Your first kiss. Getting chickenpox. Sky-diving. Donating a kidney. There are lots of things that people tend to only experience once in their lives. And when you’re on the set of Neighbours and some smiling people ask you if you’d like to be an extra, you say yes, even when you feel only nausea at the prospect of acting on camera.
I visited the Neighbours set in Melbourne in July, the lone Australian among a bunch of sweetly enthusiastic British journalists who had been flown over to report on the soap’s return. They could all breathlessly recall the names of the children of characters long gone. I knew only of Harold Bishop, and Toadie’s suspiciously high tally of dead wives. They were all very at home; I was essentially on safari. It was perhaps the resulting sense of giddy novelty which, when they asked if I wanted to be an extra, made me say yes.
