The devil you don't know

Published on Saturday 5 January 2008 16:54

IMAGINE being Jason Donovan. You spend the whole of your adult life trying to escape your youthful cheesiness, only to be cast again and again in roles so cheesy they would shame a plateful of gorgonzola.

You take drugs, you get snapped falling out of nightclubs and still you end up starring as Caractacus Potts in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. To make matters worse your first real girlfriend and early co-star has made the transition from kitsch to cool and is on hand – often sporting a raunchy basque – to remind you just how clean-cut and Cliff Richard-like you still are.

Take the X-Factor final for example. There was Kylie Minogue dressed in a lace bodysuit and singing 'Better The Devil You Know' with Leon Jackson. And there was Donovan singing 'Any Dream Will Do' with Stepford siblings Same Difference. It wouldn't have taken a genius to work out whose credibility would get a bigger boost from those performances.

But then, Donovan's career has been a virtual conveyor belt of bad decisions: from turning down a role in the hit Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert because he "didn't like the script", to accepting a role in Rough Diamonds which sank without trace, to suing The Face magazine for libel after it implied he was gay, Donovan seems to have gone out of his way to make his professional life more difficult for himself.

His latest attempt to prove he has more to offer will take him back to his soap beginnings, but with a clever twist.

Like Neighbours – where Donovan famously played Scott to Minogue's Charlene – the ITV series is set in a beach town, only this time it's not in Melbourne, Australia, it's in Cornwall; and it's on post-watershed, so there will probably be more sex. Oh yes, and the clever twist is that it will be shown alongside a spoof reality show Moving Wallpaper which purports to follow the production team making the soap. Cue lots of TV-will-eat-itself humour of The Office and Extras variety.

It does sound as if it has potential, but with Moving Wallpaper featuring a scene where spoof producer Jonathan Pope attempts to lure Donovan onto the show by promising Kylie is involved, it remains to be seen if he will succeed in doing more than sending himself up.

Of course, viewed from an entirely different perspective, Donovan has led a pretty charmed existence. With his father Terence, a well-known actor who won custody of his son when Jason's newsreader mother left home, he had an easy entree into the world of showbusiness, making his first television appearance on the Australian series Skyways when he was just 11. Then the week after he left school he was offered the part of Scott in Neighbours – a job that paid A$1,000 a week and propelled him to international fame. Eighteen million viewers tuned in to see Scott and Charlene get married, a ceremony given an added frisson by speculation – later confirmed – that the pair were real-life lovers.

When the Neighbours adventure came to an end, Donovan followed Minogue by signing with Stock, Aitken and Waterman and producing a string of middle-of-the-road hits including 'Nothing Can Divide Us' and 'Too Many Broken Hearts'. His cover of Brian Hyland's 'Sealed With A Kiss' entered the charts at number one, while his duet of 'Especially For You' with Minogue was the fourth-highest selling single in the UK that year.

Winning the starring role in Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat in London's West End (he was personally sought out by Andrew Lloyd Webber) at the age of 23 should have been his crowning glory. So popular was Donovan with young girls at that stage that screaming hordes of them would ambush the stage door of the Palladium hoping for a glimpse of him every night.

Instead of revelling in his success, however, he found himself plunged into an identity crisis. A music-lover whose heroes were not disposable commercial pop acts, but cult figures such as New Order's Bernard Sumner and The Cure's Robert Smith, he was disappointed in his own safe image. "It was one evening while doing Joseph," he has said. "I looked down at myself in a loin cloth and white socks and thought: 'This isn't me.' Commercially, it may have been the right decision but mentally, it was all wrong. It was too squeaky, too clean."

Taunting him in this self-doubt was the knowledge Minogue had moved on and was seeing the impossibly cool lead singer of INXS, Michael Hutchence, who quickly "corrupted" her, transforming her image from pop pixie to vamp. Dropped by his record label due to declining sales, Donovan, who had been smoking pot since his high school days, developed a severe cocaine habit.

In the midst of all this, he made possibly the worst move of his career. In 1991, he sued the fashionable magazine The Face for libel after it published a photo of him in a T-shirt with the words 'Queer as F***' superimposed on it. He won the case, but in doing so alienated not only his gay fanbase, but the hip London circle he so desperately wanted to impress, which wrote him off as a homophobe. "You know, for much of the Nineties, I just wanted to be cool," he has said. "I wanted to be Keith Flint or Kurt Cobain. That's why I snorted up a whole mountain of cocaine – I thought that was the route to credibility."

The years of falling over in nightclubs and concerts cancelled due to "asthma" came to an end only after Donovan became a father. He was already drifting apart from Angela Balloch, a former set designer he met while appearing as transvestite Frank N Furter in The Rocky Horror Show in London when she became pregnant in 2000. They split up after Jemma, now seven, was born, but then Donovan experienced something of an epiphany – he realised children could provide a route out of his addiction. The pair reunited and have since had a son Zach, now six.

Since then, Donovan's career has made steady progress. He has made a reasonable fist of a couple of serious acting roles – including The Last Bullet, set in Borneo in the last days of 1945. He starred in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Sweeney Todd, and finished third in I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here. In interviews he purports to be satisfied with life – and he certainly doesn't come across as bitter. And yet, references to how Sweeney Todd brought out hidden depths in his acting or allowed him to explore "his darker side", suggest he still craves to be seen as more than just another light entertainer.

In a recent interview, he suggested he might be just one trailblazing Australian film role away from a Hollywood career. "Anything could happen," he said. "I'm under no illusions, mind, but you never know." Until then, Donovan can only hope Echo Beach/Moving Wallpaper proves to be as alternative and cutting edge as its makers believe. And that the cheesy Eighties soap star doesn't end up regretting yet another woeful decision.