More than 2 million people across Australia watched Seven’s miniseries about the songwriter Peter Allen, which trended number one on social media and handed the station a huge share of the audience on Sunday night.
The colourful story – combined with the debut of The X Factor – gave Seven an impressive 37.5% share of the audience, eclipsing both The Block on Nine and The Biggest Loser on Ten.
Peter Allen: Not The Boy Next Door, with triple threat performer Joel Jackson in the lead role, is based on the book Peter Allen: The Boy From Oz by Stephen MacLean.
Australian audiences appear to love biopics. In 2014 Seven also had a hit with another musical biopic INXS: Never Tear Us Apart. Both Not The Boy Next Door and INXS were made by the same production company Endemol Shine Australia.
During Sunday night’s broadcast of the Allen story, the network aired a sneak peek of another musical biopic coming up soon: Molly.
Starring Samuel Johnson as music broadcaster Molly Meldrum, the telemovie tells the story of Meldrum, the Australian music scene in the 1970s and the ABC’s legendary TV show Countdown.
Not The Boy Next Door featured some extraordinary performances as it told the story of young Peter Woolnough growing up in country NSW amid family tragedy and going on to perform on Broadway and marry Liza Minnelli. Allen died in the US from an Aids-related illness in 1992 aged 48.
A young Minnelli was played by Sara West from the ABC’s Anzac Girls and Allen’s mother Marion Woolnough was played by Rebecca Gibney.
But the performances which got the most attention on social media were Sigrid Thornton as eccentric, pill-popping screen legend Judy Garland (Minnelli’s mother) and 14-year-old actor Ky Baldwin as the young Peter.
The story was carried along by the Grammy and Oscar-winning songwriter’s catalogue of hits such as I Go To Rio, Australia’s unofficial anthem I Still Call Australia Home and Tenterfield Saddler.
Allen also co-wrote I Honestly Love You, Don’t Cry Out Loud and Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do).
Cashing in on this trend, Ten has two biopics in the works: Mary: The Making of a Princess about Australian real estate agent Mary Donaldson falling in love with the future Crown Prince of Denmark, and Peter Brock the Australian racing car driver.
The only biopic we apparently don’t want to see is one about former prime minister Julia Gillard which was knocked back by every single broadcaster despite starring Rachel Griffiths in the lead role.
“No Australian broadcaster wants to tell the story of Australia’s first female prime minister,” producer Richard Keddie said in June. “All the broadcasters said ‘no way’ to the Julia film.”
The second part of Peter Allen: Not The Boy Next Door airs on Sunday 21 September.
- This article was amended on 15 September 2015 to correct Samuel Johnson’s name
