Skippy cast struck down
October 3, 2011, 6:18 pm David Eccleston Today Tonight
In what's being called 'the Skippy curse', the key characters of the classic TV series are being struck down by cancer, one after the other.
Ed Devereaux has lost his battle, while both Tony Bonner and Ken James have had the disease, and are confident of beating it.
Now Liza Goddard, who played Clancy, has spoken out about her long fight with breast cancer.
Skippy’s sound alone is enough to take you back to your childhood, and the daily adventures with a high IQ kangaroo, with a new rogue and a new mystery to solve.
For the show’s stars, 45 years on, there’s is another, real-life mystery: is there a Skippy cancer curse?
Tony Bonner played Gerry King, the chopper pilot, and later beat prostate cancer.
As Mark Hammond, Ken James became a household name. He's now in his fourth stage of cancer of the lymph gland.
And sadly the patriarch of the Hammond clan, Ed Devereaux, lost his battle with throat cancer in 2003.
For many Liza Goodard will always be the fresh-faced piggy-tailed Clancy Merrick.
Like her co-stars, Goodard was diagnosed with cancer in 1997. The cancer then returned, forcing her to have a double mastectomy.
“I had breast cancer a few years ago. Eleven years ago now, and that time the garden was extremely important because it was a place of haven, and a place to heal,” Goodard said.
Life is a lot more subdued and more reflective for Goodard nowadays. She's a proud survivor, enjoying her days at an English retreat in the county of Norfolk.
She shares this slice of idyllic English life with her husband, TV producer, David Cobham, in a world away from her teenage years spent in Waratah Park.
“Five or six generations after the show was around everyone still knows who Skippy is,” she said.
TV Commentator and Writer, Peter Timbs is just one of the many who grew up watching Goodard and her co-stars.
“Times are changing and unfortunately things like cancer and this stuff happens to this generation - it’s very sad, but there’s going to be more and more of these stories, and we do want to know about it.”
Fellow survivor and cast member Bonner is another star thankful for a second run.
“Whether it's the tragedy of melanomas or breast, testicular or prostate cancer, we all dance with that little devil,” he said.
http://au.news.yahoo.com/today-tonight/latest/article/-/10390243/skippy-cast-struck-drownForceRecrawl/
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