Veteran performer Noni Hazlehurst.Credit: Daniel Boud
The thing you don’t know about Play School is how much swearing went on. In the years Noni Hazlehurst was a presenter on the beloved kids’ TV classic, each episode was filmed continuously, as if it was being broadcast live. The only way to stop the cameras rolling was to let rip with something un-airable.
Play School is the second-longest running show on Australian TV, and the second-longest running kids’ show in the world. Hazlehurst was a presenter for 24 years – but that’s less than half of the time she’s been in the public eye. She’s recently been working on a memoir: “I’m feeling exhausted going through my CV going, how did I do all of that?”
Hazlehurst in her early days as one of the Play School hosts.
In the mid-1970s her career kicked off with regular parts on Australian television classics The Box and The Sullivans. By the 1980s she was in demand as a documentary narrator, while she was also beginning to flex her serious acting muscles in films such as Monkey Grip and Fran. For 10 years she hosted Better Homes and Gardens; she’s played radio broadcaster, and recorded music and spoken word albums.
She’s also an award-winning stage actor. Later this year Hazlehurst will be in Melbourne to perform Mother, the one-woman show written especially for her. The tour-de-force work was penned by Melbourne playwright Daniel Keene, who created the script with Hazlehurst in mind. It first debuted in Sydney in 2015 and has enjoyed multiple tours around the country. This September, Hazlehurst will perform the demanding role at Arts Centre Melbourne.
Though at 70 she remains as extraordinarily prolific as she’s ever been, she doesn’t say yes to everything that comes her way. “I very much pick and choose ... I’m always happy to look at projects but to tempt me out of my comfort zone now, it’s got to be something pretty amazing.”
It all starts with Play School, though. The show’s presenters make their job look easy, but anyone in the biz will tell you that it’s one of the toughest gigs going. There are few roles that will better equip an actor for the industry than Play School, and the show “continues to affect everything I do,” Hazlehurst says.
“Play School took me away from performing, to being,” she says. “That’s the hardest thing for any of us, whether we’re actors or not. Most of us are playing a role in every interaction that we have, whether we do it consciously or unconsciously.”
When she began with the show in 1978, the role she fell into was “very Miss Prim”. Her co-host John Hamblin, in contrast, would sometimes deviate from the script or insert cheeky jokes. “I thought John was a bit slack because he didn’t always have the words 100 per cent correct.”
Hazlehurst, with co-star Colin Friels, won an AFI award for her role in 1982’s Monkey Grip.
Dear reader, here I must object. To anyone who grew up when ?Funny John’ or ?Naughty John’ was a Play School host, any criticisms are heresy.
“John Hamblin was a genius!” agrees Hazlehurst. It was only when she watched him on screen that she understood this. “You couldn’t take your eyes off him. He was in the moment. And yes, he did occasionally get things wrong but it didn’t matter. It doesn’t matter to a three-year-old that you’re a duffer. He was so alive and so present, even though we rehearsed the program four or five times before we ever taped it.”
Those rehearsals were a must: in those days they were performing a 32-page script with no teleprompter, and much of that text doubled as cues for camera operators and other crew. You had to be fairly exacting, but somehow Hamblin kept things in the moment. “I could see the difference: I was performing and he was being,” she says.
Trying to fake your way through the job was never going to cut it. “A three-year-old child is a far better bullshit detector than any adult.”
The second lesson the kids’ show taught Hazlehurst was that she’s not performing to an audience. “We were playing to one pair of eyes only. The camera was one child. It made me understand that you’re talking to one person at a time.” That’s why, to this day, Play School presenters don’t start the show with a big “hi kids!” but instead greet the viewer with a warm and direct “hello”. “So you go ?hello’ back because it’s someone speaking directly to you,” says Hazlehurst.
TAKE 7: THE ANSWERS ACCORDING TO NONI HAZLEHURST
- Worst habit? Procrastination.
- Greatest fear? That the 1 percent who are currently in charge of the rest of us are allowed to continue.
- The line that stayed with you? “We don’t want to see women rise only on the basis of others doing worse.” Scott Morrison in an address to mark International Women’s Day.
- Biggest regret? Trusting the wrong people.
- Favourite room? The kitchen.
- The artwork/song you wish was yours? The Burlington House Cartoon by Leonardo da Vinci of the Madonna and Child.
- If you could solve one thing... Inequality.
She always knew that for some children, Play School hosts were the nicest adults in their lives. Even if it was through television, they had a vital role to play. “In the world that the small child inhabits, to have access to two adults who are speaking in a language that they can understand about things they know is really important. There’s very little in the world that offers us that non-judgemental acceptance and unconditional love.”
Judgement and its alternatives are also a major theme in Mother. In the one-woman show, Hazlehurst plays Christie, a woman dealt the harshest of life’s hands. “She’s been homeless and wandering the streets of Melbourne for years, and she’s lost any ability to interact with people, because people don’t want to interact with her,” she says.
Hazlehurst on stage in the one-woman play Mother.Credit: Brett Boardman
“She’s dirty, she’s smelly. But she has a story to tell. It’s just remarkable how the audience response changes. At first they’re like ?ugh, who’s this?’ and by the end they’re totally caught up in this story.”
Before the script was even written, Hazlehurst and Keene had agreed that the cruelty of judging others would be a core concern of the work. “The ridiculousness of the way we judge each other all the time, and who cares? Just be kind. That’s the bottom line. Everyone has a story to tell and so many stories are never told because these people fall through the cracks.”
Hazlehurst is passionate about the work’s ability to give us pause. “There but by the grace of god go every bloody one of us, really. We’re one bad choice away from being destitute and homeless. Some people don’t even choose, they just find themselves in that situation. So judgement is such an evil, toxic flaw.”
Mother is only the first occasion in which Hazlehurst has held the stage on her own. “I’ve just found it extraordinary. I’m responsible for the beginning and the middle and the end. The only person I have to help over the finish line is myself. It’s such a wonderful challenge. It makes every fibre of my being tingle when I do it.”
If she messed it up she’d be mortified. “I don’t want to get a single word wrong. It’s like a symphony. If you play a wrong note – which thankfully I haven’t, touch wood – you’d know. Just as if people came to hear a concert pianist play a really well-known sonata with a full orchestra and they hit a bum note, people will know.”
A decade after it premiered, Mother’s appeal to open our hearts to invisible suffering seems more relevant than ever. “It will never be irrelevant, this story. As long as there is a feeling that some people are better than others, or some people are more special or more deserving than others,” says Hazlehurst.
“My philosophy is that no one is special, everyone is unique.” Not a bad lesson, kids.
Mother is at Arts Centre Melbourne from September 5. artscentremelbourne.com.au
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correction
An earlier version of this story said Noni Hazlehurst’s career kicked off in the mid-1960s. It has been corrected to note that she started getting regular parts on Australian television in the mid ’70s.