The spat106 short longform #10

Five possible new Shortland Street characters

Once in a previous life I had auditioned to be one of the script writing team for Shortland Street, this involved sending in a full test script written in accordance to the story outline they had sent to me. If you have read my previous newsletters you can certainly see why I was unsuccessful in getting that job. However I have watched Shortland Street in its initial years and on then off and then permanently off again seeing as I prefer watching The Crowd Goes Wild at that time.

So I don’t know much about Shortland Street nowadays, apart from the fact that Chris Warner is still on the show like the Highlander. And the writers probably had thought about killing him off but then his line of “Tell me that is not your penis.” got famous around the world so that means he’ll be on the show for another 20 years. Therefore he’ll end up being some type of low-rent Ken Barlow.

So with no knowledge of the many of the current characters or storyline, here are my suggestions for five new characters that could be on the show, especially now that Shortland Street will reach its 25th anniversary. We need these new characters because there’s new immigrants in Aotearoa and in order to officially be either a permanent resident or citizen in this country you had to have been acting on Shortland Street at least once.

The first new character is Cliff Curtis, he has been on a whole bunch of different movies playing characters of varying ethnicities so it’s only appropriate that he appears on Shortland Street. He won’t however ironically be played by himself.

The second new character is an Indian doctor. I mean it makes sense, many doctors in New Zealand hospitals are Indian yet the fictional suburb of Ferndale doesn’t seem to have one walking the corridors of Shortland Street Hospital. And this acting job will be ideal for a recent Indian immigrant who is a qualified doctor but came over here and the only job they could get is driving a taxi or own & run a petrol station. At least they can now play a doctor, use a bit of their training in practice, pardon the pun or don’t pardon the pun, does it look like I care?

The third character will be an evil spirit who is just like Killer BOB from Twin Peaks, he will occupy the body of one of the existing cast, possibly Harry Warner. You know that Killer Bob is in Harry Warner because Harry Warner will have white hair while being possessed by this demon and everyone will be wondering why a young teen’s hair has changed so dramatically. Then Chris Warner will receive a email with an attachment with a bunch of white hair on it, so he’ll go up to Harry Warner with the iPad and say to him,”Please tell me those are not your pubes?!”

The fourth character needs to be a superhero of some sort. Maybe a woman. Okay a woman who wears glasses while she is a doctor but then takes off her glasses when she is off saving people’s lives. Which she is doing as a doctor. Effectively every scene of her in the operating room is her putting her glasses off and on every two second for the duration of the surgery. These rest of the doctors will be screaming at her, ”Stop messing around with your glasses and make an incision with the scalpel!”

The fifth and final new character on Shortland Street I suggest is the Ferndale Feline. This is just a cat but this capitalises on the modern society’s fixation with cats and will also stick it to Gareth Morgan who wants to see them dead, yet NZ’s most watched soap puts one in the spotlight. Also it will be great to see a cat performing surgery and trying to enter itself into a love triangle between one of the nurses and another one of the doctors. Plus it can be the one who secretly kill off some of the characters, therefore making sure there are less actors to pay and South Pacific Pictures can use more of the cash on funding another fifty series of Westside.