‘When did the sex start?’
I never actually said those five words to Bob Hawke and Blanche d’Alpuget so bluntly when they went on air, but more on that later.
My introduction to the perils of prime-time commercial television dates back to the mid-1990s and this 60 Minutes interview with the recently separated former prime minister and his future wife.
Me: “Blanche, tell me about the first time you met him.”
D’Alpuget: ‘It was at a party in Jakarta. I had been living outside Australia for a long time and I didn’t know who he was. But I was very impressed because we had a lot of fun that night and the party lasted until four in the morning.’
Me: Bob, how do you remember when you first met Blanche?
Hawke: ‘It was 1970. I was visiting Indonesia and having a drink at the Australian embassy when a young girl appeared around the corner. I remember she was wearing a white dress and I was struck by her physical attractiveness and her vivacity too.’
Twenty long years passed. The pair remained in different orbits, but the relentless gravity of planetary attraction somehow predestined them to become colliding worlds.
Charles Wooley was a reporter for 60 Minutes when he asked recently separated former Prime Minister Bob Hawke and his future wife Blanche d’Alpuget: “When did sex start?” (above)
Neither Hawke nor d’Alpuget responded to Wooley’s question about when they first had sex. “What mattered was the publicity frenzy those five words generated,” Wooley says.
And $200,000 of Kerry Packer’s money gave me exclusive access to the fireworks when the passion exploded.
I had always been reluctant to join 60 Minutes because of what, in my noble youth at ABC, I considered the popular show’s sensationalist prurience.
But “lewdness” was not a word in the dictionary of the legendary Peter Meakin, Channel Nine’s master of marketing and ratings.
He assured me, “Dude, travel the world in the front of the plane. Enjoy the money and remember you can always take a shower after the show.”
“Oh shit,” I said to my producer. “Do I really have to ask them when they started having sex?”
“I know we’re paying, but Bob tells me to go to hell and you can’t blame him. God, I hate this job sometimes.”
“Don’t give me that nonsense,” he replied. “You’re in the business world now. We don’t make ‘television shows’, we sell Toyotas.”
“I was told not to go all ‘ABC’ with my superiors by refusing to ask the former prime minister about the gender of her husband,” Wooley says. Above, Hawke and D’Alpuget at Sussex Inlet on the south coast of New South Wales in December 1994
I was learning that in the world of commercial television producers, as often happens in nature, the female is the most lethal of the species.
We had sequestered the loving couple into a hideaway on Scotland Island, in Pittwater, Sydney, away from the prying lenses of all the other envious media whom we had outbid for our exclusive interview.
Slowly and sensually, Blanche was applying suntan lotion to Bob’s body. He laughed and collapsed.
Bob, fascinated by his budgie smugglers, told our camera: “She’s crazy, of course, quite crazy.”
They hugged, kissed, caressed and laughed. It was obvious that they were in love. But for me there was a huge dark cloud in the warm, clear air.
Blanche D’Apluget tenderly applies lotion to Hawke, above, during the segment in question.
The toxic question I had to ask was whether the physical relationship had begun before Bob left his wife Hazel, a woman much loved by the Australian public and our viewers.
My deadly producer was adamant: “Every woman in Australia wants to know. Don’t be afraid.”
Then, not entirely unmoved by my agitation, he relented. “Look, ask the question. It doesn’t matter how they answer you. What we’re paying for are those pictures of Blanche rubbing her lips together.” Amber Soleil ‘between Bob’s legs.
So, I asked the most circumlocution in the history of unedited television, which included confusing phrases like “look, it’s open speculation in Australia” and “shouldn’t that be clarified?” and “I’ll be accused of beating around the bush” (unfortunate choice of words), “but what most people want to know and I have to ask” and “did you fall in love and do you know, can you tell us when, at what stage of your relationship you got to the physical stage of love, when sex started?”
Wooley had always been reluctant to join 60 Minutes. From left, 60 Minutes reporters Richard Carleton, Tracey Curro, Wooley and Jeff McMullen.
From that mess, my producer and her editor created a concise five-word summary of my embarrassed speech.
Mark Day, a wise veteran columnist of the time, wrote sympathetically that I would have been fired if I hadn’t asked.
He said, “When did sex start?” would be “the question of the year” and I might have to “live the rest of my life in his shadow.”
For the record, neither Bob nor Blanche answered the question. But my producer was right.
What mattered was the publicity hype those five words generated.
In retrospect, it was an innocent time. Nowadays, on morning television, the acting prime minister is asked if he strips in front of his dog. There is no problem because hardly anyone watches commercial television anymore.
I wonder why that is.
Charles Wooley has spent his entire life travelling the world. After 25 years and more than 100 countries during the heyday of 60 Minutes, he now lives and writes in Tasmania. He is the deputy mayor of the coastal shire of Sorell and a keen fly fisherman.
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