Blake back with a smile
There is an unusual cheeriness about Lucien Blake on his return to Ballarat at the beginning of the second season of The Doctor Blake Mysteries on ABC1.
Some of the black cloud that has hung over him since the end of World War II has lifted. He has found out what happened to his wife and daughter after the fall of Singapore and returns home with a new zest for life, which makes the character now a more natural fit for actor Craig McLachlan.
McLachlan is someone who definitely lives on the sunny side of the street, but last year in a bid to prove himself as a serious actor, he lost weight to become a 1950s country doctor, giving some of the best performances of his career as he struggled with mysterious deaths, his postwar demons and the drink.
Not that all goes smoothly for Dr Blake in the opening of the second season: there is a new and hostile face at the police station, a close friend dies and one of his favourite patients, Nell Clasby, has passed on (this reference was written into the script as a tribute to the actress who played Nell, Penne Hackforth-Jones, who died last year).
But despite the occasionally dour tone to the series, ABC audiences have loved it.
When I met McLachlan on set in inner Melbourne last year, he was in high spirits despite having the flu.
"We just shot some stuff on location at a very groovy barber shop and I stuck my head out the door and people in the street said 'Back on the case, Dr Blake'," he said.
"People are really generous in their support of the show and that is lovely."
Actress Nadine Garner (It's a Date, City Homicide), who plays Dr Blake's housekeeper Jean Beazley, has a theory about why the series has been so popular.
"Maybe there is a hankering for a lost innocence of a time where there was faith and trust and people did understand one another and we weren't all distracted by technology," she said.
Garner is the mother of two boys and admits she spends a lot of time trying to drag them away from various gadgets and out into the fresh air. She loves her role on Doctor Blake.
"Jean is the moral compass of the show," she said. "Some of her moralities are not particularly aligned with mine and yet she is a woman of her time.
"I think the interesting thing is that although she is conservative, she is not God-fearing, she gave up on God long ago. She believes in rights and wrongs and she operates in blacks and whites.
"But Dr Blake doesn't and what fascinates her is his ability to keep opening doors and asking more questions. She needs to be around someone like that in order to stay engaged with the world, otherwise she would just die a quiet death in the corner."
There are 10 episodes in the new season of Doctor Blake but last year McLachlan also found time to take an ongoing role in House Husbands and to star in a Redfern Now story directed by Leah Purcell and based on her life. "Who would have thought," McLachlan laughed. "When Leah asked me to take the role I told her that for a kid who started out shirtless on Ramsay Street in the 1980s to be invited to join her on this journey meant more to me than she would ever know."
So why, having established himself as a serious actor, is he again touring with The Rocky Horror Show, in Perth from February 14? "I guess somewhere tucked away in the mad McLachlan mind I probably harboured a fantasy to do it once more before I got too old," he laughed.
"Actors talk about returning to their favourite Shakespeare, well Dr Frank-N-Furter in Rocky Horror is my Shakespeare. I was only 25 when I did it the first time and I was intoxicated by the high-octane camp facet of Frank-N-Furter. There is something quite empowering about being a fairly built Aussie bloke in eight-inch stilettos and a corset."
