Aussie TV star’s desperate attempt to bury acting footage
An Aussie TV star was so horrified by her acting appearance that she made the network sign a contract promising not to air it again.
A TV star was so embarrassed by her appearance on Home and Away that she asked Seven to sign a contract agreeing to bury the tapes.
That star was Johanna Griggs, who is one of the famous faces taking part in a special episode of Spotlight to celebrate 70 years of Seven.
News.com.au has had a sneak peak at the episode which will air this Sunday night, and it in Griggs tells a wild story about her forgettable appearance on the soap.
We gave her a quick buzz to get more details about her small acting role, which was filmed way back in 1991 when she had temporarily halted her professional swimming career.
“I was doing some stuff for Vivian’s Modelling Agency and they used to just send you out for random stuff,” Griggs said. “One day it was to go out and do Home and Away.”
When the 17-year-old Griggs arrived on set, she was told she would be playing a Swedish character called Inga who was trying to steal Bobby’s (played by Nicolle Dickson) husband.
“I am not an actor and had no desire to be an actor,” Griggs said. “My accent was getting worse each take, and we couldn’t stop laughing at the end of each scene.”
When filming wrapped, Griggs immediately rang her manager and told her that her acting days were over.
Fast forward a year or two later, and Griggs was fielding a number of offers from TV networks after announcing her retirement from swimming.
She ultimately decided she wanted to sign with Seven to be a sports broadcaster, but was worried her dodgy Home and Away appearance would affect her credibility.
“It actually became part of our negotiations (to bury the tapes),” Griggs told news.com.au. “They (Seven) said they could get rid of all the copies apart from the master tape, and we were like, ‘cool, that means that no one will ever see it again’”.
Over the next 20 years, a few people tried and failed to get their hands on the footage.
But then, in 2014, came the day Griggs was dreading.
“I woke up in the morning and I looked at my phone and there was a post on Instagram that said, ‘did Johanna Griggs from Seven play Inga from Sweden on Home and Away? I can’t believe my eyes!’”
The eagle-eyed viewer had spotted the star’s cameo on 7mate, which was playing every episode of Home and Away from start to finish.
“The next day the front page of the newspaper said, ‘Johanna’s lost soapie tapes’,” Griggs recalled, “so I took a photo of that and tweeted, ‘it could have been worse, it could have been a sex tape!’”
The tweet didn’t go down well with the Seven bosses.
“I actually got in a lot of trouble for doing that,” Griggs laughed.
The Spotlight Special
Griggs will take a look back at a bunch of other memorable TV moments this Sunday on Seven’s Spotlight special.
She’ll be joined by fellow network personalities including Larry Emdur, Sonia Kruger, and Bruce McAvaney, to watch and discuss rare archival footage and never before seen bloopers.
“Every single tape package that came up was so brilliant,” she said. “There’d be about 50 things that you either didn’t know or that would jog your memory. It was amazing.”
