Ringing those 80s wedding bells again
Ah, the way we wore ... goes back 30 years to one Aussie soap’s famous wedding and finds out why its big song nearly got rejected.
In the old nave of Melbourne’s Holy Trinity Church, on a wet Wednesday morning in 1987, and before a backdrop of ‘‘rough-hewn sandstone and glowing stained glass windows’’ a young bride and groom exchanged their wedding vows. Their nuptials might have been lost to history, were it not that this was no ordinary bride and groom.
This was the wedding of Scott Robinson and Charlene Mitchell, bound in a union that joined the two founding families of TV’s Ramsay Street, a typically Australian, budget-scaled version of the Montagues and Capulets. A television event – a moment that stopped the nation – like no other, it confirmed to the rest of us what Australia’s television viewing public already knew: that Neighbours stars Jason Donovan and Kylie Minogue, alias Scott and Charlene, were bona fide superstars.
‘‘When Kylie stepped into the set, I remember everybody, the crew, the extras, everybody’s attention turned towards her arrival and it was because she did have that charismatic, quietly understated quality about her,’’ Rod Hardy, who directed the now iconic wedding episode, recalls.
‘‘Everybody’s attention went to her and I thought that’s what I’ve got to do when we shoot it. to create that same feeling of, here comes the fairy princess. And then I realised that they would look at each other and that look in the eyes was what I had to capture in the scene.’’
The episode aired on July 1, 1987 on the Ten Network. In Australia, it drew an audience of roughly 2 million viewers. When it screened in the UK, the audience was almost 10 times that size. Even three decades later, rewatching the scenes the chemistry between Donovan and Minogue is obvious. What was only still emerging at the time, of course, was that the actors playing Neighbours‘ lovecrossed teens had also, in real life, fallen in love.
‘‘These wedding things, we’ve done them before and it wasn’t as if this was anything new but it was different because it was those two kids, because they had that chemistry,’’ Hardy says. ‘‘After the event it stood out [and] when I cut it together, and when I look back at it, I don’t think it’s any spectacular cinematic experience but what is there is the heartbeat of two people in love about to be married.’’
The cementation of Jason and Kylie’s super-stardom surfed off a wave of the show’s rebirth, acquired by Network Ten after a bruising cancellation by Seven, who had sent it to a soap opera dustbin already piled high with 1980s-era bodies such as Possession, Waterloo Station and Kings.
Hardy has since moved to the US and directed episodes of series such as The Mentalist, The X-Files, JAG and Battlestar Galactica ;heis currently prepping two new projects, a television series, Frontier, based on the novels by Australian author Peter Watt, and the feature film Photos In The Attic, based on a collection of photographic plates owned by Kerry Stokes.
The veteran director says at the time the crew were largely unaware of the media furore which would be created by the wedding episode. ‘‘At the time it was a job, and I only did that block of Neighbours, which was the wedding episode,’’ he says. ‘‘It’s become bigger in time, which is the interesting thing about the show; at the time it was just a job I was employed to do.’’
Hardy had known Jason since he was a young boy, as he was friends with his parents, actor Terry Donovan and news broadcaster Sue McIntosh. He met Kylie when he directed an episode of the airport soap Skyways in which both Jason and Kylie appeared.
‘‘It was nice to be working with people I knew,’’ Hardy says, describing Minogue as a ‘‘a pimply-faced, excitable and definitely enthusiastic young actress’’.
‘‘They were both a delight to work with, enthusiastic and focused,’’ Hardy adds. ‘‘I can say that with no fear of anybody saying, oh that’s not true. And because they had this sort of behind-the-scenes relationship that was slowly building, you can tell that they just loved working with each other.’’
Hardy recalled when he and his then-wife Valerie, who was an executive at Network Ten at the time, had lunch with Jason and Kylie before they left for the UK, a shift across the world which put Donovan on the West End stage and turned Minogue into a pop icon.
‘‘I remember looking at them both, thinking where is this going to go?’’ he recalls. ‘‘They were filled with wild enthusiasm about what was going to happen.
‘‘And then a year later, Valerie and I were coming out of Heathrow airport in London and there was a crowd of people screaming and yelling,’’ he adds. ‘‘And I could see a big stretch limo and Kylie and Jason getting into it. And I was thinking, well, that’s where life can take you.’’
In some respects, however, after three decades, Scott and Charlene’s wedding seems hopelessly lost in time.
The bride wore a New Romantic-style wedding gown, piled with ivory silk, organza and chantilly lace. The groom was in the kind of grey tuxedo that adorns the walls of tuxedo rental places and is now rarely seen anywhere else.
‘‘The period was very strong,’’ Hardy observes, laughing. ‘‘Mullets were very in. And that tuxedo, you hit it right on the head. It should be on some sort of mannequin at a bad tuxedo place.’’
One of the other memorable aspects of the episode was the choice of wedding song: Suddenly, by Angry Anderson, which charted in the wake of its use on the episode, peaking at No.2 in Australia, No.3 in the UK and No.35 in the US.
Hardy confesses now that he originally rejected it.
‘‘I remember when we cut it together there were about five tracks given to me by the producer and I thought they were horrendous,’’ Hardy says. ‘‘They were so obvious and on the nose.
‘‘He picked Suddenly, and I put it in, and I said, please don’t make me put this in here,’’ Hardy adds. ‘‘But how wrong was I? It became a huge hit. And even today if you play it somewhere, people will immediately flash back to the Neighbours wedding.’’
In many respects, Scott and Charlene’s wedding was the kind of television event which belonged to the 1970s and 80s, such as Simon and Vicky’s wedding (or Molly’s death) on A Country Practice, or Pat The Rat’s return from apparent death in Sons & Daughters.
Each was chronicled on a cover of the then ubiquitous TV Week magazine, and each, in its own way, stopped Australia.
In that sense, Hardy says, they are the sort of television events which won’t ever be replicated. In part, he says, that is due to the rise of the internet and the proliferation of programmes and channels.
‘‘The moment in television is no longer in that style, moments in television now are who got killed in Game of Thrones,’’ Hardy says.
‘‘There was an innocence back then, of all of us, that I think we’ve lost,’’ he adds. ‘‘They were small moments, but they were big in the audience’s minds.
‘‘Those simple things of life, like a wedding, no longer have the importance,’’ he says. ‘‘Which is a real shame because that it is, when we reflect, that is what life was about back then.’’ – Fairfax
Neighbours continues to screen weeknights on TVNZ2 at 6.30pm.