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DISTANT SHORES - THE SHORE FAMILY PROFILES

Peter Davison is all over our screens at the moment with two series on at the same time, The Complete Guide to Parenting over on the ABC and the drama Distant Shores on Saturdays on the Seven Network, here we present profiles of the characters from DS.

Bill Shore (Peter Davison)
Bill is a successful plastic surgeon with his own practice, a great house and a fantastic new car. He believes he’s got it all, but his wife and children don’t seem to agree with him.

Bill can be self-centred, blinkered to the point of utter blindness and he doesn’t realise he’s in danger of losing his family. In fact, they are so unhappy with his self-obsessed, self absorbed world that wife Lisa hatches a plan to try and save their marriage.

Get out of the rat race, move away from the hurly burly of London life and escape to the beautiful countryside of Hildasay, a mystical, magical island off the North East coast. Little does Bill know what lies ahead.

Lisa Shore (Samantha Bond)
Bill’s long-suffering wife, Lisa is looking for her place in the world. Easily flustered, eternally patient, and a master of compromise, Lisa started training as a vet but gave it up after a year when Bill was offered a lucrative job in Saudi Arabia. Then she got pregnant, and ended up spending the next 16 years raising her children and apologising for her husband.

Now she wants a change. Deep down she’s scared that she and Bill have fallen out of love with each other and even more scared that they don’t seem to be doing anything about it. They need to talk about things and address their problems. So, she could either go to marriage guidance, or she could up sticks and drag the whole family kicking and screaming to an island in the middle of nowhere.

Now the fun really starts, because Lisa falls in love again... but not as planned with Bill. Worryingly, she finds herself falling for local farmer Duncan. And boy does she fall.

But it’s not because he’s gorgeous, although he is, or because he’s nice to her, although he is that too. In fact, what she comes to realise is that Duncan represents everything that Bill was when she first met him. What she sees in Duncan is what she saw in Bill when she fell in love with him 20 years ago. So, what’s she going to do about it?

Kate Shore (Claudia Renton)
Like most teenagers her age, Kate is struggling to come to terms with life, sex and her parents. She has very low self-esteem and is often quite rude and abrupt. She also refuses to let anyone get close. She hides behind a variety of different personalities, doesn’t value herself and doesn’t think life is worth living.

Until she meets 17year-old Ben who intrigues her. She also fancies him, but that proves complicated. In a very public humiliation for both of them she makes a pass at Ben which forces him to reveal to the entire island, that he’s gay.

From that point on their friendship is all-important to her – she knows she likes him, but is having to come to terms with the fact that she can’t win him over with a snog. Instead, she’s going to have to earn his friendship. However, her self-confidence is so low that she can’t see that he likes her and wants her to be his friend.

Harvey (Matthew Thomas-Davies)
Harvey fantasises his way through life. He lives in the same world as the rest of us, but he just tailors it to suit him. For instance, he’s got an imaginary dad called Malcolm. A dad who’s perfect, looks after him, tells him off, holds his hand and takes him to school on the bus.

It suits him perfectly, and it suits Bill too. Neither one of them is disappointed and they don’t have to do any of that tricky, talking stuff. It’s not all Bill’s fault, though. After all, Harvey is his father’s son, so he’s pretty good at avoiding confrontation.

THE ISLANDERS
Duncan (Tristan Gemmill)
Duncan is Hildasay born and bred. His father is the vicar, and the farm they run has been in the family for generations. He is very in tune with the land and is the voice for a lot of the mythology and legends of the island. This slightly feral quality means that there is a straightforward honesty to him, which can be unsettling, but for Lisa it is a refreshing contrast to Bill’s glib, city flippancy.

Although Duncan loves his wife Laney, something is missing from their marriage. He can’t put his finger on it. He puts it down to not having any children yet, but when he meets Lisa he starts to wonder if it may be more to do with having married the wrong woman.

In a way, his marriage to Laney was pre-ordained; although his father didn’t approve, to the rest of the island it was clear that these two should be together.

Laney (Emma Fildes)
Daughter of the recently deceased island GP, Laney is the heartbeat of the island and has been married to Duncan for five years.

She has an ability to find the best in people and that, coupled with her natural pragmatism and an earthy cheekiness, makes her a perfect foil to jaded cynic Bill.

But Laney has a secret. Something she has never even told her husband and that secret threatens to eat away at their marriage. Laney is one of life’s ‘fixers’, and Bill becomes her project. Her problems, however, are closer to home and, like a lot of people who are good listeners and empathise with other people’s troubles, Laney is rubbish at healing her own.

Ben (Justin McDonald)
The second son of the vicar and island ‘elder’ Charles, Ben is bright, perceptive, down to earth and ‘in the closet’.

His mother died when he was very young and he’s been brought up by a father who’s struggling to be both parents to him. His dad has done a good job but it has made Ben a ‘coper’ – both he and his dad are protective of each other and would bottle things up rather than risk having a conversation which might cause any upset.

It’s not that they’re emotionally stunted, just that there is a security to their relationship which is based on not having to say ‘I love you’.

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