His career is built on flawless comic timing, but Shane Bourne still believes there’s a certain serendipity to life; moments when the stars align, a door swings open and someone says, ‘thank God you’re here’. It’s possibly the very expression Channel Seven executives used when the veteran performer waltzed in as the new co-host of ratings evergreen Dancing With The Stars, but then they had been waiting for him to ring the doorbell for some time.
The comedian and award-winning actor had been firmly in their sights when original host Daryl Somers quit in 2007, but Shane was occupied elsewhere. When, after seven successful seasons, Daniel MacPherson announced he was leaving DWTS to focus on acting, Shane got the call.
“Normally I am a shocking decision-maker, but it didn’t take me any time at all to say, ‘yes, I think this is a good idea’,” he says.
More than 20 years since his regular
Hey Hey It’s Saturday appearances, Shane was thrilled to be returning to live television with all its seat-of-the-pants, sweaty-palmed adrenaline. “What I love is that you are not getting something written in post-production and characters created in an editing suite. It is just people, who are fish out of water to some extent, having a crack, and there is a real sense of possibility there.”
He was completely unfazed by the negative twittering of social media after his first night. “The audience I meet that are really loving the show are probably watching with a cup of tea or a glass of wine, not a phone, in their hand.”
The new gig is a homecoming of sorts for the 65-year-old, who made his first television appearance on Seven’s
The Happy (Hammond) Show at age 10, miming the Rolf Harris song I’ve Lost My Mummy.
As founder of Shane Bourne and his Miming Prawns, he had rehearsed his troupe of four with utmost seriousness. “I remember we all went on the train to auditions … and they didn’t have a record player. So here we were miming to a record with no record, but we got on the show anyway. That was The Prawns at their peak.”
Raw as Shane’s talent was, he had a considerable theatrical pedigree. His mother Pixie had been a model, his grandmother Dorothy May a Tivoli showgirl who appeared in the 1927 silent film
Environment, and her sister Ruby a well-known Melbourne stage actor. But it was Shane’s father, Stan Bourne – a multi-instrumentalist, singer, band leader and comedian dubbed “the King of the Gold Coast” – who shone brightest of all.
The Bournes and their three children, Shane, Dannie and Robynne, were living in Ivanhoe when Stan decided the time was ripe to move to Southport in Queensland.
“I was six when he convinced my mother to move there. We were back before I was seven. I remember looking out the back of the bus window. I picture my dad in a Hawaiian shirt just kind of waving. It’s almost like a scene from a movie, but I do remember it was pretty emotional. I remember the sense of loss.”
Pixie and the children eventually settled in Boronia. Stan was a dazzling once-a-year comet in their lives. “He would come down in a big American car and it would be like ‘wow’,’’ says Shane. “Once we came home from school and were asked to put pillowcases over our heads and walk into the lounge. And when we removed them, voilà, there was a TV, voilà, there was a piano.
“But I think mum did it pretty tough. Here he is throwing the dough around, but probably the cheques aren’t arriving as regularly as they could.”
At 15 Shane contracted pericarditis, a virus that inflames the lining of the heart. “I was laid up in St Vincent’s for six weeks in a ward with older men, including a guy who was actually in Pentridge (prison) at the time, some skinny old lag fagging away,’’ Shane says. “I look back on that period and it was probably a bit of a watershed and not the least because while I was in there I grew three inches (7.6 centimetres).”
Until then Shane’s school reports had been punctuated with “can do better”, but he knuckled down to catch up and by 17 was at Monash University studying politics and economics. “I passed politics, but it was the wrong course and I decided it was not for me.”
He worked cleaning pubs, shops, offices and hospitals before joining the advertising agency McCann Erickson, which offered him a solid career path. Then in 1971 Stan died of a heart attack aged 58 and Shane, who had just begun to reconnect with him, was stunned.
“Part of what thrust me into the performing arts was wanting to be part of the same milieu,” Shane says. “When I did
New Faces in 1972, the producers knew him, people like Bert Newton and Graham Kennedy were familiar with him, and I got a great kind of sense of belonging or connecting to my father hearing that.
“My mother was so supportive of me, but it must have been hard for her, knowing the way life could go. She always said, you are too sensitive for this. But I said that’s a good thing. It’s a good thing to be sensitive and learn how to be a bit tougher.”
Shane’s start in The George Hotel in St Kilda, in a strip show called
My Bare Lady, was not auspicious. The lanky young lad in a dinner suit appearing between Jeanette Pleasure, The Mighty Atom and Alexandra The Great 48 was roundly heckled.
“But, I didn’t care because I was in show business,” he laughs. By the fourth night he’d won them over.
Through the early ’70s he supplemented his stand-up gigs by working as a taxi driver, and salesman for Adele and Rob Palmer’s burgeoning Jag jeans. “It was good fun, but I had no vision. I remember Rob asking me, ‘what’s your five-year plan?’, and I said, ‘I dunno, go to a few parties’.”
In 1975, Shane teamed up with Madder Lake’s Mick Fetters to form Bandicoot. “We were kind of dual front men. Mick had a very gruff kind of Joe Cocker voice and I tried to emulate him and could hardly speak for three years. We wrote a bunch of songs and we did record an album, but only 1000 copies were released because the record company closed.”
Travelling overseas for the first time, in the ’80s, Shane immersed himself in the Los Angeles comedy scene before going to India, which he describes as a “life-changing experience, which inspired me to be more courageous and adventurous”.
He added the first acting credits to his CV with roles in
Prisoner: Cell Block H and two series of the Australian version of Are You Being Served?, and began his long partnership with the late Maurie Fields on Hey Hey It’s Saturday’s Great Aussie Joke segment. He also appeared in theatre shows, including Some Night In Julia Creek, Hurly Burly and What the Butler Saw.
Things were also changing dramatically on a personal front. In 1990, he and his wife, Shanyn, welcomed their daughter, Ruby, but the couple’s relationship was fraught and they separated within 18 months. Still Shane was determined to break the chain of absent fathers that began with his grandfather, Percy.
“The biggest thing for me, that weighed on me and I probably wasn’t totally aware of it at the time, was that sense of abandonment that I probably carried with me. Was I passing that on to my daughter, my innocent darling daughter?”
Shane’s efforts to remain a constant in Ruby’s life continued when she and her mother moved to Queensland. “She was my top priority and anyone who came along had to fit in with that.”
He could not have been happier when, at 15, Ruby came to live with him full-time in his Albert Park home. By then the erstwhile strip club comic had proven himself a “serious actor”, having won AFI awards for Best Actor in a Television Series for his role as lawyer “Happy” Henderson in the ABC series
MDA in 2003 and 2005. He also hosted the improvised comedy show Thank God You’re Here – the most popular new show of 2006, attracting upwards of two million viewers.
Shane was also cast in the Sydney version of the musical
New In Town, and embarked on a 70-episode, five-season commitment as Detective Senior Sergeant Stanley Wolfe in the Channel Seven drama City Homicide.
“It was busy, but I have always had a theory that it was the universe saying, you take this on (being a single dad to Ruby) and we will give you this. I do have a belief in a bit of karma and that kind of thing. I remember one of the network executives saying, ‘Bourne you are white hot’.”
It seems he’s once again having a moment; with his
DWTS début attracting almost 800,000 viewers and a role in one of the most anticipated Australian films of recent years – The Dressmaker, based on the best-selling novel. In it he sports red hair and a moustache as Evan Pettyman, an unscrupulous town councillor and father of protagonist Tilly Dunnage, played by Kate Winslet.
He has reached a point where he’s able to take roles such as
DWTS for fun, without worrying about career implications.
“I feel like I’m a bit freer of that kind of having to prove myself,” he says.
Is he glad he’s here? “Hell, yes.”
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sharris@theweeklyreview.com.au
