What’s up with the weird ageing of Shortland Street characters?

Sunday, 21 January 2024

If you’ve ever sat down to the latest happenings from NZ’s longest-running hospital drama, only to be distracted by an incessant voice in your head screaming about how the maths doesn’t calculate to Harry Warner being old enough to be a surgeon - you’re not alone.

Ever since Xander Manktelow appeared on screens as the fifth actor to play the son of Chris Warner in 2023, questions around his age, show time-lines and just how ageing on the show works, have been living rent-free in this reporter’s head.

Afterall, real-world maths would make Harry 21, having been born into the show in 2002.

It’s been a mere five years since we farewelled Harry number four - then a school-aged teen, as he sauntered off to China, before an apparent Doogie Howser-esque rise up the med school ranks to become a (fake, it turned out) surgeon, scalpel at the ready.

But Harry’s not alone. Take a close look and few characters seem to really have an “age” on the show. Kids have been known to grow up fairly quickly. Remember when TK’s daughter Tilly left to go live with Aunty Kuini then returned in 2020 looking, well … quite a bit older?

Determined to find out the truth, and with little else to do as I waited to welcome Ferndale back to the lounge after the summer break, I hit up the show’s producer, Oliver Driver, whose answers to my burning questions basically boiled down to, “relax. It’s TV”.

“Who’s to say Ferndale works in the same time-line as Auckland?” he says.

“Sure, it’s been five NZ years, but we don’t say how many Ferndale years have passed [since Harry left].”

Although when it comes to Harry, he does admit, “we probably should have waited another four years. But we didn’t want to.”

The show creators wanted to bring Chris Warner’s son back on screen, and they also wanted a group of young registrars join the Shorty ranks. It was decided one of them should be Harry.

And while the plot wouldn’t have worked if a teenage Harry had only left the show within the past year or so, he’d left Ferndale “years ago”.

“There’s a few minutes where everyone goes hang on, isn’t he a bit young, then you forget about that and Harry’s on screen being a doctor,” he says.

“It’s not a constantly gnawing problem.”

When it comes down to it, the characters - and the show - are about storytelling. Harry would ultimately be more interesting as a junior doctor than a medical student.

They take liberties with a few “real-world” scenarios, if you look “too closely”, says Driver.

Like, for instance, the fact that “our doctors are specialists in every kind of surgery that exists”.

“If we need you to do a lung transplant one week and a brain surgery the next … that’s what you’ll do,” he laughs.

What “trumps everything” is telling good stories.

“Isn’t [Harry] two years too young to do this? Oh well, tough,” says Driver.

As for Manktelow (who is actually 21 in real life), he doesn’t think Harry has a “specific” age in the show, it’s more that he’s simply “young doctor age”.

While a few of his mates have questioned Harry’s age, ultimately, people don’t “stress too much about it”, as long as an interesting story is coming out of it.

Since starting on the show, Driver is making a point to not be a stickler for “Ferndale time” needing to match perfectly with “Auckland time”.

It allows for some freedom, and a few time leaps when needed for entertainment value.

Take, for example, when a character dies. Nobody is entertained by everyone being really sad for four weeks of TV, right? Jump ahead a few weeks, says Driver, and they’re still “a bit sad, but they’re getting on with their lives”.

There was also the “bit of flak” creators got following the 2023 cliffhanger that saw Chris Warner and TK Samuels watching on as the hospital went up in flames.

They got around the rebuild by leaping forward five weeks in that first episode back in 2024.

“We had to rebuild the hospital. We’ve only got one set … We put some CGI flames on it and changed the colour set,” he laughs.

“Sometimes ‘a day is a day’ is not a good way to make a show.”

Then there are the children on the show. Ever wonder why they seem to grow up rapidly when the actors get replaced?

There are a few factors at play, says Driver.

For starters, a baby could be perfectly placid and “cool and great” on set, and then hit an actual real-life milestone.

“They’ll suddenly cry and trying to have them on set is a nightmare because they’re now a two-year-old,” Driver says.

“The six-month-old baby you had is now chaotic and crazy on set because they’re just an 18-month or two-year-old toddler.”

“And you can’t fix that by replacing them with another 18-month or two-year old toddler, so at that point you tend to go, ‘lets cast a four-year-old or a three-year-old, and play them a little bit younger but fudge up the age a bit’.”

That decision to leave is usually made by the child or parent - the show creators like to keep things consistent where possible.

But when a new child actor is brought in, “we always do look to age them up if we can”.

“It’s purely for ease of shooting and working and doing everything else. A six-year-old playing a four-year-old is better than a four-year-old.”

“Then you tend to just go, ‘eh, they’re five’.”

Shortland Street returns to TVNZ for 2024 on Monday, February 5 at 7pm.