated by drugs and guns, and a trio of bad boys. Meagher is sure that the soap’s core audience – kids watching the show before dinner – were driven away (or at least, their mums were) during this time.
‘‘Nothing against the boys,’’ he says, ‘‘but the person in control of storylines fell in love with them and wrote about 70 per cent of the screentime for three characters and left the other 18 to fight over what was left.’’
Things have settled down again, and now Meagher is contemplating going around once again. His existing deal expires at the end of 2018.
At the same time, there’s a 40-week Australian capitals tour of
Priscilla being mooted for 2018. Either way, he reckons he will be working until at least the end of that year. What does it say about him, likely to be still working to the age of 74? ‘‘I’m an idiot?’’ he ventures.
Look, it’s a good gig, and a good lifestyle, he says. He’s got no complaints. Yes, he admits, people do shout ‘ya flamin’ galah’ at him.
‘‘It goes with the territory. If it’s the worst thing that ever happens to you, life’s not too bad, right?’’