Photo courtesy of Channel 5.
One of the most comically unbelievable things about Neighbours has always been quite how much action and drama occurs on one small suburban street. It’s one of the ways a regular soap viewer has to suspend their disbelief. While a lot of the current characters on Neighbours have only been getting in on the Ramsay Street drama for a few years, there are a few veterans who’ve been around for a lot longer. The longest-standing character on the show is Erinsborough’s perennial villain Paul Robinson, played by Stefan Dennis, who was one of the original characters back when Neighbours was launched in the 1980s. He’s been on the show on and off for over thirty years, so it’s incredibly fun to look back at a few Paul storylines from the past, with some help from The Perfect Blend website, which is an absolute godsend for any die-hard Neighbours fan.
His first big drama in life was marrying a murderer – I mean, we’ve all done it, haven’t we? Like everyone in Neighbours, Paul married Terry in a ceremony at their house, which is a totally normal thing that everyone does. It later turned out that Terry had murdered her ex, and when Paul found out and was justifiably a bit upset about this, she shot him in the shoulder and did a runner.
Stefan Dennis as Paul Robinson. Photo: © Channel 5/Source: Digital Spy.
Paul’s second marriage was to Gail Lewis, who wore some of the most 1980s fashions the world has ever seen. By this time, Paul was working for the family firm, The Daniels Corporation, alongside Gail. For some rather contrived reason, Japanese tycoon Mr. Udugawa would only do business deals with people who were married, so Paul and Gail entered into a weird marriage of convenience in order to do business with him. Eventually though, Paul and Gail fell in love for real and had triplets, although their marriage dissolved before they were born when, Amy, the first of Paul’s surprise children, appeared in Erinsborough and it drove a wedge between Gail and Paul.
Paul soon married again, to Christina Alessi, with whom he had another child, Andrew. If we know one thing about Paul Robinson, it is that he is a very fertile man. His marriage to Christina hit the rocks after he slept with Christina’s twin sister Caroline, but they decided to make a fresh start in Hawaii, and left the street. Paul returned for just long enough to get his brother-in-law Phil Martin involved in some sort of fraud, and then he did a runner to Brazil, which again is a really normal thing that happens to people all the time.
The fraud case eventually caught up with Paul, and after a casual stint in prison, he returned to Erinsborough. Having learned nothing, he immediately went back to being evil, thus starting several years of shady deals, fraud, blackmail and illicit affairs, which culminated in him purposefully polluting some wetlands, then falling off a cliff and losing his right leg. Incidentally, sometimes Stefan Dennis remembers Paul has one leg and puts on a limp, and sometimes he just doesn’t bother.
Paul’s next big storyline came in the form of an ill-conceived idea he had to fly half of Ramsay Street’s residents on a trip to Tasmania. The whole street on one plane? What could possibly go wrong? Well, there was a bomb on the plane and half the street died, that’s what. Harold Bishop lost his entire family, leading the usually avuncular buffoon to flip out and attempt to strangle Paul to death. Just another normal day in Erinsborough.
The next person to have a crack at killing Paul was one of his estranged triplets – the excellently named Robert Robinson – who was trying to get revenge on Paul for being such a deadbeat dad. It was actually Robert who had planted the bomb on the plane, and he engaged in a prolonged campaign against Paul and his family, which eventually ended up with him drugging Paul and trapping him in an old mineshaft, obviously very much coming from the Bond-villain school of plotting murder. The evil triplet went to prison, but the non-evil male triplet was killed in a tragic case of mistaken identity, which will happen when you have the same actor playing two different people.
Stefan Dennis reunited with evil triplet Adam Hunter for the Neighbours vs Time Travel special. Photo: © Fremantle Media/Source: Digital Spy.
Paul’s fourth wife, in quite possibly the weirdest matched couple in Neighbours history, was Lyn Scully, who Paul had landed in a load of legal hot water over a baby utility belt that her daughter Steph had invented. She’d also hidden a gun for Paul after he attempted to shoot Max for running over the non-evil triplet – you know, just normal relationship stuff. They got married, but it was immediately annulled. Every so often, Lyn turns up so she and Paul can exchange barbed comments in the Waterhole, then her and her big hair go back to Bendigo, or wherever it is she lives.
It was at this point that Paul got an imaginary friend, which turned out to be a hallucination caused by the brain tumour he’d unknowingly had for many years. After brain surgery, Paul had amnesia, and was horrified to learn that he was, in fact, an evil douchebag. He briefly became nice and married his fifth and (so far) final wife Rebecca, but he inevitably went back to his old ways and Rebecca pushed him off a balcony.
In recent years, Paul has been reunited with his first surprise child Amy, and gained two more surprise children in the form of twins Leo and David. So this man has triplets, twins and two other kids – I’d advise any future partners to double-bag if they don’t want any more mini-Robinsons. He also had another casual stint in prison after blowing up the hotel complex, and he was diagnosed and treated for cancer, despite actually being perfectly healthy, in a plot hatched by evil Dr. Nick in order to get funding for his new cancer ward.
His current storyline is just him constantly getting up in Terese’s grill and trying to win her over by being as annoying as he possibly can, but I’m sure it won’t be long before he has his next near-death experience or discovers he has quintuplets he didn’t know about…
