by Tina Arena
Being a YTT cast member was almost a full-time job. We worked at least twenty hours a week, Tuesday to Saturday, all squeezed in around school and whatever else we had on. The show ran virtually year-round, so we did that for eleven months of the year.
It was a tough, rigorous schedule, not only for me but for the whole family. After school on Tuesdays we rehearsed and recorded the backing vocals for the coming Saturday’s show. For the first few months I was on YTT, we spent those nights at Channel 0’s studios in Nunawading, east of the city, a forty-kilometre drive across Melbourne from Keilor East where we lived. The sessions would start around 4.30 in the afternoon and finish around eight o’clock at night. My parents played tag team – Mum would drop me off, and when Dad finished work at night he’d pick me up. I remember those long drives home with Dad. I’d be flaked out in the back seat; he’d be listening to the radio. When we finally got home I’d fall into bed, exhausted.
Not long after I joined we began recording backing vocals at studios in St Kilda then Richmond, while weeknight rehearsals were moved to John’s production offices at Television House. The change took a little of the pressure off.
Television House became our second home. It was where it all happened. Wednesday night was reserved for publicity: public appearances, photo calls, promos, interviews. Or we might use the night for costume fittings, answering fan mail or to put the finishing touches on the songs. Sometimes, we got Wednesday nights off.
We learnt the dance routines and practised all our moves on Thursday and Friday nights. And then, starting midmorning on Saturdays, we’d be in the TV studio doing camera rehearsals, lighting rehearsals, costume rehearsals, then hair and makeup.
Late on Saturday afternoon the show was recorded with a live studio audience, and either went to air live or was broadcast around the country soon after recording. In the early days Mum and I travelled to Nunawading by train on Saturdays, leaving home at around 6 am. After a while my parents bought a second car so we could drive there instead.
Sunday was usually our day off. Then we’d wake up on Monday and the whole cycle started again.
It may have been a punishing schedule, but for me, working on YTT was like going to Disneyland five days a week. I loved every second of it: the painted sets, the satin and sequins, the makeup, the hairdos, the songs – it was the best game of make-believe I’d ever played, and I got to do it most days.
When I joined, the team consisted of Karen Knowles, Nicole Cooper, Debbie Hancock, John Bowles, Robert McCullough and Steven Zammit. Very quickly I was teamed with little Johnny Bowles, as he was known, a boy who had started on YTT not long before I did. John was a couple of years older and a bit taller. We made a cute duo singing ‘You’re the One that I Want’ dressed in white flares and bright yellow satin tops; or ‘Everybody Needs a Rainbow’, strolling hand in hand down a garden path at the Melbourne Show; or ‘Jeans On’, with John sitting at a table in a VicRail cafe (I popped up into frame to do the ‘chh chh’ between choruses, which must have inspired the train theme).
John and I spent so much time with each other he became the brother I never had. We laughed our heads off together, perfected that ‘smile into each other’s eyes’ look as we harmonised on choruses, and forgot our dance steps together – well, okay, I forgot my dance steps.
Not long after I joined Young Talent Time, someone, probably John Young, had the idea to make a record of ‘Tiny Tina and Little John’ singing a bunch of show favourites, including ‘Ring Ring’, which I performed again on the show as a team member. We also sang ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ and John sang ‘Ben’, a song about a pet rat that gave a fourteen-year-old Michael Jackson a number-1 hit in 1972.
That album, which apparently went gold, has gone down in history as my first release. The cover was surely a powerful selling point: John and me dressed all in white (I was clutching an oversized teddy bear), hand in hand on a little brown wooden bridge with brown painted trees and a brown rainbow in the background.
I remember recording my vocals for that album standing on a hill of sandbags so I could reach the mike. It’s something I’ve done ever since.
By the end of that first year I was already a seasoned professional performer, with all the skills that went with that: memorising, recording and performing new songs every week, working with TV cameras, understanding how the recording process worked, singing live. It was seat-of-the-pants stuff when the show was done live to air (which depended on whether Studio A at Nunawading was available). We often had just the thirty-second commercial break to change costumes and redo hair, and performing the next song with an open fly or your shoelaces undone was a common occurrence. Doing the show on Saturdays was exciting – fun, but gruelling. It was nonstop and required absolute concentration.
So it was hard going, but we had a great working environment, starting with the lovely John Young, who was as gentle and sweet as he came across on TV. Young Talent Time was his baby. He was involved in every aspect of the show, but he’d surrounded himself with an interesting, solid bunch of people. They taught us an enormous amount, and were great with us kids – supportive and nurturing. Which was just as well, because sometimes it felt like we saw more of the Young Talent Time team and crew than our own families. Or to put it another way, the team and the crew on Young Talent Time became my second family.
Clips from those early years are time capsules. The hilarious 1970s fashions, the pop songs of the day, the innocence – all are forever captured there, as are we kids, growing up in front of the nation’s eyes. In 1980, still a little girl and decked out in a powder-puff fairy godmother dress, I sang ‘When You Believe in Magic’. That same year, I was dressed as a fluttering angel with a tinsel halo while John Bowles sang Gene Pitney’s 1974 hit ‘Blue Angel’. And as part of a round-the-world special I sang ‘Mare Mare Mare Mare’ in English and Italian, dressed in a sequinned ocean-green shirt with the biggest collar you’ll ever see. I’d heard that song at home, probably the original version by Ada Mori (the Australian singer Judy Stone later covered it). It’s about a lover leaving, crossing the sea, never to return, and it must have struck a chord with Italian migrants like my parents.
In fact, I became quite a hit with Australia’s Italian community, who loved their music. When, in 1978, Italian superstar Gianni Morandi toured (and I mean superstar – he’s estimated to have sold fifty million records worldwide), I appeared live with him, aged just ten, singing his 1976 hit ‘Sei Forte, Papà’ (You’re Strong, Dad). It was the first time I ever sang at the Sydney Opera House. I would also perform at Italian variety shows featuring Italian and Australian–Italian performers.
It had taken only a couple of weeks on the show for people to recognise me in the street and at school. Wherever I went, kids and often their mums and dads would stare or sidle up to me with anything they could find to get an autograph. As months and then years passed, people truly believed they’d come to know us personally. In a strange way they had, because they spent quality time with us – we were in their lounge rooms every single Saturday night.
Part of our education on the show was learning how to cope with that kind of notoriety. It was simple, and something I had no trouble understanding because Mum and Dad had drummed it into me since I could talk. ‘Treat others the way you’d like to be treated’ was the basic rule. Always show respect and always be polite. Always introduce yourself – never assume people know your name.
But the instant notoriety, the fame, still came as a shock. Because not everyone was a fan. Having strangers call you names, sometimes racist names, when you’re ten years old is confusing, even frightening, and it was something that stayed with me. I also learnt that sometimes people were only interested in the girl on the telly rather than Pina the person. It was a crash course in the complexities of human nature.
Some of the kids on the show found all the attention difficult to deal with. And there’s no denying that many child performers suffer or struggle later with self-est
eem issues, drug or alcohol addictions, eating disorders, depression. Young Talent Time members weren’t immune: Debra Byrne had an awful experience, which she wrote a book about later, and there were others who struggled after they left the show.
I don’t know why my experience was relatively positive when some others’ clearly weren’t, but I do know that my very traditional, very strong parents had a lot to do with it, Mum in particular. Both my parents had strict upbringings in Sicily – I remember when I met my nonno, Mum’s dad, on that trip back to their homeland, I thought he was the grumpiest man I’d ever met. We celebrated my fifth birthday in my grandparents’ dark little house in Valguarnera, the town where my mother grew up. Nonno was there as I blew out the candles, and he looked as gruff and cross as if I’d just tipped the cake all over the floor. I never really came to know him, even though I felt a connection with him, but I got the sense he’d been a hard disciplinarian.
In our house, respect for tradition, for the people around you, was demanded. We were expected to follow the rules, and to do things honestly and to the best of our ability. There was a lot of love, but it came hand in hand with discipline, and an assumption that you worked hard and didn’t let your family down. It kept it all pretty straightforward for me growing up.
One way my parents showed their love was by always being there. When YTT went on tour, which we did during many school holidays, Mum or Dad always came, just as they promised. By then Mum was working from home, sewing on an industrial machine in the laundry. She’d pound away on it every day in between cooking, feeding us, dropping us off and picking us up – she more or less worked around the clock.
My parents never once made me feel guilty about the effect my ridiculous schedule had on the family. As Mum has said since: ‘Do it with love or don’t do it at all.’
I’m sure Nancy and Silvana wondered more than once why I seemed to get so much attention or why their schedule had to fit in around mine. But we’d all been taught that family came first, above everything, and when you love and respect your family you stick together through thick and thin.
This became a necessity when Mum had a car accident and was bedridden for almost a year when I was twelve. It threw the household into chaos, but somehow we held it together. Because there was no one to drive me to the studios on Saturdays, the network sent a car. The other YTT kids razzed me mercilessly for that. They thought I was a total upstart!
The kids at Keilor Heights Primary had never made a fuss about me being on the show. Occasionally I got a bit of stick, but it never felt like anything I couldn’t handle. However, when I attended a week-long orientation at the local high school, the kids just ripped into me.
I was mortified. On the fourth day I came home and burst into tears. ‘I can’t go to that school, Mum, I just can’t,’ I said.
Mum got it, and went to work. Through a family friend a meeting was arranged with the principal of St Columba’s in Essendon. Sister Helga Neidhart was gorgeous, cultivated, an arts lover, and she and her team welcomed me with open arms.
No one gave me a particularly hard time at St Columba’s and I made some true friends there, girls who knew me as Pina, not Tina. It was at St Columba’s that I met Julie Field, who remains a dear mate more than thirty years later. Julie was a year older than me but we just hit it off – she had such a warped and comical outlook and we spent most of our time together laughing. Julie is almost six feet tall and I always looked like a stunted mushroom beside her, but her generosity and friendship got me through tough times on more than one occasion. Then there was Morena Miceli, another mad Sicilian like myself. Morena and I still laugh like schoolgirls whenever we see each other. Danielle Bernardo was, and still is, a great mate. And there was Clare Heasly, a good friend and arts lover. Clare and I ended up working together on and off.
It was also at St Columba’s that my enduring love of musical theatre was born. The school staged a production every year and I always got involved if I could. In 1980 I played Polly Browne in The Boy Friend; in 1981 we did Bye Bye Birdie; and in 1983 I was Charity in Sweet Charity.
Saint Columba’s was another rock under my feet, as were the lifetime friends I made there.
In 1981 John Bowles turned sixteen and left the show. I missed him terribly – we’d been such good mates. Bobby Driessen took John’s place as my counterpart, and that year, on the 500th episode special, Bobby and I sang ‘I Believe in Music’. Things had changed, though, and I had, too. Tiny Tina had suddenly grown up and my little-girl voice had matured into something stronger and richer.
By the following year I had come into my own, whether I was singing ‘Day by Day’ in a glittery red belted mini or ‘I Love the Nightlife’ in a silver metallic frou-frou skirt. That year – 1982 – was the year Dannii Minogue started on the show. I adored Dannii – I still do. She was such a beautiful child, sweet-natured, kind and funny, who, like me, had a wonderful family around her.
But for the first time since I started as an eight-year-old in 1976, it all began to feel a little laborious. Homework had increased, there was more social pressure at school, and I began to feel twinges of dissatisfaction.
Sometimes, performing with the littler kids, I felt a bit too big or a bit too old for it all, not that I ever made a fuss. I think I was starting to look ahead and think about the next chapter.
My musical tastes had developed as well, starting with Barbra Streisand and Liza Minnelli. I remember seeing Liza live at the Palais in St Kilda when I was thirteen or fourteen and being mesmerised by her performance. Then there was Dusty Springfield, especially her versions of Burt Bacharach’s classics, as well as contemporary female artists like Kate Bush and Debbie Harry. I’d also fallen in love with R & B, and was listening to Diana Ross, the Pointer Sisters, Sister Sledge and, most inspirational of all, Donna Summer. It was Donna’s 1978 version of Jimmy Webb’s classic, ‘MacArthur Park’, that inspired my first performance of that song on the show in 1982. Perhaps the sentiment of the song reflected how I was feeling: the magic of Young Talent Time was passing, as was my childhood. And as the song says, I’d never have that recipe again.
I remember the day I decided it was time to call it quits. I was going to perform ‘Happiness’ by the Pointer Sisters. I wanted to sing live with a live band, which John and the crew thought was a good idea. Then I picked an outfit I wanted to wear: a lavender silk number with bat wings and a big belt that had been one of Jana Wendt’s outfits for reading the news. It was very eighties and quite sophisticated for a fifteen-year-old. I was excited at the thought of wearing something more grownup instead of the usual frilled skirts and ankle socks. But John made me change it – I guess he thought it was too old for me. It was then I decided I had to leave soon. I couldn’t be that kid on YTT forever. It was time to grow up.
By mid-1983 I was ready to go, even though John wanted me to stay on. I gave a lot of thought to what I’d sing for my final appearance on Young Talent Time and two songs stood out. I’d sing ‘MacArthur Park’ again. I would also sing a song that, when I look back now, captures the nostalgia for those simpler times when a kids’ song-and-dance show like Young Talent Time entranced an entire nation. It’s a song that was written for Streisand. On my last show, I decided, I’d sing ‘The Way We Were’.
CHAPTER 4
Turn Up the Beat
Grief. I suspect lots of teenagers go through it, whether they realise or not, as they leave their childhood behind. Grief for innocence, for how things were. Knowing life can never be like that again.
Young Talent Time had been a huge part of my childhood. Leaving the show meant growing up and saying goodbye to my own little Disneyland forever. Coming to terms with that was going to be a huge adjustment.
But by the time I’d made my decision to leave I was already through the first stages of grief. I was starting to feel trapped, something we Scorpios hate. I knew it was time.
My final show was to be 22 October. The year was 1983. When I arrived at the studio t
hat Saturday morning it was like a dream. The mood was sombre and everyone was sad. I guess it was the end of an era, in a way – for many of the crew, the team, and the musicians, I’d always been there.
We had a great day but by the time 6.30 came around, sadness descended. Still, I knew that, like every Saturday for the last seven years, I’d just get up and do my job. I’d keep smiling.
When it was my turn to sing, I walked out onto the stage, and the floor manager, Greg Petherick, positioned me for the cameras. I peered out into the audience and spotted Mum, Dad, Nancy and Silvana. Nancy gave me a little wave. When John introduced me, the crowd cheered. At that point I blocked out everything around me and went into my own little bubble. As soon as I sang the first words of ‘The Way We Were’, boom, I immediately felt the beauty of the song and everything was all right. Just like the night at Gaetano’s wedding, my feet were barely touching the ground. It’s a poignant song and it was an incredibly poignant moment in my life.
As the last notes of the song faded the audience applauded and I started to cry.
John appeared with all the team. Gorgeous little Dannii Minogue, who only came up to my elbow at the time, presented me with a huge bouquet of flowers. Someone else handed me a gift – a stunning gold and garnet necklace from Channel Ten that I still own. John – ever the practical Dutchman – gave me a box of tissues. It was nearly over. Just ‘MacArthur Park’ to sing.
In keeping with Donna Summer’s version, the song started slow before launching into a full-on disco anthem. It was a great way to go out – singing and dancing like there was no tomorrow.
But there would be a tomorrow, and it would be without YTT. From here on there’d be no more recording sessions, no more dance rehearsals, no live performing, no sparkly costumes. It was a brutal ending to what had been a hardcore but exciting routine.