H&A Spring Break - From the Bay to LA

[atrus]

A nice departure for Shannon there, with everybody crowding around to say goodbye. I nearly always tear up when someone says goodbye to Pippa, which is mainly a testament to Debra Lawrance and the very genuine warmth she brought to that role.

I would echo comments above to the effect that Mandy's return does seem vague and ambiguous. But at least this was back in the day when H&A would at least dare to address the issue of homosexuality, if not head-on. The very fact of Shannon's happy departure with Mandy remains quite a milestone in the depiction of gay relationships on the show, and in soap more generally. It's a pity that the show's days of pioneering in that regard seem to have come to an end.

I kept doing a double-take at early-days Jesse - I'm so used to seeing him without hair in the later years that several times I was convinced he was wearing a wig!

Good to see Kelly, who I always liked, some of the Marilyn/Don period, and also those full closing credits on Thursday/Friday, which I think I'm right in saying ITV never or hardly ever showed in their entirety. Not so fussed about the stuff with Shannon's real mother, who seemed like a bit of a pantomime villain.

I have mixed feelings about Steven coming back. I always liked his character in the earlier days, but I felt the relationship with Selina really compromised him. Of course you can't help who you fall in love with, but you certainly can and should resist acting on it when it's one of your pupils. I think it takes a certain degree of arrogance to breach that position of trust in the first place because you think your own experience somehow transcends that moral boundary. And by this stage Stevo is indeed quite aptly depicted as a fairly arrogant character.

His scenes with Pippa were very strong, though. Her rare casting of judgement of him initially, though it obviously hurt him enormously, is totally justified by her character - she's spent most of her life offering a sanctuary for vulnerable kids, so of course she would view his relationship with Selina as the serious transgression it was. That said, it was nice that she has been able to forgive him despite everything, and welcome him back into the family.

[beau_t]

I managed to see the episodes and thoroughly enjoyed them.

I think you have a point regarding Steven acting on his feelings for Selina while she was a pupil. However I think that was the point he was making upon his return. He lost his job, and the respect of people he cared about - he paid the price for what he did. Now he's no longer her teacher, she's no longer a school pupil, but the feelings between them are still there. There's nothing wrong with it anymore, he no longer has anything to apologise for.

I really liked the conversation between Pippa and Steven. Their damaged relationship both before and after his absence is one of my strongest memories of that era. A lot of hurt on both sides. And Irene being her usual dry self towards Steven - she never really liked him, even before Selina-gate, they had their differences over Dodge.

Shannon's exit was nice, and while I liked her one-on-one chats with Sally and Pippa, and it was especially nice that she got nice goodbye scenes with Alf and Donald, I felt a stronger scene just between her and Selina was missing. The little chat about them being old ladies together wasn't quite enough.

A few pages back someone listed some suggestions of better episodes for Shannon and I agree with them, the ones we saw really didn't show off what a great character she was. Pippa summed it up perfectly, she really was different from the other kids, a bit of a child and adult rolled into one.

Episodes I'd pick for Shannon would be

Coming to terms with her sexual abuse

Nearly drowning in the pool and finally admitting to her anorexia

The Shannon/Kye/Pippa climax OR the previously suggested episode where Pippa is in a coma and Shannon is trying to run the house

If possible a Shannon/Mandy episode, although their storyline was so subtle I don't know if there was really any stand out episode focusing on their growing feelings or if it was always on the backburner.

The case study (the episode centered around Shannon writing about her life and that of her friends)

[Slade]

I would echo comments above to the effect that Mandy's return does seem vague and ambiguous. But at least this was back in the day when H&A would at least dare to address the issue of homosexuality, if not head-on. The very fact of Shannon's happy departure with Mandy remains quite a milestone in the depiction of gay relationships on the show, and in soap more generally. It's a pity that the show's days of pioneering in that regard seem to have come to an end.

Was that really the case and if so was this the first time? (Didn't see Shannon's departure when it was originally broadcast in the UK but didn't even realise she liked women). Just curious really because if it was I think it's interesting that they started with a female couple as opposed to a male couple. The impression I often got with a lot of people who were against same sex couples was that it was OK if two women engaged in some sort of relationship but not two males. Obviously not all cases but most of the people who felt like that were male. Was the writer of the storyline actually male or female?

[atrus]

I'm not saying it was the first gay storyline in soap, but it was one of a fairly small handful of stories that had aired at the time. Someone may correct me but I'm pretty sure it was a first for Home & Away.

I know Coronation Street hadn't gone there at that point. (Probably EastEnders, Emmerdale and Brookside had, but I don't know exactly when.) Neighbours had something around that time with a male teacher at the school, but he was only a guest character. And as with the Shannon/Mandy story, I think it was tiptoed around a fair bit. But even so, these stories had a real positive impact: as an eleven-year-old boy at the time, I knew exactly what they were getting at with Shannon and Mandy, even if the words themselves weren't used.

You're right to say that particularly in men, there is a degree of hypocrisy in that they will be prepared to tolerate watching lesbian characters on-screen but not gay men. But anyone who admits to holding that viewpoint shouldn't command any respect whatsoever - there's no reasonable argument that can be made in favour of that position. There are plenty of conservative voices who dismiss the validity of depicting any same-sex relationships - and while I totally disagree with them, at least these people have the merit of being consistent.

ETA: I don't know about the gender of the story writer(s) in this instance, but what I would say is that soap writing teams tend to be fairly liberal, regardless of gender - and it's often less about them not wanting to include gay storylines, and more about the networks. But yes, I think TV broadly speaking found it easier in the past to get lesbian stories to air than gay male ones. (It's not so much of an issue now, at least in the UK.)

Then again, some of H&A's gay characters/storylines have arguably set back progress in this area considerably - not least the psycho-stalker lesbian lovers Sarah and Zoe. More recently you have examples like Spencer's online stalker: it's the first male homosexual character they've depicted in years, and they decided that it would be a predatory storyline. Not at all helpful in my view.

H&A has seen two regular characters 'dabble', as far as I am aware, and both have been female - Shannon and Charlie. The two brief gay male stories I can recall that could be alluded to as positive depictions, should we define 'positive' in fairly loose terms (Chris Fletcher and Matilda's boyfriend) were both guest spots. To date, the show has never had a regular character who has explicitly defined themselves as gay, male or female.

[H&Alover]

That was a lovely farewell for Shannon and she was so worried no-one would turn up, as usual it was a spur of the moment things but they managed to put on a great spread. Like Slade I didn't realise Shannon was into women, might explain her failed relationships with men. Two women going off on a trip together isn't much different to two guys gong off on a road trip together, unless there were some of them, like Pippa, who knew otherwise. It was aimed back then at the younger audience so maybe the producers had to be more careful how they depicted characters who had different feelings than others and didn't want to be seen 'corrupting' them.

What Steven had done when he was Selina's teacher was wrong, even if she had been over 16 and they loved each other, he was in a position of trust which he broke. Selina certainly seemed to be trying to prove to herself she was over him by going home and jumping on Jesse, she had to confess to Shannon he had brought up all her old feelings for him. As we all now know she did end up with Steven, maybe.

Not often we see Pippa being shown in a bad light, regarding her feelings at the time over Selina and Steven but she is only human and Steven had been in her care at one time so perhaps she felt she hadn't brought him up to act like that. Steven seemed to have made his peace with Don and Pippa. I'm guessing Sally's gambling came to light at some point which was eventually replaced by her OCD.

This coming week Vinnie - YEH!!!!!!!

[beau_t]

. More recently you have examples like Spencer's online stalker. It's the first male homosexual character they've depicted in years, and they decided that it would be a predatory storyline. Not helpful in my view.

Oh you're kidding? Every time I stumble across something about the current show I just get more and more disappointed and yet less and less surprised.

Back to Shannon and Mandy, and I have to say that even though the storyline was subtle, it was so sensitively written that it didn't feel like tip-toeing around the issue, more that they were just handling it really respectfully. Nowdays the show has no problems using words like gay and lesbian in the scripts (which they didn't back then), but when it comes to actually writing the storylines, they are nowhere near as sensitive.

[atrus]

Two women going off on a trip together isn't much different to two guys gong off on a road trip together, unless there were some of them, like Pippa, who knew otherwise.

Mandy had appeared in a previous stint, when the romance storyline with Shannon was more forthright than in these scenes. But it still wasn't presented as clearly as a heterosexual romance would be.

ETA:

It was aimed back then at the younger audience so maybe the producers had to be more careful how they depicted characters who had different feelings than others and didn't want to be seen 'corrupting' them.

That was definitely the networks' view. But far from corrupting young people, I'd argue that early storylines like this actually made gay kids/teens realise (sometimes for the first time) that they might not be alone in the world. As I say, as an 11-year-old I knew exactly what was going on with the story, and exactly that they were 'bubblewrapping' it slightly to avoid offending sensibilities. But that they did it at all was still important, and worthy of praise.

Oh you're kidding? Every time I stumble across something about the current show I just get more and more disappointed and yet less and less surprised.

It was really quite appalling, in my view. Not that they ran the storyline per se, but that they did so within the context of a total vacuum of positive gay male depictions for years on end. Cyber-predators is a totally legitimate story to tell, but they should have done it with one of the female teen characters - which would have both been more credible in plot terms, and less offensive given the lack of positive gay portrayals.

[Slade]

I'm not saying it was the first gay storyline in soap, but it was one of a fairly small handful of stories that had aired at the time. Someone may correct me but I'm pretty sure it was a first for Home & Away.

Then again, some of H&A's gay characters/storylines have arguably set back progress in this area considerably - not least the psycho-stalker lesbian lovers Sarah and Zoe. More recently you have examples like Spencer's online stalker: it's the first male homosexual character they've depicted in years, and they decided that it would be a predatory storyline. Not at all helpful in my view.

Thanks. I meant H & A. They already did a gay storyline with Eastenders in the late 80s with a character called Colin (I remember seeing a documentary on it a few years later).

Ironically I think it's actually heterosexual reasons for the rank hypocrisy (the idea being that two women having sex is a turn on to any heterosexual male). I've often found the main reason people claim to hold these views is down to religious reasons (or at least that's the excuse) but luckily we have laws in place in the UK to prevent this type of thing (Recently saw a BBC documentary about homophobia in Russia and it was quite disturbing).

I agree about your point in terms of portraying gay characters in a negative light in H & A over the last few years (The storyline with Charlie and Joey I actually quite liked but it was always made out to be a phase for Charlie rather than anything else). Don't want to digress too much from the main topic of this thread but maybe the producers think if they bring a main/recurring gay character into the mix it won't generate sufficient ratings. I imagine it would take a lot of bottle to do something like that too!

[atrus]

It does take bottle, but Neighbours did it several years ago with Chris and is still doing it now with Nate, with no public uproar that I've heard of. H&A, I guess, is still smarting from the backlash from a small but vocal opposition to Charlie/Joey from some quarters, and I'd guess it's more likely to be that than the ratings that is worrying them. I can't imagine it much affecting ratings either way, but if anything I'd expect them to go up because of the additional potential for attracting a gay audience, and the novelty value for everybody else.

[Red Ranger 1]

I always found the evolution of the Shannon/Mandy relationship rather meandering.As I recall, Mandy had three stints.In the first one, it's played as if Shannon is attracted to Mandy but Mandy only sees her as a child and shows no sign of being interested in same sex relationships.By her second appearance, Shannon is in a happy heterosexual relationship with Alex and basically dismisses her crush on Mandy as a passing phase:They're closer but 100% platonic and a major plot point resolved around them not wanting their past relationship to be mistaken for something "inappropriate" (although that seemed more to do with the age gap than anything else).Then in the third stint, when Shannon's dated plenty of boys including Mandy's brother in the interim, Mandy's suddenly portrayed as the great lost love of Shannon's life (even though they never actually say that) who seems devastated at the thought of her marrying someone else, and it's hard not to go "Where did that come from?" Even Isla Fisher seemed a bit bemused and threw around phrases like "Became a lesbian" in an ironic fashion during interviews.

I get the positive statement of them going off together, and quite possibly still being together, but watching Shannon's last episode in isolation there is absolutely nothing to suggest they're a couple. I'm not sure they even speak to each other, and if they do it's just a couple of lines in the opening kitchen scene.A sisterly kiss on the cheek just before they leave doesn't really sell the moment...