As Paul Robinson, he was one of Ramsay Street’s most notorious scoundrels. Now, he’s hoping to dazzle on the dancefloor. Here, he talks about the loss of his brother, leaving soap acting and his wildest storylines
Stefan Dennis joined the cast of Neighbours as Paul Robinson, the git, for its first episode in 1985. He declines to tell me how old he was then. “See,” he says, with a glint of that Paul cunning: “That’s gonna give my age away if I tell you.” If I were to take a guess – looking at him today, in Boxpark in Wembley, pin neat and ready for anything (he could nip to the shops or go clubbing) in a Lacoste polo shirt, leaping on and off high chairs as gracefully as a cat, I would say early 60s. Wikipedia says he is 67 in October. My first and enduring impression is not his age, but the fact that he must, in some bigwig showrunner’s imagination, be this year’s Strictly Come Dancing crown prince. That’s just how it works – there are some irredeemably bad dancers who are fun to watch, there are some perfect physical specimens in their prime who look like the obvious contenders but then flame out, and then there’s the person who thinks they can’t cut a rug but has some inner dancer, that’s waited a lifetime to be activated, like a sleeper agent. Sorry to spoil it, everyone, but he is definitely that guy.
Anyway, back to his age, which he insists is undisclosed. “The reason is, I was doing Flying Doctors …” This is the Australian drama about the outback. It was on in the daytime, if you were at school in the 80s you only watched it when you were ill, and I wonder how much the memory of it – very high drama, slightly terrifying, wide-open scenery, absolutely millions of sheep – was coloured by having a temperature. Anyway, Dennis was in the original miniseries but didn’t return for the series because, by that time, he was already Bad Paul in Neighbours. “And in the green room, I’m reading a magazine, and there was my wife on the cover, my first wife.”
