It has been more than three decades since the children’s author Paul Jennings first wrote the scripts for Round the Twist, but Australians of a certain age will still have a favourite episode. It might be the one about a tube of lipstick that made everyone want to kiss you, or perhaps the tale of a remote that can rewind and fast forward time (used to disastrous effect during a spaghetti-eating competition). Maybe you have fond memories of the Twist family – siblings Pete, Linda and Bronson, and their widower dad, Tony – and the strange lighthouse they called home. Have you ever, ever felt like this?
For the 36-year-old composer and playwright Paul Hodge, the episode etched in his mind involves a pair of shoes so smelly their stench could knock someone out – a superpower deployed by Bronson Twist while yelling “Up the pong!”
In 2016 Hodge was searching for an idea for a new family-friendly musical when his memory of that episode activated like a sleeper agent – and convinced him to bring Round the Twist back in a new format, for a new generation.
“My mum was changing my nephew’s nappy and she went, ‘That’s a pongy nappy.’ My brain immediately went, ‘Up the pong!’,” he laughs. “And that’s what the musical was inspired by – a smelly nappy.” It might seem silly now but, as Hodge puts it, “that’s a testament to the power of Paul Jennings’ stories to stay with all of us”.
Round the Twist hit Australia’s TV screens in 1990 and was beloved for its quirky tales of shrunken mouths, magical underpants and cabbage patch babies. The stories pushed the envelope – it’s hard to imagine many of the episodes getting made today – but they had heart and humour alongside the frequent body horror. It picked up Logies and AFI awards at home and became a global sensation that was exported everywhere from Sweden to Sri Lanka, that earworm of a theme song echoing around the world.
But despite its popularity, Round the Twist has only ever existed on the small screen – until now. Since getting a whiff of that stinky Proustian nappy, Hodge has been hard at work on bringing the musical adaptation of his favourite childhood show to life. Round the Twist: The Musical finally premiered in Brisbane this week.
It has been a long road to get here. To make it happen, Hodge had to convince the Australian Children’s Television Foundation, which holds the rights to Round the Twist, to give him the green light. But it was important to him to also get the approval of Jennings himself – so Hodge flew to Melbourne to meet both the author and the foundation and passionately sell them on his vision.
It worked. The ACTF, which had turned down other hopeful playwrights in the past, was swayed by Hodge’s understanding of what made Jennings’ work special. Jennings says he found the script “clever and funny” and has continued to get together with Hodge once or twice a year since their first meeting.
Once the rights were secured and the pandemic waited out, the seasoned theatre director Simon Phillips came on board. For him, Round the Twist: The Musical is a rare chance to excite millennials about a musical – and bring in a different crowd to the curious mix of teenage girls and well-heeled boomers who usually make up his audiences.
“I was so thrilled to find something that [millennials] went, ‘Yay, that’s the thing I wanted to see turned into a musical,’” Phillips says down the phone from Brisbane, during a break from rehearsals. “I’d been looking for a project that got that reaction from people of that generation – not all the grizzly old people I meet.”
Phillips, who is in his 60s and thus firmly outside the original Round the Twist target market, “didn’t know anything about” the show before taking the project on. Instead of diving into the show’s back catalogue, Phillips initially avoided watching any episodes, aware that the production needed to work for those who had never seen the show as much as it did for fans. That distance allowed him to be a “fresh pair of eyes” to ensure the musical had a coherent narrative as well as the nostalgia factor.
He and Hodge, the Round the Twist superfan, were the perfect odd couple to make the musical sing. “Occasionally, I’d say, but why is this here? I just don’t get it,” Phillips says. “And Paul would say, ‘Well you couldn’t do Round the Twist if that wasn’t there – it’s one of the bits that everyone loves.’”
The team does not want to give away too much detail of the musical’s plot but Hodge will say that the story is “incredibly true to the TV show”, particularly the first two seasons.
Of course, not every moment can make it into a two and a half-hour stage production. Hodge trawled the internet to determine what the most popular Round the Twist episodes were, and landed on three: Smelly Feat, where “Up the pong!” came from; Nails, an episode about a boy growing fingernails under his skin and turning slowly into a merman; and Without My Pants, in which Pete suffers a verbal tic where every sentence he utters is followed by the words “without my pants” – the sort of silly but undeniable premise Round the Twist so often hit for six.
Adapting the show into a musical was the easy bit, Hodge says, thanks in no small part to its unforgettable theme song. (Unsurprisingly, “a very, very important part of the musical”.) It is his hope that the musical will travel – perhaps to the UK, where Round the Twist was phenomenally popular.
“I didn’t realise when I started writing it how well known it is outside of Australia,” Hodge says. “It was probably even bigger in the UK than it is in Australia. It premiered on the BBC first, because Channel Seven was dragging their feet about airing it – so the BBC had already aired it, and was already asking for a second season, before Australia had even seen it.”
After years of work, Hodge is excited to unveil the musical – and hopes it will be as beloved by today’s kids as the show was by 90s kids such as himself.
“There’s a story of a kid coming up to Paul Jennings at a book signing, saying, ‘How do you know what it’s like to be me?’ And I think that is just who Paul is,” Hodge says.
“He’s very good at doing the funny, silly and bizarre things. He really understands the not-so-fun part of being a kid, the times when you feel embarrassed or anxious or scared or are dealing with things like your first kiss. His work has a lot of authenticity to it – I think that’s why it stays with people.”
Round the Twist: the Musical is at the Playhouse Theatre, Qpac, in Brisbane until 8 December
