With Rove McManus:
Rove: From the Channel Ten series CrashBurn on Monday nights, welcome to the program Catherine McClements! Come on through, how you going?
Catherine: Yeah good, thank you.
Rove: Yes?
Catherine: Yes.
Rove: You look very well.
Catherine: Oh do I? Thanks.
Rove: Now you're a Carlton supporter too, aren't you?
Catherine: Oh yeah I am, unfortunately. Oh unfortunately! It's awful, isn't it?
Rove: See the thing is, you couldn't even get last place. They didn't even try hard enough to get bottom of the ladder.
Catherine: I never thought in my lifetime we'd get the wooden spoon. I didn't think it. And last year... it was like oh no. My father he was a huge Carlton supporter and as a little boy he used to run, chase the bus. And if he beat the bus, Carlton would win. And if he wouldn't you know beat the bus, well then they'd lose. And so we've always felt that we have some hand in Carlton winning or not. I don't know what's going on.
Rove: Well see that makes sense, because nowadays probably being a bit older - a lot harder to beat the bus.
Catherine: That's the truth.
Rove: Were you ever... was there ever any chance of you being a sporting person then?
Catherine: Well I feel like putting on my running shoes, I must say, and running after those trams you know. But oh, ah... I used to play softball a bit. You know and it was quite good, played all around the field. But I always shut my eyes when I'd catch the ball and I just think you're just no good when you do that.
Rove: That's just not gonna help.
Catherine: It's something you can't stop, yeah you just...
Rove: But also, you were a very studious person I guess, because initially you didn't want to become an actress.
Catherine: No, no, I... My first experience... my older sister was very interested in the arts you know, and acting. And we used to go to these sort of after school programs and things. And I enrolled in pottery, which was then cancelled because there wasn't enough people. And my sister enrolled in acting, you know, and so I had to go with her because there was no one else to take me. And you know it was full of sort of primal screaming and black polo necks and stuff, and so it really put me off for a long time.
Rove: And there was a while there you wanted to be a librarian, didn't you?
[audience laughs]
Catherine: Yeah! Oh! It was so beautiful! It's such a beautiful thing to do.
Rove: Did you ever have a crack at being a librarian?
Catherine: Well no, I wish I could, you know, I'm itching. But I did it for a year and it was just it was a lovely part of campus that I was on, it was an old building. And we just read books and discussed them and I left before we did the Dewey system and all that sort of controversy.
Rove: Oh that's confusing. You get up to the 700s and it's like what's that again? History? I don't know.
Catherine: Yeah so it was just reading books and discussing them. It was wonderful. Yeah.
Rove: And so you got into acting by getting into NIDA of all places.
Catherine: Yeah. Yeah. I was quite young. It was a very close friend of mine was really keen on going to NIDA and we sort of had a bet. We were quite competitive I think at high school and she really wanted to go and she said "I bet you, that you go as well". So we did the bet and I turned up and she didn't! I don't know. I don't know where she was. But yeah and I got in. I suppose from not preparing.
Rove: Well no nerves, I guess.
Catherine: Yeah maybe. Yeah.
Rove: So where did the love and the passion for acting come from then?
Catherine: I suppose it came from going to NIDA. You know it was just... to be able to realise that it could be a career, that it could be something you did for the rest of your life. You know it was something I'd dabbled in and thought yeah this is fun. But it's like I suppose a kid, you know the idea of playing in the sandpit could be a career. You just don't equate the two. But I suppose when I went to NIDA I thought 'Oh yeah, there are a whole lot of people here who could do this as a job'.
Rove: Is it a very tough place to study acting? Because there was a TV show on that was like behind the scenes of what they do at NIDA...
Catherine: Oh yeah, I never watched it.
Rove: It's like a very strict place.
Catherine: Oh yeah, it's really, you work really hard. You know, you get very serious. I was very serious when I went there and you know, I was only 17, it's quite young and probably too young. And I just was so intense there, and yeah that's all I did for three years.
Rove: And now you're doing CrashBurn on Ten of course.
Catherine: Mmm.
Rove: Now this is the first full time TV role you've had since your days on Water Rats.
Catherine: That's right, yeah.
Rove: Is is good to be back doing television?
Catherine: Oh it's great.
Rove: And did you enjoy being away, as well, I guess to some extent.
Catherine: Yeah. I think in a funny way I now appreciate Water Rats more than I did when I was doing it. You know I realise just how expensive that show was.
Rove: Well there were boats, they used boats!
Catherine: I know! They had two boats, not just one!
Rove: Two boats, yes!
Catherine: And it was a huge cast and it was just done on film and you know it was really a really expensive and so the qualities in it, it was quite a high quality show, you know and it's less and less available as money's getting tighter and tighter. So um, to be able to come back to CrashBurn and it's also filmed on film and there's really talented people behind the scenes and it's a really great feeling to come back.
Rove: What I like about it is, for a drama, it's still really funny.
Catherine: Yeah!
Rove: Like because I guess it's looking at relationships and your seeing both sides of it, you get a lot of very funny moments out of it.
Catherine: Well one of the writers, Andrew Knight, he started on D-Generation and Fast Forward, so he's actually a comic writer, so he always comes from that side of things. Yeah that was one of the great sort of things about the show.
Rove: And have you found that in dealing with a script that looks at a relationship from the female perspective but the male as well, have you learnt things about the way males look at relationships, maybe?
Catherine: Oh I didn't read the male stuff.
Rove: You didn't?
Catherine: No, it's all rubbish. I just went rubbish, rubbish, rubbish, rubbish... female stuff! Yeah, I didn't... I've got nothing to learn from them.
Rove: Fair enough. We've learnt nothing ourselves. We've actually got a clip here. Let's have a look at Catherine in action. CrashBurn.
[clip from CrashBurn plays]
Rove: And there you have it. The show is CrashBurn it's Monday nights 8:30 on Ten. Please thank Catherine McClements, ladies and gentlemen! Good to see you Catherine.
Catherine: Thank you.
[audience claps]