INXS Never Tear Us Apart
Channel 7
Sunday, 16 February
EVEN if you weren’t a fan of INXS it was hard not to shed a tear when his band-mates carried Michael Hutchence’s coffin from the church 16 years ago to the heartbreaking strains of Never Tear Us Apart.
Purple flowers covering the coffin with just one poignant orange tiger lily in their midst and familiar faces looked heartbroken and more like lost young men then the rock gods fans round the world had thought them as they said a final farewell to their mate.
It was a sad and poignant end to one of those great Australian stories about mateship and triumphing against the odds.
The surprise wasn’t that they made a mini-series about Michael and INXS – the surprise was that it took so long for it to happen.
It is a story that has everything – drama, mateship, success – Aussies taking on the world and succeeding, and heartbreak.
The nice thing is, unlike the reality show that the band chose to do to replace Hutchence, this is Australian-made.
It is great to see Australians making their own stories with Never Tear Us Apart following the recent examples of the brilliant Paper Giants and the solid Howzat.
At the heart of this show is a great ensemble of actors lead by relative newcomer Luke Arnold as Hutchence and the brilliant Damon Herriman as manager Chris Murphy (who seems to have rebranded himself as C.M. Murphy these days).
If you’re old enough, and I am, Herriman might look a little familiar – he grew up on our screens in the Sullivans a million light years ago.
But it is the core cast – the six young actors playing the band that half the population had written on their pencil cases, that is the soul of this show.
They put in performances that lift it above the cliché (not that it doesn’t fall into that trap – with lines about never making it etc causing a bit of the cringe factor).
But it is still a ripping yarn and with a good cast it is hard to muck it up too much.
The pity of this show was that it was lined-up on a night with other Australian stories – the return of the brilliant, witty and original Rake on the ABC and the Shapelle Corby television movie on Nine. We get so few good well-scripted, well acted and uniquely Australian stories on our television channels these days it was disappointing that the networks seemed determined to pit them against each other!
Of course, Never Tear Us Apart was the ratings winner but it was at the expense of other Australian productions including So You Think You Can Dance Australia over on the ailing Ten network.
Of course, the networks have no-one to blame but themselves but the big losers were the Australian viewers (who have probably been heading online to catch up with what they missed – hopefully).
– Tania Phillips
