Lorraine Bayly remembers her 10 years on Play School including the day an elephant called in

Fifty years ago actor Lorraine Bayly made her first regular TV appearances on a new children’s show called Play School. She stayed 10 years and here remembers some of the wilder highlights.

Lorraine Bayly, Anne Haddy and Diane Dorgan celebrating 100 episodes of Play School in 1968.

I started acting quite a few years before I did Play School. I started in Play School in 1966, but I had been acting for probably eight or 10 years before that, mostly doing theatre work.

When I auditioned I remember thinking, this could be interesting because they rehearsed on a Tuesday morning and taped the show on a Friday morning. Which meant that it didn’t interfere at all with theatre work, because back then matinees were on Wednesday and Saturday and the rest were all evening performances. So it fitted in really well.

My agent had called me and I asked if I wanted to go along to audition for a new children’s show. I remember there was quite a lot to do in the audition but it was also a lot of fun. Allan Kendall was in charge, he knew exactly what he wanted and was so good at giving direction.

One of the things I had to do for my audition homework was to write a story because in the rundown it said “tell a story” but there was no story in the script. So I wrote a little story about fairies and gnomes and read it out. After the audition I was told “that was an interesting story, but you know you could have just read the story of the Three Little Pigs or something”.

Lorraine Bayly with another cast favourite Little Ted..

One of the things they told me about the show was that it was not going to be one where the hosts talked down to the children. They wanted us to talk to the children on a normal level and let the script take care of the age. The other thing we were told was that we would talk into the camera as if we were talking to a particular child. I had fun doing that.

I was one of the first on air in 1966, one of the three original women along with Anne Haddy and Diane Dorgan. The three original men were Alister Smart, Kerry Francis and Donald McDonald.

I had never done any children’s shows before then. Most of what I had done up to that point was drama. I remember I was doing D.H. Lawrence’s play The Daughter-in-Law, quite different from anything I was doing on Play School. So I would go home on Thursday night after doing the show and sit down with the Play School script, then I would have to switch off from the play I was doing and get into having fun.

A lot of very funny things happened on the set. Even though we were taping it, we filmed it as if it was live. We went straight through without stopping, so if anything happened off the script we just had to keep on going. Doing it like that kept your mind going, you really had to be with it, in case you had to cover things that happened.

Play School’s 1978 cast mambers John Walters, John Hamblin, Jan Kingsbury, Alister Smart, Benita Collings and Lorraine Bayly present the Christmas Show.

In one episode we had a little pig in a pen and they had a trough of porridge. The pig had a great time eating it and wriggling around in it. He was soon covered in porridge, became very slippery and got out of his pen.

We had to carry on, saying things like “Oh, he’s had his dinner now he’s going for a little walk.” Meanwhile, the floor managers were trying to catch the pig in the background and you could hear these squeals.

There was a time when I had to come on riding a penny-farthing bicycle and I fell off bringing down part of the set. But we just had to carry on.

Play School has been entertaining Australian children for 50 years.

One of the most famous animal episodes involved Abu the elephant from Ashton’s circus. For some reason we couldn’t rehearse with the elephant so they only brought the elephant in for the taping. I was a little bit shocked by its size and you can see on videos that I am shaking while I talked to the elephant handler Phillip and I said “So is Abu the biggest circus in the elephant?”

I was on the show for 10 years exactly and the only reason I left was that I had to move to Melbourne because I had started filming the series The Sullivans. They kept asking me to come back and do some shows but it was impossible.

I remember when Noni Hazlehurst was leaving The Sullivans she asked me for contacts for work in Sydney and I told her she should do Play School. She became one of the long-time hosts of the show and one of the most popular.

As told to Troy Lennon

Originally published as Lorraine Bayly remembers her 10 years on Play School including the day an elephant called in