Remembering Dr Paul: The first Aussie soap to air in the UK

British audiences have had a long love affair with Australian soap operas.

Dr Paul (Alastair Duncan) and Sister Irene Preston (Anne Haddy) examine an x-ray. Anne went on to play Helen Daniels in Neighbours.

The first Aussie television soap to air in the UK was the rural drama Bellbird which was acquired by Thames Television in 1972. Then in 1977 we were transported back to the Second World War with The Sullivans and we were soon lapping up The Young Doctors, A Country Practice, Prisoner: Cell Block H, Sons & Daughters, Richmond Hill, The Flying Doctors, Cop Shop, Skyways, Carson’s Law, Neighbours, Home & Away, E Street, Paradise Beach, Pacific Drive, Echo Point, Breakers, Chances, Out of the Blue, The Heights and countless other serials from Down Under.

But did you know that the first Australian soap opera to land in the UK was the long-running radio serial Dr Paul when it was picked-up by Radio 390 in 1965!

Dr Paul began life in America but when Grace Gibson acquired the rights to make an Australian version of the show, she found that she had a ratings winner on her hands. Grace Gibson Productions initially adapted the American scripts to suit Australian tastes but when they ran out of content, they began developing their own original storylines.

This was the story of a man that placed service to the community of Stanton above personal ambition, and of the two women that loved him.

Elizabeth was the daughter of the wealthiest man in town and could have married anyone but she chose Dr Paul Lowe because she craved fame and success, and wrongly believed that by becoming a doctor’s wife she could bask in his reflected glory. Paul had a burning desire to start a hospital and Elizabeth persuaded her father to fund the Miles Memorial Hospital, but she would grow to hate the hospital which would become a symbol of her own frustrated ambitions. Elizabeth wanted Paul to further his career by accepting an offer from a prestigious physician but her husband would never leave the hospital that he loved.

Listeners only got to hear Dr Paul’s voice and had no idea what he looked like so in 1949 newspapers across Australia ran a competition in which fans had to describe his appearance using the clues concealed in each episode. The fan who gave the most accurate description had the chance of winning £250.

Dr Paul was the most popular show on 2UW in 1950.

Listeners were enthralled as the Lowe’s went from one crisis to the next, divorce raised its ugly head, and then there was Virginia Martin, a woman with a secret that would be drawn into the tangled lives of our key players. Paul would end up marrying Virginia but Elizabeth would keep a hold over her ex-husband which could never be broken.

It has often been said that Neighbours was the first Australian soap opera to be saved by switching networks when it was axed by Channel 7 and subsequently picked up by Channel 10, but in actual fact Dr Paul achieved this great feat on more than one occasion.

The first episode of Dr Paul went to air on the 11th October 1948 on forty radio stations across Australia when the Lintas advertising agency put together a sponsorship package with Lever Brothers who wanted to promote Pepsodent toothpaste. Despite good ratings Lintas cancelled the contract at short notice, meaning that episode 159 was to be the final instalment of Dr Paul. It was decided that the serial would go out with a bang with virtually the entire cast plunging over the edge of a cliff in a car, but this episode never went to air and had to be hastily rewritten when Fidelity Radio came to the rescue after putting together a new distribution deal which would see Dr Paul running on twenty radio stations across Australia – in many cases the show would now be heard on different radio stations in towns and cities where it was already being enjoyed.

Fast forward to 1964 and 2UW in Sydney decided on a change of format meaning that they were going to abandon all radio drama which included Dr Paul and Portia Faces Life, both of which were being produced by Grace Gibson. These serials were still profitable and were rating well on both city and country stations so after a three-month break Portia Faces Life and Dr Paul (resuming from episode 3111) were back on air in Sydney on rival station 2CH.

In 1964, Dr Paul met his fans at Rogers department store in Canberra to celebrate the transmission of the 3000th episode on 2CA.

Dr Paul was played by John Bushelle for the first twenty episodes but when the actor went overseas, he was replaced by John Saul. When John Saul decided to go overseas Dr Paul was given a heart attack and was kept off air for six weeks whilst he was recuperating. When the character finally returned to the storyline he was being played by Alastair Duncan, listeners accepted the change in casting but noticed that a different actor was playing the role straight away. Some years later Alastair decided to go overseas and John Saul reprised the role of Dr Paul until Alastair returned to Australia six years later and continued in the title role for the remainder of the serial.

John Bushelle was the original Dr Paul.

Other members of the cast during it’s long run included Laurel Mather, Neva Carr-Glyn, Dinah Shearing, Joan Lord, June Salter, Lynne Murphy, Michael Plant, Alan White, Margaret Christensen, Charles Tasman, John Godfrey, Amber Mae Cecil, Brigit Lenihan, Therese Desmond, Reginald Goldsworthy, Ray Hartley, John Ewart, Lola Brooks, Bruce Stewart, John Alden, Leonard Bullen, Lyndall Barbour, Barry Cookson, Anne Haddy (from Neighbours), and Ron Roberts was the shows narrator.

The Australian version of Dr Paul ended up being sold all over the world to countries including New Zealand, South Africa, Fiji, and Montserrat. In Singapore the serial was being broadcast to help the locals improve their English language skills, and in the West Indies they had been running the original American version of the show but when they ran out of episodes, they switched to Grace Gibson’s adaptation of Dr Paul and listeners found that the plot moved a lot faster.

The British based distribution company Overseas Rediffusion acquired Dr Paul and arranged sponsorship with Ovaltine but this was not for broadcast in the UK, they sold the serial to Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados and British Guyana.

Listeners around the world were enthralled by radio’s greatest story of adult love and human conflict, but getting Dr Paul on the air in Great Britain was proving difficult.

John Saul was Dr Paul mark two.

Reg James was the sales manager for Grace Gibson Productions and he had made several failed attempts to sell Dr Paul to the BBC, then in 1965 he finally succeeded in becoming the first person to sell an Australian soap opera to the UK. Radio 390 was a pirate radio station operating from a disused Second World War sea fort called Red Sands Tower approximately nine miles off the coast of Whitstable in Kent and they decided to schedule Dr Paul every weekday at 11.15am directly opposite BBC Radio’s own medical drama The Dales which had previously been called Mrs Dale’s Diary.

Unfortunately, things got off to a shaky start with the first broadcast having to be delayed because the radio station had expected the episodes to be supplied on tape but a package containing transcription discs arrived from Australia and they didn’t have the equipment to play them. The programme soon established a firm following in the UK but fans were left in limbo when the station went off air abruptly prompting Mrs J Wood of Surrey to write to the Daily Mirror asking if anyone knew who murdered Arnold Smith in the series.

The vast majority of Australian radio soaps were axed because they couldn’t compete with the onslaught of television drama but Dr Paul, Portia Faces Life and Blue Hills (which was produced in-house by the ABC) were still holding their own and were continuing to pull in large numbers of listeners.

Alastair Duncan became Dr Paul after the character suffered a heart attack.

The final episode of Dr Paul was produced in July 1970 not because of falling ratings but because the majority of writers had moved over to television where the financial rewards were more lucrative. Grace Gibson had decided that Dr Paul should hang up his stethoscope after 4634 fifteen-minute episodes because she was finding it increasingly difficult to find strong writers for the show who could come up with new and original story ideas. The remaining episodes of the series were being heard around Australia and in other parts of the world over the next couple of years.

Tragically a significant number of Dr Paul episodes are missing from the collection of the NFSA (National Film & Sound Archive of Australia). Grace Gibson Productions and the NFSA are keen to recover the missing editions of Dr Paul which are episodes 1 – 1236, 1245 – 1250, 1259 – 1260, 1265 – 1266, 1323 – 1324, 1327 – 1328, 1331 – 1334, 1359 – 1928, 2161 – 2294, and 4633 – 4634. If you think you might have a missing episode, please drop me an email and I’ll pass your details on to the relevant archivists.

Pictured top: Recording an episode of Dr Paul in 1953. From left are John Alden (Dr Guthrie), Laurel Mather (Elizabeth Lowe), John Saul (Dr Paul) and June Salter (Virginia Martin). Photos copyright IRS Grace Gibson Productions.