When I talk to Australian gen Xers about my new play, I invariably get the same response: a dramatic intake of breath, a hand swiftly covering the chest and an “Oh my God! Molly! God! I was devastated.”
The play imagines two days in the writers’ room of A Country Practice, dreaming up what they went through to kill off Molly Jones, arguably the show’s most beloved character – played with charm, wit and truth by actor Anne Tenney. Tenney had become Australia’s sweetheart and one of its biggest TV stars. It was a big deal to off her.
It’s a television death that really meant something to the viewers at the time, and in the four decades since it broadcast in June 1985. When I asked people about their memories of the episode, two responses stood out.
The theatre director Lee Lewis, a teenager in rural Goulburn at the time, wore funeral blacks to watch the episode: “I lived my life through the television – it was an important window into other lives, growing up in the country. Molly was dying, and I was dressing in black for her funeral.”
Kate Mulvany, who’s gone on to be an actor and television writer herself, remembers the night of Molly’s death profoundly. Eight years old when it aired, “I was so grief-stricken afterwards that I asked to sleep in my parents’ bed. I wet the pillowcase with inconsolable tears, then changed the pillowcases before my parents came to bed so that they didn’t think I’d had some kind of ‘accident’. That’s how much I cried.”
Why is it consistently on lists of the best episodes of Australian television? Why is it such a formative memory for so many?
After watching it at least 30 times, I think it’s because the episode, written by the screenwriter Judith Colquhoun (who wrote more than 100 episodes of A Country Practice and pretty much every other great show of the 80s, 90s and noughties), provides a blueprint for the perfect death.
Of course, there’s nothing perfect about a young mother dying of acute lymphoblastic leukemia in her late 20s but the way Molly dies is how most of us would wish to go: at home surrounded by people we love.
Molly died over a 14-episode arc, for a couple of reasons: the late James Davern, the creator of A Country Practice, hoped his star might change her mind and stay on the show. If she was determined to leave, he wanted his team of writers to remember that children loved Molly, and he didn’t want to traumatise them. The audience lived through the progression of her illness. They were there for the first rumblings of ill health, the diagnosis, the treatment – just as they’d been there in the years before as Molly had a baby, lost a baby, ran for council and tied herself to trees.
Her death ultimately became about the importance of love and community, and believing in a future of beauty even though you’re not going to be there. Molly is brought home from the hospital to die on her beloved farm, which has been painted lovingly by her community while she was in hospital.
In the days leading up to her death, as an audience, we’re offered a glimpse into her world. There’s the barbecue with her friends, each of them having time to say goodbye and letting her know how much she means to them. The uneasy discussion with her best friend, Vicky (played with an exquisite vulnerability by the late Penny Cook), about the mothering Molly’s daughter might need when Molly is gone. A heartbreaking and practical conversation with her husband, Brendan (a beautifully underrated performance from Shane Withington), about the importance of him allowing himself to move on: “We’ve had a perfect marriage … well, nearly. And you can’t live with just a memory.”
These are the conversations we dream of having with those we love, and often circumstances or a lack of emotional courage prevent us from having them.
These hard conversations never become saccharine. You can feel the love these actors all have for each other and their sadness at losing their colleague but there also is humour. Somehow, while our beloved friend Molly is being taken away from us before the final ad break, we’re laughing at one character marinating a steak with garlic (these are tomato sauce people!), and Molly is joking about who Brendan needs to stay away from after she’s dead.
Nothing is left unsaid. Even though she is so young, Molly has had a full life, she’s accepted her fate and she’s loved to her final moment. Maybe that’s why we still love this incredible episode of television 40 years later – because who among us wouldn’t want the same when our screen fades to black?
• Melanie Tait is a playwright and journalist living in Sydney
