With restrictions easing, Ray Meagher heads back to Summer Bay

How have you been spending your isolation?

I've been getting up about seven, getting out on the walking track, coming back, reading the papers – I've read a number of books during that time, which I don't get the opportunity to do when we're in full filming. I'm a very slow reader, painfully slow, so it was wonderful to just sit back and I ploughed through three books, the last one quite thick.

Is it good to be back though?

Oh, fantastic. I came in this morning, came up in the lift and instead of going straight to wardrobe or makeup we're like a mob of sheep in a race, where the race ran straight into the nurse who took the temperature and checked that you didn't have any sniffles, pointed you to the wash-your-hands station and then around to the dressing room. So it's different already.

Do you feel that this pandemic has caused major changes to the industry?

I think like all industries it's going to take some time to pull out of it and get back to what we thought was normal. Hopefully it's going to claw its way back. Neighbours took their first tentative steps back a few weeks ago, we're taking ours now, our management has been incredibly careful about making sure we're protected, that we're safe, we're not doing anything that is going to endanger us in in any way, shape or form. But for the industry... hopefully our production will encourage others to get going.

You've been in Australian TV for some time now, you must have seen the business change quite a lot over the years already.

Yeah, there are changes, but there are a lot of things that are the same. Ever since I started in about 1970 or thereabouts, I remember we used to drink at a pub called The Strand in William Street, and then later at the East Sydney Hotel, that we used to call the East Berlin Hilton because it was run by a guy called Harald Muller, who was of German extraction. But I remember people like Billy Hunter and a few of us would be there saying, "Wait till September, mate, wait till September" – that's when the tax incentives will kick in after the end of the financial year and there'll be a boom in production. But it was always a situation where at any given time, around 90 per cent of actors were out of work. I sound like an old fogey, but some people haven't been bitten on the backside by this business, so they aren't aware of how lucky they are when they have got a job. Not that you want them to learn in this manner, but this is a real jerk on the rein for a lot of people who think they're bulletproof. Having said that, it's a real kick in the backside for people who've been working hard and doing their best to get work and stay in work, and who through no fault of their own are not in work.

Speaking of staying in work: back in 1987, when you got the part of Alf Stewart, did you think, "Looking forward to playing this part for the next thirty years or so"?

I did the pilot in between two miniseries. I was lucky enough to be doing a thing called True Believers, which was about the history of the Labor Party in the Ben Chifley era, and another miniseries called The True Story of Spit McPhee, which John Mills came out here to do. And I think I had a three-week break between finishing one and starting the other, and the opportunity to do the Home and Away pilot came up. I thought, well I've got three weeks, why not? I did the pilot thinking nothing would ever come of it, most pilots used to crash and burn, but then we heard later that we were going to series. The older, more cynical actors, like myself, Judy Nunn, Norman Coburn we were thinking "Oh this is great, we'll get three months' work."

And recently Alf's been going through some pretty exciting changes in his life.

I guess you're referring to finding his first wife, who he thought had tragically drowned thirty-odd years ago. He did think she'd drowned, but she turned out to be a hell of a lot better swimmer than he gave her credit for. She disappeared in the creek, but came up and faked her own death. She had borderline personality disorder and she thought we were better off without her. Of course at that time if you had any kind of mental illness you weren't treated anywhere near as well as you are now. But then she wrote to Alf and Alf kept it from Roo and he didn't tell Roo until he thought he was going to cark it at the bottom of a sinkhole and he thought before he goes he better tell her her mother's still alive. I can hear you laughing, you think this is soapie stuff, don't you – this is very serious!

No, this is classic drama, this is the way TV should be.

We had a lot of fun shooting it, even though it was dealing with a very serious matter: mental illness, which is high on a lot of people's agendas today.

Being so iconic, can you go out in public without getting mobbed?

I don't see myself like that, I see myself as a jobbing actor who goes to work every day and is lucky enough to be in full-time employment. As far as the other, I think if you go and sit on the steps of McDonald's in George Street, you're going to get noticed by some people and that mob thing in a mild sense will happen. But if you get on with your life in the area you live in, people see you about and they get bored with you fairly quickly and you get on with your life. The other thing is – this sounds dreadful – but the more money you're prepared to spend on a meal, the more you get left alone. In flasher places, even if people did watch a show like ours, they wouldn't admit it.

Home and Away is on Seven, Monday-Thursday, 7pm.